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

[fjruple]

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....

https://www.milsurps.com/images/impo...PL7RfS1h-1.jpg

https://www.milsurps.com/images/impo...HNuhL9Uh-1.jpg

I would like to see the complete documents of these two sections of documents as I believe they are taken out of context. The first document appears to be discussing the availability of M1917 rifles from the inter-war years and appears to discuss the lack of war reserves and their readiness. We know the the US shipped a large number of M1917s to the UK pre-lend-lease. If you noted the shipment dates, they are a month before President Rooveselt signed the Lend-Lease Act. These rifles were not inspected and degreased by the US Ordnance Department before shipment as time and need were critical, the Home Guard who received the M1917 complained about having to clean the "grease" from the rifles and giving up what No.1 MKIII rifles they had for the greasy M1917s. While it is clear that the 170,000 rifles were shipped to the UK from Columbus. I know of no evidence of them being returned. I do know the US Ordnance Department did rebuild those that were in US troops hands and were held for Foreign Military Aid after WWII which left a lot of them available. Foreign militaries were looking for M1 Garand rifles and M1 carbines not M1917s. I have been to the Columbus General Depot many times as it was later known as the Defense General Supply Center under the Defense Logistics Command. It is interesting to note that the Wright Corporation which is close to Columbus Depot did rebuilds of the M1917 towards the end of WWII.