The Forgotten Tooling at Rock Island
In the autumn of 1941, the U.S. Army is short of rifles. Production of the new semi-automatic M1 Garand is ramping up too slowly: Springfield Armory, the only government manufacturer, is overwhelmed and cannot keep pace with the cadence demanded by mobilization and Lend-Lease.
At Rock Island Arsenal, on the Mississippi, the complete tooling for the old bolt-action M1903 Springfield rifle has sat idle in storage since 1919. The arsenal itself no longer makes rifles: it has turned to artillery, recoil mechanisms, gun carriages, and Browning machine guns. This tooling represents an immediate capacity, but for a weapon considered obsolete.
The Ordnance Department must decide: should the M1903 be revived from this dormant tooling, should it wait for the Garand to reach full production, or should it rely on the government arsenals alone?
What should be done with the M1903 rifle tooling stored at Rock Island since 1919, now that the army is clamoring for rifles in large numbers?
The Ordnance Department chose to put the dormant M1903 tooling at Rock Island back into service rather than wait for the Garand to reach full production. After negotiations, the contract was awarded to a private manufacturer, Remington Arms: the tooling stored since 1919 was shipped from Rock Island to the Remington plant in Ilion, New York, and M1903 production restarted in late 1941 (around serial number 3,000,000). This decision provided hundreds of thousands of supplementary rifles while Springfield Armory devoted itself to the Garand; the M1903, and later its simplified M1903A3 version, would remain in production until 1944.
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