“The French told us that they had never seen such marksmanship practiced in the heat of battle.”
“I am the ranking officer here,” yelled Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, “and I give the order to charge!”
It was July 1, 1898. America was a few hours away from becoming a world power.
But it sure didn’t look it. Thousands of American troops were roasting in the hot sun below the hills guarding the eastern approaches to Santiago, Cuba. Palms and the nearby mountains made the place look like a picture postcard paradise. But the whizzing bullets and heat made it feel like hell.
The Americans were bunched up, clogged and trapped by their sheer numbers.
Bullets shredded the tall grass around them. “The situation was desperate,” wrote Richard Harding Davis, a reporter on the scene. “Our troops could not retreat, as the trail for two miles behind them was wedged with men. They could not remain where they were, for they were being shot to pieces. There was only one thing they could do—go forward and take the San Juan hills by assault.”
Roosevelt’s thick glasses fogged in the boiling humidity. He was leading a force of nearly one thousand “Rough Riders,” officially named the First United States Volunteer Cavalry. The handpicked, motley-crew cavalry regiment took Texas Rangers and Western cowboys and mixed them with East Coast Ivy Leaguers, polo players, and tennis stars. Not only were they a varied unit, they were on foot, except for Roosevelt. The rest of the unit’s horses were still back in Florida.
Mounted or not, they’d just be targets if they stayed where they were. But the American infantry officer at the head of the mass formation didn’t want to command his troops to move without orders from his superior. And his unit was in Roosevelt’s way.
Screw that, said TR. Move or get your butt out of the way.
Not in those exact words. But he did pull rank.
“Charge!” barked TR.
Roosevelt galloped around the field cursing and cheering his cavalry forward. The infantry troops around and in front of them realized it was their best option, too. Soon they were all rushing up Kettle Hill.
“The entire command moved forward as coolly as though the buzzing of bullets was the humming of bees,” recalled Lieutenant John J. Pershing, who would lead the American Army in World War I and the years that followed. “White regiments, black regiments, regulars and Rough Riders, representing the young manhood of the North and the South, fought shoulder to shoulder, unmindful of race or color, unmindful of whether commanded by ex-Confederate or not, and mindful of only their common duty as Americans.”
But as the Americans advanced, the gunfire intensified, both on Kettle Hill and the nearby San Juan Heights, where the main American assault was focused. Soldiers dropped in bunches. Not only did the enemy have artillery pieces in position, they had better rifles. Though the Spanish were vastly outnumbered, they commanded the high ground, and had a serious edge in firearms.
The main Spanish infantry rifle, the German-made Spanish Model 1893 Mauser rifle, was a fast-firing, speed-loading, repeating firearm of excellent reliability and smooth, safe, and effective performance. It was close to a masterpiece of a gun. It fired a high-velocity 7 × 57mm full-metal jacket cartridge with a spitzer—or pointed—bullet at its tip. The ammo fed smoothly from an integrated five-round staggered box magazine that could be loaded via stripper clips. The bullets were nicknamed “Spanish Hornets” by American troops who heard the supersonic rounds zipping by their ears. The weapon was so efficient that it served as the starting blueprint for many of the world’s infantry rifles for the next fifty years.
The Americans had their own bolt-action weapon, the magazine-fed Krag-Jorgensen, officially named “U.S. magazine Rifle (or Carbine), .30 caliber, Model 1896.” While the Krag was a step up from the past, the Norwegian-designed gun wasn’t in the same league as the Mauser. Worse, most of the regular U.S. Army troops on the battlefield were carrying the 1873 Trapdoor Springfields, which fired dangerously obsolete, shorter-range .45–70 black powder cartridges. Yes, those are the same rifles Custer’s men used at Little Bighorn. The clouds of smoke they shed were “bullet magnets” letting the enemy know where they were. Let me tell you, I don’t recommend announcing your position like that when there are snipers around.
Before arriving in Cuba, Roosevelt had decided the trapdoor Springfield was “antiquated” and “almost useless in the battle.” He wasn’t too sure about the Krags, either. He had shelled out money from his own pocket to buy his officers some of his favorite Winchester repeaters, but his force was still hopelessly outgunned.
And stuck, with only one way to go—up the hill, toward the bullets.
“Spanish fire,” remembered Roosevelt later, “swept the whole field of battle up to the edge of the river, and man after man in our ranks fell dead or wounded.” The Mauser’s smokeless powder made it harder for the Americans to find targets. “The Mauser bullets drove in sheets through the trees and the tall jungle grass, making a peculiar whirring or rustling sound,” said Roosevelt. “Some of the bullets seemed to pop in the air, so that we thought they were explosive; and, indeed, many of those which were coated with brass did explode, in the sense that the brass coat was ripped off, making a thin plate of hard metal with a jagged edge, which inflicted a ghastly wound.”
Lines of American soldiers, led by Roosevelt, climbed the hills like streams of ants into the carpets of Spanish bullets. It was a slow-motion charge, with the Americans fighting not just the Spanish bullets and the slope, but also the intense heat. Some fell; others dropped for cover. The assault crawled along.
With his men hugging the ground, an American officer stood up and paced in the open to inspire his troops. “Captain, a bullet is sure to hit you,” protested one of his men. The officer took his cigarette out of his mouth, blew out a smoke cloud, and laughed. “Sergeant, the Spanish bullet isn’t made that will kill me!”
Roosevelt witnessed what happened next: “As he turned on his heel, a bullet struck him in the mouth and came out at the back of his head; so that even before he fell his wild and gallant soul had gone out into the darkness.”
Reporter Richard Harding Davis recalled, “They walked to greet death at every step, many of them, as they advanced, sinking suddenly or pitching forward and disappearing in the high grass, but the others waded on, stubbornly, forming a thin blue line that kept creeping higher and higher up the hill. It was as inevitable as the rising tide. It was a miracle of self-sacrifice, a triumph of bulldog courage, which one watched breathless with wonder.”
For all their bravery, the assault might have failed except for an ace of a weapon. A battery of three hand-cranked Colt M-1895 Gatling guns swept the Spanish-held heights with sheets of .30-caliber gunfire, covering the advance and clearing paths for the American assault.
The drum of the guns was like no other sound on the battlefield. The sound cheered the Americans even as it mowed down the Spanish. The Gatlings would lay down an impressive 18,000 rounds in support of the U.S. troops that day.
The assault picked up steam. Roosevelt was grazed by bullets twice. He waved his bloody hand in the air to rally his troops forward. Finally the Spanish, realizing they were about to be overrun, retreated from their Kettle Hill fortifications.
Forty yards from the crest, a wire barrier blocked Teddy’s stallion. Roosevelt spun out of the saddle like the rancher he once was, climbed over the wire, and dashed to the top. For a moment, he stood atop Kettle Hill nearly alone, his troops climbing to meet him.
Over on San Juan Heights, the main force sent the Spanish reeling. Roosevelt reinforced Kettle Hill, surveying a horrible sight.
The Spanish fortifications, Roosevelt recalled, were “filled with dead bodies in the light blue and white uniform of the Spanish regular army.” He came across very few wounded, as “most of the fallen had little holes in their heads from which their brains were oozing.”
Suddenly, two Spanish soldiers popped up from the piles of bodies, leveled their Mausers at Roosevelt, and fired from ten yards away.
They missed. Roosevelt jerked his Colt revolver and held it at hip level as they turned to run. He fired twice, missing the first and killing the second.
A reporter watching the Americans consolidate their positions atop San Juan Heights at about 2 p.m. remembered the scene: “They drove the yellow silk flags of the cavalry and the Stars and Stripes of their country into the soft earth of the trenches, and then sank down and looked back at the road they had climbed and swung their hats in the air.” The reporter heard a faint, tired cheer. The battle was won, and over.
American losses were immense: over two hundred dead and nearly another twelve hundred wounded. The Spanish lost 215 dead and another 376 wounded. The real story of the numbers, though, is this: the American force was 15,000; the Spanish started with 750. The fact that the Spanish could hold off such a large force at all is a testament not only to their weapons but their courage and skill as warriors.
The charges up Kettle Hill and San Juan Heights alone did not win the Spanish-American War. But it had numerous effects. With the hills taken, Santiago could not be held. The admiral who headed the Spanish fleet had been sitting on his ass for days, debating whether to go out and face the American fleet or not. Now he had no choice. His ships sailed out to their destruction in Santiago Bay July 3. The city of Santiago surrendered July 17; game over.
The Spanish sued for peace. The Treaty of Paris was signed on August 12, and the Americans were granted authority over the Spanish colonies of Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. Just like that, the United States was an international power. The epic images of Roosevelt and the Rough Riders’ actions that day were celebrated by the press. His fame propelled him into the governorship of New York State in a few short months. Then came the vice presidency, and after William McKinley’s assassination in September 1901, the presidency itself, at the tender age of forty-two.
The episode also marked a turning point in American guns: the shift from antiquated military rifles to cutting-edge, modern weapons that could dominate the battlefield. The road ahead would continue to be filled with curves and detours, but change would no longer be resisted on the grounds that proven technology was still too new.
And one of the prime movers of the new direction was Teddy Roosevelt, who as president helped push the American military to adopt what was essentially a bootleg copy of the gun that had done so much damage to his forces on Kettle Hill.
For more than sixty years, America had been cursed by bad decisions coming out of one office in Washington, D.C.: the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps. The head shed there controlled the nation’s weapons arsenals, including the biggest ones at Springfield, Massachusetts, and Harpers Ferry, Virginia.
The men in charge were the bureaucrats and generals who were supposed to equip our fighting men with the latest firearms and the top technology. Instead, as we’ve seen, they managed to do their best to condemn American soldiers to failure and death. They pissed away opportunities to get superior weapons and consistently chose clunkers, again and again.
When George Washington ordered his artillery chief Henry Knox to start an American weapons arsenal in Springfield in 1776, he helped spark the stirrings of the American Industrial Revolution. But by the Civil War, the arsenal was stuck in the past. The arteries were so clogged it affected the Army’s brain. Bad weapons mandated bad tactics; bad tactics encouraged bad training; bad training justified bad weapons.
“The armory also spawned a culture of obdurate bureaucracy that has afflicted parts of the U.S. military establishment down to the present day,” wrote John Lehman, who served as secretary of the Navy during the Reagan administration. “Having made a vital contribution to winning independence, the Springfield armory had great prestige in the new republic. Unfortunately, the armory and the Ordnance Corps developed an autonomy within the new War Department that rapidly hardened into orthodoxy and an aversion to new weapons technology.”
After the Revolution, the ordnance bureaucrats ignored the obvious promise of the breech-loading rifle and percussion cap and forced the military to cling to outdated muzzleloaders and flintlocks into the Mexican War era and beyond. During the Civil War, breechloaders, repeaters, and Gatling Guns were available for mass production and might have won the war for the Union much more quickly, but officials stubbornly sidetracked each breakthrough.
In the Indian Wars, they kept Winchester repeaters out of our troops’ hands. Incredibly, after the Little Bighorn disaster, Army Chief of Ordnance Stephen Vincent Benét insisted that the totally obsolete single-shot Trapdoor Springfield would remain in service as the regulation infantry shoulder weapon from 1874 to 1891. His successor, Daniel Webster Flagler, chose the Krag-Jorgensen to replace the Springfield Trapdoor over the Mauser. Why? Partly because the boob-ureaucracy thought the Krag would use less ammunition and so reduce costs. These guys had a fatal fetish for conserving ammo. I’m all for cutting back on government waste, but there’s a point where saving money ends up costing a heck of a lot more in people’s lives. The Ordnance officers flew past that point time and again.
Privately, many U.S. Army officials were horrified by the carnage wreaked by the superior firepower of the Mauser rifles at the Battle of San Juan Heights. They were determined to get their soldiers a much better gun than the Krag. Captured Spanish Mausers were carefully analyzed, and gradually an idea began to spread:
“Why not just copy the Mauser?”
And so they did.
Developed from earlier Mauser designs, the Mauser M93 used on Cuba stands at the head of a family of weapons that saw rapid improvement in the years around the turn of the century. As you’d expect, the rifle’s development and innovations in ammunition went hand in hand. Advances in the science of alloys led to stronger steel and more powerful and lighter weapons. That meant that other improvements in powder could be put to work. Cartridges could be more powerful without damaging the weapon. Bullets could go faster and farther.
The Mausers used what is known as “bolt action” to handle the complicated business of putting the ammo in place and then sending it on its way. The breech of a bolt-action rifle is opened by a handle at the side of weapon. When that handle is drawn back, the spent cartridge is ejected. The handle is then pushed forward, stripping the cartridge from the magazine and placing it into the chamber. The bolt is locked in position, and the gun is ready to fire. It’s tough to improve on this system—most of my sniper rifles were bolt-action.
Going from black to smokeless powder didn’t just make it easier to see on the battlefield. Rifle bullets could now move faster and go farther with the same or even less volume of powder. The design of the bullets and their cartridge evolved hand in glove with the powder and the rifles, becoming more efficient and cleaner in the gun.
Not to mention deadlier.
Four years after the charges at San Juan Hill, following extensive testing, experimentation, and input from veterans including Roosevelt, the Springfield Armory unveiled the five-round-magazine, stripper-clip-fed, bolt-action M1903 Springfield. Officially called the “U.S. Rifle, Caliber .30, Model of 1903,” it was known by troops as the “aught three,” or, in later years, simply “the Springfield.” There were a few key differences and improvements, most notably in the firing pin, but the aught-three was pretty much a Mauser. In fact, the Americans plagiarized so badly that the U.S. government lost a lawsuit brought by Mauser and was forced to pay the foreign company hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties. Still, the United States had its gun.
Teddy loved the new Springfield 1903 so much he put in an order for his own custom-made hunting model. For the next twelve years he used the rifle to bag more than three hundred animals on three continents, including lions, hyenas, rhinoceros, giraffes, zebras, gazelles, warthogs, hippopotamuses, monkeys, jaguars, giant anteaters, black bears, crocodiles, and pythons.
But there was one thing Roosevelt hated about the rifle’s original design. He thought the weapon’s slim, rod-type bayonet was a piece of junk. He wanted it changed, so he halted production.
“I must say,” he fumed in a memo to Secretary of War William Howard Taft, “I think that ramrod bayonet about as poor an invention as I ever saw.” The point of the slim bayonet was to serve as an emergency ramrod in case the rifle jammed. Roosevelt as well as countless Army men realized it was too fragile to do its main job. So in 1905 a sixteen-inch knife-style blade bayonet was added. The bayonet was a real beast; the devil himself wouldn’t have wanted to pick his teeth with it.
Even better was the improved ammo, which was introduced in 1906. The new cartridge was based on the old one, but had a lighter, 150-grain pointed “boat tail” bullet at its head. It became the classic American military round for decades, and remains probably the most popular civilian hunting round today. Known as the .30-06, the “aught-six” refers to the year it was introduced rather than the size of the ammo. The new ammunition made the 1903 Springfield rifle a superstar, conferring the advantages of greater speed, force, and accuracy than a round-tipped projectile. Along with the new ammo the barrel was shortened, making it a bit easier to handle.
You may have noticed that the size of rifle bullets has started coming down. Throughout history, there was a tradeoff between speed and size, weight of the gun, and ease of use. It’s tough to make a blanket statement about what ammo or bullet is better without viewing the entire system or the job that needs to get done. The rifles the Americans had in Cuba fired bigger bullets than the Spaniards; obviously that wasn’t an advantage there. But here’s an interesting observation from that war, made by Roosevelt himself:
“The Mauser bullets themselves made a small clean hole, with the result that the wound healed in a most astonishing manner. One or two of our men who were shot in the head had the skull blown open, but elsewhere the wounds from the minute steel-coated bullet, with its very high velocity, were certainly nothing like as serious as those made by the old large-caliber, low-power rifle. If a man was shot through the heart, spine, or brain he was, of course, killed instantly; but very few of the wounded died—even under the appalling conditions which prevailed, owing to the lack of attendance and supplies in the field-hospitals with the army.”
That’s an observation that would be made again, though in different words and context, when rifle technology took another step forward (and half-step back) with the birth of the M16 family and its 5.56 × 45mm rounds.
With the new .30-06 cartridge giving the gun serious stopping power, the 1903 Springfield became one of the best infantry rifles in the world. The Germans had a decent weapon themselves in the Gewehr 98, another improved Mauser. I’ve heard it contended that the Springfield’s manufacturing was more consistent, but on the other side of that people say its firing pin is weaker than the Mauser’s.
Take your pick. I’d happily shoot either or both any day of the week.
The Springfield 1903 first saw action in the U.S. military operations in the Philippines, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, and in General John “Black Jack” Pershing’s deep penetration raids into Mexico, in pursuit of Pancho Villa. When World War I started, it was ready for war before the Doughboys were.
On June 2, 1918, it looked like the Germans were about to win World War I.
The Russian army had collapsed and a peace treaty between the two countries was signed in February. That set nearly fifty German divisions loose. They were switched to the Western Front, and the German General Staff got ready to push the Allies to the sea. German planes bombed Paris; their long-range guns lobbed shells in the direction of the Eiffel Tower. The British high command started planning how to get its troops back to England without having them swim. The German army had seized the initiative and shattered the spirit of the Allies. Oh, and they had Mausers, too.
The imminent capture of Paris was likely to deliver a psychological blow the French would never recover from. The Germans pressed on, sure that the Allies would soon be forced to sue for peace. Just forty-five miles northeast of Paris, near a patch of forest called Belleau Wood and the town of Chateau-Thierry, U.S. Marine Corps Colonel Albertus Wright Catlin saw the leading edge of the methodical German advance as it steamrollered through the French lines. “The Germans swept down an open slope in platoon waves,” he recalled, “across wide wheat-fields bright with poppies that gleamed like splashes of blood in the afternoon sun.”
It was a thing of beauty, unless you were tasked to stop it. The French troops fell back, fighting as they retreated across the wheat field. “Then the Germans, in two columns, steady as machines,” wrote Colonel Catlin. “To me as a military man it was a beautiful sight. I could not but admire the precision and steadiness of those waves of men in gray with the sun glinting on their helmets. On they came, never wavering, never faltering, apparently irresistible.”
What the Germans didn’t know was that a force of thousands of tough young U.S. Marines was lying in wait for them, supported by thousands more U.S. Army troops nearby. In a desperate, last-second move, they had been rushed to the scene as a blocking force to stop the German advance.
It had been more than a year since America declared war on Germany, but its troops had yet to play a major role in any battle. That was because the Allied high command didn’t think the American forces were ready to fight. They thought them soft and unprepared. Before they arrived in 1917, one British general even proposed that American recruits be used directly as replacements in British divisions, entirely under British command.
The Americans told them what they could do with that.
Even so, General Pershing, the commander in chief of the American Expeditionary Force, knew there was a lot of truth in the harsh assessment of his troops. He spent the better part of 1917 and the first half of 1918 training them up.
Now they were ready. Black Jack, who we saw in Cuba as a lieutenant, had been urging the reluctant allies to get his Marines and soldiers into real action for months. The German offensive made the French so desperate they had no choice. The U.S. Second Division, which included a brigade of Marines, and the Third Division were moved into positions along the line of the expected German advance.
Every one of the Marines lying in ambush was a highly skilled, long-range rifleman. The Marines were supported with some artillery and machine guns, but their main instrument of battle was the light, accurate, bayonet-tipped M1903 Springfield rifle. Each Marine had endured eight weeks of brutally intense training at Parris Island, South Carolina, drills that included extensive practice in the care and feeding of his rifle. Besides long-distance marksmanship, there was also close-quarter bayonet and hand-to-hand combat training. Unlike the Army, which assumed mass firepower from large units and didn’t pay too much attention to marksmanship, the Marines started from the idea that they’d be fighting in small units that had to make every shot count.
As they arrived in the fields near Belleau Wood that early morning, one of the Marines asked, “Where’s this here line we’re supposed to hold, Sarge?”
The reply: “We’re gonna make a line, sonny.”
The French had a line, but it was moving the wrong way. Now the Germans were aiming to blow a gap in it that would take them from Belleau Wood, across the Marne river and on to Paris. The Americans were between them and the best road to Paris for miles. As the Americans marched in, Captain Lloyd Williams of 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines Regiment, was advised by withdrawing French army troops that his best bet for survival was to fall back.
“Retreat, hell!” he said. “We just got here!”
All the Marines felt that way. As one commander explained to a French general, “We will dig no trenches to fall back into. The Marines will hold where they stand.”
The Germans who came through the wheat field that afternoon had little or no idea they were about to stumble on American Marines. Their intel had them facing the crumbling French army, and their eyes told them no different. The Americans waited until the right moment, then unleashed a barrage of rifle and machine gun fire on the German spearhead. Marines methodically picked off individual targets with their Springfield 1903s from hundreds of yards away.
“The French told us that they had never seen such marksmanship practiced in the heat of battle,” recalled Colonel Catlin. “If the German advance looked beautiful to me, that metal curtain that our Marines rang down on the scene was even more so. The German lines did not break; they were broken. The Boches [Germans] fell by the scores there among the wheat and the poppies. They hesitated, they halted, they withdrew a space. Then they came on again. They were brave men; we must grant them that. Three times they tried to reform and break through that barrage, but they had to stop at last. The United States Marines had stopped them.”
The remains of the German force retreated into the thick cover of Belleau Wood. A delighted French pilot swooped low over the scene and signaled “Bravo!” to the Marines.
A savage back and forth bloodbath followed over the next three weeks, as the two sides fought for control of Belleau Wood. The terrain was straight out of a nightmare, a barely-penetrable two-hundred-acre tangle of thick vegetation stocked with German mustard-gas mortars and machine-gun nests. In the words of one Marine commander, it was “like entering a dark room filled with assassins.” Plagued by confusing orders and bad maps, scanty food, little intelligence, and poor communications, the American Marines and soldiers launched five failed attempts to sweep the forest, coming up short each time.
On June 6, at 5 p.m., clutching his bayonet-tipped M1903 rifle, Sergeant Major Dan Daly rose from the wheat and yelled to his marines the order to advance on the German machine-gun positions bracketing the edge of the forest.
“Come on, you sons of bitches!” yelled Daly, who at a five-foot-six weighed all of 132 pounds. “Do you want to live forever?”
The only thing small about the sergeant was height. He’d already received two Medals of Honor for conspicuous bravery under fire, one in Haiti and the other in China. A thousand Marines stood up and ran forward when he yelled. The Germans unleashed a fierce barrage of rifle, machine gun, and artillery fire. “The losses were terrific,” said Colonel Catlin. “Men fell on every hand there in the open, leaving great gaps in the line. [3rd Battalion commander Major Ben] Berry was wounded in the arm, but pressed on with the blood running down his sleeve. Into a veritable hell of hissing bullets, into that death-dealing torrent, with heads bent as though facing a March gale, the shattered lines of Marines pushed on. The headed wheat bowed and waved in that metal cloud-burst like meadow grass in a summer breeze.”
When they reached the trees, Private W. H. Smith and his squad put their Springfield 1903 rifles to good use against lingering German troops: “There were about sixty of us who got ahead of the rest of the company. We just couldn’t stop despite the orders of our leaders. We reached the edge of the small wooded area and there encountered some of the Hun [German] infantry. Then it became a matter of shooting at mere human targets. We fixed our rifle sights at 300 yards and aiming through the peep kept picking off the Germans. And a man went down at nearly every shot.”
German officers and soldiers were stunned at both the tactics and the appearance of the attacking Americans. The Marines used “knives, revolvers, rifle butts and bayonets,” complained one German. “All were big fellows, powerful, rowdies.” The Marines were so fierce, the Germans were convinced they were drunk and oblivious to pain. My guess is that they were just being badass Marines. Or as a German military report put it, “vigorous, self-confident, and remarkable marksmen.”
A letter was found on the battlefield in which a German soldier despaired, “They kill everything that moves.”
Yes to that. And they still do.
Captain John W. Thomason wrote that the Marines’ rifles let them carry the day. “All [the German] batteries were in action, and always his machine-guns scourged the place, but he could not make head against the rifles. Guns he could understand; he knew all about bombs and auto-rifles and machine-guns and trench-mortars, but aimed, sustained rifle-fire, that comes from nowhere in particular and picks off men—it brought the war home to the individual and demoralized him. And trained Americans fight best with rifles. Men get tired of carrying grenades and chaut-chaut [French-made machine gun] clips; the guns cannot, even under most favorable conditions, keep pace with the advancing infantry. Machine-gun crews have a way of getting killed at the start; trench-mortars and one-pounders are not always possible. But the rifle and bayonet goes anywhere a man can go, and the rifle and the bayonet win battles.”
By midday, the Marines had settled things. They owned the woods. The Germans weren’t getting to Paris, except maybe as tourists after the war.
It was the bloodiest day in U.S. Marine Corps history to that point, with 1,087 casualties, more than the Marines had suffered in the Corps’ whole previous history. But they died heroes and helped save the war. It would be nearly three weeks before the sector was completely secured, but the last great German offensive of the war was pretty much history.
“The effect [of the Marine action at Belleau Wood] on the French has been many times out of all proportion to the size of our brigade or the front on which it has operated,” American General James Harbord wrote in his war diary. “They say a Marine can’t venture down the boulevards of Paris without risk of being kissed by some casual passerby or some boulevardiere. Frenchmen say that the stand of the Marine Brigade in its far-reaching effects marks one of the great crises of history, and there is no doubt they feel it.” Years later, the commander of the 1st Infantry Division, General Robert Lee Bullard, concluded that the Marines “didn’t ‘win the war’ here, but they saved the Allies from defeat. Had they arrived a few hours later I think that would have been the beginning of the end.”
The grateful French renamed the forest “Bois de la Brigade de Marine,” or “Wood of the Marine Brigade,” and awarded the 4th Marine brigade the Croix de Guerre.
The Springfield 1903 remained in service through World War II and was even used in Korea and Vietnam. At least one World War II general is known to have carried and used his with great relish. Omar Bradley, at the time an Army corps commander, habitually kept his in his Jeep in Africa and on Sicily. General Bradley often used the gun to take potshots at attacking German planes.
Though an excellent shot, Bradley is not known to have brought down a plane.
Then again, the German pilots missed him as well.
Much of the Springfield’s service in World War II was as a sniper weapon. Army sergeant William E. Jones used it in Normandy with great success. So did many others. While not initially designed as a sniper weapon, its inherent abilities of sure fire and long range made it a good one. Jones credited much of his success to his scope, which provided 2–5× magnification. It was a huge advantage over iron sights, even though it’s a far cry from even the less expensive civilian hunting sights we use today.
Inevitably, improvements in technology made the Springfield obsolete as a sniping weapon. Still, its influence lived on, as did its ammunition. Legendary Vietnam-era sniper Carlos Hathcock—the greatest American combat sniper ever—shot a .30–06 from his Winchester Model 70. Even today, the longer range weapons preferred by most snipers can trace their roots back in some way to the bolt-action long gun and its ammo.
Most of my sniper kills in Iraq were made with weapons chambering a .300 Win Mag. The Winchester Magnum round was developed after the 30-06, and in fact the round was first wildcatted, or made privately, after Winchester introduced the cartridges in three other sizes. The new ammo gave more punch to the Model 70 rifle, letting it reach out and touch someone just a little farther than before.
Over the course of my career, I used a number of different bolt-action weapons chambering that particular ammo. Early on, my best combo was probably a gun that used McMillan stocks, customized barrels, and a Remington 700 action. Later on, I shot a weapon from Accuracy International that had a slightly shorter barrel and a folding stock.
I would imagine that most serious hunters are familiar with the Remington 700 rifle and its bolt-action. Running through all the possible variations would take the better part of a day; that’s how popular this particular platform has been. Another measure of its success is its adoption by many military forces, police departments, and SWAT teams as the weapon of choice for their long-range shooters. Most famously, the Army’s M24 Sniper Weapon System is made by Remington and based on the Remington 700 rifle. The Navy’s MK13 sniper weapon is also based on the Remington action, though it uses a different chasis.
The Remington family is so popular that many manufacturers make a ton of accessories, add-ons, and replacements for it. From the days of the Revolution and our friend Tim Murphy, shooters have always wanted to have a little personal touch on their weapon, with customized triggers, stocks, cheekpieces; you name it. You’ve got to constantly look for an edge anywhere you can find it.
Remington’s recent ad campaign puts this gun’s popularity in perspective. Above a photo of a modern stainless sporting version of the Model 700 the headline reads, “Over 5,000,000 sold. The world’s largest army ain’t in China.”
One of my favorite personal sniper weapons was a highly customized Mk 13 put together just for me by a friend and fellow SEAL named Monty LeClair. I met Monty when he was a sniper instructor. I’d already seen some of the work he’d done on guns for himself when I picked up a rifle of his one day. As soon as I held it, I knew I had to have one for myself.
We ordered a bunch of parts and went to work. Monty started by taking a Remington 700 action and truing it. This meant going over the workings until they were to exact specifications, removing what for most people wouldn’t even be considered blemishes. He put a Rock Creek barrel on it, and then added a number of other high-tech, top-shelf parts. One of Monty’s little personal touches had to do with the way he bedded it into the Accuracy International chassis he used. There’d been the tiniest external warp to the action, and he cured any flaw that might have caused.
When he was done, the weapon was a sub-half MOA gun, or accurate to within a half-minute of angle when fired at a target at one hundred yards away. It’s a standard snipers and marksmen use to gauge a gun’s accuracy without interference from the shooter. In this case, it meant that five military spec bullets hit less than a half-inch apart when fired. Rifles have been improving steadily over the past few years, but that’s a damn good grouping by any measure.
Monty’s been building guns since he was a teenager, and taking them apart before that. He probably hasn’t met a weapon he doesn’t think he can improve on. Chief LeClair is still in the Navy, but he ought to eye a career as a gunmaker if he ever retires.
Toward the end of my service as a SEAL, we started working with guns that fired the .338 cartridge, a larger round that in the right weapon has tremendous power and range. The .338 Lapua Magnum round is a great option; in fact, it’s the ammunition I was shooting when I got my longest kill, at some 2,100 meters outside Baghdad. I was able to use both a McMillan and an Accuracy International version of the 338; I was on the McMillan when I made that shot. The bullet shoots farther and flatter than a .50 caliber, weighs less, costs less, and will do just as much damage. While the guns are heavier than those designed to fire a WinMag, they’re a good sight lighter than a .50. They’re awesome weapons.
In case you’re wondering, the round is named Lapua after the Finnish company that developed it in the 1980s. The bullet was first intended for a gun being developed by Research Armament Industries in Arkansas to meet a Marine Corps requirement for a new long-range sniper weapon to replace .50 caliber sniper guns. The gun, known as the Haskins rifle after its designer Jerry Haskins, influenced a new generation of designs.
To stand up to the round, the gun required a thick bolt and a wider frame for the action; one of the first companies to produce such a weapon was Mauser, which came out with a .338 Magnum SR93. A lot had changed in a hundred and twenty years since their rifles buzzed past TR’s ears, but the company, now a subsidiary of Sig-Sauer, still aimed for the cutting edge of gun design.
Since we’re talking about sniper weapons and the cutting edge, I should mention that some of the most important developments in the technology have come in the area of optics. There’s no sense having a gun that will shoot 2,000 meters if you can’t see what you’re aiming at. Improvements in scopes and guns are being made every day. And then there’s this: One system I looked at recently allowed the gun—or more specifically its computer—to decide when to take the shot. With that system, say its developers, anyone can be a sniper.
I don’t know about that.
The sighting system sure is sweet, and the gun definitely packs a wallop. Is it the future? I guess we’ll find out.
The Springfield M1903 enjoyed a long run. It lives on today not only in the hands of collectors and shooters who like its solid feel, but in movies and classic novels. Steve McQueen handled a Springfield in The Sand Pebbles, and an M1903 with a telescopic sight was used by the sniper played by Barry Pepper in Saving Private Ryan. Ernest Hemingway and Kurt Vonnegut wrote Springfields into their stories, and in James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, soldiers drilled with Springfields and fire them at Japanese aircraft on December 7, 1941.
But another gun developed in the pre–World War I era had an even greater role in movies and popular culture.
I’m talking about the M1911 pistol, standard sidearm for the U.S. military from 1911 to 1985, and the gun that defined semi-automatic pistol for several generations of Americans.