Sangamon County Rifle Association Right Reason on Second Amendment Rights Springfield, Illinois

The .30-06 Cartridge - the most popular big game cartridge in the world Phil Davis  SCRA meeting 1/2/06 February 2006 GunNews 2006 marks the anniversary of a very important birthday.  One hundred years ago this year the most popular sporting cartridge in North America was adopted, the 30 caliber cartridge of 1906, or as we know it, the 30-06. In 1900 the United States was the only major power that did not have stripper clip loaded or charger clip loaded rifle for its military.  A stripper clip holds the cartridges and they are stripped down through the open bolt into the magazine of the rifle.  In 1900 we were armed with the Krag-Jorgenson 30.40 caliber rifle.  It was what we used in the Spanish American War.  The carbine version of that is what Teddy Roosevelt and his first volunteer calvary regiment carried up San Juan Hill.  It faced the 7 mm Model 1893 and it was found to be lacking.  The Spanish Hornet is what they called the Spanish Mauser, the 7 mm.  It shot flatter and faster and it could be reloaded quicker because it had stripper clips and, it had the very strong, powerful Mauser action.  To load the Krag, you opened a door on the side and you either inserted rounds one at a time or a handful and then closed it.  That left the whole action open to dirt, grime and grass getting in there especially if you were nervous. There are only two kinds of people on the battlefield that are not nervous: those who are insane and those who are already dead. Davis loves the Krag rifle and says it has the slickest bolt action in the world.  He says you can hardly tell that you are chambering a round with it.  However, it is a finely machined piece of equipment that will get fouled up if you get garbage in there and it is slow to reload. In 1898, the Germans adopted the Mauser 98 system and along with it they changed to a different kind of bullet.  The bullet they used before was a .318 diameter 215 grain round nosed bullet called the J bullet.  When they adopted the rifle model of 1898, they switched to the JS, stands for spitza schlosser or pointed nose bullet. The British followed suit in 1903 with a pointed bullet replacing their 215-grain round nose bullet in .303 with a 174-grain bullet.  The United States again was behind the curve.  At the turn of the century we had a rifle that fired a 220 grain round nosed projectile, a rimmed projectile that had a tendency to hook the rims together so that you occasionally got a jam that way and a cartridge that could not be stripper clip loaded. In 1903 we stole the Mauser action from the Germans, modified it slightly and manufactured it as the US rifle 1903.  It is a rip-off of the Mauser system for which we had to pay Mauser three million dollars in patent infringement.  The first couple thousand 1903's that came out actually had a bayonet  that looked like a cleaning rod underneath the barrel.  You pressed a button and the rod would come out.  If you have one of these rifles you can retire now as they are very valuable.  It was chambered for the cartridge caliber .30 1903 rimless.  The Krag had a rim on it which tended to hang up.  The 1903 cartridge still had a 220 grain round nose bullet going at nominally 1220 feet per second, a big heavy hitting round nose bullet that did not shoot very flat.  It was a different cartridge than the 30.06 so if you get an old rifle like the Winchester that is marked 30 government, it could be three different cartridges.  It could be a 30-40 Krag, it could be a 30.03 or a 30.06.  The 30.03 had a longer shoulder and a shorter neck.  You cannot shoot 30.06's in a 30.03 rifle. If you try to fit 30-03 brass in a 30-06, the neck ends up being way too short.  If you have a 30-03 rifle this is a collector's item not a shooters item unless you are absolutely obsessive about your loading.  Then you can go ahead and shoot it if you want to.  The first Springfields were 30-03. Three years later after testing next to the British SLME,  the ordnance board decided they had adopted a rifle system that was excellent with ammunition that was already obsolete by 1903 standards.  They realized that if they did what the Germans and the British already did, in putting a lighter weight bullet with a pointed nose and a more aerodynamic profile. they could gain an extra two to three hundred yards of effective range and shoot much flatter.  In 1906 the ordnance board ordered that all 1903 rifles be rechambered for the new cartridge which is called the caliber .30 of 1906, shortened by civilian nomenclature to 30-06 which is what we know as the venerable 30.06 cartridge that we have today. The military cartridge loading at that time was the 150 grain bullet with a flat base going approximately 2800 feet per second.  They were issued for the Springfield in five-stripper clips.  You would load the rifle by inserting the clip into the charger bridge (at the rear of the bolt), pressing down and when you close the bolt it flips the stripper clip out.  It was capable of fairly rapid fire.  It also had magazine cutoff that would allow you to fire single shot, leaving the rounds in the magazine for emergency use. After 1906, the 30-06 was starting to be issued to the main military forces of the United States although it was still in limited numbers when the United States entered World War I.  The 30-06 cartridge had already started to catch on with civilian shooters.  One of the biggest advocates of the 30-06 was former President Theodore Roosevelt.  He took two 30-06 rifles with him to Africa.  Yes, Theodore Roosevelt did kill one elephant with a 30-06 rifle, one more than he killed with his vaunted 405.  A 220-grain round nosed bullet in a 30-06 properly placed in an elephants head will turn his lights out instantly.  Theodore Roosevelt proved this. The United States wanted to stay out of World War I so badly that when we actually began fighting in 1917 we only had something like 200,000 1903 rifles to man an army of a million men.  We switched over the manufacturing facilities for the Enfield P-14's to start manufacturing a US rifle in 1917.  Davis said he loves the 1917 rifle.  It was found to be accurate, reliable, robust, and not easy to break.  It was actually a better rifle for the trenches of Europe than the Springfield because the Springfield had very tight tolerances and very fine sights that could get knocked around very easily.  The American Enfield 1917, however, was not. Alvin York was issued a 1917 model.  York was just a Tennessee Mountain boy who used to go out and shoot a rifle, thats all he knew.  He realized that the only way he was going to get back home was when all these Germans were done so he figured he would do his contribution and do his best.  So he took both hunting skills, civilian marksman skills and common sense and applied them on the battlefield. York's version of common sense was that you shoot the ones in the back of the attack so that when the troops in the front got to your front lines, they don't realize they're all alone. It was said the Springfield and the Enfield were two of the finest rifles around and it must be true because variations of those rifles were still in service up through the 1960's in some third world countries. There are a few things to worry about with early Springfields.  The heat treating on the first 200,000 from both Springfield and Rock Island Arsenal was somewhat suspect.  If you have an early Springfield with an early barrel date of 1917 or earlier please contact Phil Davis and he will look up the numbers and  let you know whether yours is in the double heat treat or the danger zone.  A couple of them have cracked and come apart.  Davis has seen some that were in the danger zone that had been rebarreled twice.  Davis figures if Uncle Sam can wear out two barrels on this action there is nothing he is going to do to it that is going to hurt it.  It is however, a possible danger, especially if you have one that is all original with something like 1914 to 1917 on the barrel dates.  The date on the barrel is found right behind the rear sight on the top. Americans generally don't think about getting ready for a war until their butt is dead center in the middle of one.  Between the wars many 1917 rifles and many 1903s were sold into civilian markets and some of the finest gunmakers in the world snatched them up and did sporterizing jobs or custom rifle jobs on them.  Sedgely made rifles built on the 1903 action.  Griffin and Howe made rifles on the 1903 action.  Even the British gunmakers like Holland and Holland and Gogswell and Harrison went out and sought out US military rifles to take back and make custom rifles out of.  That tells you something about their presumed quality.  The United States stagnated and we went through a great depression.  We fought small wars in Nicaragua and  Hunduras but nothing major.  We stuck our fingers in our ears when Japan invaded Manchuria in the 1930's.  We said it doesn't matter to us when Hitler was rolling across Europe in the late 1930's and early 1940's.  When England is sitting on its heels hoping to hold on a little longer we were still claiming it doesn't have anything to do with us.  In 1941 we had just barely started to develop a new military rifle, the caliber .30 M1Garand.  Davis described "M1 thumb", a condition achieved when pushing the 8 round en bloc clip into the magazine, and not moving your thumb out of the way before the bolt slams home.  Davis said he got an M1 thumb at the Abe Lincoln Gun Club when he was thirteen years old. "It was the first time my father ever heard me use that word!  It rhymes with truck!" The M1 rifle started development in 1936.  When World War II finally engulfed the United States on December 7, 1941, there were not enough M1's to equip all the troops.  As a matter of fact the Marine Corp was very suspect of the M1Garand.  At the same time, as a supplement, they developed a new model of the 1903 rifle, the 1903 A3, (adaptation three). It has an an aperture rear sight, similar to the M1Garand.  This was popular with the Marine Corp.  Davis recently watched a documentary on Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal featuring these rifles. (When history teachers are at home on Christmas break, guess what they watch - the history channel, much to the disdain of Davis' wife). Davis showed a 1903 A3 World War II vintage rifle.  It was built as a substitute standard for the M1Garand.  Many 1903 rifles were reparkerized, refinished and reissued.  Many 1917 rifles were dragged out of storage and reissued.  As usual the United States waited until the last minute to arm up for conflict again.  Many people thought they were going to have to go into World War II with biplanes and World War I stuff.  If it had not been for the foresight of a few people in the aviation industry and a few people who ran their projects through the back door, we would have been even more unprepared for combat in World War II then we were.  For those people who survived World War II era, you remember the scrap drives, the drives for weapons, the general clamoring "we are sorely insufficient in our weaponry."  And many people think the fact we didn't have enough armored humvees was a big scandal for the current conflict.  In both World War I and II, both times they had men in boot camp training with broomsticks for rifles, boxes with sticks sticking out of the front for machine guns .  During the first couple years of World War II they had Ford trucks with "TANK" spray painted on the side for armored vehicles for training,  Our sniper rifles, our infantry guns, our light machine guns, everyone was a .30 caliber 1906.  Only the heavy machine guns, the .50 calibers were something different.  It made things very good for us.  Our Browning automatic rifles, everything, took the 30.06 cartridge.  So all they had to do was ship 30.06 ammunition and you could make your weapon work.  You might have had to scrounge around on the ground to find one of these clips to load back up and stuff back into the rifle but you could make it work.  One of the favorites for the BAR or Browning automatic rifle was a 165-grain bullet with black tip armor piercing rounds.  These were very popular with BAR men as they believed they could actually chew holes through houses with them.  World War II came to an end after a couple really big booms and again the United States Army began selling off its rifles as surplus.  We also started shipping them to our allies around the world.  China got a bunch of 1903s before 1950, South Korea got a bunch of them, many south American countries got a bunch of them and some of these rifles came back to bite us a few years later. By 1950 we were again in conflict along the Korean Peninsula and again the US rifle M1 was the rifle that was in the hands of many of our servicemen.  The things Davis hears from people who carried the rifle was it was either a love or hate relationship.  They loved it because it was reliable and accurate.  They hated it for three reasons.  One was the M1 thumb.  Two, it weighs nine pounds and 8 ounces, and the third thing was when you fired your last shot it tells everybody in the world because you hear "clink clink clink" because that clip comes flying out of the top. The 30.06 served through Korea. along with the BAR, the Browning automatic rifle, and the machine gun 1917 and 1919 (both belt fed Browning designs).  In 1957 the 30.06 as a rifle cartridge was superseded by the  7.62 millimeter Nato round, the 308 and the M-14.  For match purposes the M1Garand was still the premier rifle for a very long time.  In many third world countries, even in Haiti currently, the M1 is in their inventory as their military rifle of record.  If you watched the news during the Haiti conflict, you saw men standing guard with M1 rifles with fixed bayonets.    During the Korean War the M1Garand acquitted itself both in heat and on the frozen terrain around the Chosin reservoir, it never failed. The last 30.06 caliber weapon to be used in our inventory was in 1960's when the 1919 machine gun was superseded by the M60. The military service of the cartridge which is where it really earned its reputation and where millions of Americans became familiar it because that's what they were issued.  They brought this love for the cartridge home into the civilian world.  Until after World War I there was a plethora of rifle cartridges out there.  If you look in Cartridges of the World, you could get any kind of rifle cartridges you wanted. When the soldiers came home from World War I there was only one cartridge that would do to kill their deer with, the one they had used to kill the Kaiser's boys with, the 30.06.  The 30.06 with a 150 grain bullet ranks up there with the 30.30 for the rifle to hunt deer with.  The 30.06 with a 150 grain bullet will do anything that you want it to do within reason. Davis discussed various ammunitions and then said if he was only able to own one weapon for the rest of his life, he would want it to be a bolt action 30.06. More from Phil Davis Return to SCRA Home Page