Army had 600,000 of its superb Springfield rifles in 1917. Lack of sufficient quantities of war materiel in general and infantry weapons in particular hampered preparations. Training and equipping so large a force quickly enough to enter the war before Germany overran the French and the British appeared insurmountable even for the United States. Army embarked on a 30-fold expansion, growing to roughly four million soldiers in just over a year. When Congress declared war on the Central Powers on April 6 and later implemented military conscription, the U.S. Army mustered roughly 127,500 officers and men, fewer men than Portugal’s army. Before the United States entered World War I, this mattered little. American troops instantly loved the rifle for its butter-smooth action and tack-driving accuracy.Įven so, the Springfield suffered from one serious weakness: limited production. Based on Peter Paul Mauser’s bolt-action rifle design, the Springfield proved short enough for cavalry use and long enough for infantry use, and fired the new 30.06 service cartridge that matched or surpassed the performance of any standard military cartridge in the world. Magazine Rifle of 1903, commonly called the Springfield because it was manufactured at the U.S. Army troops in the Spanish-American War were inferior to the 1893 Mauser rifles that the Spanish troops carried, the Army adopted the U.S. Having concluded that the Krag-Jorgensen rifles used by U.S. How did York wind up with a British gun? The explanation involves American ingenuity, productive capacity, and lack of preparedness for entry into the Great War. I don’t think they were as accurate as our American rifles.” A Shortage of Springfields I had taken it apart and cleaned it enough to learn every piece and I could almost put it back together with my eyes shut. I had taken a liking to my gun by this time. There we turned in our guns and got British guns. Although some confusion persists about which rifle York carried during the battle, in his diary he wrote: “We got to France at Le Havre. It seems more likely that York achieved his stunning feat of arms carrying the less-well-known but more widely issued U.S. Inspiring as the film was, York probably did not use a Springfield rifle on that October day in 1918 during the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Sleek and accurate, the Springfield seemed the perfect weapon for an iconic American hero. The movie’s climactic scene helped cement the Springfield’s mystique with generations of military firearms collectors, history buffs, and re-enactors. In the process, the former conscientious objector from Tennessee drops 25 Germans with 25 shots, many fired from his trusty 1903 U.S. In director Howard Hawks’s 1941 film classic, Sergeant York, then-Corporal Alvin York, portrayed by Gary Cooper, single-handedly knocks out more than 30 German machine-gun nests and, with little assistance, captures 132 enemy soldiers.
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