With caps doffed in respect for the aging patriarch of American cartridges, the printing of this article was delayed until the century mark had passed. The well-earned kudos and plaudits are fading, and it's time for a more sober analysis of the beloved John Wayne of chamberings. Like the Chevy smallblock, the .30-06 is versatile and powerful, but it, too, has flaws and excesses.

In spite of its bull-in-a-china-shop excesses, perhaps the .30-06's greatest gift was the confidence it gave green troops. Once under fire, Americans found the mild 6.5x50 Arisaka or 7.62x25 Tokarev could kill them just as dead, but no American grunt ever feared being outranged or undergunned.

I have no desire to be hung in effigy down at the VFW, nor do I want my image to become the dart board at next season's hunting camp, but reality must at some point intrude into our affection for the once and future buck stacker.

Craig Boddington warned me that "You're being set up" when he heard I was writing this, but I'll stand by it. I'm grateful for his warning and have tread carefully, for emotions run deep when a familiar tool has saved lives or garnered meat for the family.

Origins
We must remember the circumstances of the period when .30-06 was chosen. Most of the men making the decisions had entered military service with the .45-70, and after enduring the recoil of the trapdoor carbine, they felt that the jolt of the '06 was nothing to be concerned about. There was, at the time, a considerable embarrassment that the contemptible Spanish had shot the pants off of our troops in Cuba and that U.S. military marksmanship had been uniformly terrible.

A scapegoat was needed, and the Krag was picked. Along with the rifle, the .30-40 cartridge, loaded with a slow, heavy 220-grain roundnose, was blamed for everything but the Yellow Fever epidemic.

The high pressure, long casing and needlessly heavy bullet demand heavy, cumbersome weapon designs. While beloved for its firepower, the BAR was loathed for its weight and reduced magazine capacity. The same weapon in .276 Pedersen would have been slightly less effective over 500 yards but lighter and more reliable--with less recoil, more ammunition and more than enough killing power.

The bizarre 1895 Lee-Winchester straight pull had performed so poorly with the odd 6mm Lee Navy cartridge that Marine detachments were swapping to the Krag before the Moros' blood had dried. The 6mm would enjoy one moment of glory, that of helping to defend the Peking legations during the Boxer Rebellion, but its long, roundnosed, highly stable bullet merely poked neat holes without transferring a lot of energy or trauma to the target. This raised a red flag of caution to the men who would choose America's next-century cartridge.

National pride would have suffered if we had gone to the nearly ideal 7x57 Mauser, which had just given us a drubbing. The British, too, had suffered greatly at the hands of 7x57mm Mausers in the Second Boer War. They immediately launched a program to design a better cartridge than the .303, which ultimately failed due to being overpowered.

These were days of high nationalism, and a nation was not really a sovereign state unless it had a proprietary cartridge. The U.S. was riding a crest of national pride that would have alarmed the staunchest of today's patriots, and, damn it, we would have a bigger cartridge than anybody. And we got it: No nation has ever used a longer casing for its service rifle.

It seemed to make sense to everyone. A heavy cartridge was necessary to take down a horse, it could shoot through sandbags, and it was useful for long-range interdiction fire. This was a pre-machine-gun technique, wherein a unit would set sights on umpteen hundred yards and so many degrees and conduct indirect fire. In practice it was found merely to waste ammunition and shorten barrel life.

Recoil
Almost immediately there were problems with the new .30-03. Recoil from 220-grain ball was so severe, it kicked long-time shooters immediately into flinching. It bored through range berms and killed and injured soldiers who were pulling targets. Marksmanship scores, which were poor, got worse.