Friday, August 20, 2010

A Story of US Military Rifle Caliber

The .30 cal was too big, and they tried to make a .276, but the Army thought that round not powerful enough, plus there was a lot of .30 lying around and the Depression was on and it would be expensive to switch over if the .30 could be made to work in the .276's action.


Later, the .30 cal was too big, and they tried to make a .276, but the army thought that round not powerful enough, so, what the hey let's make a shorter .30 instead, and see if that could be made to work, recoil-wise on full auto in a shoulder rifle.


Later, the .30 cal was too big (recoil), and they stepped it down to .22, totally stepping past the .276 this time. Nearly no one liked the new .22 poodle-shooter. And many still don't.


So the .223 is too small and so they are sorta looking for that .276 again.


You'd think that one of these decades they'll go ahead and adopt that .276. If only MacArthur had given it all the green light in the 1930s. Imagine WWII with M1919's firing .276, and 10-shot Garands, and re-chambered BAR's




2 comments:

Murphy's Law said...

Money was the thing back in the day. Remember that the US military of the 1930'd trained with wooden guns, built tanks around aircraft engines, and forbid the Navy to test-fire any of it's torpedoes. There was no way that they were going to pony up for a new caliber when they still had all of that old ammo and perfectly serviceable guns--1903 Springfields, 1917 Enfields, BARs and 1917/1919 MG's--set up to shoot it.

It might have made logistical sense in the long run, but there was no way that they were going to spend the money to do it; our military just wasn't that important in the 1930's.

Borepatch said...

This post is 100% awesome.