The solution was a lighter pointed bullet. But even with a 150-grain spitzer in the 81?2-pound 1903, recoil was harsh. Not only were shooters flinching, they were barely bothering to aim. Good marksmanship was so difficult to achieve and maintain that a cash incentive had to be offered. The famous Marksman/Sharpshooter/Expert badges entered service with the Marines and a similar system with the Army. Experts made an extra three dollars a month, roughly a 15 percent pay bonus.

Many attempts have been made to mitigate the overpowered .30-06's recoil. These snaps were taken by the author's father, Erick, of a fellow competitor at the 1936 National Matches: "Shooters to the line! Assume a good sitting--Target 43, what the…?"

Recoil is one of the most under-appreciated issues associated with declining interest in the shooting sports. The .30-06 started being used for deer hunting in the 1920s. Since then, hundreds of thousands of young shooters have suffered a .30-06 being the first rifle placed into their adolescent shoulders. How many fired one round and thought, This is for the birds? How many wives have fired one round out of their husband's deer rifle and said, "That's enough for me"? If those first rounds had been with a moderately pressured 7x57 or a mild .300 Savage, we'd have a lot more sport shooters and hunters in this nation.

Weights
Militarily, consider the extra costs associated with such a massively overpowered cartridge: The machine guns and the automatic rifles had to be many pounds heavier than if they had been built for a more practical chambering. They could have been built lighter and handier. How much extra shipping was necessary to carry the additional and unnecessary weight of the ammo itself?

Untapered
Then there is the issue of taper, or, rather, lack of it. The most important feature of a combat firearm is reliability, and a straight-walled case, such as the '06, doesn't suffer dirt and grit or corrosion well. During the .30-06's service life, all weapons were issued with a ruptured-cartridge-case extractor. A tapered case is far more reliable, and this is immediately evident considering the number of weapons that were considered reliable in other tapered calibers but not in '06.

The Lewis gun worked quite well for the Brits and Japanese in .303 and 7.7, while the U.S. Navy's .30-06 Lewis was derided as worthlessly unreliable. The same goes for the Chauchat, which worked poorly in 8mm Lebel and barely at all in '06. Straight-walled cases stack neatly in magazines, but when it comes to military service, a strong taper is worth all the cleaning in the world.

The Garand finally tamed the recoil dragon, resulting in vastly increased shooting scores and reduced flinching but with a weight penalty for both rifle and ammo. Here the author enjoys plinking with a friend's M-1 at the Silver State Range in Beatty, Nevada.

If we had not had weapons designers with the talent of Browning and Garand, .30-06--with far too long a case wall--might have been replaced well before 1957. Many nations changed cartridges in the first half of the century. You're thinking, yes, and almost all those nations were going up in caliber, not down. That is true, but it's largely due to tracer performance in automatic arms.

Too, the long, slender casing is an inefficient powder column, requiring more powder to achieve performance. Contrast it with any number of shorter .30s that get almost the same velocity from a smaller capacity and with less recoil.

Missed opportunities
An attempt was made in 1932, with the almost-intro of the farsighted .276 Pedersen--which would even today be as close to perfect for men and deer as any casing ever devised--but it was blocked by Dugout Doug. Just think if the Garand had fired from a 10-round clip with 30 percent less recoil and just as much practical horsepower.

Also, had we gone with the perfect Pedersen, we still might be using it instead of that ridiculous mouse cartridge with which we've been saddled for four decades.