A One-Man Wave of Terror Struck America in 1915

Bomb Damage in the U.S. Senate

Shortly before midnight on Friday2 July 1915 police responded to the U.S. Capitol where an explosion had just rocked the Senate wing. Fortunately they found no fatalities–a byproduct of the fact that Congress was not in session and the building was lightly staffed at night. But, there was plenty of destruction and, obviously, great concern about security.

The next evening, Washingtonians opened their Evening Star newspaper to find a peculiar letter under the headline "Letter Received by the Star Thought to Have Bearing on the Explosion." The diatribe began "Unusual times and circumstances call for unusual means" and quickly moved into a critique of American businesses supplying warring European countries with armaments.

Paradoxically, the letter claimed that the attack on the Capitol was a call for peace "Europe needs enough noncontraband material to give us prosperity. Let us not sell her EXPLOSIVES! Let each nation make her own man-killing machines. Sorry I had to use explosives. (Never again.) It is the export kind and ought to make enough noise to be heard above the voices that clamor for blood money. This explosion is the exclamation point to my appeal for Peace!"

The letter was signed, "R. Pearce" and included a postscript: "We would, of course, not sell to the Germans either, if they could buy here." It had been postmarked less than two hours before the bomb went off.

Beside the letter ran an account of the other big news of the day.

The morning after the Capitol explosion, banker J.P. Morgan had been attacked in his summer home on Long Island, New York, by an assailant who carried two revolvers and a briefcase packed with dynamite. Morgan suffered two flesh wounds before house servants overpowered the man and tied him up on the front lawn to await police.

Erich Muenter

When Glen Cove, New York, detectives arrested him, the gunman identified himself as Cornell University German Professor Frank Holt. He told authorities that he had never intended to hurt Morgan–he just wanted to scare him. In a statement to the Justice of the Peace, Holt claimed, "My motive in coming here was to try to force Mr. Morgan to use his influence with the manufacturers of munitions in the United States and with the millionaires who are financing the war loans to have an embargo put on shipments of war munitions so as to relieve the American people of complicity in the deaths of thousands of our European brothers.

District of Columbia Chief Detective Robert Boardman found the similarities between Pearce's letter and Holt's statement curious. After applying pressure the investigators got Holt to confess. It turned out that his name wasn’t even Frank Holt. . .  or R. Pearce. It was Erich Muenter. And Erich Muenter had quite a past. He was a committed German Nationalist and connected with Germany's network of saboteurs in America. Unfortunately, on 6 July he committed suicide in his jail cell and took many secrets with him.

Source article from WETA Television Network's Blog

Remembering a Veteran: Captain D'Urban Victor Armstrong, 151 Squadron RFC/RAF

Born in the Colony of Natal on 26 July 1897, and educated at Hilton College, D'Urban Victor Armstrong joined the Royal Flying Corps in 1915. He was assigned to No. 60 Squadron the following year; while with them, he scored his first victory on 9 November 1916. His next posting was to No. 44 Squadron on home defense duties. His last assignment was to 151 Squadron.

He was one of the first night fighter victors in aerial warfare, as 151 Squadron was the Royal Air Force's first night fighter squadron. Armstrong was credited with four nighttime victories between 29 June and 17 September 1918, including a Gotha G bomber on 24 August near Bouvincourt-en-Vermandois, France. Two days after war's end, Armstrong was killed in a flying accident while flying aerobatics in his Sopwith Camel. He was awarded the DFC for a night patrol in a driving rainstorm. The citation described him as "a brilliant pilot of exceptional skill."

His death was strikingly described in Cecil Lewis's Sagittarius Rising 

I suppose everyone who saw him would agree that Armstrong was the finest pilot in the Force. He was a past master at that most dangerous and spectacular business of stunting near the ground. He would take his Camel off and go straight into a loop. The Camel, if the engine held, gained about ten feet on it. If the engine spluttered or missed, he was for it. . . Then, one day, he was spinning down to the ground, with him a favorite method of descent; but he left it too late, pulled out, thought he had not enough room, jerked back the stick before the machined had flying speed, went into another spin, and struck the ground. He was killed outright. They found his tongue on the engine.

 

Sources: Biographical sketch from Wikipedia, photo from the Imperial War Museum.

 

French Generals of the Great War: Leading the Way

Tomb of Maréchal Foch, Les Invalides

Edited by Jonathan Krause and William Philpott 

Pen & Sword Military, 2023

Roy A. Prete, Reviewer

This book is designed to fill a significant gap in the literature on French generals who led the French Army to victory in the First World War and to assess how they adapted strategically, operationally, and tactically to the changed condition of industrial war. Drawing on the rich material now available in French military and political archives, this pioneer volume, written by a team of experts, gives us a fresh appraisal of the performance of 12 French generals, from the highest to less prominent levels of command.

To those schooled in the notion that the French Army started out in the First World War with a mistaken idea of modern warfare—that the appropriate response to increased firepower was l’offensive à outrance—and was slow to adapt to the demands of the new industrial warfare of the 20th century, the subtitle, “Leading the Way,” in this volume on French generals may come as a surprise. But interpretations have changed, particularly over the last two decades. The publication in 2003 of Anthony Clayton’s Paths of Glory: The French Army 1914–18 gave a quite favorable portrayal of the performance of the French Army in the First World War, while the paradigm-changing volume of Michel Goya in 2004, La chair et l’acier: l’armée francaise et l’invention de la guerre moderne (1914–1918) (available in translation since 2018), affirmed that “France created the first modern army” with more tanks and airplanes in 1918 than any other.

Appraisals of the performance of the French Army and the quality of its leadership have continued to rise since these publications, with the outstanding scholarly studies by Robert A. Doughty and Elizabeth Greenhalgh on the French Army in the First World War, and the latter’s excellent tome on Ferdinand Foch.  The French Army, in fact, was the mainstay of the Entente coalition, and even after the mutinies of 1917, played a decisive role in 1918, in repelling German advances north of the Somme and on the Marne and in the subsequent Allied march to victory.

The transformed army was able to respond to German infiltration tactics, and with its British and American allies, smash through German trenches in a victorious counteroffensive. In this optic, the performance of French generals, their challenges, their defeats and their triumphs, and their adaptation to the new conditions of trench warfare is entirely apropos.

Order HERE

Distinguished British scholars Jonathan Krause and William Philpott have originated and edited this notable volume. Krause, who is known for his work on the development of French tactics in the Second Battle of Artois in 1915, fittingly wrote the chapter on General Philippe Pétain. Known for his extensive publications on the First World War, including Anglo-French command relations, attrition warfare and his two books on the Battle of the Somme, Philpott has contributed four chapters on French generals, including those on Joseph Joffre, commander-in-chief of the French Army through 1916 and Marie Émile Fayolle, who was Army Group Commander next to the British Army in 1918. In a first-rate introductory chapter, the book’s editors explore in detail the “Leadership and Learning” process of battlefield experience, the evaluation of successes and failures, and adaptations that lay at the base of the transformation of the French Army. Their assessment is that, given the size of the problems associated with the maneuver of mass armies and the increased firepower on the battlefield, these leaders used a fruitful method of assimilating evidence learned from courses taught at the École supérièure de guerre [Superior War College] to develop the tactics, tactical organisation, technologies and logistics to breach the trenches and restore movement on the battlefield. . . 

While this treatment of 12 generals does not exhaust the list of French generals who contributed significantly to the French war effort, it provides a major contribution to the literature representing the “range, ability and achievement of the men who led France and her allies to victory” (p. x).

Roy A. Prete

Source: Prete, Roy A. Review of  French Generals of the Great War: Leading the Way  edited by Jonathan Krause and William Philpott. Canadian Military History 33, 1 (2024)

The Great War on the Italian Front–A Chronology

Prosperity in War—Uncertainty in Peace: The Case of American Wheat Farmers

Idaho Wheat Farmer c.1920

Robert Marcell, Homestead National Monument of America

Once war erupted in Europe in 1914, farmers in the United States stood to make significant financial gains from the fighting going on across the Atlantic. In The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan wrote that:

[N]o group of people took a more dramatic leap in lifestyle or prosperity, in such a short time, than wheat farmers on the Great Plains. In less than ten years, they went from subsistence living to small business-class wealth, from working a few hard acres with horses and hand tools to being masters of wheat estates, directing harvests with wondrous new machines, at a profit margin in some cases that was ten times the cost of production. In 1910, the price of wheat stood at eighty cents a bushel, good enough for anyone who had outwitted a few dry years to make enough money to get through another year and even put something away. Five years later, with the world grain supplies pinched by the Great War, the price had more than doubled. Farmers increased production by 50 percent. 

When the Turkish navy blocked the Dardenelles, they did a favor for dryland wheat farmers that no one could have imagined. Europe had relied on Russia for export grain. With Russian shipments blocked, the United States stepped in, and issued a proclamation to the plains: plant more wheat to win the war. And for the first time, the government guaranteed the price, at two dollars a bushel, through the war, backed by the wartime food administrator, a multimillionaire public servant named Herbert Hoover. Wheat was no longer a staple of a small family but a commodity with a price guarantee and a global market.

During the war, many small wheat farmers were making more money than the factory workers on Ford assembly lines (and about eight times more at that). Wealthier farmers, such as Kansas farmer Ida Watkins with her 2,000 acres of wheat, could do even better. Watkins bragged that she had made a profit of $75,000 one year, which was “bigger than the salary of any baseball player but Babe Ruth and more money than the president of the United States made.”

When the Dust Bowl Came to American Farms c.1930
(Bettmann/Getty)

The reason that this is in Egan’s award-winning book on the Dust Bowl is, of course, because this ramped-up farming—continued well after the end of the war—is what led in part to that great environmental catastrophe. . . Indeed, one of the questions raised by this paper is what role did [the war] play in the “Plow-Up” of the 1920s that led in part to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s? Nevertheless, with the future unknown, for the period of the war itself and in the years that shortly followed it seemed like a very good time to [farm].

Source:  Adapted from "World War I and the Homestead Act of 1862: When Farmers Fought and Soldiers Farmed for America’s Homestead States," by Robert Marcell, National Park Service Website

Reconsidering Reds

By Editor/Publisher Mike Hanlon 

It has been [over] 40 years since the release of Reds, the much-honored 1981 glorification of the Russian Revolution produced, written, directed, and starred in by Warren Beatty. It's rather hard for a proud former Cold Warrior like myself to recommend a film that was produced by people who apparently had neither read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago nor grasped the catastrophic costs of the Russian Revolution—20 million deaths in the Soviet Union, 94 million worldwide, according to the authoritative Black Book of Communism. Nonetheless, I think a view of the film (with some major qualifications) might be worth the 3 hours+ investment of your time to view it, even—maybe especially—if you saw it four decades ago.

Beatty plays a left-tilting Harvard-educated journalist from Portland, OR, named John Reed, who found himself in the middle of the Russian Revolution and won fame for an instant-history of that catastrophe, titled Ten Days That Shook the World. His sympathetic treatment earned him the distinction of being the only American buried within the Kremlin walls. 

For me, the outstanding quality of the movie—and which makes it worth re-watching (despite what I'm writing otherwise)—is Beatty's directing, for which he was deservedly awarded the "Best Director" Academy Award. He shows an impressive feel for the scale of historical epic film-making and the need to coherently tie many elements and points-of-view together neatly. The movie still has a fresh look, like it could have been filmed last week, and his on-location selections of Helsinki for Petrograd and Spain's Sierra Nevada for the Caucasus work perfectly as well. The viewer can't help feeling he's watching a grand and important story, artfully presented. When I viewed it again recently, I had the sense I was experiencing an interpretation (the winning side's view) of the Russian Revolution complementary to David Lean's Dr. Zhivago.

Director Beatty interweaves four elements to tell his story, which I will describe and comment on separately:

1. The Love Story: Reed's affair and marriage with Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton) is the pervasive narrative, permeating the entire movie. It's not a compelling or interesting relationship for me as Louise implausibly morphs from candidacy for the "Most Annoying Girlfriend on Earth" title (first hour) to "Most Devoted and Heroic Lovemate" (third hour).

2. Interminable, Boring, and Pompous Radical Intellectual Debates and Arguments: Talk, talk, talk. Fast forward through these scenes. (Better yet, just skip the first hour. It's filled with Louise and Greenwich Village posers.)

3. The Russian Revolution: After that dreadful first hour, Jack and Louise arrive in Russia just in time for the October Revolution. This is the best part of the movie, beautifully filmed, capturing the intense energy of the moment, and revealing the collective awareness of the participants and observers that important history was being made.

4. The Witnesses: The main narrative is supplemented with documentary-style, talking-head cut-ins and voice overs by 32 elderly, mostly left-wing, political and literary "celebrities" who were around at the time of the revolution, some of whom knew Jack or Louise. They are uninhibited and often informative, with on-point anecdotes, bitchy gossip (wow, lefty women have really long memories), and out-of-the-blue non sequiturs. I particularly enjoyed a still sex-addled Henry Miller, the astute Dame Rebecca West, and Georgie Jessel singing his favorite World War One tunes.

Available by DVD or streaming for a fee from Amazon and Netflix.

Source:  Originally presented in the May 2020 St. Mihiel Trip-Wire

Conan Doyle Visits the Argonne Forest

Warfare in a Forest by the Editor of the Daily Chronicle

With the French Army in the Argonne

Along the battle-line in the West, stretching from the Belgian coast to the Swiss frontier, the war is carried on under varying conditions. The configuration of the country and the nature of the soil determine the weapons mostly in use and the tactics employed. Artillery duels take place over the whole line; but the form of attack and defence, when the contending forces come to close quarters in the trenches, depends on the nature of the ground. Take, for example, the forest-clad mountains of the Argonne, where the fighting has developed on special lines. I have just spent several days with the French armies on this romantic and picturesque battlefield. The Argonne links up with Verdun on the East and with Champagne on the West, but unlike these historic names, will not be the scene of another big battle.

Where War Might Last a Century

The great forest consists of sturdy oaks and beeches and firs, with a thick tangle of undergrowth, mountain, valley, and plateau alternating. The soil is soft clay, admirably suited for entrenching, tunnelling, and mine warfare — when it is dry. As an outside observer, I do not see why the war in this area should not go on for a hundred years, without any decisive result. What is happening now is precisely what happened last year. The only difference is that the trenches are deeper, dug-outs better made, tunnels are longer, and the charges of explosives heavier. The armies are fighting Nature in the Argonne. The great oak and beech trees have to be completely destroyed before any advance can be made. Shells smash the trees, but leave broken trunks and torn and twisted branches as an impenetrable barrier between the foes.

They cannot be destroyed by liquid fire, as there is equal danger to both sides from such a conflagration. Explosives — and sometimes there are fifty tons — tear up the trees by the roots, hurl them into the air, and excavate a huge crater; but obstacles remain which make an immediate advance almost impossible.

Fate of Picturesque Villages

Machine guns and rifle bullets would be like a hail storm amid the trees, but would cause few casualties unless men exposed themselves.

There was very severe fighting for the possession of the forest in the autumn of 1914, after the retreat from the battle of the Marne, and before trenches could be dug and big guns brought up. The French drove the army of the Crown Prince and the Wurtemburgers back with rifle and bayonet, in the struggle for the possession of the forest. Some of the most beautiful villages, old, quaint, and picturesque, were burnt by the retreating enemy, and many of them were afterwards destroyed by the furious fighting which took place in this region. The line of. battle, as finally settled, cuts across the forest, leaving the great part of it in the hands of the French.

Thatch Huts for Poilus

Burden of the Helmet

Let us visit one of the divisions which have held-back the enemy in the Argonne. Starting from Sainte Menehould you are motored along the valley, passing villages which have been burnt by the enemy or have suffered from his artillery. There are many soldiers on the road. There are encampments in the woods where huts have been built or tents erected — "nigger villages" as the French call them.

You notice that the huts are in some cases planted on the hillsides and great underground dwellings constructed. Leaving the car you are led up a mountain- side along rough paths. Everywhere there are trenches, barbed wire, machine guns, where they are least suspected, and all the complicated arrangements for defence. You soon have to take to the trenches. They are very deep, very narrow, and very wet. Streams of water run at the bottom. You must walk over wooden ladders made of the rounded branches of trees, and have difficulty in keeping your feet. When nearing the summit the visitor has to put on one of the steel helmets which the French army officer's and men all wear. It is very heavy.

The sun is very hot, and you realise the additional burden which the gallant French soldiers have to bear.

The nearer one gets to the front the more mysterious and wonderful become the methods of defence. You are allowed to peer through an observation post towards the German trenches a few hundred yards away. You see absolutely nothing but a mass of brushwood, broken trunks of trees, hanging branches and barbed wire. At one point we are only ten yards from the enemy. "The Boches are just on the other side of the road," said our guide. You look through a periscope, but see no sign of life whatever. You can just identify the enemy trenches. They have snipers on both sides to catch the unwary, and just as we are looking a French soldier, on outpost duty, is hit.

We return down the hill-side again by devious trenches to safer quarters.

 

Forest Trench

Mountains as Mole Hills

Operations of defense in the Argonne forest are of course very largely of an engineering kind. Dug-outs and underground refuges are capable of holding a large force. Huge tunnels are driven through the mountain-sides and they are lit with electric light.

Presumably the Germans adopt similar means. "The whole mountains," said an officer, "are burrowed like a mole-hill." On another part of the front we had a similar experience of exploring the Forest, but in this case the lines of contending trenches were on a slope. The Germans were about four  hundred yards up the hill; we came down the opposite slope, trudging through trenches to the valley near the Four de Paris, the scene of a fierce battle in 1914.

Shells had left their imprints in the. Valley quite recently. The soldiers were encamped at the foot of the hill. Their kitchens and huts were at the base, barbed wire and entrenchments behind them. We wanted to know why the Germans, having what appeared to foe the advantage of position, did not attack at night. We were told that the French guns on the opposite hill were trained on the enemy trenches, and at the first signal of a movement they would pour a shower of shells into them. The enemy tried an attack by gas recently, but it rolled back on themselves. Every now and then trenches change hands in the Argonne. The French capture a first trench partly for the purpose of securing a few German prisoners.

Scenes from the Argonne 1

Continuous Bombardment

The guns are always at work. On the day of my visit to this area there was an almost continuous bombardment going on. The shells were hurtling over our heads. You heard the sharp discharge, and then the explosion of the shell. You saw nothing. The sound re-echoes through the woods and valleys like rolling thunder. The French fire six rounds to the enemy's one. The object of the. Cannonading is to disturb any work going on behind the enemy lines, to destroy transport, or interfere with any activity or movement which observers report to be going on.

We watched the system at work from the safe security of an observation post. The concealment of observation stations in the Argonne is complete.

The Boches occupied an exposed position about a mile and a-half away. They were at work in; a quarry above the French trenches. "Give them a salvo of ten," telephoned the Lieutenant to the guns perhaps a couple of miles behind us. The first shell fell short. The Lieutenant telephoned the direction in metres and the gunners soon got the exact range and planted their shells in the quarry. "We saw a German band hobbling along over there in a bunch the other day," said the Lieutenant, "and we planted a shell in the middle of them. You should have seen them roll down the hill," he added. "They didn't all gather themselves together again."

And so the intermittent bombardment goes on. The enemy fires every day during the lunch and dinner hours of the French troops in the hope of hitting the supplies on the way to the trenches.

 

French Shelter in the Argonne

 

Tree Broken Like a Match

There is no safety among the trees when a bombardment is taking place. Some time ago, near a chateau which General Humbert had made the headquarters of a divisional command, the Chief Medical Officer said to a friend: "Why do you expose yourself unnecessarily ? Do as I am doing; get behind one of the big trees." A moment later a shell cut the tree in two, as if it had been a match, killing the doctor immediately, while the officer who was advised to hide remained in the open twenty yards away and was unhurt.

We had abundant evidence that the French soldiers are well fed; they have coffee and bread in the morning. Lunch, with soup, meat, vegetables, wine and coffee about 12. Dinner between five and six, with soup, meat and coffee. Soup and bread are the great mainstays of the French army, and the soup invariably contains meat and vegetables.

Poilu's Good Living

The French poilu adds to his fare by a little poaching. The forest swarms with game. Since the war, sport of all kinds is suppressed in France. Game is allowed to increase untouched. There is every kind of game in the Argonne. Wild boars are numerous, but the soldiers are not allowed to shoot them because of the possibility of accidents. Some however have been killed, and game is frequently brought down. The French army utilises everything which comes its way. It is run on economical lines. I visited tripe and sausage shops behind the lines. Everything is utilised. The fat from the army slaughter-houses is made into candles for the trenches. Wounded horses are killed and their meat eaten. Horse sausage is a favourite meal.  

There is economy in other directions. The linen and clothing of the soldiers is cleaned, and mended by slightly wounded and invalided men, who are sent to stations behind the lines to recover. These temporarily disabled men — éclopés they are called — also make a variety of articles required by the men at the front.

"These men," said the Colonel in charge of an encampment of éclopés, "who have little strength and much time, work for the men at the front who have plenty of strength and little time."

Efficiency of the French Army

The whole organisation of the French army has been carried to a high state of efficiency. The French officer is a fine type. He is smart, businesslike, and the pink of courtesy. He is proud of his men and keenly interested in their welfare. There is a comradeship between the French officers and men closer and more ultimate than in any other army. That does not mean there is not discipline. Order is strictly maintained.

The regimental officers near the front are established in very comfortable quarters. They have made bomb-proof dug-outs on the slopes of the forest. The Frenchman's love of flowers and passion for neatness are shown by the window gardens and the beds of flowers in front of the officers' quarters. The qualities of the artist are also seen in the decorations of the rooms. The French officers in the Argonne are all cheerful and confident, determined to see this war through to a finish. No compromise is their policy, no halting half way, no. stalemate peace. "It must be the last war," they say, "however great the sacrifice," and most of them add, "however long the struggle," All were extremely anxious to hear of the English offensive which had not then begun, and rested great hopes on their British comrades.

Scenes from the Argonne 2

French Hospitality

English visitors to the French Army near the firing line are shown the greatest hospitality by the French, officers. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and myself had the honour of lunching and dining with all the Generals of the armies in the Argonne.

One General ordered a special dinner in our honour, and one of his orderlies, who has artistic gifts, designed a menu for the occasion, of which a reproduction is given. The medallion at the top represents the Sherlook Holmes coat-of-arms — a revolver, a pipe, and a violin. The lion and the unicorn are seen in the top corners, and the thistle and the shamrock at the bottom, while in the centre are the German and Austrian eagles, represented as being hanged. The dishes are named after the Allies, whose flags were reproduced on the menu.

The fine physical condition of the men is the first characteristic which strikes one. Battalions marching along in firm and measured steps look as if they meant business.

Source: Originally published in The War Budget, 13 July 1916; provided to Roads by Tony Langley from his collection.

Weapons of War: The Pedersen Device—A Game Changer?

A Doughboy Aims an '03 Springfield Equipped with
the Pedersen Device

By James Patton

The U.S. Army’s standard issue M-1903 Springfield rifle in .30-06 (7.62x63mm) received a few technical innovations during World War I. The most common was the addition of optical sights, and perhaps the most unusual was the Pederson Device, a mechanism that replaced the bolt on a slightly modified M-1903 rifle designated the Mark 1, thereby converting it into a semi-automatic that fired a .30-18 (7.62 x 20mm) pistol-length cartridge fed from a detachable 40-round box-type magazine. The modification required milling an  ejection port into the receiver, which could only be done at the factory. The device itself was a complete blow-back semi-automatic pistol like the Remington 51, sans hand grip, forming a gun within a gun. This conversion dramatically increased short-range firepower, which would be useful for close-quarter fighting and hit-and-run raids. 

Soldiers could use their M-1903 Mark 1 rifles normally; then with a simple switching of the bolt, they had a semi-automatic that fired at a rate of 80 rounds per minute. This switch-over took about 15 seconds. (The five-shot .30 06 magazine didn’t even need to be unloaded.) Each soldier had  special pouches to store the bolts in and carried five loaded Pedersen magazines in another pouch. 

Comparing the Standard
'03 Round with the Pedersen Round

Critics pointed out that the 24”  barrel of the M-1903  would still be a handicap in close quarters. Indeed, all of the various weapons subsequently designed for this purpose have short barrels, like the Sten, the Uzi, or the HK MP5. Another criticism was that the magazine could be inserted backward, certainly a serious risk in heated combat.

The device was invented in 1917 by John Pedersen (1881–1951), who had been a long-time employee at Remington Arms. Before the contract was cancelled in 1919, a total of about 65,000 of his devices were made at the Rock Island Arsenal and Remington’s Bridgeport factory, along with 1.6 million of the magazines and over a million of the Mark 1 rifles with the ejection port. The U.S. government paid Pedersen a flat fee for the rights plus a per-unit royalty; he earned over $85,000 (about $1.8 million today). 

John Pedersen Holding an Adapted '03
(Without Magazine) and His Device (Left Hand)

No Pedersen Devices were ever issued to soldiers. Instead they all wound up in storage until 1931, when the government ordered them destroyed, probably to keep them away from criminals, although those folks  already had a lot of the .45 ACP Thompson sub-machine guns, which were sold without restriction from 1921 to 1934. Most of the Pedersen Devices were melted down, but some were evidently pilfered. Allegedly, the ones stored at San Antonio, Texas, were supplied to reinforce concrete in local sidewalks. 

Today only a few Pedersen Devices survive in private collections and museums, some of them showing signs of attempted destruction. Pedersen also designed similar bolts for both the U.S. produced M-1917 Enfield and the M-1916 Mosin-Nagant rifles, which in order to be used would also have required the Mark 1 ejection port modification to the rifles. Reportedly prototypes of these two devices were handcrafted by Remington but neither went into production. For those curious, this video demonstrates how to modify your Springfield for  the Pedersen Device:

Later, Pedersen designed a complete semi-automatic rifle, officially called the T1E3, but widely known as the Pedersen Rifle, which lost the competition to the Garand Rifle in 1932. Pedersen also designed a .276 (7 x 51mm) cartridge for the Army that testing demonstrated was superior to the .30-06, but the Chief of Staff at that time, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, quashed the program. He cited logistic constraints: (a) unnecessary cost—the army had huge stores of paid-for.30-06 ammo to use up and (b) complexity of supply chains—all of the machine guns and automatic rifles would still require the .30-06 ammo. It is also said that he personally regarded the 7mm bullet as  too small. 

During WWII Pedersen was a principal in the Irwin-Pedersen Arms Co., which was the original manufacturer of the M-1 Carbine (7.62 x 33mm), which wasn’t a Pedersen design. Although both the carbine and the Garand Rifle were badged as M-1s, they share only one non-essential part and they don’t use the same ammunition.  Most of the carbines were made by the Saginaw Gear Division of General Motors and were still in use in special circumstances up through the  early days of the Vietnam War. 

Pedersen Examining a Competitor's Garand Rifle,
Prototype of the M-1

The Soviet SKS semi-automatic rifle (7.62 x 39mm), introduced in 1949, bears a striking resemblance to the Pedersen Rifle, although the two are mechanically dissimilar. Pedersen also designed many shotguns and rifles  for Remington, mostly using pump actions. He was granted 69 patents in his lifetime. 

Sources include The American Rifleman, The Armory Life and The Rock Island Auction Co.

Here is a LINK to a more detailed article about the Pedersen device.

The Most Concise History of World War One Ever Written?

E.H. Gombrich

When, in the spring of 1914, the heir to the Austrian throne was visiting one of these newly conquered regions called Bosnia, he was murdered by a Serb in the capital, Sarajevo.

Austria’s generals and politicians thought at the time that a war with Serbia was inevitable. The dreadful murder had to be avenged, and Serbia humbled. Frightened by Austria’s advance, Russia was drawn in, whereupon Germany, as Austria’s ally, also became involved. And once Germany was in the war, all the ancient enmities were unleashed. The Germans wanted to begin by destroying France, their most dangerous enemy, so they marched straight across neutral Belgium to attack Paris. Britain, fearing that a German victory would make Germany all-powerful, now joined in as well. Soon the whole world was at war with Germany and Austria, and the two countries found themselves surrounded by the armies of the entente (meaning their allied enemies—those who had an understanding with one another). Germany and Austria, in the middle, were known as the ‘central powers’.

The gigantic Russian armies pressed forward, but were brought to a standstill after a few months. The world has never seen a war like it. Millions and millions of people marched against each other. Even Africans and Indians had to fight. The German armies were stopped when they reached the River Marne, not far from Paris. From this moment on, real battles, in the old sense, would only very rarely be fought. Instead, giant armies dug themselves in, and made their camps in endlessly long trenches facing one another.

Then, for days on end, they fired thousands of guns at each other, bursting out in assaults through barricades of barbed wire and blown-up trenches, across a scorched and devastated wasteland strewn with corpses. In 1915, Italy also declared war on Austria, despite having originally been its ally. Now people fought in the snow and ice of the mountains of the Tirol and the famous exploits of Hannibal’s warriors during their crossing of the Alps seemed like child’s play compared with the courage and endurance shown by these simple soldiers.

People fought each other in the skies in aeroplanes; they dropped bombs on peaceful towns, sank innocent ships, and fought on the sea and under the sea, just as Leonardo da Vinci had foreseen. People invented horrible weapons that murdered and mutilated thousands each day, the most terrible of which were gases that poisoned the air. Anyone who breathed them died in terrible agony. These gases were either released and carried to the enemy soldiers on the wind, or fired in the form of grenades which released their poison when they exploded. People built armoured cars and tanks which moved slowly and inexorably over ditches and walls, demolishing and crushing everything in their path.

The people of Germany and Austria were destitute. For a long time there was hardly anything to eat, no clothes, no coal and no light. Women had to queue for hours in the cold to buy the smallest piece of bread or a half-rotten potato. But just once there was aglimmer of hope. In Russia a revolution had broken out in 1917.

The tsar had abdicated, but the bourgeois government which followed wanted to continue with the war. However, the people were against it. So there was a second great uprising in which the factory workers, under the guidance of their leader, Lenin, seized power. They shared out the farmland among the peasants, confiscated the property of the rich and the nobility, and tried to rule the empire according to the principles of Karl Marx. Then the outside world intervened, and in the fearful battles that followed millions more people died. Lenin’s successors continued to rule Russia for many years.

The Germans were able to recall some of their troops from the eastern front, but this didn’t help them much because new, fresh soldiers now attacked them from the west. The Americans had decided to step in. Nevertheless, the Germans and Austrians held out for more than a year against overwhelming odds. By putting all their efforts into a last desperate attempt in the west, they very nearly won. In the end, however, they were exhausted. And when, in 1918, America’s President Wilson announced that he wanted a just peace in which each nation would determine its own fate, many of their troops gave up. So Germany and Austria were forced to agree to a ceasefire. Those who had survived returned home to their starving families.

The next thing that happened was that revolution broke out in these exhausted countries. The emperors of Germany and Austria abdicated and the various peoples of the Austrian empire – the Czechs and the Slovaks, the Hungarians, the Poles and the Southern Slavs – declared themselves independent and founded individual states. Then, having understood from President Wilson that there was to be a peace treaty, and that negotiations were to be held in the ancient royal palaces of Versailles, St Germain, and the Trianon, Austria, Hungary, and Germany sent envoys to Paris, only to discover that they were excluded from these negotiations. Germany was held chiefly responsible for the war and was to be punished. Not only did the Germans have to surrender all the colonies and lands which they had taken from France in 1870, and pay vast sums of money to the victors each year, but they even had to sign a formal declaration saying that Germany alone was to blame for the war. The Austrians and the Hungarians fared little better. So this was how President Wilson kept his promises. (What you have just read is what I believed to be true when I wrote this account, but read my explanation in the final chapter of this book.)

Eleven million people died in that war and entire regions were devastated in a way that had never been seen before. The suffering was beyond imagination.

Source:  A Little of History of the World, Yale University Press, 1985

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India's Homefront at War

By George-Morton Jack

Originally presented on Scroll.in, 17 November 2018

On the evening of 22 September 1914, over a hundred artillery shells made in Germany rained on Chennai. Fired by an Imperial German Navy cruiser a mile offshore in the Bay of Bengal, they fell onto Burmah Oil facilities and merchant seamen in the port, and onto the High Court, the National Bank of India and other buildings in the city. The shells inflicted India’s first casualties of the First World War. The global conflict had arrived shockingly on the home front.

As the British Empire’s Asian giant in colonial chains, India had been dragged by London that August into the Allies’ world war on Germany. Come November, India was also set against the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. Some 315 million people on the Indian home front would experience the war up to 1918 in myriad ways. But together they experienced one great effect of the war on Indian society—the connection of India with the wider world more than ever before.

Reception for Royal Visit, 1911

Wartime city life

If you walked the streets of a big Indian city between 1914 and 1918, reminders of the global war were ever-present. Cinemas from Mumbai to Kolkata showed British documentary and propaganda war films, such as the Battle of the Somme (1916). Meanwhile the imperial government plastered street-side buildings with colourful posters advertising its public offer of war bonds to finance the British war effort, a typical poster showing paper money transforming into machine gun bullets fired by a Sikh.

In Kolkata, the war bonds offer was reinforced in June 1918 by a thirty-feet long “War Tank”—not a real one, but a replica British Army Western Front tank, made of sheet-iron, a wooden frame and electric lights, and carried on a motor lorry chassis. The War Tank drove about the city centre and suburbs accompanied by a marketing team on foot, handing out leaflets in Bengali and Hindi that bore the tank’s image and proclaimed the bonds as a safe bet—yields were government guaranteed.

Then, every day of the war on city street corners, the sales of local and India-wide newspapers spread domestic war news. The press carried stories on the maharajahs from Kashmir to Mysuru who from 1914 poured their cash into British war coffers, for instance to purchase motor ambulances and hospital ships for wounded troops on the German and Turkish fronts. There were also newspaper appeals for Indian war charities, such as in 1915–16 for the Punjab Aeroplane Fund. This raised enough money from Punjabi bankers, students, artisans, and other donors to buy 51 armoured aeroplanes, all named individually after local towns, districts and rivers, such as Amritsar, Gujranwala, Sutlej, and so on.

Lahore Gate Peshawar, 1918

The Indian newspapers also reported the twists and turns of wartime politics, from international news of the Allies’ cause such as the United States 1917 entry into the conflict in the name of democracy against German militarism, to domestic developments in the Indian nationalist politicians’ freedom struggle.

Mahatma Gandhi included, the Indian politicians generally supported the British war effort in the hope of extensive postwar constitutional reform in return, expected to grant Indians democratic rights equal with Australians and the British Empire’s other white peoples. The Indian politicians’ strongest public statements in support of the war came in April 1918 at a special Delhi War Conference with the British. Here they tabled a widely publicised resolution to commit themselves fully to escalating India’s war effort—“I tender my support to it with all my heart,” said Gandhi.

At the time, much of India’s mobilisation on the home front was in the factories. For Indian industrialists, business boomed with government contracts to supply the Allied armies abroad. One of the biggest government contractors was Tata Steel. At its foundries at Sakchi (now Jamshedpur) in British India’s province of Bihar and Orissa, Hindu and Muslim workers sweated around the clock to produce military hardware for British use on overseas fronts—in total three million tons of steel, often converted into weaponry such as artillery shells to fire at the Germans and Turks in East Africa and Palestine, and 1,500 miles of railway track to stretch across the foreign fields of Iraq.

On the railways of India itself, troops trains were a common sight throughout the war, carrying a million Indian Army servicemen to their ocean transport ships for foreign duty—mainly illiterate Indian recruits from the villages of northern India’s plains, hills and jungles and their Himalayan environs. As the trains steamed into the major seaports, some city dwellers unfamiliar with the recruits’ home communities were at a loss to tell who they were, in Mumbai mistaking riflemen from Nepal as Japanese.

In the Villages

The villages the Indian troops came from were the home front’s bedrock. A minority of the Indian recruits left them for the army under coercion by local recruiters in British pay and bitterly resented.

Typical Indian Village During the War

Yet most of the army recruits from the villages were volunteers seeking British pay themselves, and were from Punjab above all. They entered military service primarily as young men out to help their peasant farming families survive the rural economy with its food shortages, plagues and wartime inflation. Service was also a means of easing the family’s tax burden under the exploitative colonial state—if a village provided dozens or even hundreds of recruits, the British reward was a collective tax cut.

The war’s grand total of 1.5 million Indian servicemen all of course served on the home front at one time or another. As they did so they were by no means politically passive. The ranks of several Indian regiments contained active dissenters and freedom fighters. From 1914 hundreds of Muslim troops in India deserted, the British suspected in sympathy with the Ottoman enemy they did not want to fight as Islamic brothers.

Clusters of Hindu and Sikh troops on home service then sided with violent revolutionary causes, and those caught doing so by the British were imprisoned or executed. One instance of 1915 involved Sikhs of the 23rd Cavalry who had joined the Punjabi Ghadar movement. They were caught red-handed when they bungled a multiple British officer assassination; they packed their homemade bombs too loosely on a regimental move, setting them off prematurely at a railway station and accidentally wounding five of their own.

Back in the recruits’ villages, news filtered in from the battlefields overseas of sons, husbands, fathers, and brothers killed by the Germans and Turks. Words can barely express the grief and anger felt by village families at lives lost for the British. Something of their utter despair has been handed down in painful Punjabi folk songs. “Without you I feel lonely here”, one song cries, “I shed tears, come and speak to me; All birds, all smiles have vanished...Graves devour our flesh and blood.”

The Days of the Raj Were Numbered

“India should be free”

By 1919, the majority of the Indian troops had returned home, bringing back from the foreign fronts their wounded bodies and minds; their souvenirs from German helmets of the Somme to African rhino horns and Turkish flags; and their war stories of sights of the oceans, Paris, and the great mosques of Istanbul, Jerusalem, and Mecca.

Yet they also returned with a brighter national future in their hearts. On overseas duty they had absorbed a strong measure of the Allies’ democratic ideals, developing their largely embryonic prewar senses of modern nationhood. “I felt that Indians should also enjoy freedom like the people of other countries”, said one Punjabi veteran, Narain Singh, having fought in West Asia. “When we were in France we felt that the French people were so lucky and enjoying their freedom”, commented another Punjabi, Mitt Singh. “So we also felt that India should be free, this war showed us the right path.”

For Gandhi and the wartime Indian politicians, 1919 was a year of British betrayal in India; the constitutional reforms they had bargained for since 1914 were not realised. Yet as national leaders, their war on the home front had accelerated and heightened their calls for self-government, laying the foundation for India’s freedom from colonial rule within 30 years.