The American Enfields
The Great War was, like every war, won and lost by logistics. In the case of the British Army, part of those logistics involved shortfalls in the production of the famous Short Magazine Lee-Enfield (SMLE) rifle that the British Tommies used to deliver .303-caliber medicine to the Huns.
To solve their rifle problems, the Brits turned to their former colonies – the United States. It wouldn’t be the last time we helped them out of a wartime problem.
Britain’s Great War Preparations
By the time the Great War rolled around, the SMLE and its.303 British cartridge had been around for around twenty years. It was and is a solid martial main battle rifle: Powerful, accurate, and robust. Its ten-round magazine had double the capacity of the German standard, the GEW98 Mauser, while matching the power level of the 7.9x57mm standard German cartridge. But in 1913, the year before a few Serb nationalists started the festivities by bumping off a minor Austrian archduke, the Brits were looking at alternatives. One of the alternatives rushed into development was something called the Pattern 1913 rifle, chambered for a new, higher-velocity rimless .276 caliber round. That .276 round was actually a product of the Boer Wars, when the Tommies found themselves facing Boer commandos using high-velocity (for the time) 7x57mm Mausers.
The P13 was actually ordered from American manufacturers, but the start of the war intervened, and the P13 was redesigned around the .303 cartridge and dubbed the Pattern 1914, or P14 rifle.
The P14 had a distinctive appearance. Its five-round box magazine gave it a pot-bellied look, and the 98 Mauser-patterned action had two big “ears” protecting the aperture rear sight. The bolt handle was angled sharply downward – that would prove handy later – and had an odd dogleg. The action was basically a modified Mauser, with two big opposed locking lugs at the front of the bolt and a Mauser-type non-rotating claw extractor. Per British preference, the P14 was a cock-on-close design.
Like the SMLE, the P14 was long – a 26” barrel, 46” overall – and heavy, weighing in at nearly 9 ½ pounds, empty. But that was usual for primary service rifles of the time. Vickers was selected as the initial manufacturer but couldn’t keep up production, so two American companies were selected to pick up the slack: Winchester and Remington, the latter of which produced the P14 in their own primary plant and a second plant in Eddystone, Pennsylvania. There were problems: Rushed into production, guns from the three plants were marked “W,” “R,” and “E” accordingly and were built to slightly different specs, leading to parts interchangeability issues.
Winchester manufactured 235,293 P14 rifles, Remington made 400,000, and Eddystone 600,000, totaling 1,235,293 rifles.
Then, 1917 happened, and the Yanks started sending young men Over There – and those young men needed rifles. There was a problem: Numbers of the famed 1903 Springfield weren’t sufficient for all of the U.S. Expeditionary Forces.
The American Version
Fortunately, Remington and Winchester had a ready solution to America’s rifle shortage. The P14 rifle’s design was altered to use the American’s famous Caliber .30, Model of 1906 cartridge, then fairly new but destined for immortality. This new arm, retaining the P14’s pot-bellied appearance and protruding rear sight wings, along with the length and heft, became the M1917 rifle.
See Related: Sunday Gun Day Vol. II Ep. XXVI - America's Misfit Toy, the 1892 Krag Rifle
Sunday Gun Day Vol. II Ep. XXX - the 1903 Springfield Rifle
This is the rifle reportedly carried by one of the American war heroes, perhaps the American war hero from the Great War, Sergeant Alvin York.
Sergeant York’s Medal of Honor citation reads in part:
After his platoon suffered heavy casualties and 3 other noncommissioned officers had become casualties, Cpl. York assumed command. Fearlessly leading seven men, he charged with great daring a machine gun nest which was pouring deadly and incessant fire upon his platoon. In this heroic feat, the machine gun nest was taken, together with 4 officers and 128 men and several guns.
That is one serious act of soldiering. He performed these feats, reportedly, with the M1917 Enfield, although accounts are somewhat muddled.
All told, more or less 2.2 million M1917 rifles were built for the U.S. military.
After the war, though, the American Enfields were mostly dropped from American military arsenals. The 1903 Springfield went on, even seeing some service in World War 2. But the story of the M1917 and the P14 Enfield rifles wasn’t over yet.
After the War
Remington adapted the M1917 action to what would become their Model 30 sporting rifle. The Model 30 had a nicer checkered walnut stock, and the ladder sight and protruding ears were done away with, replaced by a standard rear sight. Aperture sights were also available, and the downturned bolt handle that was originally adopted with the P14 was amenable to scope mounting. This civilian adaptation was made and sold as the Model 30 from 1921 to 1925 and as the Model 30 Express from 1926 to 1940. A final version was sold as the Model 720, with that ultimate version only lasting for eight years, from 1940 to 1948. Fewer than 30,000 of all the variants of the Model 30/30Express/720 were made.
But the story doesn’t end there. A lot of the original P14 and M1917 rifles landed on the surplus market, and while many were used as-is, the tough action became a middling-popular basis for custom sporters. The P14 action’s bolt face, specced out for the big rimmed .303 case, would accommodate belted magnum cartridges, and so more than a few sporters appeared rebarreled for rounds like the .300 H&H Magnum and, later, the .300 and .338 Winchester Magnums. The M1917 was fine the way it was, cartridge-wise, as the .30-06 with proper loads will handle almost anything in North America but the largest Alaskan moose and bears and will even handle those with careful shot placement. The bent bolt handle made it, as mentioned, amenable to scope mounts – although that required the removal of the rear sight and grinding down of the big, protruding ears.
The American Enfields are an interesting piece of firearms history. They represented a wartime contingency measure, rushed through design and into production to put rifles in the hands of soldiers, and while that effort wasn’t perfectly executed, it was, as the saying goes, “close enough for government work.” The rifles were easy to handle, robust, and accurate. You can still find them in military trim, in post-war Remington livery, and as the basis for custom sporters. That’s not the worst legacy for a military rifle, even when you set it against its more famous counterparts.
