August 22, 2018 – The ExhaustNotes Blog

This is an interesting story about the development of the .45 ACP 1911 and a sister military sidearm, the 1917 revolver, and maybe a little more. To really appreciate the history of these two guns, we need to consider three cartridges (the .45 Colt, the .45 ACP, and the .45 AutoRim), and four handguns (the 1873 Colt Single Action Army, the Model 1911 Colt, the Model 1909 Colt revolver, and the Model 1917 revolvers). Wow, that’s a mouthful. But it’s a fascinating story.

So what is this story about? A tale of two .45s, or of four?

The Two .45 Handguns

Well, it started out as a tale of two…the 1911 Rock Island and my Model 625 Smith and Wesson. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Read on..

The 1873 Colt Single Action Army, chambered in .45 Colt (the cartridges you see on the gunbelt). If you grew up watching cowboy movies (like I did), you know this gun well.

.45 ACP Historical Perspective

To best understand this, we need to go back to 1899, and maybe as far back as 1873. Yep, this tale goes back a century and a half.

In 1899, the Philippine-American War started (it’s also known as the Philippine Insurrection). We sent US Army troops armed with .38-caliber revolvers, Krag rifles, and 12-gauge shotguns to put down the insurrectionists (the Moros), and we found out the hard way that the .38 just wouldn’t cut it as a military sidearm.

General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, who was a captain during the Philippine Insurrection. He had direct experience using the .45 Colt Single Action Army during the American Indian wars. Pershing was America’s only 6-star general, a rank never attained by anyone else. He fought Indians, he chased Pancho Villa in Mexico, and he commanded American troops during the first World War.

In response to this, or so the story goes, the Army tried all kinds of handgun ideas, including the then-new 9mm Luger. There was a lot more to the story than just the concept that the .38 wasn’t enough gun, but it’s the version that is most frequently bandied about and we’ll stick with it to keep things simple. You hear about drug-crazed Moro insurgents, you hear about religious fanatics, and more. I don’t know which parts are true and which parts are, to use a current term, fake news. But I do know that as a result of that war, the Army wanted a handgun with more power.

The idea of a semi-automatic handgun was cool, but the Army thought the Luger was too complicated and the 9mm cartridge wasn’t much better than the .38. The .38 and 9mm bullets are essentially the same diameter (one is 0.356 inches, the other is 0.358 inches), and neither had enough knockdown power.

Our Army went back to an earlier cartridge, the .45 Colt, a rimmed cartridge used in the old 1873 Single Action Army Colt. It’s the six shooter that you see in the old cowboy movies (the one holstered in the photo at the top of this blog). The old 1873 was a single action sixgun (you had to pull the hammer back for each shot). By the time the Moro Wars rolled around, both Colt and Smith and Wesson had double action revolvers. On those, all you had to do was pull the trigger (that cocked the action and fired the weapon). To meet the new need in the Philippines, Colt manufactured double action revolvers (their Model 1909) chambered in the .45 Colt round. The Army was all for it, and they felt it met their needs (at least on an interim basis).

An interim solution to the unstoppable, presumably drug-crazed Moro insurrectionists…Colt’s Model 1909 revolver in .45 Colt, the same cartridge used by the Colt 1873 Single Action Army.

Having played with the Luger, though, the Army liked the idea of a semi-automatic handgun. But that puny 9mm round wasn’t enough back in those days, so the Army invited firearm manufacturers to submit larger caliber automatic pistol designs.

The 1911

The winner, of course, was John Browning’s 1911 design, and the .45 auto came into being as the US Army Model of 1911. It was a new gun and a new cartridge. The 1911 couldn’t shoot the rimmed .45 Colt cartridge used in the 1873 Peacemaker and Colt’s double action Model 1909 handguns. Instead, it used a new .45 ACP round (“ACP” stands for Automatic Colt Pistol), which fired the same big .45-inch-diameter bullet in a rimless cartridge case (actually, the cartridge has a rim, but the rim is the same diameter as the rest of the cartridge case, and that allowed it to work in the new semi-auto).

The 1917 Colt and Smith and Wesson Revolvers

Fast forward a few more years and World War I started. The Army’s preferred handgun was the 1911, but there weren’t enough of the new semi-autos. Colt, and Smith and Wesson came to the rescue by modifying their earlier big bore revolver designs to shoot the .45 ACP cartridge, and the Army issued these as the Model 1917 revolver.

A US Army 1917 Smith and Wesson. These are beautiful revolvers. The gizmo beneath the grips is a lanyard attach point, which tied the gun to the soldier who carried it.

The 1917 double action .45s were phased out of the Army a few years after World War I ended, and they were sold as surplus to the public (things were different back then). Model 1917 revolvers are highly collectible today. I owned an original GI issue Colt Model 1917 back in the 1970s, when you could pick them up for about a hundred bucks. I loved that revolver, but I stupidly sold it 40 years ago. (When discussing firearms, the phrase “stupidly sold” is inherently redundant. Like nearly all of the guns I’ve sold, I wish I still had it.)

The three cartridges, all in .45 caliber. The one on the left is the .45 ACP, as used in the Model 1911 automatic and the Model 1917 revolver (and my Model 625 revolver). The one in the middle is the .45 AutoRim, which is essentially the .45 ACP but with a rim (that allows it to be used in the Model 1917 revolver and its descendants without a star clip). The one on the right is the old .45 Colt, which has been around since 1873 and is still a popular revolver round.

The 1911 .45 auto? It continued as the official US Army sidearm for the next seven decades. I carried one when I was in the Army. Like a lot of shooters, I think it is the best handgun ever.

In 1985, the Army replaced the 1911 with the 9mm Beretta. That (in my opinion) was a dumb move, and apparently the Army ultimately came to its senses with regard to the Beretta, but they stuck to the 9mm Luger round (now the NATO standard pistol cartridge) when they went to a Beretta replacement. The Beretta is being replaced by yet another 9mm (the SIG).

The Model 625 Smith and Wesson

No matter; there are still many of us who consider the 1911 in .45 ACP the ultimate sidearm. I’m one of those guys, but I’m also a huge fan of the double-action revolver in .45 ACP. The good news for me (and you, too, if you’re a .45 auto fan) is that Smith and Wesson still makes a modern version of their double-action revolver in this cartridge. It’s the Model 25 Smith (or, in stainless steel, the Model 625), and it’s a direct descendent of the old 1917 revolver.

A Model 625 Performance Center Smith and Wesson, and my reloaded .45 ACP ammo.

The Rock Island 1911 Compact

I am a lucky guy. I own both the .45 ACP Model 1911 and the .45 ACP Smith Model 625. You’ve read the earlier ExNotes blog about my Rock Island Compact 1911. It’s a sweet shooter and, at just under $500, it’s a hell of deal. And that Model 625? Wow. The Performance Center is Smith’s custom shop, and that revolver is accurate. It should be; it costs twice what the Rock Island 1911 goes for. But both guns are great, and I love shooting both.

A Rock Island Arsenal Compact 1911, the subject of an earlier ExNotes blog.

I had both of my .45s out at the range yesterday, and I had a blast (pun intended). Yeah, the revolver is a more accurate handgun than the 1911, but like we used to say in the Army, both are close enough for government work.

.45 ACP Accuracy

So just how well do these guns shoot? The short answer is very, very well. After running through a couple of hundred rounds, I thought it might be a good idea to set up two targets, side by side, and fire six rounds at each (the first six with the 1911, and the second six with my revolver). That’s exactly what I did, and it’s the final photo for this story…

Two targets at 50 feet, with six rounds each. The one on the left was with the Compact 1911, and the one on the right was with the big Smith and Wesson Model 625. Are both guns accurate? You bet! They’re close enough, as they say, for government work…

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The Follow Up: Another Tale of Two 45s

If you enjoyed this post, be sure to see the follow up: Another Tale of Two 45s!

The Gatling Gun

Incidentally, if you like reading about guns and their history, you might want to pick up a copy of The Gatling Gun. I wrote that book, and it covers the early days of the Gatling (the Civil War), the transition to a modern weapon system after World War II, and modern Gatling applications on high-tech weapon systems. I worked on many of these systems, and I worked for the company that manufactured 30mm ammo for the A-10 Warthog. You can read all about that in The Gatling Gun, available from Amazon.

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NOTGNOTT? (None of the gear, none of the time.)

As our generation ages off this mortal coil there seems to be a strong conservative trend among motorcyclists. By conservative I don’t mean politically, although most of my rowdy friends have settled on the putative conservative party. I mean in their actions and words.

Post a video of kids popping wheelies or burning up motorcycles and the comment section rapidly fills with sour, tsk-tsk and rote complaints about using proper riding gear, safe riding practices or endangering others. Quite a few commenters will wish death upon anyone not head-to-toe in safety gear. Organ Donors, an insult once used by straight citizens to describe motorcyclists in general, has been co-opted by ourselves and liberally used to describe riders not wearing hi-vis green, stifling gloves, helmets, boots and one of those silver blood-type/medication allergy bracelets sold in high schools throughout the mid-1970’s.

Realizing that the depressing safety-crats were doing the exact same wheelies when they were under 100 years old you have to wonder what changed. Responsibility to the group, to all road users or the prospect of injuring an innocent bystander is regularly trotted out by safety mongers. They sound like lower case communists instead of riders living free like it says on their belt buckles and t-shirts.

So is it fear or wisdom? With death imminent, I suspect fear. Our motorcycles are becoming sodden with anti-lock braking systems, rev limiters (God forbid we blow an engine!), traction control and power management systems. The price we are willing to pay for a motorcycle less inclined to kill us is in the tens of thousands of dollars. If we are so concerned about staying alive to drag down future economies with our failing bodies why not forgo motorcycles and drive a truck?

Our generation believes, as have previous generations, that we know best for the next guys. A do-as-I-say, not-as-I-did type of thing that must drive the young ones insane. We think a motorcycle with less than 100 horsepower is unrideable yet we expect others tap into maybe 50% of that power. If they actually twist the throttle then they become the irresponsible ones.

We are, in a nutshell, full of baloney. We rode without helmets, we rode in shorts and t-shirts, we popped wheelies on public roads, we drank and took drugs and then got on our motorcycles and crashed. We died and we were injured. We cost society money way beyond our true dollar value. And now like bit players in the song “Cats in the Cradle,” we sit behind our screens scolding others for being just like we were.