The Caliber the Army Tried to Quit

On October 26, 1905, on the island of Samar, a prisoner named Antonio Caspi tried to escape.

He fought the guards hand-to-hand. A soldier put four rounds into him at point-blank range with a regulation Army revolver. Three of them went through his chest and into his lungs. The fourth passed through his right hand and out his forearm.

Caspi kept fighting.

The bullets did not stop him. He was stopped when a soldier caved in his forehead with the butt of a Springfield carbine.

The revolver was a Colt Model 1892, chambered in .38 Long Colt, and it was the standard sidearm of the United States Army. An Army Medical Corps officer named Louis LaGarde wrote the wounds down in detail, because by 1905 the question of why American soldiers were emptying their revolvers into men who would not fall had become a problem the Ordnance Department could no longer ignore.

The Army already owned the answer. It had carried a cartridge that would have put Caspi down on the first shot, and it had carried that cartridge for more than twenty years before deciding it could do better.

The cartridge was the .45 Colt, and the gun was the Colt Single Action Army.

The Army adopted it in 1873 as the New Model Army Metallic Cartridge Revolving Pistol. Colt engineers William Mason and Charles Richards had built it around a self-contained metallic cartridge, which put it a full generation ahead of the cap-and-ball percussion revolvers it replaced. No loose powder, no ball, no caps. Load through the side gate, cock the hammer, fire.

The cartridge did the work. Period ordnance loads ran a 250 to 255 grain lead bullet over roughly 40 grains of black powder, leaving the muzzle around 850 to 900 feet per second with more than 400 foot-pounds of energy behind it. A heavy, slow bullet that crushes tissue and breaks bone. It was built to stop a man or the horse he rode in on, and it did.

Colt’s first Army contract in July 1873 was for 8,000 revolvers, inspected at the factory by Orville Ainsworth, whose “OWA” stamp marks the earliest guns. They came in three barrel lengths: the 7.5-inch Cavalry, the 5.5-inch Artillery, and the 4.75-inch Civilian. The 7.5-inch Cavalry rode on the hip of the 7th Cavalry at the Little Bighorn in 1876. By the end of 1874 the Army had more than 12,500 of them in .45 Colt.

It was slow to reload. You worked the empties out one chamber at a time through the loading gate with a rod under the barrel. But it was simple, it was nearly indestructible, and it hit like a maul. For nineteen years it was the standard.

The Army’s return to .45 was not one decision. It came in pieces, and the version you usually hear, that the Army simply pulled old Single Action Armies out of storage, is only the first of them.

That first piece is true. Since the 1890s the Army had been cutting 7.5-inch Cavalry Colts down to 5.5 inches at Springfield Armory, the refurbished guns collectors now call Artillery models. As the reports came back from the Philippines, those stocks went out the door. In 1901 the Army inspected 2,600 of them and shipped 550 straight to Manila. They were old, they were single-action, they were slow to load, and they dropped men. That was the point.

The second piece came in 1902. To arm the Philippine Constabulary, the native police force under Brigadier General Henry Allen, the government bought 4,600 Colt Model 1878 double-action revolvers in .45 Colt. Colt stiffened the mainsprings for reliable ignition and lengthened the trigger and guard so a shooter could get leverage against the heavier pull. Collectors later misread that big trigger guard as a cold-weather feature and stuck the name “Alaskan Model” on it. It was built for the jungle.

The third piece was the real stopgap. In 1909 the Army adopted the Colt New Service as the Model 1909, a 39-ounce double-action .45 with the swing-out cylinder it had wanted all along. The original .45 Colt rim was too narrow for the extractor star to catch every case, so Frankford Arsenal widened it. Between 1909 and 1911 the War Department bought more than 19,500 of them and sent most to the ordnance depot in Manila.

While the revolvers shipped, the Army went looking for proof.

In 1904 it convened a board under Colonel John Taliaferro Thompson of the Infantry, who would later put his name on the Thompson submachine gun, and Major Louis Anatole LaGarde of the Medical Corps, the same officer who had written up Caspi. Their methods were grim. At the Nelson Morris stockyards in Chicago they shot live cattle and horses. At medical schools in Philadelphia and New York they fired into human cadavers hung by the neck and limbs, and read the stopping power off how far the bodies swung. They put .30 Luger, 9mm Parabellum, .38 Long Colt, .38 ACP, .45 Colt, and .476 Eley through the same tests.

The board’s finding set Army doctrine for the next seventy years. A service handgun should fire a bullet of a caliber not less than .45.