In “The Gun the Army Can’t Kill” (August/September 1983,) Mr. Andrews is thoroughly in error by opening the .38 versus .45 debate by stating that “ever since the 184Os the standard Army sidearm had been the .45-caliber single-action pistol.” This is not so. In the 184Os the standard Army sidearm was a muzzle-loading cap-and-ball, single-shot pistol of caliber .54. This big-caliber, black-powder percussion pistol was the standard sidearm of the U.S. Army from 1842 until the Civil War, when the Union ordnance certified no fewer than ten makes of sidearms, all of them blackpowder, cap-and-ball revolvers of .36 or .44 caliber.

A .45-caliber single-action pistol did not become a standard Army sidearm until 1873, when the U.S. ordnance placed a trial order of eight thousand Colts for cavalry use. These handsome revolvers were continuously produced by Colt until 1941 and were later reinstated after popular outcry. This particular weapon was the gunfighter’s gun, of which we have seen so much in the movies.

It is true that the service pistol initially used in the Philippine insurrection was a .38 (double-action) Army-issue revolver. It was found insufficient, and an appeal was sent back home to retrieve the old single-action .45s. The problem was not so much “stopping power” as it was the complicated double-action mechanism and weak mainspring of the .38, compared with the simpler, stronger mechanism of the single-action .45.

John Browning, who had already perfected a .38 automatic, quickly perceived from the Philippine experience that the U.S. Army would standardize on a .45 automatic rather than on his .38, then being tested. He hastened to strike a deal with the Colt factory for undertaking manufacture of the bigger caliber. The prototype .45 was produced as the 1905 Colt Model, and the U.S. ordnance ordered four hundred for testing in 1907. This model evolved very slightly to become the 1911.

Your article also states that for the change from the .38 service revolver to the .45 automatic Colt, “the work at hand was to bowl a man over in his tracks at a distance of only a few yards. ” No slug from a sidearm, .38 or .45, will bowl a man over. The stopping power or striking force of the slug can have no more impact than the recoil; otherwise the one pulling the trigger would be bowled over, because every action is accompanied by a reaction of equal force in the opposite direction, as most high school seniors know. The striking force of a .44 Magnum, even today, throwing a 240-grain ball (muzzle velocity 1,470 feet per second, almost twice that of the Model 1911 .45 Colt automatic) would strike a stationary two-hundred-pound man at arm’s length with one-twentieth the force of another man walking into him .

I remember watching a Stalingrad battle scene (1942), filmed inside a factory where Soviets with a machine