The one that explains why it never left. To understand why the M1911 exists at all, you have to go back to the Philippines in the early 1900s. And you have to understand just how badly the United States Army was losing a fight it had no idea was coming. The Philippine American War had officially ended in 1902.
But in the Southern Islands, the Morrow people, fierce Muslim warriors who had been fighting foreign armies for centuries, had not gotten the message. Or rather, they had. They just didn’t care. American soldiers were patrolling through dense jungle carrying the standard issue 38 long colt revolver and it was getting them killed in a way that nobody had anticipated.
Not because it jammed, not because it was inaccurate, because it lacked the power to stop a man who had decided he was going to die. The Moros had a practice called hudermanado. A warrior would make a formal religious vow to die killing as many enemies as possible, work himself into a state of frenzy, and then charge alone into a group of armed soldiers carrying nothing but a bladed weapon called a cris.
What made this terrifying wasn’t just the courage, though that was real enough. It was that American soldiers were putting 38 caliber rounds into these men and they were not going down. A hudamament warrior with three bullets in him would cover the remaining 10 ft and put that blade into a man before his body understood it was supposed to stop.
One documented account from a US Army officer describes a soldier emptying his sixshot revolver into a charging Morrow warrior at close range. Six rounds. The man kept coming. The soldier survived only because a comrade stepped in with a rifle butt at the last second. It happened again and again. The army launched a formal investigation.
Field commanders sent urgent reports. The conclusion was simple and brutal. The 38 long cult lack the stopping power to stop a determined attacker before he closed the distance. And men were dying because of it. The army’s response was to temporarily reissue the old 45 caliber singleaction army revolvers from the Civil War era.
40-year-old guns because the bigger round worked and the newer gun didn’t. That was the problem on the table and eventually it landed on the desk of the one man in America best qualified to solve it. John Browning. The brief was as clear as it was demanding. Design a new semi-automatic service pistol chambered in at least 45 caliber.
