Was Springfield Armory considered a competitor of Colt?
It sounds like a symptom of a larger problem with our Pre-WWII military. Lack of funding meant we didn't test a lot of weapons very well or use them enough in training. Otherwise, they might have noticed this much sooner.
Much of our military - the army, at least - was being run by old cavalry officers. Some of whom, quite frankly, were idiots. As an example, when the Nazis invaded Poland, their early Panzers went through the Polish cavalry - some of the finest in the world - like a buzzsaw. Our generals saw this and were appalled. But did they say "We need tanks of our own!" ? Nope, not at first. The "lesson" they took from the demise of the Polish cavalry was that we needed
armored horse wagons that would protect our cavalry until it got into the enemy's rear, at which point the cavalry would be turned loose.
. . . It's firing 700 rounds per minute for a full minute that did in the barrels. Although the manual and your instructor say to fire bursts of 3 to 5 rounds, it is so much more tempting, in the heat of combat and awash with adrenaline, to hold the trigger down until "bang" becomes "click".
Improving the metalurgy is still a good thing, but putting all the blame on the manufacturer when dealing with operator error is just wrong. . . .
At the time, we still had a senior officer corps trained by Civil War veterans, and they were still more concerned with costs than combat effectiveness - their predecessors of a generation or two earlier actually fought
against repeating rifles because ". . . the soldiers would shoot up all their ammo . . . " and the same mindset still prevailed. Short bursts saved ammo, but when Jap after Jap is roaring in, long bursts made sense - you needed to put lead on the bad guys, and ammo conservation wasn't even on the radar as a concern. After the Great War and the use of machine guns then, they SHOULD have known that fire discipline would evaporate in a hectic, target-rich environment, and planned for it. But upgrading the weapons would have taken innovative thinking and more money, so it didn't happen, even after they upgraded the ammo to a hotter load. It was much easier to say "Don't shoot too much too fast."
