Over the weekend, I inherited a 1917 Army model .45 Smith & Wesson revolver. The owner is a family friend and his father served during the Korean War - not in theater, but rather, ferrying supplies back and forth between different Air Force bases in the country via aircraft. He died when he crashed his plane into a mountain in the fog carrying supplies from a California base destined for Nellis Air Force base in Nevada, which are all the details I have about the incident.
What struck me as strange was the fact that his gun, supposedly recovered from the crash site and given to the family, has these fake plastic elkhorn handles on it that look like they belong on a child’s toy cowboy gun. The owner assured me that these were indeed on the gun when his father died and they were the only handles the gun has ever had to his knowledge. Obviously they are not military issue, which leads to my question. If you are in the military and are issued a side arm, are you allowed to (legally) modify it with different grips/handles, sights, trigger, holster, etc.? If so, does someone have to check that the after-market parts are acceptable to some level of quality? If this is not allowed today, was in allowed in the 1950s?
Assuming this story is true, I find it hard to believe this Air Force pilot was flying around with this in the 1950s and wasn’t reprimanded for having such a ridiculous set up on his military-issued revolver which you could see from a great distance since they are white and obnoxious to say the least. These handles look like they would crack and fall off if you dropped the gun from even a modest height on to a hard surface.
Both Colt and S&W manufactured .45 cal acp revolvers for US Army issue during WWI. They were a stopgap measure until production of the M-1911/1911A1 ramped up and were popular among cavalry and armor branches. I doubt if any were issued after the 1920’s. It’s likely those who had the revolver when there were enough autos around for everyone who needed a sidearm were either allowed to just keep them or were allowed to purchase them. The Army didn’t want them anymore.
People authorized to carry sidearms were permitted to carry a personal sidearm, as long as it didn’t use an exotic round that wasn’t kept in US Army stock. And since it was their’s, they could have it modified. Remember Gen Patton’s chromed revolvers with the bone grips? Those were personally owned M-1917 .45 cal revolvers.
I had a modified M-16A1 back in the day. It wasn’t like that when it was issued to me. Once, when I was in country, I casually mentioned to a Special Forces Armorer and Artificer Sergeant (now a Weapons Sergeant) I was friendly with that I wished the peep sight on my rifle had a smaller aperture. He took me over to the SF compound to his shop, took my rifle, searched through his parts kit, opened his tool box, and fixed me right up. The walk over took longer than the “fix”.
As soon as I had the chance after that, I gave him a bottle of Jack to keep my credit good.
.45 is meant for “automatics” (that’s what the “A” means), but have been adapted for use in revolvers. You normally need moon clips. They also make rimmed versions. .45 Colt that you find in revolvers normally is not interchangeable.
It’s probably not technically allowed today, but it happens all the time to various degrees depending on the unit. Hell, they even sell aftermarket grips at the PX. That includes the PX in theatre, so no argument can be made the the items are for personally owned weapons only. Magpul furniture, CAA grips and accessories and any number of custom add-ons are quite common. Personal grips on an issued pistol? Definitely!
I always thought most post-WWII USAF pilots were issued 38 special revolvers. A 45 revolver is kind of an oddity, and I’d wonder if your friend’s father’s gun was a personal weapon, and not an issued one.
That said, there are probably plenty of unauthorized modifications along the lines of what Bear_Nenno mentions.
Even my grandfather’s WWII M1911A1 had some weird filing-down/grinding work done around where the safety is - it appears to have been done to prevent it catching on clothing or something- the edges of the safety are rounded off quite a bit. Probably not technically authorized, but I’d be willing to bet that the base armorer probably did it for him and all the other aircrew.
In the 1980s the USAF standard issue pilot survival weapon was a S&W .38 Spl. I forget the S&W model number (17?) but it was a box-stock civilian model. Some time after I left in '88 IIRC they switched to an auto, the same one the Army was getting to replace the M1911 .45 ACP.
Having said that, we never carried the weapon or ammo on normal peacetime ops in the US. For day to day training missions we wore our vest with all the survival gear, but the holster was empty. And transport pilots didn’t even have or carry a vest. For the semi-annual full up “war week” exercises we’d all go draw a pistol and ammo from the base armory. That was an administrative PITA. And we’d wear the damn thing all day and while flying. Which was also a PITA. We were always damn glad to give the stupid useless brick back to the armory.
The weapons weren’t individually assigned; they just had a pile of a few hundred and would hand them out at random. You’d never get the same serial number twice. At that time the cops carried the same type of pistol and I suspect, but can’t say for sure, that they did keep the same individual weapon from one workday to the next.
I also know that during my stint as a USAF-to-Army liaison officer in the early '80s both I and about half the Infantry and Artillery officers I knew carried personal firearms rather than the then-current issue weapons. A few chopper pilots did too, but that was pretty rare. This was overseas in a officially peacetime environment where “stuff” happened more than one might suspect.
As **Ranger Jeff **tells us about more modern times, the only requirement then was that you use issue ammo to stay on the right side of the Geneva Conventions. No using JHP rounds in your personal firearm.
Turning to the OP’s specific situation, I fully believe the weapon belonged to the old man. I doubt he flew with it routinely and I doubt he had it with him when he was killed in that crash. Unless he was already the kind of guy who just liked totin’ a gun. Whether it was “issue” or was a personal possession of his is unknowable at this point.
In most cases I would say things that cannot be reversed easily or modifications to his primary weapon that would make him stand out too much in a combat situation - making him and those around him a primary target over and above normal.
I carried an Army-issue .38 special revolver in the early 90s. It came with wood panel grips, but I swapped it with Pachmayr rubber grips while I used it. That’s no big deal, I swapped the issue ones back when I eventually turned it in.
But after one too many double-action range sessions that left my trigger finger almost shredded from the sharp-grooved target style trigger, I took my Dremel and ground/contoured/polished the trigger into a nice smooth finish double action trigger.
No one ever said anything, and I didn’t hear a thing back when we finally turned them in for 9mm SIGs. It was much, much nicer to shoot double action afterwards, I have to wonder about the S&W engineer who thought a snubnose 38 should have a target trigger.
They were minor modifications of large frame revolvers Colt and S&W were already making. The challenge was with the rimless .45 ACP ammo, there was nothing for the “stars” in the existing pistols cylinder to engage to eject the shells. The half moon clips held 3 rounds each and clipped into the “groove” around the back of the case. The “star” could engage the clip.
In the late 1950’s a lot of us poor kids had old military .45’s and used the clips.
Would .45 long colt ammo have worked? I had never seen any long colt ammo as kids having real Colt single action pistols was nearly unheard of in our circles.
I have a weapon that uses a .45 long Colt / 410 slug & shot barrel. The long Colt .45 ammo seems to have more power than the little .45 semi-auto ammo. ??? I have never shot the semi-auto ammo with a longer barrel so I only have the apparent destruction down range to judge by.
seems to indicate the two loads are similar in max performance. It take 2-3 grains more powder to get the same velocity out of .45 Colt than .45 ACP.
It’s not clear to me this guy is controlling for barrel length in his data so they might be bogus.
At the same time, if you’re comparing downrange impact results between .45 Colt shot from a carbine and .45 ACP shot from a pistol, then most of the performance difference is probably reduced velocity from the short pistol barrel.
.45 Colt aka .45 Long Colt is originally a black powder round. It needed that cavernous case to hold enough black powder to drive a bullet of the desired weight to sufficient velocity to achieve what the US Army wanted a pistol to do. It was developed as a joint project between Colt’s and UMC in the early 1870’s.
The .45 ACP was the end result of a long series of events beginning during the US pacification of the Philippines following the Spanish American War. The US was issuing a .38 revolver which was found to be inadequate. Stocks of older .45 Colt revolvers were re-issed to the troops at the time. The powers that be wanted one of those new fangled automatic pistols, but they wanted one with real power. The Thompson-LaGarde tests ensued. The.45 acp essentially duplicated the performance of the .45 Colt in a much smaller package because it used the newer smokeless powder. A .45 Colt loaded to spec with smokeless powder will have a lot of empty space in the case.
The 1917 revolver was widely issued in WWII right up to the end of the war. It would not surprise me to hear that some were still in supply during the Korean war, as that war was fought with the same weapons as WWII. It is possible that his gun was given to his family because he had already purchased it.
Forgot to note that if you somehow managed to cram a .45 Colt into a 1917 revolver, get the cylinder closed, and fire it off, you could count on the gun failing in a most catastrophic fashion.