>>and then the Army Chief of Staff
>>demanded that the new service rifle use .30-'06 like its predecessor,
>
>I meant to ask, when I first read this one, and I entirely forgot. Was
>there any reason given for why?

The official reason was that the Army already had a large amount of .30-'06 ammunition stockpiled, and it would be logistically unfeasible to get rid of it all and produce a similar quantity of .276 Pedersen to replace it. To some modern observers (e.g., me) this seems like a concern that might have been raised somewhat earlier in the process if it was going to be raised at all, and rather spurious anyway. But, to be fair, General MacArthur couldn't have known in 1932 that five years later, the .30-'06 M1 Ball round would be obsoleted anyway and replaced with the slightly-lighter-bulleted M2 version—nor, for that matter, that a mere decade later, he would be busy losing the Philippines to the Japanese and wartime production demands would make the quantity of ammo he'd been bitching about ten years before seem piddling and inconsequential.

But I digress.

There was at least one plausible concern about the .276 cartridge as employed by Pedersen's own rifle, that being that the Pedersen action needed its ammunition to be lubricated in order to function properly. Earlier rifles designed by a number of different people had called for lubricated ammo, and they had all failed spectacularly, because they had all involved various goofy systems designed to oil the cartridges as they were loaded—brushes, oil drippers, that kind of thing—and the whole thing was just ludicrously impractical, especially for a military weapon.

.276 Pedersen cartridges, on the other hand, were lubricated by a thin coating of wax that liquefied under the friction and heat of being loaded, fired, and extracted. This meant that the ammunition was dry, not oily or greasy, when handled, and that the rifle didn't need some wacky mechanism for oiling it as it was loaded. The residue left behind by fired empties was negligible and, in the Pedersen rifle's trials, didn't build up to any greater extent than all the other residues of sustained fire. About the only legitimate objection to it was that it would make the ammunition a little more expensive to produce, since applying the wax added a step to the process.

(Note that we are talking about a very small amount of wax per cartridge here, it's not like they were encased in candles or something. I've never handled .276 Pedersen ammunition, but I've seen pictures, and I've heard/read that to the uninitiated observer, they give the impression of having been varnished as much as anything else.)

Anyway, it isn't clear whether MacArthur knew the details of the Pedersen rifle's lubricating "system" (i.e., that it wasn't a system on the rifle, which had been tried and never worked before); he may simply have been skimming the report, spotted the words "lubricated cartridge" and reached for his NOPE stamp. Alternately, it might have been a reaction against novelty for reacting against novelty's own sake, or a case of the wrong person not having been convinced of the utility of the less powerful but ballistically superior cartridge. Or possibly MacArthur was just an enormous douche who was pissed off that he hadn't been consulted before that point, but realized that the Army's bureaucracy gave him an opportunity to fuck with everyone's decade. Probably it was some combination of all of the above. We'll never really know.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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