Check your M1917's for safety issues. Eddystones especially..

[cplstevennorton]

Here is a new twist to this. These cracked receivers were probably unlikely to be rebarreled.

When I was at College Park the last time, I pulled a box that was titled lend lease. I pulled it because I was tying to document the story of the Lend Lease Garands.

But I copied about a 1000 pages of this box. I have not read all of it. But I looked in it enough, that I think I found a clue to this.

Columbus Supply Depot is who sold those Eddystones that had been cracked and returned. Researching the depot online t looks like it was opened in 1918 and was a point of embarkation of supplies for WWI.

Well it looks like they had a lot of supplies leftover at wars end and they spent in between the war trying to get rid of a lot of their surplus. So with this backstory, this seems to be making more sense. I imagine it is likely these Eddystones at Columbus, were probably supplies leftover from the buildup of WWI.

In 1941, Britian received 250,000 M1917's. But I got looking and Columbus Supply Depot is listed as shipping 170,000 of them.

This is the only time I can so far, find that Columbus sold M1917's.

My hunch is now that these were not likely rebuilds. They were probably pretty original rifles that had been in storage since WWI.

Now to play Devil's advocate, it shows the US sold over 300,000 M1917's during WWII, after this 250,000 sale. These look like they were going to France, China, and Canada.

They sold 320,385 between March 1941 to June 30, 1945. But there is never a mention that the Columbus District sold any of these that I see.

I think in this 320,000 sold during WWII, these were probably in the hands of the troops at the start of the war, as the doc below states they had cleaned out all of their surplus of M1917's in 1941.

But now I think the ones that were cracked from Columbus, were probably in that 1941 shipment to Britain and returned. My thoughts now are these rifles were probably pretty original, if not even un-issued rifles

Check this out....