When fired the new American gun sprays the contents of each shell over an area measuring nine feet horizontally and about three feet vertically, so that it is almost impossible not to hit a large number of enemy infantrymen coming to the attack in the typical mass formation of the Germans. Ansell began by stating the obvious-namely, that the purpose of the shotgun was to kill and to wound.Īnsell then noted that he assumed the object of the protest was a pump shotgun described this way several months earlier in Scientific American magazine: Ansell, the army’s acting judge advocate. The result, a week later, was a five-page memorandum from Brigadier General Samuel T. The State Department immediately forwarded the cablegram to Secretary of War Newton D. It, too, cited Article 23(e) and demanded a reply before October 1. “The German Government protests against the use of shotguns by the American Army and calls attention to the fact that according to the law of war ( Kriegsrecht) every prisoner found to have in his possession such guns or ammunition belonging thereto forfeits his life,” the cablegram said. On September 19 Friedrich Oederlin, the Swiss chargé d’affaires in Washington, presented Lansing with a cablegram from the German government protesting the use of shotguns by American forces on the Western Front. forces violated Article 23(e) of the 18 Hague Conventions and warned that any American captured with a shotgun or shotgun ammunition would be executed.Īlthough Secretary of State Robert Lansing didn’t receive the note until sometime in October, he had become aware of the protest almost immediately.
The note asserted that the use of shotguns by U.S. On September 15, 1918, the German government officially protested the use of the shotgun in a note verbale-an unsigned diplomatic note-transmitted to the Spanish Embassy in Berlin, then to the Swiss Embassy, and eventually to the American legation in Berne, Switzerland. soldier from the 6th Infantry Regiment, 5th Division, who was also carrying a Winchester Model 97. On September 11, near Villers-en-Haye, the Germans captured a U.S. He was carrying a weapon they had never seen: a Winchester Model 97 pump-action shotgun. soldier from the 307th Infantry Regiment, 77th Division, near Baccarat, France. On July 21, 1918, German soldiers captured a U.S.
Ironically, the protest came from Germany, which during World War I had unleashed on its enemies such instruments of killing as the Zeppelin airship bomber, the Maxim MG-08 machine gun, the Type 93 U-boat, the Big Bertha howitzer, the Paris Gun, and, of course, chlorine gas. Yet only one weapon-the pump shotgun American troops used beginning in 1918-led to a diplomatic protest.
Poison gas brought its own horrific casualties. The machine gun, the war’s most prolific killer, slaughtered untold thousands. Millions of combatants in World War I were killed by all manner of weapons, including aerial bombs, artillery, bayonets, hand grenades, pistols, revolvers, and rifles.
In the final year of World War I, the United States armed its forces on the Western Front with pump shotguns.