Post by BoW GaCAman on Sept 21, 2013 11:27:56 GMT -5
WOW...more gems as fruit from Wednesday's phone talk. Inspired me to go do some additional research on facts behind the 1911. Thanks again, Mr. Burns!
I think most of us have heard of the infamous Moros, of the Philipines archipelago, but I'd never heard them described in such detail, as this:
1902
Perhaps you doubt that history repeats itself.
On July 4, 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt declared the Philippines War officially over. Except, of course, “in the country inhabited by the Moro tribes.” The Moros, so called by the Spanish, were 35,000 fanatical Islamic warriors, Muslim terrorists if you will, who “fought in the way of Allah” and declared a jihad, or holy war, against American infidels. The Moros were a small, fierce people with no fear of dying. One of the few things they feared was that their families would survive them, so they often charged into certain death holding their children in front of them as shields. With almost unstoppable bullet-eating assaults, booby trap warfare as sophisticated and deadly as in Vietnam, and suicidal attacks reminiscent of the Middle East today, the Moros kept more than one-fifth of the entire U.S. Army fully occupied for a decade.
With hair and eyebrows shaved, arteries and genitals bound in leather to slow the flow of blood and deaden the sensation of pain, drugged out of their minds on who-knows-what, and armed mostly with spears, hatchets, daggers and swords, plus a few old Arab matchlocks, ancient flintlocks dating to the American Revolution and the Southern War for Independence, the Moros made superhuman efforts to fulfill their oaths to kill (and eat) Christians in order to assure their places in paradise.
Moro invincibility was legendary. In one instance, a Moro warrior received 14 bullet wounds in five minutes, three of which penetrated his brain, and yet he fought on. As a seasoned Army officer put it, “Even the veteran Indian fighters among [the Army regulars] had to learn that a Moro was more dangerous than a renegade Apache and twice as hard to kill.”
The arrival of the new Colt semiautomatic pistols in 1911 was welcome, as this account of the death of a Moro warrior by an American soldier attends: “He had 32 Krag balls through him and was only stopped by the 33rd bullet - a Colt .45 slug through both ears.”
In 1913 some semblance of peace prevailed, but the Moros were never permanently subdued. In fact, in 1972, they rebelled again when martial law was declared in the Philippines and the government ordered civilians to surrender their guns. The right to keep and bear arms is holy to the Moros, apparently far more holy than it is to Americans, as the Moros are absolutely unyielding in their refusal to trade their holy rights for political convenience. They continue to fight to this day.
One of the things we learned in the 1902-1913 war with the Moros was that revolvers chambered in .38 Long Colt, with ballistic performance in the same class as today’s .38 Special and 9x19mm Parabellum, were inadequate at stopping such a determined enemy. So were the army’s 30-40 Krags, with performance almost indistinguishable from today’s .308 Winchester or 7.62x51mm NATO. Many were the soldiers in that conflict who would have given anything for the trusty old big-bore 45-70 which the Krag had replaced. Many are the American soldiers today who must wonder in amazement that they are once again fighting Islamic militants with guns in the .38 Long Colt and 30-40 Krag class, or with so-called assault rifles which a Moro might find marginally useful for piercing his ears. 1906
Based on the ongoing clashes with the Moros, the U.S. Army came to the painful conclusion that a new military handgun was called for. Extensive ballistic testing on live cattle and human cadavers performed in 1904 (the famous Thompson-LaGarde tests), plus the cavalry’s traditional requirement to shoot horses in battle as well as men, led to the determination by an Army Ordnance Board headed by Col. John T. Thompson and Col. Louis A. LaGarde that the army needed a 45-caliber handgun to provide adequate stopping power. The selection process started in 1906 with firearms submitted by Colt, DWM/Luger, Savage, Smith & Wesson, Knoble, Bergmann, Webley-Scott and White-Merrill.
John Browning, who was working for Colt at the time, had already developed a semiautomatic pistol around his .38 Colt Automatic cartridge (almost identical in performance to the 9mm, later improved in the .38 Super) that he knew he could re-engineer to accommodate a more effective 45-caliber cartridge of his own design.
Browning’s new pistol worked in an entirely different way than the paragons of semiautomatic pistols at the time, which were the Model 1896 broomhandle Mauser and the 1902 Luger which was Georg Luger’s improvement of the German-manufactured pistol designed by American Hugo Borchardt in 1893.
Browning’s pistol was a radical, yet simple, recoil-operated, locked-breech, tilting barrel design. The barrel, slide, magazine and frame were separate components. The barrel was attached to the frame by means of pins which passed through pivoting links. The slide was fitted into channels in the frame. Ridges and grooves were machined into the top of the barrel at the chamber to match ridges and grooves on the inside of the slide. With the action closed, these ridges and grooves interlocked, the slide covered virtually the entire barrel, and the firing pin housing closed off the chamber. Lock-up was complete. Upon firing, recoil forced the slide and barrel to travel rearward together for about a quarter of an inch. The links caused the barrel to pivot downward at the same time, freeing the slide and barrel from their interlocking grooves. The slide then continued rearward to full recoil, extracting and ejecting the spent cartridge case and re-cocking the hammer. With the slide at full travel and the recoil spring fully compressed, the spring then took over and pushed the slide closed again as it stripped a fresh cartridge from the magazine and loaded it into the chamber. The operation of almost every semiautomatic pistol manufactured since has been based directly on this breakthrough design.
Browning and Colt had developed the new .45 ACP (Automatic Colt Pistol) cartridge in 1905, chambering it in a scaled-up pistol they called the Model 1905. The new .45 ACP round was loaded with a 230-grain FMJ (Full Metal Jacket) bullet, and matched the performance requirements the Moro-weary army officers were looking for. It was a further improved model of this pistol that Colt entered in the 1906 trials.
Only Colt and Savage survived those first trials. A series of further tests and experiments were called for by the Ordnance Department, and a final selection committee was appointed in 1911.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moro_Rebellion
I think most of us have heard of the infamous Moros, of the Philipines archipelago, but I'd never heard them described in such detail, as this:
1902
Perhaps you doubt that history repeats itself.
On July 4, 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt declared the Philippines War officially over. Except, of course, “in the country inhabited by the Moro tribes.” The Moros, so called by the Spanish, were 35,000 fanatical Islamic warriors, Muslim terrorists if you will, who “fought in the way of Allah” and declared a jihad, or holy war, against American infidels. The Moros were a small, fierce people with no fear of dying. One of the few things they feared was that their families would survive them, so they often charged into certain death holding their children in front of them as shields. With almost unstoppable bullet-eating assaults, booby trap warfare as sophisticated and deadly as in Vietnam, and suicidal attacks reminiscent of the Middle East today, the Moros kept more than one-fifth of the entire U.S. Army fully occupied for a decade.
With hair and eyebrows shaved, arteries and genitals bound in leather to slow the flow of blood and deaden the sensation of pain, drugged out of their minds on who-knows-what, and armed mostly with spears, hatchets, daggers and swords, plus a few old Arab matchlocks, ancient flintlocks dating to the American Revolution and the Southern War for Independence, the Moros made superhuman efforts to fulfill their oaths to kill (and eat) Christians in order to assure their places in paradise.
Moro invincibility was legendary. In one instance, a Moro warrior received 14 bullet wounds in five minutes, three of which penetrated his brain, and yet he fought on. As a seasoned Army officer put it, “Even the veteran Indian fighters among [the Army regulars] had to learn that a Moro was more dangerous than a renegade Apache and twice as hard to kill.”
The arrival of the new Colt semiautomatic pistols in 1911 was welcome, as this account of the death of a Moro warrior by an American soldier attends: “He had 32 Krag balls through him and was only stopped by the 33rd bullet - a Colt .45 slug through both ears.”
In 1913 some semblance of peace prevailed, but the Moros were never permanently subdued. In fact, in 1972, they rebelled again when martial law was declared in the Philippines and the government ordered civilians to surrender their guns. The right to keep and bear arms is holy to the Moros, apparently far more holy than it is to Americans, as the Moros are absolutely unyielding in their refusal to trade their holy rights for political convenience. They continue to fight to this day.
One of the things we learned in the 1902-1913 war with the Moros was that revolvers chambered in .38 Long Colt, with ballistic performance in the same class as today’s .38 Special and 9x19mm Parabellum, were inadequate at stopping such a determined enemy. So were the army’s 30-40 Krags, with performance almost indistinguishable from today’s .308 Winchester or 7.62x51mm NATO. Many were the soldiers in that conflict who would have given anything for the trusty old big-bore 45-70 which the Krag had replaced. Many are the American soldiers today who must wonder in amazement that they are once again fighting Islamic militants with guns in the .38 Long Colt and 30-40 Krag class, or with so-called assault rifles which a Moro might find marginally useful for piercing his ears. 1906
Based on the ongoing clashes with the Moros, the U.S. Army came to the painful conclusion that a new military handgun was called for. Extensive ballistic testing on live cattle and human cadavers performed in 1904 (the famous Thompson-LaGarde tests), plus the cavalry’s traditional requirement to shoot horses in battle as well as men, led to the determination by an Army Ordnance Board headed by Col. John T. Thompson and Col. Louis A. LaGarde that the army needed a 45-caliber handgun to provide adequate stopping power. The selection process started in 1906 with firearms submitted by Colt, DWM/Luger, Savage, Smith & Wesson, Knoble, Bergmann, Webley-Scott and White-Merrill.
John Browning, who was working for Colt at the time, had already developed a semiautomatic pistol around his .38 Colt Automatic cartridge (almost identical in performance to the 9mm, later improved in the .38 Super) that he knew he could re-engineer to accommodate a more effective 45-caliber cartridge of his own design.
Browning’s new pistol worked in an entirely different way than the paragons of semiautomatic pistols at the time, which were the Model 1896 broomhandle Mauser and the 1902 Luger which was Georg Luger’s improvement of the German-manufactured pistol designed by American Hugo Borchardt in 1893.
Browning’s pistol was a radical, yet simple, recoil-operated, locked-breech, tilting barrel design. The barrel, slide, magazine and frame were separate components. The barrel was attached to the frame by means of pins which passed through pivoting links. The slide was fitted into channels in the frame. Ridges and grooves were machined into the top of the barrel at the chamber to match ridges and grooves on the inside of the slide. With the action closed, these ridges and grooves interlocked, the slide covered virtually the entire barrel, and the firing pin housing closed off the chamber. Lock-up was complete. Upon firing, recoil forced the slide and barrel to travel rearward together for about a quarter of an inch. The links caused the barrel to pivot downward at the same time, freeing the slide and barrel from their interlocking grooves. The slide then continued rearward to full recoil, extracting and ejecting the spent cartridge case and re-cocking the hammer. With the slide at full travel and the recoil spring fully compressed, the spring then took over and pushed the slide closed again as it stripped a fresh cartridge from the magazine and loaded it into the chamber. The operation of almost every semiautomatic pistol manufactured since has been based directly on this breakthrough design.
Browning and Colt had developed the new .45 ACP (Automatic Colt Pistol) cartridge in 1905, chambering it in a scaled-up pistol they called the Model 1905. The new .45 ACP round was loaded with a 230-grain FMJ (Full Metal Jacket) bullet, and matched the performance requirements the Moro-weary army officers were looking for. It was a further improved model of this pistol that Colt entered in the 1906 trials.
Only Colt and Savage survived those first trials. A series of further tests and experiments were called for by the Ordnance Department, and a final selection committee was appointed in 1911.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moro_Rebellion
