July 7th, 1944, Saipan. They prop a dying sergeant against a tree. He can’t walk, can’t be carried. Three to 5,000 Japanese soldiers are pouring down a hillside in the largest banzai charge of the Pacific War. And his squad has to pull back through the dark. There’s nothing left to do for him, and everybody knows it.
Someone puts a pistol in his hand. Eight rounds. That’s everything Thomas Baker has left in the world. We’ll come back to that tree. But first, you need to understand the weapon they handed him because every man who ever held this pistol had the same math. Not enough bullets, not enough time, and no other option left.
The island of Samar, Philippines. October the 1905. A prisoner named Antonio Caspby tries to escape and attacks American soldiers. They shoot him four times at close range with a 38 Colt revolver. Three rounds punch through his chest and perforate both lungs. A fourth passes through his hand uh into his forearm. Caspie keeps fighting.
They finally stop him by cracking his skull uh with the steel butt plate of a Springfield carbine. Colonel Lagar document the case. Caspby was a Pula Han rebel on Samar, not a Morrow from the south, but what happened to him was an exact preview of what was happening 600 miles away. In the southern Philippines, Mororrow Germanado warriors had undergone ritual purification, wrapped their limbs with leather tourniquets to slow blood loss, and charged American positions with swords.
The 38 went through them without slowing them down. Here’s why. A 38 bullet is 357 in across. A45 is451. Under the rules of war, military bullets can’t expand. So the hole is exactly the size of the bullet going in. That difference, less than a tenth of an inch, was a difference between a man who kept charging and a man who dropped.
General Wood’s 1904 report was blunt. The 045 caliber revolver stops a man in his tracks. Now, most people will tell you the M1911 was designed to fight the Moros. It wasn’t. The pistol didn’t reach the Philippines until mid 1913 after the last major engagement. The45 revolvers fought the Germanados. Uh but the moral experience created the 045 caliber requirement.
The requirement created the cartridge and the cartridge created the gun. In 1904, Colonel John Thompson and Major Louisard ran the test that decided the caliber. Union Stockyards Chicago live cattle, horses, and human cadaavvers, seven calibers. The conclusion, a bullet which will have the shock effect and stopping power at short ranges.
necessary for a military pistol should have a caliber not less than 045. John Browning had been developing semi-automatic pistols for Colt since the 1890s. He scaled up his 38AP design to meet the45 mandate. 6 years of refinement. In the final trial, his pistol fired 6,000 rounds against the Savage. The Savage suffered 37 malfunctions. Browning’s cult had zero.
Adopted March 29th, 1911. $14.25. And here’s a detail that ties the origin together. Colonel Thompson, the man who ran those cattle tests, chaired the board that approved the M1911. Then he retired and invented the Thompson submachine gun chambered in the same .45A CP. Browning built the pistol with intentionally loose tolerances.
The slide rattled. Engineers hated it. He wasn’t building a target pistol. He was building something for conditions that didn’t exist yet. Mud, ice, blood, sand. Remember that. Those loose tolerances are going to save lives in a place called Chosen. The army had its pistol. What they didn’t know yet was what it would actually be used for.
October 8th, 1918. The Argon Forest. Fog in the ravines. Machine gun fire echoing off wet limestone. Alvin York almost didn’t go to war. He was a conscientious objector from the Tennessee mountains. A Christian who believed the killing was a sin. Filed for exemption twice. Denied both times. Now he’s crouched in a ravine with seven survivors of a 17man patrol.
Six Americans killed, three wounded. German maxims sweeping the ground above. and a German officer and five men have just leapt from a trench with bayonets fixed 25 yards away and closing. York’s Enfield rifle is nearly empty. Six men in the open bayonets 25 yards. He’d grown up in the mountains of Palmau, Tennessee.
Been hunting wild turkeys since before he could read. And turkey hunters know something that most soldiers don’t. You shoot the rear bird first so the front ones don’t see it fall and scatter. Um York pulled his M1911 and shot the last man first. Worked forward six rounds, six men down. The German commander surrendered.
York and seven Americans marched 132 uh prisoners back to Allied lines, a pacifist from Tennessee with a pistol he never wanted to carry. His Medal of Honor citation doesn’t mention the point for five. The story comes from his diary and from Private Percy Beardsley’s affidavit. I saw Corporal York fire his pistol repeatedly.
I saw Germans who had been hit fall down. A pattern was forming, one that would repeat for the next 60 years. Nobody planned to use this pistol. It was what happened when the plan was already dead. In the first war, the M1911 was the backup, the thing you reached for when your rifle failed. Um, in the next war, men would reach for it knowing they’d never reach for anything again. Back to Saipan.
Back to that tree. Baker had refused evacuation, told his squad he’d rather die than risk another man’s life carrying him out, so they left him with a pistol, and the only goodbye anyone could manage in the middle of a banzai charge. His Medal of Honor citation reads, “When last seen alive, Sergeant Baker was propped against a tree, pistol in hand, calmly facing the foe.
” Later, Sergeant Baker’s body was found in the same position, gun empty, with eight Japanese lying dead before him. Same battle, Lieutenant Colonel William O’Brien fought with two Colt 45s until he died manning a machine gun. Both men received the Medal of Honor postumous. That word uh defines the M1911 in World War II.
At least 20 Medal of Honor actions involved this pistol. 12 of those 20 men were killed, 60%. Drawing a sidearm in that kind of combat wasn’t offensive. It was the end of the line. The country built, you know, 1.88 million of them for the war. Remington Rand, a typewriter company, built 900,000.
Their previous best known product had a back space key. If you’ve ever held a 1911, you know the weight. 2 and 12 lbs loaded. Pick up a hard coverver book. That’s what Baker had in his hand against that tree. A Marine Raider battalion’s afteraction report from New Georgia, November 1943 summed up the M1911’s entire war in one line. Held up very well, but used very little, almost never needed, uh, completely reliable until it was the only thing left. And then the weather turned.
Korea chosen reservoir November 1950 35 below zero steel burned skin on contact morphine froze in the curettes remember Browning’s loose tolerances uh the ones the engineers hated standard lubricants froze solid bar actions locked so hard that Marines urinated on them to thaw the bolts the M1 carbine’s reputation was destroyed at chosen the M1911 survived D soldiers stripped every drop of oil and ran it dry.
The same sloppy fit that rattled in a clean room let ice pass through without seizing. General SLA Marshall noted more instances of the service pistol used with killing effect in Korea than in all his World War II uh studies combined. Chinese forces specialized in night infiltration. They appeared inside American foxholes.
At that distance, you didn’t shoulder a rifle. The gun survived the ice of Chaos. Months later, in the muddy hills of June 1951, it was the last line of defense for PFC Jack Hansen of the 31st Infantry. Uh, his squad had four wounded men who couldn’t move fast. Hansen volunteered to cover their withdrawal.
He told them to go. He stayed on the gun. When the counterattack retook the hill the next morning, they found a machine gun ammunition expended. An M1911 in his right hand, slide locked back on an empty magazine, a machete in his left, 22 enemy bodies in front of his foxhole. He’d gone through every weapon he had in order until there was nothing left.
Slide locked back. That’s how they kept finding it. Baker at Saipan. Um Hansen in Korea. The last round fired. The slide caught open and the man behind it was already gone. The next place it happened, the walls were close enough to touch Vietnam. The air smelled like turned earth and something worse. Somewhere beneath a jungle floor, the enemy was waiting.
Hundreds of army tunnel rats volunteered for this duty over the course of the war. Under 5’5, slight build. The tunnels were three feet wide at best. red clay, handcarved, sometimes dropped straight down into a second level that ran for miles. Air thick enough to taste soil and sweat and something chemical that burned your throat. No room to turn around.
If you met someone coming the other way, one of you was going to die facing forward and the other was going to die crawling backward in the dark. They went in with a flashlight, a knife, and a45. Captain Herbert Thornton built the first tunnel clearing teams in 1966. his assessment. He had to have an inquisitive mind, a lot of guts, and a lot of real moxy because you could blow yourself out of there in a heartbeat.
The M1911 underground was power and punishment in a45 round in a clay tube barely wider than your shoulders produced instant deafness and temporary blindness from muzzle flash. the National Museum of the Army. The 045 caliber round was too loud and the muzzle flash too bright. Three shots maximum before reloading any longer. And the VC rushes you.
Tunnel rat. Harold Roer put it simply. I felt more fear than I’ve ever come close to feeling before or since. Three shots, then silence, then the sound of your own breathing and the knowledge that whoever was down there with you had heard everyone. You couldn’t see. you couldn’t hear the clay walls pressed against your shoulders and the 045 in your hand was uh the only reason you were still alive.
That was what the M191 was in Vietnam. Not a weapon you wanted to fire, a weapon you couldn’t survive without. In 1985, the army retired the M1911 after 74 years. 15 rounds of 9 mm replaced 7 of 045 NATO standardization. The frames they replaced were 40 years old. The last ones built in 1945. The 045 didn’t throw men backward.
That’s not how physics works. If a bullet could knock the target down, the recoil would knock the shooter down, too. What it did was make a hole 60% larger than a 9 mm. In a world where military bullets can’t expand, that was the whole secret. That was enough. But the gun wouldn’t die either. Marine Force Recon handbuilt pistols from gutted World War II frames.
In 2012, Colt won a contract for 12,000 M45s A1s. The first new military issue 1911 since 1945. Mars carried them until 2016. switched to the Glock 19. Not for performance logistics, 74 years, 55 Medal of Honor actions, 2.7 million built, a sergeant propped against a tree with eight rounds, a pacifist in a forest shooting the backman first, a private in a frozen foxhole with a machete in his other hand, a volunteer underground with three rounds before the dark closed in.
The M1911 was never designed to win a war. It was designed to keep one man alive for 10 more seconds when the math said he was already dead. Slide, lock back, magazine empty. That’s how they always found
