Greatest
Pistol Ever Stopped Attackers Cold
The M1911 killed bad guys,
made history
His name was Sgt. Alvin York and during World
War I he used a M1911 .45-caliber pistol to stop an attack by six German
soldiers while he helped assault a German machine-gun nest near Chatel-Chéhéry
on the Western Front.
On Oct. 8, 1918, York drew his pistol after
emptying his Enfield rifle at the enemy. Then he was rushed by the bayonet
charge—and had one bullet left in his M1911 when four German officers and 128
German soldiers surrendered to him and his command.
He was awarded the Medal of Honor and his name
became a by-word for bravery on the battlefield.
To the day he died, York gave credit for his
success to God, the men serving with him and the pistol he carried—a weapon
that would be commonly known as “the GI 45” and that is arguably the best
military handgun ever designed.
The M1911 is second-longest-serving weapon in
the U.S. inventory, the standard sidearm for all four branches of service from
1911 to 1985. But even after it “retired,” it never truly went away because of
the trusty reputation it gained during use in every conceivable theater,
terrain and environment.
The history of the M1911 begins in the
Philippines during the Spanish-American War, when U.S. soldiers and Marines
found themselves locked in fierce combat with the Moro, a knife-wielding native
insurgency that combined religious zeal and potent drug use.
Much of the fighting was close-quarters battle
and the hopped-up Moros took round after round from U.S. .38-caliber pistols
while they continued to hack away at Americans.
If anything positive came from the bloody
15-year guerrilla war, it was the realization that the U.S. military needed a
better pistol.
A look back at an older weapon pointed the way
to a solution. In desperation, the Army had issued Colt Model 1873 .45-caliber
revolvers—dating back to the Plains Indian Wars—to soldiers fighting the Moros.
The heavier round began to turn the tide. It
often took just one well-placed shot from the .45-caliber pistol to kill a
Moro.
In 1906, Gen. William Crozier of the U.S. Army
Ordinance Department began evaluating several pistol designs along with the
suitability of a new cartridge designated the .45-caliber Automatic Colt
Pistol, or .45 ACP.
The weapons Crozier examined were the then-new
semi-automatic self-loading design that’s so common today.
One man who would eventually offer a pistol for
consideration was John Moses Browning, the most innovative and successful weapons
designer in American history.
Browning created the M1918 Browning Automatic
Rifle, the M1917 .30-caliber machine gun, M1919 .30-caliber machine gun,
the M2 .50-caliber
Browning machine gun and the Browning
Hi-Power pistol, the first successful
high-capacity semi-automatic pistol that became the mostly widely used military
sidearm in the world.
Based on the short recoil principle of
operation, the Browning-designed Colt for the Army pistol trials was a magazine
fed, single-action semi-automatic pistol with both manual and grip safeties.
The pistol was rugged, simple to field strip,
and claimed to possess utter dependability.
Those claims were put to a torture test in 1910
when a prototype Colt M1911 fired 6,000 rounds during two days. Browning’s
sample pistol became so hot that he dunked in a pail of water to cool it for
further firing—and yet it passed the test with no malfunctions. The nearest
competition suffered 37 jams.
M1911s—particularly the M1911A1 variant—saw
service in the U.S. military during both World Wars, the Korean War and the
Vietnam War. Despite the fact that Congress pressured the Department of Defense
to adopt the M9 Beretta because it used the standard NATO nine-millimeter
round, select units in the U.S. military continue to use the M1911 to this day.
The Marine Corps in particular was reluctant to
give up the M1911. Dave Dotterrer, a retired Marine Corps colonel, told War is
Boring he trusted the pistol completely.
“It is a great weapon because of its stopping
power,” he said. “It instilled confidence in you because the .45-caliber round
is a substantial round. It is meant to be a ‘close in’ weapon.”
“I was in a Marine infantry unit that swapped
out the pistols for the new nine-millimeter pistols,” said Dotterrer, who
retired in 2001. “There was a lot talk along lines of ‘What the heck? What’s
wrong with what we had?’”
He said if had to return to the Marine Corps
today and choose between the M9 or the M1911, his choice would be easy.
“The M1911 is the greatest pistol ever
invented,” Dotterrer said.
But the M1911 had a reputation for intimidating
the shooter as well as the enemy. Some people consider the recoil too
powerful—even some Marines. Dotterrer recalled a time in 1973 when he and
264 other newly minted second lieutenants were training at a Marine Corps
pistol range with the M1911.
All but one of his fellow officers emptied their
magazines at the targets. A lone lieutenant had two rounds left.
The officer complained that the pistol was
inaccurate, even though the instructor said the lieutenant was flinching as he
fired the weapon, throwing his shooting off. The lieutenant insisted that he
was not.
The instructor told the lieutenant to fire the
remaining rounds at his target. With every eye on him, the officer leveled the
pistol and squeezed the trigger—but it didn’t fire.
“The round had misfired, but both of his arms
went up in the air 90 degrees,” Dotterrer said. “All of us gave him a pretty
hard time about that.”
Recently, the M1911 made a kind of official
return to the Marine Corps in a slightly different guise. For the first time
since World War II, Colt will deliver a variant of the M1911 called the M45A1
Close Quarter Battle Pistol. The $22.5-million contract calls for 12,000 new
weapons.
The CQPB is definitely an M1911 for the 21st
century. It has a flat, desert-tan-colored Cerakote coating, an underbarrel
Picatinny rail, fixed Novak three-dot night sights, enhanced hammer to prevent
“hammer bite” and an ambidextrous safety.
But it fires the .45 ACP round and shoots like
dream.
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