John Browning: Man and Gunmaker

by James Barrington

  The contract with FN was formalized on 17 July 1897, though production did not start until 1898 and the pistol was not offered for sale until January 1899. This was one year before the introduction of the Colt Model 1900, thus making the FN model the first Browning semi-automatic pistol produced anywhere. It was an immediate Europe-wide success, and not least with the European underworld. Soon after its introduction a group of French criminals armed with Browning pistols held off the forces of the French police, who were armed with revolvers, for several days.

  Unlike Colt and Winchester, who both produced Browning-designed weapons under their respective trade names, FN from the first used the word ‘Browning’ to designate their pistols, with the result that John’s surname was soon far better known in Europe than in America. Indeed, it was this policy, together with heavy advertising by FN for the pistols, which was largely responsible for the word ‘browning’ entering French common parlance as a synonym for ‘automatic pistol’.

  John Browning made his first visit to the FN factory, and to Europe, in 1902, immediately after his break with Winchester. As well as wishing to visit the factory where his pistol was being produced, he wanted to see something of Europe and, just as important, he also wanted to see his automatic shotgun, wrapped and stowed carefully in his cabin on board the liner on which he’d crossed the Atlantic, go into production.

  He hadn’t advised the factory that he was arriving, so he was able to spend a week in Paris seeing the sights before continuing on to Liege, where he arrived in February 1902. Berg had left FN in 1898, and John was perhaps a little unsure of the reception he would receive. In fact the director, Henri Frenay, was delighted to see the tall American inventor whose towering genius had literally pulled FN out of the doldrums and set it on course to becoming the largest arms manufacturer in Europe.

  John probably hadn’t realized what an enormous difference his .32 pistol had made at the factory, but the days of empty benches and idle workers had gone. With the ever-increasing sales — half a million pistols were to be produced by 1909 — had come full employment and rapid expansion. And the FN company was eager to get into the sporting arms field, so the automatic shotgun was received with something akin to rapture.

  As at Winchester, the FN engineers closely scrutinized the weapon, and their enthusiasm for it more than made up for the lukewarm response John had received from Bennett at New Haven. A contract to produce the shotgun was signed in March that year, and John remained in Liege for three months in order to supervise the production of the first models.

  Part of the contract with FN was an order for ten thousand units for the technically non-existent Browning Automatic Arms Company. In fact, these were bought by John himself, as a measure of his confidence in his new gun, and were to be sold through Schoverling in America on his behalf. Any doubts harboured by anyone about the potential of the gun — which became known as the Browning Auto 5 — were dispelled when all ten thousand weapons were sold in less than a year. And that was only the start. Since then, the shotgun has been manufactured by Remington, Breda, Savage, Franchi and a number of other firms, and total world sales cannot even be estimated — by 1961 FN alone had produced nearly one and a half million units.

  The output from both the FN and Colt factories showed a fairly close parallel in the early part of the twentieth century. Both companies were delighted with the success of the initial Browning designs, and both subsequently marketed a full range of Browning-designed pistols primarily intended for the civilian and police markets. John, however, could see the potential for the military use of certain of his pistols, and he soon began directing his efforts in this direction.

  As a result, Colt introduced a Military Model .38 pistol in 1902, the calibre being deliberately chosen to match that of the current official army revolver. This weapon did attract some official interest, but the military opinion was that a more powerful cartridge than the .38 was required, following experiences in the Philippines against the Moro terrorists. This bitter campaign had shown that the comparatively small .38 round simply didn’t possess the one-shot ‘knock-down’ man-stopping capability that was needed for a military sidearm.

  In 1905, in response to this requirement, Browning developed a new cartridge — the .45 ACP — that he believed would be more than powerful enough for military use, and submitted that to the Army Ordnance Board together with two pistols, one with a hammer, the other hammerless, and both variants of the same design, for testing. After demonstrations of the weapons by Browning, Colt began commercially manufacturing the hammer model in 1905 and by 1906 the Board was able to examine a production weapon.

  Over 1906 and 1907 several different types of semi-automatic pistol, manufactured by Colt, Savage, Luger and other companies, were tested by the American military, but all proved to be unsatisfactory for the rigours of use in combat. The manufacturers were told that new trials would be carried out in 1910, and were requested to improve their designs by that time. During 1909 and 1910 Browning made a number of modifications to the design of his pistol to satisfy the revised brief.

  The problem with most of these early semi-automatic pistols was that they were complicated designs, inherently fragile, and liable to jam or malfunction in adverse conditions — and especially the conditions likely to be encountered on the battlefield. The cartridges they fired were also felt to be inadequate as man-stoppers, one of the principal reasons why the American government was looking for a replacement for the official Army revolver.

  The final selection trials for the .45 calibre sidearm took place in March 1911, and were rigorous. Each pistol had to fire six thousand rounds, being allowed to cool after each hundred and be cleaned and oiled after every thousand. Then the weapons were to chamber and fire a selection of deformed and abnormal loads, and finally be assessed again after being attacked by acid and with dust inserted into the mechanism. After details of the trial were published, two of the foreign pistols were immediately withdrawn, leaving the Colt with only a single competitor.

  The complete trial occupied two days. At the end of that time, the Colt had fired the six thousand rounds without any stoppages, chambered all the odd loads with no difficulty at all and completed the acid and dust tests faultlessly. It was the first time ever that an automatic weapon of any type had achieved a perfect score in a government test, and the feat was not to be equalled until 1917 when a machine-gun — perhaps predictably a weapon also designed by Browning — matched the record.

  When the Browning pistol successfully fired its final round, a soldier who had been assisting in loading the multiple magazines exclaimed: ‘She made it, by God.’ When John Browning made his brief acceptance speech after it was announced that his pistol had won, he concurred that he had very little to add to the soldier’s comment.

  The Board reported in March, strongly recommending the adoption of the Browning Colt as the official US sidearm, and the recommendation was made official by the Chief of Ordnance of the General Staff and Secretary of War on 29 March 1911. The pistol was renamed the Colt 1911, or the M1911, and remained the official US Services’ pistol until 1985 when it was replaced — amid considerable controversy — by the 9 mm Beretta Model 92. Quite apart from the fact that the Beretta is an Italian, rather than an American, weapon, which was seen by many people in the States as being a non-patriotic choice, it’s been well-established that the 9 mm round is much less effective as a man-stopper than the heavier .45 bullet. On the other hand, the Beretta is a lighter weapon and easier to handle, with a larger magazine capacity.

  Nearly three million M1911s were manufactured for the American military during the First and Second World Wars, and the campaigns in Korea and Vietnam, and the pistol was first used in action in the Border War with Mexico, during General ‘Black Jack’ Pershing’s pursuit of Pancho Villa. In the First World War, an American Army sergeant named York used his M1911 to capture 132 German soldiers, and it also proved extremely popular among the criminal fraternity, being used
by, amongst others, Bonnie Parker, Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine-gun Kelly and John Dillinger. There was even one account during the Second World War of a pilot who had been forced to bail out of his B-24 bomber using his 1911 to shoot down a Japanese Zero fighter which was strafing him.

  Whatever the truth of that story, everybody who used the weapon in combat praised both its total reliability, no matter what the conditions, and its prodigious stopping power. The design has been produced in one form or another by almost every major weapon manufacturer in the world, and has proved to be arguably the most successful semi-automatic pistol ever made. The only conceivable challenger to this title is the Browning Hi-Power which is also, of course, also a Browning design. Total manufacturing figures of the M1911 have never been assessed.

  Despite being heavily involved with his work with Colt, Browning did not neglect his responsibilities at the FN factory and supplied the company with a succession of highly successful pistol designs, including the Model 1922 and, of course, the pistol for which the name Browning is best known; the Model 35 or Hi-Power. This pistol represented a logical development, and simplification, of Browning’s earlier designs, and most notably that of the Colt 1911, which externally closely resembles the slightly smaller Browning.

  11. THE MACHINE-GUNS

  John Browning’s remark to his bothers in 1889, after the experiment with the Model 73 and the block of wood, that he might be able to build a machine-gun in about ten years was extremely pessimistic. In November 1890, just over a year later, Matt Browning wrote to Colt and offered to demonstrate just such a weapon. John had chosen to contact Colt because the company had made the hand-cranked Gatling gun, and was about the only major arms manufacturer in America with any experience of machine-guns. This was actually the first contact between the Brownings and Colt, though certainly the Colt management knew who they were — indeed, in their reply to Matt they made specific reference to the fine qualities of the Winchester 86 — and extended an invitation for the Brownings to visit Hartford.

  John and Matt arrived at the Colt factory in Hartford early in 1891, bringing with them the prototype machine-gun and four belts of ammunition. The weapon was the world’s first gas-operated machine-gun, a system which was to surpass mechanical recoil operation as the standard design for the vast majority of high-powered self-loading weapons in the future.

  John had considerable doubts about their mission. The gun looked very rough indeed, heat-blackened and with the hammer marks of its forging still visible, and could not by any stretch of the imagination be considered a production weapon.

  But he knew it would work, and the Brownings ignored the doubtful looks on the faces of the Colt president, John Hall, and his works manager. Instead, he and Matt just set up the gun on its mount and prepared it for operation. Then John chambered the first round, checked that everybody was clear of the firing line, and triggered the weapon. The prototype machine-gun blasted two hundred rounds without a single pause or malfunction down the firing tunnel.

  When he turned round, all expressions of doubt on the faces of the Colt men had vanished. In fact, John later described Hall as ‘bug-eyed’, and added: ‘The changed expression of Hall and his men put a pound of fat on my ribs’. The Colt team was clearly very impressed. John then explained the reasons for the rough appearance of the weapon, while Matt filled in the background, tracing the development of the gun from that afternoon at Ogden when John saw more than just bending weeds in a muzzle blast. At Hall’s request, the Brownings agreed to stay on in Hartford for a few days to discuss the weapon.

  Unfortunately, there was only a fairly limited market for a machine-gun, and there appeared to be little interest in such a weapon at government level, but Hall did suggest an unofficial showing for some officers he knew in the services to attempt to generate some enthusiasm that way. John agreed to bring the gun back if such a demonstration could be arranged, but Hall vetoed his suggestion to try to tidy the weapon up a bit, because he knew how dramatically his own opinion had changed when the gun started firing, and thought it a good move to leave it just as it was.

  The expected invitation didn’t come until late in 1891, and it was, as Hall had suggested, an unofficial demonstration to two officers from the Naval Ordnance section. The catch, as far as Browning was concerned, was that they wanted the gun to fire continuously for three minutes, which meant, at the 600 rounds a minute John had adjusted the gun to maintain, eighteen hundred cartridges. While he had no doubts about the gun’s ability to keep firing for three minutes, he was actually quite concerned about the task of stitching and then loading sufficient ammunition belts to provide that number of rounds.

  He accepted, persuaded a tentmaker to stitch the belts for him — he had decided on ten belts, each carrying two hundred rounds — and Matt and Ed hand-loaded them for him. John went to Hartford alone, a day early, where he devised and had made a series of wooden boxes, each of which would hold one ammunition belt. He designed these to clip on to the side of the gun, enabling the new belt to be inserted and the firing to continue almost without pause.

  At the demonstration, John sat on a bicycle seat attached to one leg of the mount, pulled back the breechblock and let it carry forward, and then pressed the trigger. The next three minutes were a blur of action. The slamming report of the gun, the change of ammunition box every twenty seconds, and the haze of smoke around him. The barrel turned from black to blue, and finally to red, and then the firing stopped, but not because something had broken. It had stopped because all eighteen hundred rounds had been fired.

  The officers were ecstatic — the weapon was an almost unbelievable advance on the familiar Gatling — and that evening they all went out to the Heublein Hotel in Hartford to celebrate. There John ate a hearty meal and, for the first time in his life, he drank champagne. As he later remarked, it was just as wall that he had a good meal, because for a long time that was all he did get from the machine-gun. Hall had faith in the weapon, and offered John a generous royalty contract for future sales, but John didn’t sign, and took the weapon back home to Ogden.

  There he worked on the gun, as well as continuing to provide Winchester with a seemingly endless stream of new arms, and developed a production model of the machine-gun that was firing within a year, despite the additional problems caused by adopting the mechanism for smokeless powders. The weapon was tested — this time officially — by the US Navy in 1893, and was put into production by Colt two years later as the Colt Model 1895, chambered for either the .30/40 Krag or the 6 mm Lee rounds, these being the calibres used by, respectively, the US Army and US Navy.

  Despite its official title, the gun acquired the nickname ‘The Peacemaker’ during the Spanish-American War, echoing that of the earlier Colt revolver, but was more popularly known elsewhere as the ‘Potato Digger’. The reason for this peculiar appellation becomes clear on firing the weapon: if the tripod is mounted too low or placed on soft earth, it will dig into the ground and cause the heavy under-barrel operating lever to churn up the surface, like a piece of agricultural machinery.

  In 1895, two years after the first official trial, another one was held, with the Browning weapon competing against a 6 mm Gatling, the Accles Improved Gatling, the Maxim and a French-made machine-gun. The Browning machine-gun easily outclassed the other weapons and convincingly demonstrated its superiority. As a result, the US Navy ordered fifty units from Colt in 1896. These were used to devastating effect by the Marines in Peking during the Boxer rebellion, and a further 150 weapons were ordered in 1898. The US Army, for no readily apparent reason, elected to continue using the antiquated, slow, inaccurate and unreliable hand-cranked Gatling.

  12. THE HEAVY MACHINE-GUN AND THE BAR

  Despite the considerable success of the Model 95, Browning was already looking at the short-recoil operating mechanism for machine-guns, and in 1900 he filed a patent for a water-cooled weapon working on that principle. The US Government, predictably enough, showed no interest whatsoever in th
e gun, but Browning continued refining the design even after the patent had been granted, while still concentrating most of his attention on the design of small arms with considerable and increasing commercial success.

  He also devoted some of his time to the development of another automatic weapon, but this time a lightweight machine-rifle intended for use by individual soldiers. This started life as the ‘Browning Machine Rifle’, but after numerous name changes it finished up as the ‘Browning Automatic Rifle’ or simply the ‘BAR’. Both the BAR and the water-cooled heavy machine-gun were designed to use the same cartridge — the standard Springfield .30/06 — to aid compatibility in the field, and both weapons were fully developed by 1917.

  13. WORLD WAR ONE

  Due in large part to the reactionary attitude of the American military community, when the United States entered the First World War its forces had access to just over eleven hundred automatic machine-guns, comprising 670 Benet-Mercies, 282 Maxims and 158 Model 95 Colts. These were just about enough to start a war, but hardly sufficient to finish one. The German forces, in contrast, had begun the hostilities with well over twelve thousand Maxims alone.

  Somewhat ironically, the Lewis machine-gun, a good and reliable weapon, had been designed in America but chosen by the British for volume manufacture, forcing the American government to buy them from the United Kingdom to equip its forces. The only other machine-gun available at the time was a French-designed weapon called the Chauchat, which very quickly proved to be both wholly inadequate and extremely unreliable, the worst possible combination for any weapon designed to be used in a combat situation. Its maximum rate of fire was only 250 rounds a minute, less than half that of the Browning, and it also had to be fired in short bursts and quite often in semi-automatic mode to avoid it repeatedly jamming.