[emcon5]

Not just after the war- If anyone has read the memoirs of Ernie Pyle (Ernie's War)

I found that a couple years ago, and posted about it on another forum, more about M1s, but the same applies to the 1903.

A couple years ago I read Ernie's War, a collection of WW2 Dispatches from Ernie Pyle, and came across something that explains in part how some of the parts on US rifles got so jumbled. One of the reasons (aside from post war reworks) that M1s tend to be mixmasters.

Excerpt:

Originally Posted by Ernie Pyle

SMALL-ARMS REPAIR: SOMEWHERE IN NORMANDY, July 27, 1944—At the edge of a pasture, sitting cross-legged on the grass or on low boxes as though they were at a picnic, are thirteen men in greasy soldiers’ coveralls. Near them on one side is a shop truck with a canvas canopy stretched out from it, making a sort of patio alongside the truck. And under this canopy and all over the ground are rifles—rusty and muddy and broken rifles. This is the small-arms section of our medium ordnance company. To this company comes daily in trucks the picked-up rusting rifles of men killed or wounded, and rifles broken in ordinary service. There are dozens of such companies.

This company turns back around a hundred rifles a day to its division, all shiny and oily and ready to shoot again. They work on the simple salvage system of taking good parts off one gun and placing them on another. To do this they work like a small assembly plant. The first few hours of the morning are given to taking broken rifles apart. They don’t try to keep the parts of each gun together. All parts are alike and transferable, hence they throw each type into a big steel pan full of similar parts. At the end of the job they have a dozen or so pans, each filled with the same kind of part. Then the whole gang shifts over and scrubs the parts. They scrub in gasoline, using sandpaper for guns in bad condition after lying out in the rain and mud. When everything is clean they take the good parts and start putting them back together and making guns out of them again. When all the pans are empty they have a stack of rifles—good rifles, all ready to be taken back to the front. Of the parts left over some are thrown away, quite beyond repair. But others are repairable and go into the section’s shop truck for working on with lathes and welding torches. Thus the division gets one hundred reclaimed rifles a day, in addition to the brand new ones issued to it.

And believe me, during the first few days of our invasion men at the front desperately needed these rifles. Repairmen tell you how our paratroopers and infantrymen would straggle back, dirty and hazy-eyed with fatigue, and plead like a child for a new rifle immediately so they could get back to the front and “get at them sonsa*****es.” One paratrooper brought in a German horse he had captured and offered to trade it for a new rifle, he needed it so badly. During those days the men in our little repair shop worked all hours trying to fill the need. I sat around on the grass and talked to these rifle repairmen most of one forenoon. They weren’t working so frenziedly then for the urgency was not so dire, but they kept steadily at it as we talked.

My CMP M1 is a prewar Springfield Armory, s/n 290xxx, (July 1941), with a wartime bolt and Trigger housing, and a post war barrel and op-rod. Who knows, it could have gone through one of those units in addition to being rebuilt at Benicia Arsenal post war.

Excellent book, by the way, I can see why he was so popular. It isn't really a memoir though, it is a compilation of his wartime dispatches, and is kind of sad actually. As you near the end of the book, and is talking about the planned landings in Okinawa, where he was killed. Weird reading the words of a guy who you know only has about 2 months left to live.