The article has one rather glaring error. Mr. Scarlata states, as he did in an earlier article on the same subject, that England received some 120,000 M1917's that went to the Home Guard. The facts are somewhat different. Here is a letter I wrote to Mr. Scarlata after publication of his earlier article; he never replied. You might find it of interest.
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Dear Mr. Scarlata,
I enjoyed your ST article on the Model 1917 rifle, but perhaps you will permit me a few comments.
You state that, through the Lend-Lease program, 119,000 Model 1917 rifles were transferred to Britain. Perhaps you have dropped a digit, as several writers put the number actually sent at about 1,100,000, roughly ten times your figure.
The Roosevelt administration, playing its double game of pretending neutrality while actually supporting the British, approved the release of 500,000 Model 1917 rifles to the British Purchasing Commission on June 3, 1940, along with 80,000 machineguns and other weapons, including artillery. (In historical prospective, that was at the same time as the fall of France and the evacuation from Dunkirk.)
Those rifles were received in July. They were not part of the so called "destroyer agreement" or of Lend-Lease. Churchill pleaded for more rifles, and the U.S. sent two more shipments of Model 1917's in September and October of 1940, as Britain awaited the Nazi invasion and the RAF fought the Luftwaffe in the skies over England.
One shipment was 300,000 rifles, the other may have been 250,000, though I cannot find an exact figure. It is clear from Churchill's remarks that those were Model 1917's, in .30-‘06 caliber (which he calls .300) and that there was little ammunition. Churchill admitted to having prayed that the shipments would arrive safely, and his prayers were answered.
On 22 Sept. 1940, Churchill states that "the Home Guard has 800,000 American rifles, enabling that number of .303 weapons to be transferred to the regular Army". The third shipment had apparently not yet arrived. Ammunition was scarce; Churchill says that in one shipment, there were only 50 rounds per rifle, and that they planned to issue only ten, as "the factories were not yet set in motion [to produce .30-'06]." Note that all those shipments were made BEFORE the Lend-Lease Act was signed in March 1941. Some were ostensibly paid for through the British Purchasing Commission, but there is some evidence that the Roosevelt administration forgot to send a bill. If so, in the long term, victory over Hitler was well worth the value of those obsolescent rifles.
So the number of Model 1917 rifles shipped to England was at least 1,050,000, a substantial part of the U.S. war reserve. This had ramifications; the U.S. Army Ordnance Department was in near panic mode. Production startup of the M1 rifle had been disappointing, with less than 25,000 completed by the end of 1939, and now the war reserve was reduced by more than half. Even at the projected full mobilization of only 1,800,000 men (not realistic, but what a penurious Congress would support), arms would be very tight.
The British had contracted with Remington to produce for them a modified M1903 Springfield in .303 caliber, and to that end Remington had obtained the old Rock Island Arsenal machinery. But the U.S. was now desperate and wanted Remington to use the machinery to make M1903 rifles for the U.S. So the Army pointed the British away from Remington and toward Savage, who contracted to produce the rifle the British actually preferred, their own Rifle No. 4. The U.S. then entered into a contract with Remington which led to production of first, the Model 1903, then to changes that resulted in the M1903A3 and M1903A4. Later, Smith-Corona also made M1903A3 rifles.
Meantime, M1 production took off and by the time the M1903A3 contracts were coming close to completion, there were enough M1 rifles to fill requirements. So the last M1903A3 rifles went from the factories directly into depot storage, kept against a possible German resurgence and the future invasion of Japan.
But Germany was well and truly beaten, and there was no invasion of Japan. Later, those rifles were supplied to allied nations, or sold to NRA members through the DCM program. Many NRA members were delighted to find that their "unserviceable" (actually "ungraded") rifles were brand new, never issued. But they were proved before sale anyway, and so marked, leading many collectors today to think they had been rebuilt when in fact they had never even been outside a depot.
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Jim
