Both the 7×57 cartridge and the Mauser rifles that fired it proved to be far superior to the arms and ammunition carried by our soldiers. When that fracas was over, the military planners set about designing a new rifle and a new cartridge.
Most of Europe had rearmed with spitzer bullet designs when the military introduced the new Springfield rifle and the equally new .30–03 cartridge to accompany it in 1903. Unfortunately, the .30–03 service cartridge was loaded with the same 220-grain round-nose bullet as the Krag. They did increase the velocity to about 2300 fps, but it still fell well behind the European developments in performance.
The cartridge was then redesigned with a slightly shorter neck to accommodate a spitzer flat-based bullet weighing 150 grains and developing a muzzle velocity of around 2,700 fps. The Springfield rifles brought out for the .30–03 cartridge were modified to accept the new cartridge, designated the M1906 cartridge.
The .30–06 Springfield know today has gone through many evolutions. One of its first was a shorting of its neck from the .30–03 to better hold the flat-based spitzer bullet.
Several modifications were made to the loading of the cartridge from time to time and for various reasons. In 1938, the M2 Ball cartridge, loaded with a 151 grain, flat base bullet and delivering a minimum of 2,740 fps velocity, became the standard issue ammunition for military rifles and .30 caliber machine guns until the cartridge was replaced by the 7.62×51(.308) NATO service round.
It didn’t take long before the US commercial rifle and ammunition manufacturers began producing both rifles and ammo for the new military cartridge, and, as the old saying goes, “the rest is history.”
In its long history, it has been loaded in about every bullet weight available in .30 caliber. The lightest bullet weight that I’ve seen commercially loaded was the 110-grain bullet, and the heaviest, the 220-grain bullet. I’ve heard of lighter than 110-grain and heavier than 220-grain bullets loaded in custom ammo, however.
A quick look in the ammo section of the 2014 68th edition of Gun Digest reflects ammo available loaded with bullets weighing 55, 125, 150, 152, 165, 168, 170, 178, 180, and 220 grains. If that doesn’t cover the waterfront, I don’t know what would.
Personally, I don’t subscribe to the one-gun fits all theory anyway. I suspect the .30–06 is probably as close as it gets to fitting that one gun does all requirements, but it is still a compromise on the upper and lower ends of the spectrum.
Even so, dead is dead and there are ample examples to prove it will work in the right hands and with the proper bullets. A friend of mine killed a Cape buffalo too dead to bellow using a .30–06. He had to get special permission from the game department to do so. A bum shoulder followed by less than 100 % successful surgery limited the amount of recoil he could tolerate. The .30–06 was his limit.
Also, the late Jack O’Connor’s lovely wife Eleanor brained an elephant too dead to wiggle with a single .30–06 round. The late Hosea Sarber, an Alaskan Game and Fish Agent and well-known guide for those huge Alaskan brown bears, used a .30–06 as his back-up rifle for his clients after the big bruins.
Still, as the late outdoor writer, guide, and who knows what else Bob Hagel wrote — or at least it is attributed to him — that one should not carry a rifle that works well when everything goes right, but, rather one that will carry the day when everything goes wrong, or words to that effect. There is merit to that argument.
I have two rifles in my safe chambered for the .30–06 cartridge. One of them is a lovely custom Model 70 stocked by Gary Goudy. I have had it to Africa twice, once in Tanzania where I took a zebra, East African impala, and a Grant’s gazelle, and as my only rifle in Namibia where I took a mountain zebra, gemsbok, springbok, and a huge eland.
In Tanzania I used 165-grain Barnes TSX bullets and in Namibia, due to the eland on the menu, I used 180-grain Norma Oryx bullets. It worked just fine, and I expected no less.
An added bonus to using a .30–06 is that I have never been in a business that sold ammunition in any form, that didn’t have .30–06 fodder in stock.
Chapter 9
7.62×51mm NATO or .308, Either Way it Packs a Punch
The 7.62×51 NATO or .308 Winchester offers nearly the same ballistics as a .30–06, but in a more compact cartridge.
First, let’s start this discussion with a comparison between the 7.62×51 NATO cartridge and its civilian counterpart, the .308 Winchester. The differences between them are very small, but they are not precisely the same.
Since the cartridge was designed to be the NATO standard military battle rifle cartridge, the military specification for the NATO round required a thicker brass cartridge case, and established a maximum chamber pressure of 50,000 psi. On the other hand, the commercial .308 Winchester has no such brass thickness specifications, and the SAAMI established maximum chamber pressure is 60,000 psi.
There are some other very minimal differences, but in practice it is generally safe to use the two cartridges interchangeably. If using .308 Win. ammo in a rifle chambered for the 7.62×51 NATO round, the shooter should pay close attention to the overall condition of the rifle, as the commercial round is loaded to higher maximum pressures.
The cartridge was developed in the 1950’s as the NATO standard small-arms cartridge. Standardizing a single cartridge for use among all the NATO allies provided a substantial advantage over the previous situation whereby each NATO nation was armed with its own cartridge with little, if any, interchangeability.
The US military at the time was still armed with the M1 Garand .30–06. NATO adopted the cartridge as its standard in 1954. Winchester ammunition offered the commercial version of the cartridge to the marketplace in 1952, a couple years earlier than the NATO adoption. The US Army adopted the M14 rifle in 1957, and chambered it and the M60 machine gun for the 7.62×51mm NATO round.
As an aside, I entered the US Army in 1960, and the M14 hadn’t yet reached Fort Gordon, Georgia by then. We were still using the old M1. I don’t remember when I saw my first M14, but it was sometime after that. I was on a couple military rifle teams during that era, and for our competitive shooting, we were using National Match M1 rifles. The M14 had a very short service life as the main battle rifle. Not very many years after its introduction, Vietnam got hot and hotter as time passed.
The M14 was one of the first battle rifles specifically chambered for the 7.62×51 NATO cartridge. The popular semiautomatic M1A is also fed the round.
In that jungle atmosphere, the M14 posed several problems.
It was a long and reasonably heavy rifle, neither of which was well suited for the steaming jungles of RVN. In addition, the weight of the ammunition restricted the amount that could be carried by the individual soldier. The DOD folks did numerous studies and conducted countless tests finally arriving at the conclusion that in this case anyway, smaller really was better. They deduced that an 8-soldier unit armed with AR-15 rifles and .223 Remington ammo could outgun an 11-soldier unit armed with M14 rifles and 7.62×51 ammo.
On the other hand, the .308 Winchester is still going strong. There is good reason for that fact.
The difference in power between the .30–06 and the .308 Win is, on average, around 100 fps, using the same bullet weight. The cartridge will fit through a shorter action than the .30–06, which to some might offer an advantage. We could probably come up with other nits, but in reality no animal that ever lived could tell the difference in being squarely struck with a good 165 grain bullet traveling at 2700 fps, and the same good bullet 100 fps faster.