There was once a time, as every Navy man knows, when small arms — musket, pistol, cutlass, and pike — were of much greater relative importance in naval combat than they are today. Gunnery being what it was, ships going into action were wont to hold their fire until within the proverbial pistol shot of the enemy and open the combat simultaneously with great guns and small arms. When, as was so often the case, opposing ships came to close grips and the boarders were called away it was the efforts of the fielders of cold steel that decided the outcome of the battle.
For many years after the introduction of the modern types of armored battleship and agile cruiser the principle of closing with the enemy remained; ships were prodded with ram bows and the gun crews went to quarters with cutlasses and pistols strapped about their waists while the marines stood to their breech-loading or magazine rifles.
From the earliest times the sword, the spear, and the bow were the weapons used, sometimes in conjunction with the ram prow, in naval warfare. The introduction of gunpowder led to the use of cannon and musket on shipboard, but the old arms still retained their place. In the struggle with the Spanish Armada the English archers plied their longbows with as much skill as they had shown on the fields of Crecy and Poitiers. The invention of the flintlock musket eventually caused the bow to be discarded and in land warfare the bayonet supplanted the infantryman’s pike. The latter weapon, however, regained in use as a naval weapon for a century after, as its great length made it a most efficient instrument for thrusting down boarders attempting to scale a ship’s side or clambering over the bulwarks.
At the time of the Revolutionary War the equipment of a man-of-war included muskets, pistols, cutlasses, and pikes as well as hand grenades and artillery. There was little if any attempt at standardization of the shoulder and side arms. The industrial setup of the Colonies where manufacturing was carried on in small independent shops prevented the adherence to any one design, and, moreover, it was not necessary as bullets could be molded for the individual pieces whenever time permitted. The muskets used in the Revolutionary Navy were mostly of Colonial make, but pistols were all of European origin, no pistols being made on this side of the Atlantic until 1775. The caliber of the muskets ranged anywhere from .70 to .80, the pistols being slightly smaller in bore. The few rifles which were obtained by the Navy and issued for use on shipboard were still smaller in caliber.
The cutlass in use in those days was practically the same weapon that was used during the Civil War and for some years thereafter. It had a short and heavy curved blade and a brass guard over the hilt. The “hanger” was a similar weapon but had a lighter guard.
The establishment of government arms factories at Harper’s Ferry and Springfield, shortly after the creation of the War Department, began the trend toward standardization of the equipment of all the United States armed forces which culminated eventually in the issue of a single pattern of rifle and a single type of pistol to all branches of the services. This process took, however, over 100 years and in the intervening time a large variety of weapons were in use at any given period.
Although, as might well be expected, a large number of government-made arms found their way into the naval service, the Navy as a rule procured its own weapons independently of the Army and it should be gratifying to the naval officer to note the fact that throughout this lengthy period the Navy ordnance boards showed much more willingness to take up progressive designs than did the corresponding boards of the land service.
In 1838 the Navy received its first breech-loading rifle, the Jenks, which used percussion caps instead of the old flint ignition. It was an arm of peculiar appearance, as it lacked the customary vertical hammer. The cap was fired by a horizontally swinging hammer which was supposed to be better adapted to the needs of the sea service than was the hammer of ordinary type. The Jenks rifles and carbines were of .54-caliber, the government standard at that time.
A few years after adopting this breechloading rifle the Navy took up its first percussion-cap pistol (all its earlier ones had been flintlocks), this U. S. Navy Pistol, Model of 1843, being distinguished by having its hammer mounted on the inside of the lock plate. It was intended as a belt gun (holsters were used in those days only by horsemen) and it was thought that the “box lock” would be less subject to snagging in a “quick draw.” Its caliber was .54, and it was a stubby weapon equipped, as were most of its contemporaries, with a link attachment under the muzzle to prevent loss of the ramrod. It was manufactured by Ames of Springfield and by Derringer of Philadelphia, the latter being famous for his vest-pocket pistol.
A Navy pistol which was very similar to that of 1843 but which had a lock of conventional pattern was the model of 1842, not made, however, until several years after the first appearance of the box-lock gun. The model of 1842 was principally an Army weapon, but as used by that service had a longer barrel.
When the forty-niners began their historic rush to California a very popular item of their equipment was the Colt’s Navy revolver. This was a 6-shot weapon whose caliber was .36 (the same size that is now called .38), which was much lighter and better balanced than the .44 Colt’s Army and had for that reason much greater popularity. It was Colonel Colt’s fourth pattern of revolving pistol and was for many years the favorite side arm of the services and of the pioneers of the west. Its popularity lasted until the .45 cartridge-revolver had been generally issued to the Army and cartridges for that type of arm were obtainable by the plainsman and miner at any military post.
The Navy Revolver was, while not a regulation Army weapon, the favorite of Federal and Confederate military officers fortunate enough to get their hands on it. The Colt’s Navy gun was sometimes furnished with a detachable wooden shoulder stock such as is used on the present-day Mauser and Lueger automatic pistols this stock being ingeniously made in the form of a canteen! The 1860 model of this revolver was “streamlined.” Manufacture of the revolver was stopped after the surrender of Lee.
During the Civil War the supply regulation .36-caliber Colt’s revolvers being (as is usually the case in such an event) inadequate, the Navy contracted for large numbers of revolvers of other makes, all of them being of the regulation bore. The best and most popular of these emergency arms was the Remington revolver, an arm which was actually much better designed than was the Colt. Many guns of this pattern are in use today, not only in the backwoods but by arms enthusiasts with a flair for actual shooting with antique cap-and-ball guns. The government price for this sturdy, accurate, and well-balanced revolver was $12.50.
A revolver almost identical with the Remington was the Whitneyville. An amusing Navy revolver of the Civil War Period was the Savage, a huge and clumsy arm fitted with two triggers, one to fire the gun and the other to revolve the cylinder and cock the hammer. Another odd Weapon used in the Navy at the same time was the Allen & Wheelock which had a hammer mounted on the outside of the frame, cap nipples let into the outer circumference of the cylinder, and a lever ramrod which when not in use folded backward to form the trigger guard. The Starr revolvers, made in both single-action and double-action models, had jointed frames somewhat like those of modern breakdown revolvers.
With the exception of the Savage all the above-mentioned guns were furnished to the Army in .44-caliber. All were loaded with powder and ball at the front of the cylinder and had to be capped separately.
The Civil War saw the first attempt to provide the Navy with a repeating rifle, a .56-caliber revolving arm made by the Colt’s firm. This arm, which had a sword bayonet 2 feet long, was not much of a success as it developed a somewhat unpleasant habit of letting off two or more chambers at once and removing any portion of the rifleman’s anatomy that happened to be in the way. Even when it failed to do this the Colt’s revolving rifle suffered from the bane of all revolvers in that there was an escape of gas from the space between the rear of the barrel and the face of the cylinder, not a matter of great moment in a hand arm but a grave defect in a shoulder weapon as the left arm of the shooter was extended along the gun in such a way that when the trigger Was pulled the arm received a liberal dose of hot gases, to say nothing of lead shavings.
No further attempt to secure a practical repeater was made by the Navy for many years, but a number of breech-loading, single-shot rifles were widely used in the service. Among them was the Sharps & Hankins, a Philadelphia-made .54-caliber lever-action gun in which the barrel and fore end moved out several inches from the butt to expose the chamber for loading. The Sharps & Hankins was issued in long and carbine patterns, the latter having the barrel encased in leather in an attempt to protect it from the ravages of sea air. The long rifle had a very long sword bayonet. This rifle was based on the patents of Christian Sharps, the inventor of the first really practical breechloader in the days before the metallic cartridge and who later designed some outstanding cartridge guns, but unlike all his other rifles this one did not employ the falling-block system of breech closure.
Apropos of the Sharps rifles, there is a legend that the accuracy of his rifles led to the coining of the term “sharpshooter” during the Civil War, the name being applied to those troops who were armed with Sharps guns. Actually this tale is in the same class as the “mourning for Nelson” myth in regard to the naval uniform; the word was in use years before the Civil War, and was probably known in Marlborough’s day.
Although the year 1863 was well along into the era of the breechloader the Navy in that year added to its equipment 10,000 Whitneyville rifles which were muzzle-loaders with a caliber of .69. This is probably accounted for by the intention of using these guns with buckshot loads for the short-range work of boarding, repelling boarders, or storming shore fortifications, which the sailors of that period were often called upon to do. The big bore would naturally lend itself better to such use than the .58-caliber (which was the Springfield standard of that time) would have done, and as there were in those days no breech-loading shotguns the only way to use a scatter load was to charge the weapon at the muzzle.
The Whitneyville gun was fitted with a special type of bayonet designed by Admiral Dahlgren, this being the forerunner of the present type of knife bayonet used by most of the world’s armed forces. The Dahlgren bayonet had a 12-inch blade and a wooden haft, and is in striking contrast to the exceptionally long sword bayonets for which the Navy had such fondness in that period.
Immediately after the war it was decided to do away with all the multitudinous service rifles and replace them with a single model of breechloader. The Army adopted the breech action designed by Master-Armorer Allin of the Springfield Arsenal; the Navy decided to take up the famous Remington rolling-block action which at that time was beginning to sweep the world. This breech system was one of the simplest, strongest, and best ever designed, and is still used on inexpensive .22-caliber rifles.
The first batch of Navy rifles of this pattern were assembled at Springfield from rifle parts left over from the war, only the actions being made by Remington. Subsequent orders were, however, made entirely by the Remington plant. These guns used a .50-.70 center-fire copper shell.
Shortly after the Navy took up the Remington rifle it provided itself with a large number of pistols using the same type of action, these guns having an 8-j- inch barrel. The Remington pistol was noted for its wonderful grip and balance and is much in demand today for conversion to a .22- or a .44-caliber target gun. The Navy pistol of this make had no trigger guard in the ordinary sense, but had instead two strong lugs between which the trigger lay for protection when the hammer was down. Upon the cocking of the hammer the trigger sprang out into position, the beauty of this arrangement being that the gun could be used as readily in a gloved hand as in a bare one. This scheme was widely used in small pocket revolvers of that period.
The gun was a .50-caliber, and was the most powerful hand gun ever produced. The Army had a model which was very similar but which had a shorter barrel, a trigger guard of conventional type, and a saw-handle grip quite like that of a modern automatic pistol.
The Remington side arm was soon replaced, however, by the most famous of all hand firearms, the Colt’s .45, which was adopted by the government in 1873. The success of this weapon was so great that it is still made and sold in large quantities. The interior mechanism is the same as that in the old cap-and-ball Colt’s revolvers but being a cartridge-gun it had additional facilities for loading and ejecting the metallic cases. Its continued popularity is due to its excellent grip and the fact that its very heavy hammer can fire ammunition which is not up to scratch. As sold it is a treacherous and temperamental gun, but the Westerners overcame some of its defects by taking out the trigger and using the arm as a fan-gun or “slip-hammer” gun, firing it merely by drawing back and releasing the hammer with the thumb. In this way phenomenal rate of fire could be obtained. Although it appears to be a very sturdy weapon some of its parts are gravely subject to breakage and the gun actually shoots itself apart in a very short time. It cannot be carried safely with all six chambers loaded, and is slow to load.
This gun remained a standard service side arm until the Spanish War period, but in 1888 the Navy began to substitute for it the .38-caliber double-action Colt and Smith & Wesson revolvers which had cylinders swinging out of the frame for quick loading and ejecting. The Army did not adopt the .38 double-action guns until several years after the Navy did so. The Colt’s gun was the more widely used, and many of the government .38’s are now in civilian hands. The Smith & Wessons are rarely seen today.
Both these revolvers resembled in outline the current police revolvers of their respective makers. The old Colt was, however, entirely different in mechanism, and the Smith & Wesson lacked the ejector-rod catch under the barrel which is now used on guns of that make.
About 1880 the Navy experimented with the Peabody rifle which was a single-shot, lever-action arm using the .45-.70 cartridge which had several years previously been adopted by the Army in place of the less powerful .50-.70. The Peabody was practically identical with the Martini-Henry rifle, then the service arm of Great Britain and which has been immortalized in the writings of Kipling. Two years later, however, the service abandoned the single-shot arms in favor of a magazine arm and took up the Remington-Lee rifle which had a bolt action of the modern type and a 5-round box magazine. The Army at that time did not favor repeating rifles, as the clouds of powder smoke given off by the .45-.70 ammunition were such as to obscure the target when a large body of men were engaged in rapid fire with magazine arms.
The Remington-Lee was extensively used in the Navy for many years, but was not otherwise much used in this country. It was widely sold abroad, however, and m 1888 the British government incorporated the bolt and magazine, with minor changes, in its new Lee-Metford smallbore rifle and has continued to use it down to the present time in the Lee-Enfield arms.
In 1894 the Navy designed for itself one of the most interesting rifles ever made, the Lee Straight-pull or Lee Navy as it is variously called. This rifle was designed by a board of officers which met at Newport, and it was made for the service by Winchester.
The Lee Straight-pull had a breech action designed by Janies P. Lee, the Scotch genius who had been responsible for the Remington-Lee gun. Called a “bolt action” because it was operated by a handle attached to the right side of the breechblock or bolt, it was nevertheless related more closely to the lever-action repeaters such as the Winchester and Marlin. The handle was moved only in the fore-and- aft direction and did not require a right- angle turn to lock and unlock the mechanism. The gun had a permanently attached box magazine which was entirely open at the bottom, and it loaded from a clip. It was the first clip loader used in the United States service, as the Army’s Krag-Jorgensen rifle, adopted in 1892, which was originally intended to load from a 5-round charger, failed to work as was intended and was always hand loaded in service.
The caliber of the Lee Navy rifle was .236, the smallest bore ever used in a military arm. It had the shortest bayonet ever employed.
This arm was the service rifle during the Spanish-American War and the Boxer Rebellion, but it failed to meet expectations and was withdrawn and “placed in ordinary” soon after. Its chief defect was lack of stopping-power and many cases were noted of fanatical Harmonious Fists who continued in action after being pumped figuratively full of .236 projectiles. The straight-pull bolt was also a disappointment.
In 1902 the Lee rifle was replaced by the Krag-Jorgensen (so called), this being a .30-caliber bolt-action piece having a horizontal, instead of the usual vertical, magazine. It was copied from the Norwegian service rifle from which it also derived its common designation, but actually the Krag rifle is a U. S. Springfield and that is the name which has always been stamped on it. In 1906 the Krag was itself retired in favor of the New Springfield, the present service arm, and the supply of Krags on hand was gradually disposed of. Until a year or two ago the War Department sold, through the Director of Civilian Marksmanship, rifles of this type for the price of $1.50 each to certain civilians, no one person being allowed to purchase more than one piece.
The Krag is much admired because of the smoothness of its action, and most of those sold have been converted into excellent sporting arms. The Krag lingered on for many years at Annapolis, and to this day a number of rifles of this type are included in the equipment furnished by the Navy Department to the Pennsylvania State Nautical School with the old gunboat, the U.S.S. Annapolis.
When the current Springfield rifle was introduced in 1903 it was quite different from what it now is. The original form used a different cartridge, had sights of a different pattern than are now used, and had an upper band of different shape and a ramrod bayonet which was housed in the fore end and which was merely pulled out when it was to be fixed. Thousands of rifles of this pattern were issued, but in 1906 they were all called in and converted to the present form. Only a dozen or so were preserved in the original form for their historical value.
It is said that President Theodore Roosevelt was personally responsible for the abolition of the “knitting-needle bayonet.”
The Service Springfield has undergone very few changes in the 31 years which have elapsed since its adoption in the present form, and the only important modification of it now projected is to substitute a pistol-grip stock for the present type. The stock now used is the same as that of the 1892 Krag, which was itself derived directly from the Norwegian design. The Norwegian stock had, strange to say, a pistol grip!
During the World War about 65,000 Mark I Springfields were made with a slot cut out of the left side of the receiver. They were to be used in conjunction with the Pedersen Device, which enabled the .30-.06 rifle to be instantly converted when desired to a semiautomatic arm firing 40 pistol-size rounds at a single loading. These devices were kept absolutely secret and were about to be sprung on the Germans as a colossal surprise when peace was made. No inkling of their existence came about until some 3 years ago, at which time the War Department decided the Pedersen Device was actually of no value and had every single specimen destroyed, at the same time allowing those few officers who had been in the know to reveal the secret which had been kept so well for so many years.
The .38-caliber service revolvers became obsolete with the development of the automatic pistol, and early in the present century the Navy purchased a number of .38 Colt’s automatics for experimental purposes. The Army had just before this time held extensive tests of practically every pistol then made (and there were a great many) and had narrowed the field down to three: the Colt, the Savage, and the Lueger.
Of these three the Lueger was the first to be ruled out, as it was unfavorably reported on by the cavalry regiment to which 1,000 pistols imported from Germany were issued. This is interesting to note in view of the great respect which the members of the A.E.F. had for this gun, the side arm of the German Army- The Colt finally won out over the Savage and would no doubt have been officially adopted but for the need which became apparent during the Philippine occupation for a heavier-caliber side arm.
The Colt firm produced a .45 automatic which was along the lines of the .38, but followed it so quickly with the model of 1911 that the first pattern of .45 became obsolete before it was past the experimental stage. The old .38’s as tried out 35 years ago were made commercially until 1928, in which year their manufacture was finally discontinued in favor of a gun on the lines of the service .45 but using the very powerful .38-automatic cartridge.
In the machine-gun category the Navy was no whit behind the Army. The hand-cranked Gatling, the Hotchkiss Revolving Cannon, the automatic Colt, the Benet-Mercier, the Lewis, the Browning, and finally the subcaliber Thompson followed each other in quick succession. The Lewis was an excellent gun but scorned by the Army, and that service has not yet seen fit to adopt the Tommy gun. The latest model of the latter, the Navy Model of 1927, is a definite step in the right direction as the full-automatic feature of the older models is eliminated in favor of semiautomatic fire which can be better controlled and is economical of ammunition, which goes to show that the Navy is as fully abreast of the times in the small-arms field as in others.