First adopted on June 19, 1903, the United States Rifle, Caliber. The M1903 Springfield rifle represented leapfrog technology. They had just gotten their rude introduction to the Devil Dogs of the U.S. The vaunted German assault troops abandoned all five machineguns and fled back to safety. He dispatched the two senior German patrol leaders with his bayonet, forcing the remainder to flee. He emptied his rifle as fast as he could cycle the action until he was eventually standing among the assaulting Germans. Gunny Janson shouted the alarm, affixed his bayonet, and charged down the hill.
At the time of its introduction, the ’03 Springfield rifle was a thoroughly modern bolt-action rifle. If the Krauts got those machineguns working they could turn the entire line.
1931 GERMAN MAUSER RIFLE FULL
A full dozen German soldiers were crawling up the hill with five MG08/15 light machineguns in tow. If the Germans could take that hill they could rain fire down on the French flanks. Hill 142 was a strategic piece of real estate. Janson gripped his M1903 Springfield rifle in a death rictus as he made a quick appraisal of the situation. The New World rescues the Old: men of the American 28th Division at Donrecourt, France during July 1918. CPT Williams famously responded, “Retreat? Hell, we just got here!” Now on June 6, Gunnery Sergeant Janson found himself cut off with the battered remnants of his small unit atop the shattered moonscape that was Hill 142. Upon their initial deployment to the front lines, the retreating French told them to turn around and go home. Marines had arrived four days earlier led by CPT Lloyd Williams. New recruits train with the M1903 rifle at Camp Wadsworth, South Carolina during the spring of 1918. History has come to refer to this particular tidy little meat grinder as the Battle of Belleau Wood. Now with the Germans within 45 miles of Paris, French troops were in retreat. This freed up some fifty divisions of battle-hardened German troops to tip the balance of power against the Allies in the West.
The Russians were bled white and quit the war in May of 1918. World War I was well into its fourth bloody year, and the world groaned underneath the unprecedented suffocating carnage. On this fateful afternoon, however, some 26 years to the day before American troops stormed ashore on D-Day, Gunny Janson was neck-deep in the suck. Army, Janson enlisted in the Marine Corps, serving in the Nicaraguan Campaign. By the time Gunnery Sergeant Ernest Janson trudged up Hill 142 at Chateau-Thierry, France, on June 6, 1918, he had already logged fourteen years in uniform.