See my previous posts above. The real irony is that the great bulk of WWI production .30 caliber ball had unannealled case necks, and by WWII case neck fractures were frequent enough that most of the older *war reserve* ammo was unusable in the automatic actions of .30 Brownings, BARs- and M1 Garands. A good deal of it was burned up in training, though, and served for stateside guard purposes.
“The real irony is that the great bulk of WWI production .30 caliber ball had unannealled case necks, and by WWII case neck fractures were frequent enough that most of the older *war reserve* ammo was unusable in the automatic actions of .30 Brownings, BARs- and M1 Garands. A good deal of it was burned up in training, though, and served for stateside guard purposes.”
YES! This is true of virtually all of the pre-WW2 necked ammo in my collection...”season cracking”, I think it’s called. On some rounds I was literally able to pull the bullet out of the case with my fingers. Also true of a lot of the M1 Ball ammo made in the 20s and 30s...I’ve seen pics of this ammo that had complete case splits, both on firing and just sitting in the box. On my bookshelf is a round of 1940 .30-06 with a hairline season crack down most of the case, plain as day.
Some of the WWI-vintage ammo aged poorly in other areas too...both a WW2 vet I know, and a fellow who shot some 1918 ammo in the early 50s, recall getting either hangfires (click-BOOM) or a “pop” and a cloud of red smoke out the muzzle. And most of the “Battling Bastards” holding the line in the opening days were probably shooting this stuff.
I’ve been told that both WW1 and interwar ammo was common enough on the civilian market into the early 70s, that the NRA issued a bulletin advising that any surplus .30-06 made before 1940 should not be fired.
Another irony, surrounding the “war reserve ammo” reason to drop the .276 cartridge...by the time the Garand design was finally adopted (1936), the supply of World War I-era .30-06 was “officially” exhausted. Around this time, base-level repair shops were officially forbidden to continue using “ammonia dope” to remove copper fouling left in gun barrels by the cupro-nickel jackets of the old M1906 ammo.
Of course, that could also have been a convenient excuse to request funding for supplies of the new M1 Ball ammo....
(”Ammonia dope” is a chemical solution made up to dissolve copper deposits left by bullets. Done properly, it works very well...done improperly, it can destroy the barrel.)