First Freedom Page 20
Winchester Model 1886 Lever-Action Rifle
Browning was just getting started. In a two-year span from 1885 to 1887, the wunderkind invented eleven new guns for Winchester in a wide range of styles. Within a few years the company became the leading manufacturer of sporting firearms, most of its designs having sprung from Browning’s fertile imagination. The gunsmith soon began making trips to Winchester’s Connecticut factory, learning both the limits and possibilities of the impressive machinery used to build his guns. One Winchester executive noted that by the end of his first visit, “there was probably no machine in this plant that he could not operate.” Browning was particularly taken with William Mason, one of the company’s top mechanics, who would modify Browning’s designs to make them compatible with mass production. Years later, when Browning had a falling-out with Winchester, the company claimed Mason as the true designer of their most popular early rifles. (Considering the slew of inventions Browning hatched after his break with the company, this claim seems highly unlikely.)
What make this early success even more remarkable are Browning’s remote western origins, his numerous personal setbacks—his second and third sons died before their first birthdays during this time—and his faith, which generated rigid hostility on the East Coast. Although there would be some debate over the depth of Browning’s Mormonism—it was a topic he rarely talked about in public—there is no evidence that he was anything but a fully engaged member of his community. In 1887, at the age of thirty-two, in the midst of his burgeoning career, John “set apart” in the Mormon tradition and spent two years in Georgia proselytizing.
When John returned to Utah in 1889, the Browning brothers opened a spacious shop in Ogden, where they printed catalogs and sold everything new westerners needed to survive on the way to California or Oregon, from fishing tackle to tents to knives. But what made the shop famous were the guns. The Browning brothers purportedly owned the longest gun racks in the West. And while the brothers ran the shop, John spent most of his time inventing new models, winning two patents within two years of returning from his missionary work.
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An important aspect of Browning’s career to remember is that many of his greatest innovations were being created concurrently rather than sequentially. The semiautomatic shotgun, the semiautomatic handgun, and the machine gun were all percolating in his mind by 1898.
Many of these new guns, however, would not be made with Winchester. Throughout their fruitful relationship, the company bought almost every idea Browning came up with—around forty in all. Often the company purchased his designs simply to prevent them from falling into the hands of the competition. The problem with this arrangement was that Browning was increasingly annoyed that he was losing out on royalties elsewhere as Winchester shelved his ideas. His models were so successful—a conservative estimate put around two-thirds of the sporting rifles sold to Americans during this time with Winchester had been patented by Browning—the realization of his designs and the resulting royalties would have been a far more enriching and, from his perspective, fairer means of compensation.
In 1902, Browning decided to personally take a prototype automatic shotgun to show Bennett. “I want to get some action on those automatic shotguns,” he told his brothers. “Those fellows down there are stalling, and we’re letting the best thing I have ever made die in its sleep.”5 Browning—who had, according to his company’s biography, spent more time testing this shotgun than any of his other creations—considered the gun his most innovative accomplishment to that point. It’s unsurprising, then, that he demanded both production of the gun and royalty payments from Winchester. Bennett demurred, perhaps fearing such a precedent would be bad for the bottom line. Angered, Browning left Winchester, breaking a nearly twenty-year relationship.
Winchester’s loss turned out to be a boon for competing firms. Browning not only worked with almost all of the other major firearms manufacturers but also struck out on his own with the Auto-5, the first mass-produced semiautomatic shotgun. The gun—with 12-, 16-, and 20-gauge models, still the standard today—ended up being leased to a number of manufacturers and was in continuous production until 1998, making it one of the most popular weapons in American history.
Yet it was Browning’s invention of the first genuine automatic weapon that fundamentally changed the gun. As family lore has it, John formulated the idea of an automatic rifle while watching his brothers and family friends target shooting at the family’s range in 1886. After witnessing the gas from one of the guns bend the grass blades, an event he had probably seen thousands of times, he blurted out to his brothers that “it might even be possible to make a fully automatic gun, one that would keep firing as long as you had ammunition.” As Maxim had seen the recoil of a gun as a way to propel the next cartridge, Browning saw the wasted gas and immediately went about building a rifle that would harness it.
The next day Browning took a four-inch-square piece of five-pound iron, drilled a hole in the center to allow the bullet to pass, and placed it one inch from the muzzle. When he pulled the trigger the iron went flying across his workspace. Next he constructed a bowl-shaped steel cap with another hole in the center, but this time he connected the metal to a spring-loaded operating lever at the lock of the rifle. When the gas blew the cap, it pulled the loading lever forward, and the spring sent the lever rearward to the locked position. Another shot repeated this cycle—and so on and so on as long as he had ammunition. The energy for Browning’s guns would be drawn from the breech using gas rather than blowback or recoil energy.
Browning wrote to Colt, a company founded only a few decades earlier on the exhilarating prospect of shooting five or six bullets without having to reload, that he had conceived of an automatic gas-powered machine gun that could not only be fired indefinitely but could be made cheaply enough to put in the hands of average men. Browning penned this historic dispatch with the nonchalance of a man selling office paper:
Dear Sirs:
We have just completed our new automatic machine gun & thought we would write to you to see if you are interested in that kind of a gun. We have been at work on this gun for some time & have got it in good shape. We made a small one first which shot a 44 W. C. F. chge at the rate of about 16 times per second & weight about 8 #. The one we have just completed shoots the 45 Gov’t chge about 6 times per second fc with the mount weighs about 40 #. It is entirely automatic & can be made as cheaply as a common sporting rifle. If you are interested in this kind of gun we would be pleased to show you what it is & how it works as we are intending to take it down your way before long. Kindly let us hear from you in relation to it at once.
Yours Very Truly,
Browning Bros6
It took two years before the gun went into production, although by 1895 Browning and Colt Manufacturing quickly created prototypes that could handle various types of ammunition, including smokeless powder and popular rifle cartridges. Browning moved to Hartford for two years to supervise the manufacturing of the gun. In 1897 the Navy bought fifty Colt-made Browning machine guns, making them the first service in American history to acquire a genuine automatic machine gun. The gun saw naval action during the Spanish-American War, and the Marines brought a few along in the rescue of Europeans during the Boxer Rebellion. And just like that, the crank machine gun was rendered antiquated technology—although the Army, as is its wont to this day, kept buying less effective and expensive Gatlings for another ten years.
The American military establishment of the late 1800s and early 1900s had shown scant interest in technological advances. There was no perceptible military doctrine to utilize new weapons with effectiveness. As the century progressed, a number of American leaders would, in fact, worry about the new machine guns. They viewed their use as wasteful, undignified, and no way to fight a war. The rapid-fire gun, many thought, would strip men of their bravery and discipline. Moreover, many of the new semiautomatics were imperfect, sometimes jamming, and some lea
ders believed that they would cause more problems than they solved. When a number of American generals and tacticians began contemplating and forming doctrines built around rapid-fire warfare, there was big pushback from traditionalists both in the Army and out.
With some dismay, General John Pershing noted on a trip to the European front early in World War I that America’s allies in Europe had “all but given up the use of the rifle.” He sent a number of messages back to Washington warning that U.S. forces should remain focused on traditional weapons because “the rifle and bayonet remain the supreme weapons of the infantry soldier . . . [T]he ultimate success of the army depends on their proper use in open warfare.”7
America, of course, still needed rifles, as they remained the standard weapon of war. In 1915 the United States military was in possession of around 600,000 Model 1903 Springfield bolt-action rifles and another 160,000 antiquated Norwegian Krags they had purchased years earlier. Once it looked like America might enter the war, the United States started manufacturing the M1917 Enfield, the “American Enfield,” a knockoff of the British service rifle. This choice was made out of convenience and necessity, as a number of the American gun manufacturers were already contracted to produce weapons for their UK allies. The gun was altered to take American .30-06 Springfield ammunition. The Ordnance Department picked Winchester and Remington, and they made more than 2 million of these rifles from 1917 to 1918. More than half of these guns were manufactured at the Eddystone Rifle Works in Eddystone, Pennsylvania. (The factory is sometimes identified as an independent company, but it was actually a holding of Remington.) The Eddystone factory made 5,000 rifles a day during the war, employing as many as 10,000 people, though some of these employees were still fulfilling the contracts for arms and ammunition they had gotten from the British.8
The first modern war required modern weapons. In the summer of 1917 the future Army chief of staff and colonel Charles Pelot Summerall warned that artillery and rapid-fire guns were the only way to break the stalemate in Europe. That same summer a rapid-fire expert from the Army traveled to France to review the lines and wrote to Pershing that “the day of the rifleman is done. He was a good horse while he lasted, but his day is over.”
These men were often dismissed as scaremongers. So it is unsurprising that by the time the United States entered World War I American soldiers were armed with antiquated machine guns, too small, too slow, and too rickety. Due to this lack of preparedness, the 14,000 U.S. Expeditionary Corps troops who landed in Europe in the summer of 1917 to fight the Central Powers were initially forced to accept donated French- and English-made models that were, in most cases, no more formidable or reliable than 1895 Colt-Browning machine guns. Oftentimes the Americans were without the right ammunition.
After contentious debate in Washington over the future of the military, a decision was made to move forward with rearmament. A call was put out to gunmakers to help fix the problem. As it happened, John Browning had been working on two new military machine guns since 1910. Both were ready by the time the U.S. Army Ordnance Department called in February 1917. One was a water-cooled machine gun and the other a shoulder-fired automatic rifle known as the Browning Machine Rifle, nicknamed the “potato digger.” Browning’s first official exhibition of these guns on the outskirts of Washington, DC, drew more than three hundred people, including a number of senators, congressmen, and various dignitaries from Great Britain, France, and Belgium. All went away awestruck by the jaw-dropping exhibition.
Colonel George Morgan Chinn, in a report on the history of the machine gun prepared for the Navy Department Bureau of Ordnance, noted that those who watched were blown away (in a manner of speaking) by the firepower and speed of the weapons, animated by the prospect that “a hundred men advancing with these weapons firing full automatic would literally sweep an enemy out of the way.”9 This was far too optimistic in the age of trench warfare, yet the improvement over the weapons they now had was palpable even in a field neighboring America’s capital.
What excited military men most was the prospect of a gun offering “walking fire,” which, as it sounds, is a military tactic of suppressive fire by infantry while moving forward. Browning would deliver. For the first time an individual American soldier could pick up and carry an automatic rifle. The M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle, called the BAR, could be carried while continuously firing twenty shots in 2.5 seconds. It could shoot nearly five hundred rounds per minute. In fact, after some modification, Browning himself took a new prototype for testing to the Springfield Armory and shot the gun at six hundred rounds per minute with not a single misfire or broken component in 40,000 shots fired. “The Colt gun is exceedingly simple in construction, and has not more than one hundred separate parts, a surprisingly small number, considering the type. It has been designed with great care and with due attention to the often conflicting requirements of lightness and strength, so that with a maximum weight of 10 pounds no part, with the single exception of the extractor, has been broken in the course of a number of very severe tests,” noted the final report.10 The weapon would be used by the American armed forces until the United States began phasing them out after the Korean War.
Browning, though always an astute businessman, saw his involvement in war as a patriotic duty. In the fall of 1917, the U.S. government negotiated a long-term contract with Browning. As his brother Matthew remembers the meeting, the government likely made an offer assuming there would be negotiations. “I supposed that John would ask for a little time to think things over and get my opinion,” his brother recalled later. “But without hesitating a second, he said, ‘Major, if that suits Uncle Sam, it’s all right with me.’ ”11 Now, a reader might be skeptical about this selfless portrayal of the gunmaker. Certainly Browning would not come out of the agreement any poorer. And, really, whom was he going to sell machine guns to if not to the military? But any delay in negotiations, though it might have made Browning richer, could have cost lives.
From the Allied perspective, Browning’s gun was a lifesaver. No one in America at the time had either the technological know-how or the infrastructure to pull it off. One of the guns used by U.S. forces was the M1911. The gun’s history went back to 1896, when Browning approached Colt’s Manufacturing Company (formerly Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company) about making four semiautomatic pistols to be sold in the United States. For the European markets, Browning would start a lifelong relationship with Fabrique Nationale, located in Liège, a city with easy access to iron, coal, and lumber that had been a leading gun center in Europe since the Middle Ages. In the coming years Browning quite often visited the firm, which employed one of his sons. The Belgians were immediately taken by the man they called “Le Maître” (“the Master”). “By reputation and appearance he astonished the people of Liège,” noted one contemporaneous account. “He was exceptionally tall and lean, and his head extraordinarily shiny. The features of his face, as sharp and immovable as those of a medal, seemed animated only by his regard.”
Browning’s patents evolved into the Model 1900, the Model 1903, the Model 1910, and the Colt Model 1911, which would possess numerous components that are still widely used in semiautomatic pistols—including, most recognizably, the detachable magazines that could be loaded in the butts of the guns. When the U.S. Army put the gun to its standard 6,000-shot test (allowing cooling every 100 rounds and cleaning every 1,000), it accomplished the task without a single failure of any kind. Its descendants would be the standard-issue sidearm of the United States armed forces from 1911 to 1986; in other words, American soldiers holstered the gun from before World War I nearly to the end of the Cold War. It would be widely embraced by American law enforcement and become a bestseller in the civilian marketplace. Colt produced more than 2.6 million military pistols based on the 1911 design and another 400,000 for civilians. All told, nearly 5 million were manufactured by various gunmakers. The design is still popular today.
The first Browning semiautomatic pisto
l appeared in Europe in 1899, and there would be more than 500,000 of them produced on the continent by the time Gavrilo Princip got his hands on one. The assassin’s pistol was a .38-caliber, which turned out to be a problem for the American military. First used by the United States during the Philippine insurrection in 1901, the Army had gripes about the stopping power of the new gun. In one such account, a man named Antonio Caspi attempted to escape from an American prison on the island of Samar. According to the Army, Caspi “was shot four times at close range in a hand-to-hand encounter by a .38 caliber Colt’s revolver loaded with U.S. Army regulation ammunition. He was finally stunned by a blow on the forehead from the butt-end of a Springfield carbine.”12 A West Point graduate named John T. Thompson, soon to invent the tommy gun, and Louis Anatole La Garde, a major in the Medical Corps, were tasked to study the inefficiencies of the .38 revolver round and figure out what caliber worked best. Thompson would shoot various calibers into animals and cadavers, while La Garde studied their medical effects. The test results, later deemed highly unscientific, were embraced by the Army. So Browning added a .45 pistol. He also added a grip frame that was made larger and sturdier, and the magazine capacity was increased from five to seven.
The 1911, like the Peacemaker or the Kentucky rifle, would take on legendary status. During World War I its reputation was buttressed by stories of American bravery. Most famous was the case of Alvin Cullum York, better known as Sergeant York, one of the most decorated American soldiers of the conflict. York famously received a Medal of Honor for leading an attack on a German machine-gun nest, killing at least 25 enemy soldiers and capturing 132. York, a Tennessean whose blacksmith father still hunted with a flintlock rifle, tamed a wild streak by joining the Church of Christ in Christian Union in his late teens. A pacifist, York petitioned for conscientious objector status but was denied. “Don’t Want to Fight” was his stated reason.