It is the summer of 1918. Somewhere in the mud and darkness of the Western Front, a young American soldier, I’m a doughboy they call him, crawls through a trench that smells of wet earth, cordite, and death. His rifle is slung across his back. In his hand, he grips a heavy steel revolver, a six shooter, a weapon that would have looked perfectly at home in the holster of a cowboy on the frontier of the 1880s.

 He is about to lead a nighttime raid into a German position 50 yard away. In a few moments, that revolver may be the only thing standing between him and eternity. And here’s what makes this story so remarkable. What makes it an American story unlike any other told in the history of warfare? That soldier was not supposed to be carrying a revolver.

The United States Army had spent years designing, testing, and adopting one of the most advanced combat pistols in the world. one that could fire faster, reload in seconds, and deliver a 45 caliber bullet with twice the stopping power of anything that came before. But America’s industrial machine, like the most powerful on Earth, had failed to produce enough of them in time.

 So, in the trenches of France, in the most devastating war the world had ever seen, thousands of American soldiers went into combat armed with a wheel gun, a revolver, and the story of how that happened and why a man named John J. Blackjack Persing cared so deeply about putting a pistol in every soldier’s hand is one of the most fascinating and least told stories of the First World War.

 If you want stories like this one, history as it really happened, not as the textbooks tell it, subscribe to this channel, hit the bell. You will not want to miss what comes next. To understand why General Persing wanted every American soldier in France to carry a sidearm, you have to go back more than a decade before World War I.

 You have to go to the jungle islands of the southern Philippines to a conflict most Americans have long forgotten and to a moment of terrible clarity that would reshape American military doctrine for generations. The year was 1902. The United States, fresh from its victory in the Spanishamean War, found itself in control of the Philippine Islands.

Not everyone in those islands welcomed American rule. In the southern archipelago, a fiercely independent people known as the Moros. Muslim warriors with centuries of resistance against foreign conquerors rose up in what would become a decadel long rebellion. The Moros were unlike any enemy American soldiers had faced before.

 They practiced a form of ritual combat that they called juramntado. a sworn sacred charge performed in a near hypnotic state in which a warrior would bind his body tightly with cloth to slow bleeding, enter a state of religious ecstasy, and then charge headlong into a line of armed soldiers with nothing but a bladed weapon intent on killing as many enemies as possible before he died.

 The problem, the terrifying problem was that the standard American sidearm could not stop them. At the time, US soldiers carried the Colt model 1892, a double-action revolver chambered in .38 Long Colt. It had been adopted because it was lighter, more modern, more accurate at a distance than the old 45 caliber revolvers. On paper, it was a fine weapon, but in the jungles of Mindanao, paper did not matter.

 Afteraction reports began flooding back to Washington. The language in them was stark. Officers wrote of Mororrow warriors absorbing five, six, seven shots from the 38 and still closing the distance, still swinging their blades, still killing American soldiers before finally collapsing. The round was simply not powerful enough to stop a man who did not intend to stop. The army acted.

In some areas, commanders quietly reached back into storage for the old 45 caliber singleaction revolvers from the frontier era. the very guns that had won the Indian Wars because they knew those heavy, slow bullets would knock a man down where the .38 would not. And simultaneously, a search began for something new, something semi-automatic, something that fired a 45 caliber bullet, something that a soldier could reload in seconds, not fumble with one round at a time.

 That search would take 9 years. It would involve some of the finest gun designers in the world. And it would end in March of 1911 when the United States Army officially adopted a pistol that would serve in virtually every American conflict for the next 74 years. It was called the model of 1911. Designed by the incomparable John Moses Browning, produced by Colt, chambered for the 45 ACP cartridge.

 A singleaction semi-automatic pistol with a seven round magazine capable of being fired and reloaded faster than any revolver ever made. It weighed just under 3 lb. It’s 45 caliber bullet fired at a relatively low muzzle velocity was engineered to stop rather than penetrate to transfer its energy into the target to knock a man down and keep him down.

 The army loved it. The soldiers who carried it in field tests reported that it felt like it had been made for the hand. After the horrors of the Philippines, after the inadequacy of the 38, holding a loaded M1911 felt like holding certainty itself. But the army had only ordered a modest number. In peace time, there was no reason to think they would need more.

The world was about to prove that assumption catastrophically wrong. John Joseph Persing was 56 years old when the United States entered the First World War in April of 1917. He had lived more history than most men dream of. Born in Lleed, Missouri in 1860. He had grown up in the shadow of the Civil War.

 Had fought Apaches in New Mexico and Sue in the Dakotas. Had charged up the blood soaked slopes of San Juan Hill in Cuba alongside Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Had commanded men in the jungles of the Philippines, and had led 10,000 American soldiers into Mexico in pursuit of the revolutionary Ponchovilla. It was that last campaign, the punitive expedition of 1916, that would prove most relevant to the story we are telling today.

 In the deserts of northern Mexico, Persing’s men had carried the M1911 into combat for the first time in a major operation. The pistol had performed beautifully. One of Persing’s own aids, a young, ambitious lieutenant named George S. Patton, had used his Colt revolver in a dramatic firefight at a ranch near Rubio, personally shooting two of Poncho Vita’s men.

 The campaign had proven the value of a reliable, powerful sidearm in close, fast, dangerous fighting. When Persing arrived in France in June of 1917 as commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, he brought that conviction with him. And what he saw in the trenches of the Western Front only deepened it. Trench warfare had transformed the nature of close combat.

The killing grounds of France were not open fields where armies maneuvered. They were narrow, winding ditches carved into the earth, sometimes only 3 ft wide, often muddy to the knee, always cramped and claustrophobic. A rifle was often too long to swing in a trench. A bayonet was useful. A pistol was essential.

 Trench raids had become a grim art form. Small groups of men, sometimes as few as 10, sometimes 30, would slip into the darkness between the lines, crawl across no man’s land, cut through wire, drop into the enemy position, and in the space of a few terrible minutes, engage in desperate hand-to-hand fighting before withdrawing with prisoners or intelligence.

In those moments, the pistol was often the decisive weapon. Persing understood this. He had spent a lifetime in uniform. He knew what close fighting demanded and he issued a command that was both simple and breathtaking in its ambition. Every combat soldier in the American Expeditionary Forces would carry a sidearm.

 It was a remarkable order. No major army in the world was attempting to arm every infantryman with a handgun. The British, the French, the Germans, all of them reserved pistols for officers and specialists. Persing wanted them for every man in the trenches. There was just one problem. The United States did not have nearly enough M1911 pistols to make it happen.

When Congress declared war on April 6th, 1917, the Army had on hand roughly 68,000 M1911 pistols. In a peaceime army of 127,000 men, that had seemed almost adequate. But Persing was not building a peaceime army. He was building the American Expeditionary Forces and which would ultimately grow to more than 2 million soldiers.

 The math was brutal. Even setting aside Persing’s ambition to arm every man, simply equipping officers and specialists would require pistols in the hundreds of thousands. And Colt, the sole manufacturer of the M1911, was already stretched to its limits. The Hartford factory was producing pistols, yes, but also Browning machine guns, Browning automatic rifles, Vicer’s guns for the British.

Every production line was consumed. The government placed emergency orders in the summer and fall of 1917. Contracts went out for more than half a million additional M1911 pistols from Colt alone. And the army simultaneously approached other manufacturers, Remington UMC Winchester, about taking on production contracts.

Even Burroughs, a company better known for adding machines, received a contract inquiry. But none of it could happen fast enough. By October of 1917, 6 months after the declaration of war, government orders for M1911 pistols had reached 765,000, and Colt, struggling with material shortages and worker shortfalls, was managing to deliver only about a quarter of its monthly quota.

 The government even issued a public appeal asking American citizens to voluntarily surrender their personallyowned Colt 45 automatic pistols for military use. The response was almost non-existent. Americans were not inclined to hand over their sidearms, however patriotic the cause. The army faced a crisis. The doughboys were arriving in France.

 The trenches were waiting and there were not enough pistols. The solution when it came had a certain elegant irony because it was in a sense the wheel of history turning back on itself. The two greatest American revolver makers had been watching the crisis unfold and they had a proposal. Colt had in its catalog a large-frame double-action revolver called the new service model.

 Smith and Wesson had their own heavy revolver, the hand ejector. Both were robust, reliable, battle tested weapons. Both were already in production with trained workers and existing tooling, and both companies believed they could be adapted quickly to fire the same 45 ACP cartridge used in the M1911. There was one significant engineering challenge. The M1811’s .

45 ACP cartridge was rimless, designed for a semi-automatic pistol, where the cartridge head spaces on the case mouth and is stripped from a flat magazine. A revolver, on the other hand, was designed for rimmed cartridges where the rim catches on the edge of the cylinder and is leveraged out by the extractor star when the cylinder swings open.

Without a rim, the 45 ACP cartridge would not eject properly. It might not even head space correctly. The revolver could not simply be rechambered and sent to war. The solution was brilliantly simple. A Smith and Wesson engineer devised a stamped steel clip, a half moon of spring steel that held three cartridges simultaneously, acting as an artificial rim.

 Two of these half moon clips loaded all six rounds into the cylinder at once. When the cylinder swung open, the clips could be stripped out with a single motion, and two new loaded clips inserted just as quickly. It was not as fast as the M1911’s magazine reload, but it was far faster than loading individual revolver rounds one at a time.

 Smith and Wesson generously offered the patent on the half moon clip to the Army and at the Army’s request allowed Colt to use it free of charge in their own version of the revolver. The result was two distinct weapons, the Colt model 1917 and the Smith and Wesson model 1917. Both designated as the US revolver caliber 45 M19 to17.

 Both were sixshot double-action revolvers. Both fired the standard 45 ACP. Both could be issued immediately because the factories and the workers and the tooling were already there. The government placed contracts for 100,000 revolvers. Then more. By the time the armistice silenced the guns on November 11th, 1918, Colt had delivered 151, that’s 700 M19 and17 revolvers, and Smith and Wesson had delivered 153 111.

More than 304,000 revolvers in total, wheel guns, old technology by the standards of 1917, pressed back into service by the sheer mechanical reality of industrial warfare. In photographs from the Western Front, you can see them clearly in the holsters of American soldiers. The big round profile of the revolver unmistakable against the angular pistol grip of the M19 now 111.

In some photographs, General Persing himself is reviewing troops whose holsters carry not the modern semi-automatic he had demanded, but the old wheel gun. History does not always give us what we plan for. Sometimes it gives us what we can make in time. Now consider what this actually meant for the men carrying those revolvers into the trenches of France.

The M1917 revolver was not a bad weapon. It was in many ways a very good weapon. It was heavier than the M1911, about 22 lb, but it was accurate. Its double-action trigger meant that a soldier who had not already cocked the hammer could still fire with a single pull immediately without an extra motion.

 It was more tolerant of dirt and mud than the semi-automatic. A revolver will fire even when partially fouled, where a jammed semi-automatic may simply stop. The Moonclip system, while not as elegant as a magazine, worked. Veterans of the war described the M1917 as reliable, robust, and reassuring in the hand.

 The 45 ACP round it fired was identical to the M1911s. The same heavy bullet, the same stopping power, the same authority at close range that the lighter 38 long colt had so catastrophically lacked in the Philippines. But the M1917 was also undeniably a step backward in technology. Compared to the M1911’s seven round magazine, which could be swapped in under two seconds with a trained hand, the revolver’s moon clips were clumsy under pressure. The clips could bend.

Bent clips could bind the cylinder and cause misfires at the worst possible moment. In the darkness of a trench raid, fingers numb with cold and shaking with adrenaline. Fumbling with half moon clips that held only three rounds each was a different proposition from slapping a fresh magazine into a semi-automatic.

 For the soldiers who had trained on the M19011 and expected to carry it into combat, discovering that they had been issued a revolver was a disorienting experience. Some accounts suggest that soldiers actively sought to trade for M1911 pistols wherever they could find them. The M1911, when available, was given priority to officers and those most likely to be in close combat.

 The revolvers went to everyone else, military, police, artillery crews, machine gunners, support troops. The men for whom the pistol was a last resort rather than a primary weapon. All of them received the M19. And when the doughboys of the AEF went over the top into the mud and wire and machine gun fire of the Western Front, a remarkable number of them went with a wheel gun on their hip and a prayer on their lips.

 There is one more chapter to this story. One that gives the M1917 revolver a second life and a second moment of American military history that deserves to be remembered. When the war ended on November 11th, 1918, the Army did the accounting. It had nearly 304,000 M19 revolvers in various states of service. These were old technology. The M1911 was clearly the future.

 So, the revolvers were cleaned, inspected, repaired where necessary, and put into storage at arsenals around the country. Not scrapped, not sold, stored. The army had a feeling these weapons might be needed again someday. 20 years later, they were right. In November of 1940, with war clearly on the horizon once more, Army Ordinance Corps records showed 188th Dasa to notice 20 M197 revolvers still in inventory.

When the United States entered the Second World War after Pearl Harbor, the same crisis returned. Not enough M1911 pistols, factories scrambling to meet demand, production lagging behind need. The M197 revolvers were pulled out of storage, refurbished, and reissued. Military police on statesside duty carried them.

 Tankers, men who worked in confined spaces where a rifle was useless and a pistol was everything, received them. Some went overseas into the same hands that gripped the steering wheels of Sherman tanks or the triggers of artillery pieces in North Africa and the Pacific. The old wheel guns designed as a temporary measure in the crisis of 1917 were still doing their job a quarter century later.

What does all of this mean? Why does it matter? It matters because it is a story about the gap between vision and reality and about how great nations close that gap under pressure. John Persing’s vision was sound. He had seen in Cuba and Mexico and the killing fields of the Philippines what a close-range fight demanded.

 He knew that a soldier without a reliable sidearm was a soldier who had nothing when his rifle was empty and an enemy was close enough to smell. He insisted on arming every man because he understood viscerally what the modern battlefield could look like in its most intimate moments. And America’s industrial machine, the greatest the world had ever seen, could not meet that vision in time.

 Not because the engineers lacked talent, not because the workers lacked dedication, but because the machine guns also had to be built. and the rifles and the artillery shells and the gas masks and the transport ships and the 10,000 other implements of industrial war. Everything was needed at once and there was never quite enough of anything.

 The M197 revolver was the answer America gave when the answer it wanted was not available. And that answer was by every measure that matters good enough. The men who carried it into the trenches of France fought with it and survived with it and won with it. This is the real history of the M1911 and the M1917. Not a story of failure, but of improvisation.

 Of a nation that set an impossible standard for itself, a pistol for every fighting man, and then found a way to meet it imperfectly at scale under fire. The Half Moon Clip is a small, humble piece of stamped steel. But in its way, it is as much a symbol of American ingenuity under pressure as any weapon that ever came off a production line.

 It held three cartridges. It made a revolver fire a semi-automatics cartridge. It closed in its small way the gap between what was needed and what could be made. That gap and the effort to close it is the American story in the First World War. The Doughboys went over there with what they had. They fought with what they were given.

 And they came home having helped end the war that was supposed to end all wars. For every man who stood in those trenches, whether he gripped a cult or a Smith and Wesson, whether he counted six rounds or seven, we owe a debt that no history can fully repay. If this story meant something to you, and if it changed how you think about the men who carried those weapons into the darkness, please subscribe to this channel, leave a comment, tell someone else about what happened in those trenches, because these stories deserve to be remembered.

Thank you for watching. We will see you in the next one.