The cult ran through clean. The official Army report was unambiguous. The Board of Officers recommended immediate adoption. In 1911, it became the standard issue sidearm of the United States Armed Forces. The model of 1911, the M1 1911. It would go to war within 3 years. American soldiers carried it into the trenches of France in 1917 and 1918.
Officers carried it in the Pacific. NCOs carried it in Korea. Every branch of the American military carried it for 74 years without serious challenge. But none of that is the reason it refused to die. For that, you have to jump forward to a beach called Saipan in the summer of 1944. It is 4:45 in the morning on July 7th, 1944.
The battle for Saipan has been grinding on for 3 weeks. American forces have pushed the Japanese defenders to the northern tip of the island. The Japanese commander, General Yoshitsugu Saito, is dead by his own hand. His forces are shattered, out of food, out of medical supplies, nearly out of ammunition. What happened next was not a military tactic in any conventional sense.
It was something older and more desperate than that. Approximately 3,000 Japanese soldiers launched what would become the largest bonsai charge of the entire Pacific War. And these were not fresh troops with full kit. Many were wounded. Some were carrying their dead comrades rifles because they had already expended all ammunition for their own weapons.
Some were armed with nothing but sharpened bamboo poles. They came screaming out of the darkness, waving flags and regimental banners in a mass wave that simply did not stop. They overran the first American defensive line. They kept running. They hit the second line and broke through that, too. They were flooding through a gap more than a mile wide, pouring toward the rear, toward artillery positions, toward field hospitals and supply dumps and communication centers.
