Loading a Rifle: 250 Years of Service Rifle History

By the Spanish-American War in 1898, the reload had moved to the back of the weapon, and it changed everything about how exposed a man was when he ran dry.

Volunteer regiments and units like the 24th and 25th Infantry carried the Model 1873 Springfield, the "trapdoor." After firing its heavy .45-70 cartridge, the soldier flipped up a hinged block at the breech, which kicked the spent brass clear. He pushed a fresh round straight into the chamber and snapped the block shut. It was still one shot at a time, but the muzzle-loading drill was gone, and an experienced man could hold twelve to fifteen rounds a minute. That is four or five times what Martin managed at Monmouth.

The regulars carried something better. The Krag-Jørgensen chambered the modern .30-40 smokeless cartridge and fed from a side gate on the receiver. The soldier flipped the gate open and dropped in five loose rounds, and he could top the magazine off without opening the bolt on a live chamber. A skilled shooter ran it at twenty to thirty rounds a minute. The gap between the two rifles showed up plainly in Cuba. The trapdoor's black powder threw a white cloud on every shot that told the Spanish exactly where the American was, and the Spanish were shooting back with smokeless Mausers that gave away nothing.

The Krag's speed was not an abstraction to Sergeant William H. Thompkins of the 10th Cavalry. On the night of June 30, 1898, a landing party lay pinned on the beach at Tayabacoa, Cuba, and four attempts to pull them off had already failed under Spanish fire. Thompkins volunteered for the fifth. He rowed a whaleboat to the beach in the dark, worked his Krag against the Spanish blockhouses, and kept up enough fire from a five-round magazine to hold the enemy back while the wounded were loaded and rowed out. He earned the Medal of Honor for it.

When the American Expeditionary Forces reached the trenches of World War I, a soldier no longer loaded one round at a time. The M1903 Springfield was the bolt-action rifle at its peak, a five-round rifle chambered in .30-06 with a Mauser-pattern action.

The thing that sped up the reload was a small strip of stamped metal. The soldier opened the bolt, set a stripper clip holding five rounds into the guides milled into the receiver, and pressed his thumb down. All five rounds stripped off the clip and into the magazine in one motion, in about two seconds, and the empty clip flicked away as the bolt ran forward. He no longer had to break his eyes off the enemy to thumb rounds in one by one. A trained rifleman held fifteen to thirty aimed rounds a minute with an '03, five to ten times the output of a flintlock, at ranges von Steuben could not have imagined.

Captain Samuel Woodfill used every bit of that in the Meuse-Argonne in October 1918. With his company pinned near Cunel, he went forward alone through the mud and spotted a German machine gun firing from a church tower about 300 yards off. He shot the gunner with his '03, then shot each man who stepped up to take the gun, working the bolt and dropping a fresh stripper clip in when the magazine ran dry. He cleared the tower, moved on to two more gun nests, and finished the last position in a shell hole in hand-to-hand fighting. One man took apart a defensive network because he could reload without losing his sight picture.

The M16 that reached Vietnam broke with everything before it. Aluminum receiver, synthetic furniture, and a small high-velocity 5.56mm round in place of the heavy .30 calibers. The reload broke with the past too. A soldier no longer fed rounds into the belly of the rifle at all. He dropped an empty box magazine, seated a fresh one holding twenty rounds, later thirty, and was back in the fight in a second or two. The unit of ammunition stopped being the round and became the magazine. A rifle was no longer "ready" because it had a round chambered. It was ready when a full magazine was locked in the well.

The early fielding of that rifle is the one place this 250-year line bends the wrong way. The M16 was designed around one powder. In 1964 the military switched to a different ball powder for production reasons. It burned dirtier and drove the action faster than the rifle was built for, so the bolt tried to yank the spent case out of the chamber before it had settled, and the extractor tore through the rim and left the empty brass stuck fast. The early rifles had no chrome lining in the chamber, cleaning kits were not issued, and a rumor spread that the rifle was self-cleaning. In the wet heat of Southeast Asia the bare chambers pitted and rusted, and the brass swelled into the pits. Men in firefights were found dead beside rifles they had field-stripped, or with cleaning rods still down the barrel where they had been trying to punch a jammed case loose. In 1967 the Ichord subcommittee laid the failure out in a hard 51-page report. The fixes followed: chrome-lined chambers, cleaning kits in every hand, the powder specification corrected. The men who died were failed by procurement, not by their own hands, and the platform they were handed became the longest-serving rifle in American history.

By Vietnam the drill was second nature, and it stayed that way from the paddies to the city. In the Ap Bac zone on May 2, 1967, Sergeant Leonard Keller and Specialist Raymond Wright were ambushed from a line of bunkers. Keller went up onto an exposed dike and walked straight into the fire, emptying magazine after magazine to keep the enemy's heads down while Wright closed and grenaded the positions. The two of them cleared seven bunkers, and the whole assault depended on Keller being able to drop an empty and seat a full one without breaking stride. Thirty-seven years later, in a black, flooded house in Fallujah in November 2004, Staff Sergeant David Bellavia fought room to room against entrenched insurgents, swapping M4 magazines by feel in the dark as fast as he ran them dry, until the last of the fight came down to a knife. The rifle had changed. The thing he was doing with it, getting the next rounds up before the man across the room could, was exactly what Martin was doing in the wheat field.