The Springfield came about as a replacement for America's first smokeless powder magazine rifle, the Craig Jorgensen rifle.   In 1903 this rifle replaced the Craig.  If you're familiar with it, it had a door on the side that flipped open and you dumped five cartridges into it and closed it, then closed your bolt.

As far as smoothness of action goes, you can't hardly beat the Craig.  For quickness of reload, they learned a whole lot from the Spanish who were armed with the Mauser system.  They used a five-shot stripped clip to reload with and it was much faster.

Also when that big trap door opens, its great if you have a nice manicured firing range but if you're lying on the ground and there's dirt flying up and shells going off all around you and you've got this door open, guess what.  Murphy's Law takes effect and everything that is flying through the air is magically sucked into the action of your rifle.

In 1903 they came out with this rifle with a new cartridge which was called the US Cartridge .30 caliber 1903 or 30.03.  It had a shorter neck on the cartridge and a .220 grain round nose bullet.  About that same time the Germans came up with the concept of bullet design that was much an improvement over the old round nose bullets.  Everybody around the turn of the  century was using a very heavy round nose jacketed bullet.  The British used a .215 grain.  The Germans used to use,  Davis believes, a .196 grain.   The Americans used a .220 grain, big round nosed bullets.

The Germans with the advent of the Mauser 98 came out with what what they called the Spitzer bullet or pointed bullet. This gave them better long range trajectory, kept the energy better and better accuracy.

In 1906 the United States adopted that bullet design, took the weight of the bullet down from .220 grain to .150 grain and came up with what we now know as the .30 caliber 1906 cartridge or the M2 Ball cartridge which is what we all know as .30.06.

The Springfield rifle, there are a number of variations, is a magazine fed, stripper clip charged, bolt action, patterned after the Mauser action.  It has the locking lugs on the front of the bolt just like the Mauser does.  It cocks on opening just like the Mauser does.  Its such a good copy of the Mauser 98 action that the United States had to pay the German government for patent infringement.

In 1903 some of the first ones had a heat treating problem on the receivers.  Some of them had to be heat treated twice.  Some of them had a nasty reputation of breaking or shattering.  So if you have one that is an early manufactured Springfield, you'll want to look it up and see whether yours is one of the ones that was double heat treated.  It might be a dangerous weapon to shoot.

The 1903 is the rifle that was general issue when Illinois state troops went after Poncho Via in 1916.  It was general issue when the United State entered World War I in 1917.  Davis says belatedly because Europe and most of the rest of the world had been fighting for over two and a half years already by that point.  There was a saying about the weapons of World War I, that the Germans went to war with a sporting rifle, the Americans went to war with a target rifle and the British went to war with a battle rifle.

The reason why they said that was the Springfield was very accurate.  It had very accurate, precise sights.  This isn't your standard everyday tapered  ladder sights you see on an Enfield or a Mauser.  You've actually got a couple different apertures here.  You've almost got to be a rocket scientist or an engineer to really figure out how to use this sight appropriately.  Your windage adjustment isn't just aim to the left or right.  You've actually got a wheel here with little marks you can adjust.  Its a piece of art, excellent workmanship, the tolerances are very tight and its very smooth.  Its a great rifle, very accurate.

At Davis' first DCM shoot at the Abe Lincoln Gun Club he was twelve years old and he didn't have an M1 Garand.  He wanted one desperately.  What he did have was an 03 Springfield.  Fifty rounds is the national match course of fire.

Davis, twelve years old, 50 rounds with an 03 Springfield.  He wasn't just black and blue, he was bleeding.  These guns, because of the shape of the stock, because of the drop in the ???, because of this nice cushy steel butt plate hurt, especially in a prone position.  You do know when you pull the trigger.

During World War I they couldn't produce enough of these to fill the requirement of all the American troops going to Europe.  So they took a British design which we were working in contract with the British to manufacture rifles for them, they were called the Pattern 14 rifle or P14.  The Americans took them over.  Remington and Winchester started making them  at Eddystone Arsenal which is a division of Remington and called them the Magazine rifle 1917.  They're a bigger, beefier, bulkier mauser type action. 

By the way, was it Gary Cooper who played Sgt. York?  No matter what Gary Cooper carried around in a movie, he didn't carry a Springfield.  He carried a 1917 Enfield.

This however is the rifle when you think of a World War I soldier you think of the 03 Springfield.  You see all the old statues and monuments and you always see the doughboy standing there with an 03 like this.  The bayonet this has issued with it was a 1905 bayonet.  Do you know what the first two years of production of bayonets were?  It was a metal rod that had a hole drilled in the end of the stock.  It slid down there, you pressed the little button, went like that and the rod bayonet stuck out of the bottom of it.  If you've got one of those,  you've got several thousand dollars.  Do not turn it in to Grandpa's hunting rifle by cutting the stock off. The 1905 bayonet had a fifteen inch blade which was on a par with all the other armies of the world at that time period and this is what they charged into the trenches with.

This rifle has a couple features that the Mausers don't have.  The Mausers, if you want to fire one round, you open your bolt, you stick your round in there, and you feed her to the magazine.  Because we Americans were kind of halfway stuck in the last century still, we believed there was a role for single shot volley fire.  There's a magazine cutoff on the side that says on and off.  You put the magazine cutoff in the off position you can't stick a round in the magazine, you just drop it in the top and close the bolt.  Thats for firing single shots.

The British did away with this finally with their magazine cutoff on their Enfields in 1916.  The United States hung onto theirs all through the production of the 1903 rifle.

After World War I was over, as with any US war that we win, we go, "Okay, we don't need to make no new guns now."  and we sit around for thirty years.  They were still making 1903 rifles up through 1928.  Davis supposes something else must have happened in 1929 or they just didn't have the money to make any more of them but they quit making them in 1928.  But what they did realize is that semi-automatic rifles might be the way of the future.

Rather than engineering a whole new rifle they came up with an idea.  "Gosh, can't we take a 1903 Springfield and make it a semi-automatic rifle?"  So they said, "Oh, okay, we can do that.  Its not going to be a .30-06.  Its going to be roughly a .32 automatic pistol cartridge.  Ever shot a .32 automatic?  Heck of a cartridge out of a little gun about yeah long, put on a nine pound rifle.  What it was called was a Pedersen device.  You had a pouch on your belt that held magazines and another pouch that held the device.  When you were going into a trench assault you put your bolt hold up into the middle, pulled the bolt out, slid the Pedersen device in, locked it in place and stuck a magazine in the side that looked like a stent on crack.  There's a hole drilled into the side.  This is called the Mark I modified 1903.  It allowed you to fire semi-automatically with a 1903 rifle in roughly .32 acp.  You could shoot a lot but you'd better shoot somebody four or five times if you were going to do any good.

The Pederson device even though it worked was a colossal failure.  If you happen to have a Pederson device laying around your closet at home that you want to give to Davis as a Christmas present or a birthday present, he would love to have one because he's got a rifle meant for it.  Don't even let it enter your mind that Pederson device is worth between ten and fifteen thousand dollars.

If you've got a functional Pederson device, insure it!

They kept up this model rifle until 1928.  It was in the basic inventory of the US Army well into World War II.  After the heart of the great depression was here and was starting to fade away slightly, Davis still doesn't believe it actually faded away until World War II got rolling, the US Army decided that they needed a new rifle.  In the 1930's they contracted for the M1 Garand to be made.

The M1 Garand is probably Davis' favorite rifle of all time.  General Patton called it the greatest battle implement ever devised.  If you can figure out how to keep your thumb out of the action, its a sweet rifle.  After Davis first shoot with this, the next shoot he went to was about three months later, and he borrowed Dick Roth's M1 Garand.  It was cold, a November shoot and Davis got his first M1 thumb, thirteen years old.  All these Korean War vets were standing around watching to see what Davis was going to do.  Someone said, "This is where it matters son.  Are you going to go home and cry like a baby or are you going to finish the shoot?"  Davis wrapped up his thumb and finished the shoot and he apologized to Dick Roth.  Imagine your thumb is stuck in the rifle and you can't get it out so you're sitting here like this with a loaded rifle trying to get the bolt back, all the meanwhile you're using language your father doesn't know that you know!!!

Davis believes he got some of those guys respect because he finished the twenty-round slow fire prone with his thumb squirting blood with a cloth wrapped around it.  Then he had to apologize to the guy who's rifle he borrowed because he got blood all over it.  He said, "That's okay, I'm going to clean it anyway."

As usual by the time we got into World War II, again about two years after everybody else did, we didn't have enough M1's to issue to everybody and, from most early reports, the US Marine Corp didn't want it anyway.  They wanted to stick with the 03.

As a stopgap measure, besides issuing another one of these that was already made, (this particular one has got parkerized finish which means it was redone before World War II.  The original finish would have been a nice blued finish or a blackened finish), they also came out with another variant, the 1903A3.  The 1903A3 Springfield was a little bit different.  They did a line with the majestic contraption of a rear sight.  They put a standard rear sight right here on this rear receiver bridge.  Anyone who's familiar with the M1 Carbine, you've seen the rear sight thats on a 1903A3 Springfield.  You've got a solid wood hand guard that goes all the way back to the front of the receiver ring.  The 1903A3 also implemented a lot more stamped steel parts. The barrel bands, the sling swivels, the trigger guard and the floor plate were all stamped sheet steel.  It made it easier and less expensive to manufacture.  Also the barrels on some of them were different.  The traditional four grooved barrel that was standard on a 1903, they cut down to a two groove barrel on many of them.  Davis has owned a couple of two grooved 1903A3s and from his experience, they don't shoot any worse than a four grooved barrel does.  As a matter of fact there have been some things that say they shoot just as well or even better than the four grooved barrel does depending on how badly they were abused while in military service.

The 1903A3 was used throughout both theaters of operations, more in the pacific from all the pictures Davis has seen than in Europe, but they were still very popular rifles.  They were one-hundred percent reliable.  You didn't have to worry about a jam.  It was real simple, there was one of these (click, click, click).  Thats all there was to it and it worked. It was a Mauser action, it wasn't going to break. It was accurate, you were going to be able to knock your target down.  And the bayonet on it, you could play pokey, pokey with somebody's ribs.  It was solid metal and wood and you could beat the snot out of somebody with it. It worked. It was a military rifle.

There was a variation of the 1903 that you don't really want to use to beat the snot out of people with. There was a Marine Corp version and an Army version and that was the 1903A4.  They are starting to reproduce these now and being sold by Gibbs Rifle Company.  It is the sniper version of the 1903 Springfield.  It had no rear or front sight.  It had a Redfield Scope base here and one of three or four different variations of scopes, either the Lyman  Alaskan, the Weaver 330C and Davis believes there was one with the M84 scope.  There are three or four different scopes on the Army version.  Two and a half to four power was about it for the World War II sniper rifle for Army service.  The Marine Corp used a more powerful scope on theirs.  The used a Unerti scope on theirs which was a target scope.

That was the last variation of the sniper rifle 1903.  Davis has seen pictures of guys in Korea carrying a 1903A3 but he has only seen one or two.  Most of the 03s went into the surplus system or back into government arsenals at the end of the second world war.  They were used for drill purposes, they were sent to military schools,  they were sold off surplus to the Department of Civilian Marksmanship,and they were sold off through Sears Roebuck and Co.  If you wanted a rifle after World War II to turn into a hunting rifle more than likely if you wanted an American rifle you got one of these.  If you wanted something in a foreign caliber you got a Mauser or an Areo Socket.

Because of what Guns and Ammo and the American Rifleman showed this year, everybody that was hunting deer this year had to have a Bishop stock and a black fore end cap on their rifle.  So many of these nice old rifles got their stocks either thrown away or chopped up and a chunk of black plastic moved to the front of it so it would look like a model 70.  An actual pristine 1903 is a fairly rare thing nowadays.  When Davis was a kid a 1903 was just an old military that if you got a hundred and fifty dollars for it you were doing pretty good.  Davis has turned down seven-hundred and fifty for this one.

They're selling Russian Nagants today for a mere couple hundred bucks.  What's the next popular thing?  Well by gosh, they've got the AM Tech plastic stock that you can put on it because you've got to have a black plastic stock to look like a super sniper, super hero.

Leave a military rifle looking like a military rifle.  That's what it was made for and that's how it was designed.  If you want something that has a black plastic stock, buy a rifle with a black plastic stock.

The 1903s were issued out to VFW and American Legion posts to use for ceremonial firings.  Davis has a friend who went to a military academy out in Pennsylvania.  In the 1990s they were still using these as their drill rifles.  There is nothing at all wrong with a 1903 Springfield.  They're a great rifle.  They helped world wars, and a couple of small ones.

Davis has a friend who was in the Marine Corp in the 1980s when they went into Beruit.  They were on patrol around the US Embassy.  The turned a corner and what did they see?  Lebanese army sitting on the top of a Sherman tank with M1 carbines, M1 Garands, M1 Steel Pots and Springfields.  They did not feel woefully in demand.

As a matter of fact, in a desert environment, give Davis one of these and a good place to get into a prone position  and you can come back at him with AK 47s all you want.  Just give him four or five-hundreds yards to engage you because he'll build up sand in front of him enough so he can start shooting back.  He'll take a .30-06 on a long length of shot a long time before he'll take a 7.62x39.



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