American Gun

6 THE M1911 PISTOL

On October 18, 1918, a tall, red-haired American Army corporal found himself behind enemy lines in the Argonne Forest in France.

German machine gunners on a nearby ridge were sweeping the bushes around him with bullets. A slug slapped a hole in his helmet, though it somehow left his skull intact.

The corporal had two weapons: a rifle and a handgun. The first was an M1917 Enfield bolt-action rifle, a British rival to the Mauser and Springfield that was a little cheaper to make. The second was a .45-caliber, semiautomatic Colt service revolver with the official name of “Automatic Pistol, Caliber .45, Model 1911.” It was a weapon that in the right hands could turn bad luck good. It simply kicked ass.

Just like the guy holding it.

The trapped U.S. Army corporal’s name was Alvin Cullum York, and the pickle he found himself in had materialized quicker than a New York minute. Bare moments before, the soldier and sixteen other men from Company G, 328th Infantry, 82nd Division, had surprised a group of German troops and taken them prisoner behind the lines. But before they could organize the POWs, the Americans came under concentrated machine gun fire. Nine, including the sergeant leading the three squads on patrol, fell to the ground, all dead or severely wounded.

They were spotted and pinned down by a force that outnumbered them by 20 to 1. Six Americans were shot dead.

“The Germans got us, and they got us right smart,” remembered York. “They just stopped us dead in our tracks. Their machine guns were up there on the heights overlooking us and well hidden, and we couldn’t tell for certain where the terrible heavy fire was coming from…. And I’m telling you they were shooting straight. Our boys just went down like the long grass before the mowing machine at home.”

York grew up in the mountains near the Tennessee-Kentucky border. Before the Army, he’d been a hard drinker, a brawler, and a bit of a redneck goof-off. Somehow, he’d grown into a gentle, God-fearing Christian. He’d also become a pacifist, and tried for conscientious-objector status. In fact, it had taken a long talk with his unit commander before he decided his duty as a soldier didn’t conflict with his beliefs.

Crouched on the ground, York held his bolt-action Enfield with one hand as bullets flew over his head. He waited for the machine gunner above to stop firing and look down. York was between the prisoners and the machine-gun nest, so close to the enemy that the German had to pitch the barrel down sharply to get at him. The nearby POWs made things tougher for the gunner; he had to get a good fix on his target before firing or risk killing his own people.

Sure enough, a head popped up. York squeezed the trigger.

The German disappeared, dropped by a .30-06 round from York’s rifle. York waited. Up came another head, York fired, and the enemy vanished.

“That’s enough now!” he yelled out in his hillbilly drawl.“You boys quit and come on down!”

The Germans didn’t take his advice. They’d been in the war long enough to know that his Enfield had only five rounds in the magazine, so maybe when a lieutenant and five men jumped out to take him with bayonets, they figured they had numbers on their side.

Problem was, York didn’t use his rifle next. He switched to his M1911 pistol. And instead of taking down the first man in line, which might’ve sent the others scurrying to the ground, he worked from back to front, popping them one at a time until finally it was the lieutenant’s turn. The German officer fell with a scream, gut-shot.

“You never heard such a racket in all of your life,” said York, talking about the battle after it was done. “I didn’t have time to dodge behind a tree or dive into the brush…. There were over thirty of them in continuous action, and all I could do was touch the Germans off [shoot them down] just as fast as I could. I was sharp shooting…. All the time I kept yelling at them to come down. I didn’t want to kill any more than I had to. But it was they or I. And I was giving them the best I had.”

Finally, York sensed someone behind him. He spun around to see a German officer in the woods with an empty Luger pistol. The German had been trying to shoot him, but missed every time. Spooked and sure that York would kill every last member of his unit, the man offered a deal; If you don’t shoot anymore, I’ll make them surrender.

Covering the officer with his M1911, York told him to go ahead. The lieutenant blew a whistle, and fifty Germans emerged with their hands up. More followed.

One die-hard threw a grenade at York and the six other Americans who’d survived. The grenade missed. York didn’t. Another German stalled when told to leave his machine gun. York shot him, too.

“I hated to do it,” he said later. “He was probably a brave soldier boy. But I couldn’t afford to take any chance so I let him have it.”

York ordered the officer to guide them toward American lines. The mass formation marched off, with the seven Americans using the Germans as human shields. They gathered more prisoners as they went.

After they reached safety, York reported to battalion headquarters. “Well, York, I hear you captured the whole damned German army,” said his brigade commander, General Julian R. Lindsey.

“No sir,” said York. “I only have one hundred and thirty-two.”

When someone asked the corporal how he did it, he gave them a Tennessee smile. “I surrounded ’em.”

York’s shooting had been honed through thousands of hours of practice in the mountains where he’d grown up. There he’d hunted with a muzzle-loading Kentucky rifle his granddad had used. The gun was an authentic American long rifle—ball, black powder, and all. He also had an old-fashioned cap-and-ball revolver he shot for target practice while riding a mule. Like many guys from backwoods, rural America, he was a crack shot. But probably the high point of his unofficial training had to be the hidden-turkey shoot.

It went like this: York and friends would tie a turkey behind a distant log. The shooter would have to knock it down with the first shot as the bird poked its head up. That itself was pretty hard—turkey heads aren’t too big. But just to make it interesting, his friends could do anything they imagined to distract him in the act of shooting, short of actually touching him. Crack jokes, holler, whistle—it all taught York to shoot with supreme focus and aim.

A day after his tromp through the enemy lines, York went back to the scene of the battle. He was shocked by the corpses still lying there. He stopped and said a prayer for his dead friends, then thanked God for letting him live.

“I prayed for the Germans, too,” he admitted later. “They were all brother men of mine.”

As word spread, York’s actions seemed just too incredible. A thorough military investigation was launched. But eyewitnesses and German reports largely confirmed the events. York’s division commander, Major General George B. Duncan, said “the more we investigated the exploit, the more remarkable it appeared.”

A legend was born. York was soon promoted to sergeant and awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Croix de Guerre, and the Legion of Honor.

“What you did was the greatest thing accomplished by any private soldier of all the armies of Europe,” declared French Commanding General Ferdinand Foch. Before returning to Tennessee, York received a ticker-tape parade in New York City and was carried on the shoulders of Wall Street stockbrokers. Offers from Hollywood, publishers, and companies seeking his endorsement streamed in.

Sergeant York lives on in American mythology as one of the toughest soldiers who ever lived. The “Government Model” 1911 pistol he used to pop those Germans has a place right next to him too. The M1911 is a true warrior’s tool. It figures into quite a number of war stories, and for its time and place was probably the greatest handgun ever made. We’re a hundred years from its birth, but it’s still going strong. It’s the basis for any number of customized models, including a SEAL commemorative by Para-Ordnance that’s one of several M1911s in my personal collection. Even when gun makers don’t use it as their model, it’s the design they’re looking to beat.

Many gun experts agree it rules the roost. When American Rifleman recently named their top ten guns of all time, they practically gushed over the weapon. “It fits the hand like a trusted tool,” wrote Brian Sheetz. “It functions without fail. It has proved itself in brutal service throughout two world wars. It works just as well on the firing line and on the front lines of combat today as it did the day it was adopted.” Editor Wiley Clapp added, “I cannot name a handgun that delivers more mud-and-sand reliability than the Government Model.”

The gun’s roots go straight back to the last days of the nineteenth century. The U.S. Army was deep in the jungles of the Philippine Islands, which they inherited after the Spanish-American War. Our soldiers were fighting a fierce counterinsurgency war against radical Islamist Moro tribesmen. The tribesmen had a habit of charging Americans with long knives while wearing wood-and-leather body armor. The Moro fanatics supposedly fought under the influence of powerful narcotics, which made them almost immune to pain. Shoot them, and they just kept coming. It was like something out of a zombie movie. The regulation firearms at the time, .38 Long Colt revolvers and .30 Krag rifles, didn’t have the man-stopping power for this kind of an attack.

Humbled by the experience, the Army soon conducted experiments on some unfortunate live animals and human cadavers, and decided that American soldiers needed a larger caliber weapon on the hip. What they wanted was something that would stop a horse.

Literally.

“The cavalry doctrine of those days was if you could drop a horse in its tracks, you got rid of the rider as well,” explained military historian Edward Ezell of the Smithsonian Institution. It was two for the price of one. So the military went looking for a handgun that could do the job. A historic “bake-off” was held by the Army. Weapons from five companies were put to the test. After years of trials, the championship match was conducted on March 3, 1911, when two finalist handguns faced off against each other in a competition somewhere between Survivor and American Idol, Pistol Edition.

At the end of the tests, one gun stood supreme: a semiautomatic, locked-breech, single-action Colt pistol. The handgun chambered .45-caliber, 230-grain, full metal jacket, smokeless rounds fed from a single stack, seven-shot magazine. The winning prototype had fired no less than six thousand rounds. It had been dunked in acid and salt water, and forced to handle deformed and misloaded rounds. The board of judges found that “the Colt is superior, because it is more reliable, more enduring, more easily disassembled when there are broken parts to be replaced, [and] more accurate.”

In other words, it rocked.

The winning design was the brainchild of the Leonardo da Vinci of firearms design: John Moses Browning. The world of guns would be very different without Browning, and the M1911 was his baby. It became the official sidearm of the U.S. Army on March 29, 1911. The U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps followed suit, adopting it in 1913.

When it was adopted, Browning’s Colt was officially known as the “Colt Caliber .45 Automatic Pistol.” The words “United States” were added to the title, along with the designation M1911 and then M1911A1 for the improved version that came out in 1924. The word “automatic” has remained, in one of the most common nicknames, the .45 Automatic. It’s also in the name of the cartridge it takes, .45 ACP (Automatic Colt Pistol). The way we classify guns these days, though, the weapon is a semiautomatic; you have to pull the trigger for each bullet to fire.

It is no exaggeration to give John Browning credit for creating much of the modern world of guns. “To say he was the Edison of the modern firearms industry does not quite cover the case, for he was even greater than that,” wrote Captain Paul Curtis in Guns and Gunning. “Browning was unique. He stood alone, and there was in his time or before no one whose genius along those lines could remotely compare with his.”

Browning came up with many of the big breakthroughs of the last century and a half in “a creative rampage unmatched in the history of firearms development,” wrote authors Curtis Gentry and John Browning (the inventor’s son) in their book, John M. Browning: American Gunmaker. “His speed and productivity made his accomplishments blur.”

Born in 1855 to a Mormon gunsmith in Ogden, Utah, John Moses Browning quit school before seventh grade to work in his family’s shop. He earned a hands-on education in firearms manufacturing and engineering from his dad, who’d developed a prototype “slide-action” repeating rifle. The younger Browning’s inventive mind quickly showed itself: He created his first gun as a boy and earned a U.S. patent before he was twenty-five.

In 1883, a salesman for the Winchester Repeating Arms Company traveled through dusty Ogden and, by chance, tested Browning’s newly patented rifle. The gun made its way to T.G. Bennet, the vice president and general manager of Winchester (Oliver Winchester had died in 1880), who was so impressed that he traveled to Ogden and personally bought Browning’s design for eight thousand dollars. The purchase began a two-decade relationship between the designer and the Connecticut manufacturing giant.

Browning’s inventions were captured in 128 patents covering eighty weapons, including the classic Winchester Models 1886, 1892, and 1895 lever-action rifles; the Model 1894, and the 1893 and 1897 Winchester pump-action shotguns. After a break with Winchester, he produced a revolutionary series of semiautomatics and machine guns. Among them: the Browning Auto-5 Shotgun (produced under license as the Remington Model 11), the legendary Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR), the .50-caliber M2 Browning machine gun, and the M1911 pistol and its descendant, the 9mm Browning Hi Power. He also designed the .45 ACP (Automatic Colt Pistol) cartridge fired by the M1911.

Browning didn’t use blueprints. According to his descendant Bruce W. Browning, he would dream up a weapon in his head, work out a bunch of problems and kinks, then build a prototype based on his ideas. Only when he had the model working would he turn it over to others to be drawn and “engineered.”

This American genius was working for Colt when he designed the M1911. He had developed an earlier Colt pistol, the Colt Model 1900. Inspecting the weapon, you can see some of the ideas that would make the 1911 a classic. The older gun was a self-loaded weapon that fired a .38 ACP round. It looked something like a smaller M1911 with a longish barrel.

Inspect a Browning design—any Browning design—and you can see the influence of the American frontier. Survival in the West depended on keeping things simple, and making them tough. The simpler and more rugged, the better. It is the winning formula for a gun, or for any tool really.

“Make it strong enough—then double it,” Browning said. “Anything that can happen with a gun, probably will happen, sooner or later.”

Like the Model 1900 before it, the Model 1911 uses a small amount of the energy from the cartridge as it is fired to eject the spent shell and cycle a new round into place. The energy that causes the gun to recoil is used in the M1911 to slap out the old cartridge and put a new one in its place.

The idea of “self-loading” (or semiautomatic) is now common, but it was new at the turn of the century. That alone would have spooked the Army brass in years gone by, but the fresh faces at the top were no longer afraid of cutting-edge design… as long as it worked.

And the M1911 did.

To the shooter, the gun’s brilliance starts with loading, where a spring-loaded magazine is easily filled with bullets. The mag slips vertically inside the pistol grip. Rack the pistol—pull back the slide (the top of the gun, sitting over the barrel). This chambers a round. Aim. Fire.

The recoil energy of the bullet pitches the slide back. The spent shell pops out quicker than you can see it. A new one pushes up from the magazine inside. Aim, and fire again. Nothing to it.

It’s not just the action or its internals that make the gun so sweet. The trigger is short and comfortable. The pistol weighs just 2.4 pounds before you pop in the magazine. The recoil is manageable, so you can shoot with one hand reasonably well. The gun has both grip and manual safeties, so it’s hard to fire accidentally.

Browning’s design was simple enough that it could be mass-produced with good, steady results, unlike its main competitor from the era, the more complex German Luger. Fewer parts also meant less could go wrong in miserable combat conditions. Part of the reason it’s tough as hell.

A Springfield TRP Operator 1911 took a frag for me in Fallujah back in 2004. My gun had a bull barrel, and I modified it with custom grips and a rail system. I doubt Browning would have recognized it at first glance. Still, at its very heart it was a M1911. The toughness he’d baked into the cake back a hundred years ago saved my hide. So I owe the man my gratitude—I might not have been able to walk after that if it weren’t for him.

By the way, the very same .45 that went through those original torture tests in 1911 is still with us, looking none the worse for all that wear. It and a nearly identical hammerless prototype variation are housed at the John M. Browning Firearms Museum in Ogden, Utah.

The M1911 first saw combat in 1916 when General Pershing drove into Mexico in a fruitless search for rebel leader Pancho Villa, whose troops had looted and burned the town of Columbus, New Mexico.

In World War I, the sidearm was used by many American troops in close-quarter battles in the trenches, forests, and fields of Western Europe. “The bottom line was that when Americans shot Germans with Colt .45 automatics, the Germans tended to fall down and die,” wrote historian Massad Ayoob. “When Germans shot Americans with their 9mm Luger pistols, the Americans tended to become indignant and kill the German who shot them, and then walk to an aid station to either die a lingering death or recover completely. Thus was born the reputation of the .45 automatic as a ‘legendary man-stopper,’ and the long-standing American conviction that the 9mm automatic was an impotent wimp thing that would make your wife a widow if you trusted your life to it.”

The M1911 gained more hard-core battle experience in the hands of Marines and bluejacket sailors fighting in Latin America and the Caribbean during the “Banana Wars.” In Haiti in 1919, guided by a turncoat Haitian general, a Marine sergeant named Herman Hanneken used a disguise to sneak into the lair of rebel chieftain Charlemagne Péralte. Hanneken gunned him down with a M1911 Colt .45 in front of hundreds of Péralte’s followers. In the chaotic gunfight that followed, the tough Marine somehow managed to escape with his life. He was later awarded the Medal of Honor.

A few months later, a team of Marines snuck through the Haitian jungle to the headquarters of Benoît Batraville. Batraville had taken over after Charlemagne Péralte’s death. The Marines were out for some payback for their fallen comrade Lieutenant Lawrence Muth, who had been killed and cannibalized by Batraville’s gang. (The bandits cut out the Marine’s heart and smeared his blood on their rifles to improve their marksmanship.)

Gunnery Sergeant Albert A. Taubert approached the entrance of the bandit’s cave, clutching an M1911. Taubert, a highly decorated World War I veteran, spotted Batraville. As the Haitian opened fire with a .38 revolver, the Marine calmly shot and killed him. The 1919–20 Second Caco War ended soon afterwards.

In World War II, the M1911 was the regulation sidearm for most Americans fighting in Europe and the Pacific. To meet the needs of war, the government contracted with numerous manufacturers—including some unusual folks like the Union Switch & Signal railroad company and the Singer sewing machine corporation—to produce almost two million pistols.

The gun became famous for keeping our guys alive in the hairiest situations. In 1942 on Guadalcanal—America’s first offensive against Japan—Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone is said to have gone through the jungle armed only with a Colt M1911 as he fetched ammo for his machine gun unit in the middle of a Japanese attack. Pounded by the enemy, Basilone and his section were down to two machine guns and three men, one of whom had lost his hand. Basilone and his Marines held off screaming “banzai” charges by Japanese troops all night, waiting for reinforcements to arrive. Their stand helped the Marines hold Henderson Field, a key airbase in the campaign. The sergeant received the Medal of Honor for his bravery; he later died in action on Iwo Jima. Basilone was one of only two Marines to receive both the Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross during the war.

On the other side of the war, American paratroopers found the weapon came in handy in the predawn assault behind the beaches on D-Day. In the cloudy and windy darkness, 2nd platoon, F Company of the 82nd Airborne’s 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment began jumping from a C-47 aircraft. In the dark, windy night, the troopers descended over a wider area than planned. Several fell directly into the French town of Ste.-Mère-Église, one of their primary objectives, instead of outside the town.

Two, in fact, landed on the old Roman Catholic church at the center of town. Private Ken Russell slammed onto the church roof. Private John Steele’s chute got tangled on the bell tower. A third paratrooper, Sergeant John Ray of Gretna, Louisiana, hit the ground on the church square nearby.

As Ray worked to detach his parachute equipment, a German soldier blasted him in the stomach with a submachine gun. Figuring that Ray was dead, the German spun toward Russell and Steele, who were trapped and defenseless. As the Nazi took aim with his MP40, a dying Sergeant Ray pulled up his M1911A1, aimed it at the back of the German soldier’s head, and squeezed the trigger.

Bull’s-eye.

Ray died, leaving a young widow, but Russell and Steele survived the invasion of France. Ste.-Mère-Église, which commanded an important crossroad on the way to the Normandy beaches, was the first French town freed on D-Day.

But maybe the most amazing feat performed by an American with an M1911 during World War II occurred not on land, but over the skies of Burma.

In March 1943,Texas-born Owen J. Baggett’s B-24 heavy bomber was jumped by Japanese Zero fighters. The enemy’s 20mm cannons set the big plane on fire. As the B24 filled with smoke and incoming bullets, Baggett and four crew members bailed out. Japanese Zeros circled the chutes and strafed the helpless American aviators as target practice, killing several and wounding Baggett’s arm.

Between 4,000 and 5,000 feet, a Japanese pilot circled close to Baggett. The Zero’s canopy was open, maybe so the pilot could get a better view of the American before finishing him off. At first Baggett played dead. Then, with the Zero throttled back close to a stall, he pulled up his M1911 pistol and fired directly at the Japanese pilot’s head.

Baggett got off four shots before the Zero dove sharply away.

Probably wishing he had another shot, Baggett lost track of the plane as it disappeared below.

Baggett and another survivor were soon captured on the ground and sent to a POW camp near Singapore. Conditions were tough; the Texan’s weight plunged from 180 to 90 pounds in the two years he spent there. And yet Baggett realized he was being treated as kind of a celebrity by the Japanese. He was even given the rare opportunity to end his captivity by committing hara-kiri, or suicide.

With honors like that, who needs Red Cross packages? He declined.

One day in the camp, Baggett met an American colonel of the 311th Fighter Group who had also been shot down. They got to talking, and soon Baggett heard an incredible tale. Before he was captured, the Colonel had met a Japanese POW who told him that the Japanese aviator Owen Baggett shot at had crashed his plane. The pilot’s body was found with a bullet in the head.

The story of the GI who shot down a fighter plane with a handgun had apparently spread through the Japanese military. That may have explained why Baggett had gotten the VIP treatment—the guards were honored to be holding such a badass.

Did I mention he was from Texas?

The American POW colonel vowed to Baggett that he would write up a report, but he died in the camp. The tale was nearly lost to history, but in 1996, Air Force magazine recovered the story, reporting that “There appears to be no reasonable doubt that Owen Baggett performed a unique act of valor, unlikely to be repeated in the unfolding annals of air warfare.”

Five years after the end of World War II, an American tank commander from Nebraska found himself inside a M26 Pershing tank, surrounded by a force of five hundred North Koreans.

Master Sergeant Ernest R. Kouma and his lone tank were the only thing blocking the path of a massive enemy assault on American infantry positions along the Nakdong River. He held his ground all through the night, issuing orders to his crew and repulsing enemy charges with fire from the turret.

At one point, surrounded by enemy troops, Kouma jumped up into a hail of gunfire, grabbed the externally mounted .50-caliber M2 machine gun—designed by none other than John Browning—and sprayed the enemy at point-blank range.

When he ran out of .50-cal ammo, he methodically picked off enemy troops with his M1911A1 pistol, then doused them with grenades. Wounded, after the nine-hour battle Sergeant Kouma and his crew drove eight miles through what was now enemy territory to reach American lines. His tank wiped out three communist machine gun batteries on the road down. He is estimated to have killed two hundred and fifty North Korean soldiers—but in doing so, saved many more American lives.

Master Sergeant Kouma’s Congressional Medal of Honor citation says: “His magnificent stand allowed the infantry sufficient time to reestablish defensive positions. Rejoining his company, although suffering intensely from his wounds, he attempted to resupply his tank and return to the battle area. While being evacuated for medical treatment, his courage was again displayed when he requested to return to the front.”

The M1911 went on to serve in the Vietnam War and beyond. The king of the combat pistols was finally retired from many branches of the U.S. military in 1985, when the Pentagon designated the NATO 9mm M9 Beretta as the standard sidearm. I didn’t like the 9mm cartridge for combat, and I was far from alone. To this day, you hear a lot of complaints from fighting men about the lack of stopping power on their belts. Many special op warriors continue to use versions of the M1911, purchasing them out of their own pocket.

Back home in the States, the M1911 became the personal handgun of choice at federal law-enforcement agencies, including the FBI and Secret Service. While the official weapon was often another gun, many agents and officers chose the M1911 as their backup. It was also used by some state units like the Texas Rangers and the occasional local department. There’s a famous story back home about a Texas Ranger named Charlie Miller, who carried his M1911 ready to fire in his holster.

“Isn’t that dangerous?” asked a citizen one day.

“I wouldn’t carry the son of a bitch if it wasn’t dangerous,” said the lawman. You’ve got to love the Rangers.

In cases where the local department allowed them to supply their own service weapon—not unusual in Texas—the M1911 was one of the more popular choices. But for a long time, the majority of local departments regarded semiautomatic pistols as too much gun for the situations their officers routinely faced. And they didn’t have the money for it—not just to buy the guns, but to keep them up. The weapon required more care and attention than other revolvers, and the ammo wasn’t free. To many police chiefs, there was hardly any reason to look into something else. What they had was tried, true, and trusted. The main police gun during this long stretch was the .38 Special, or some variation of that classic wheelgun. It’s a weapon on our list—but first let’s look at something that made a lot more noise.