Only a few men of each infantry regiment carried pistols when our troops first went into the trenches. But in almost the first skirmish this weapon proved its superior usefulness in trench fighting. Such incidents as that of the single American soldier who dispersed or killed a whole squad of German bayoneteers which had surrounded him struck the enemy with fear of Yankee prowess with the pistol. The "tenderfoot's gun," as the westerners loved to call it, had come to its own. By midsummer of 1917 the decision had been made to supply to the infantry a much more extensive equipment of automatic pistols than had previously been prescribed by regulations--to build them by hundreds of thousands where we had been turning them out by thousands. In February, with war in sight, realizing the limitations of our capacity then for producing pistols, the Colt automatic being manufactured exclusively by the Colt's Patent Firearms Manufacturing Co. at Hartford, Conn., and for a limited period by the Springfield Armory, we took up with the Colt Co. the proposition of securing drawings and other engineering data which would enable us to extend the production of this weapon to other plants. This work was in progress when in April, 1917, it was interrupted by the military necessity for calling upon every energy we had in the production of rifles. In order to supplement the pistol supply, although the Colt automatic was the only weapon of this sort approved for the Army, the Secretary of War authorized the Chief of Ordnance to secure other small arms, particularly the double-action .45-caliber revolver as manufactured by both the Colt Co. and the Smith & Wesson Co. These revolvers had been designed to use the standard Army caliber-.45 pistol cartridges. The revolver was not so effective a weapon as the automatic pistol, but it was adopted in the emergency only to make it possible to provide sufficient of these arms for the troops at the outset. At the start of hostilities the Colt Co. indicated that it could tool up to produce pistols at the rate of 6,000 per month by December, 1917, and could also furnish 600 revolvers a week beginning in April. As soon as funds were available we let a contract to the Colt Co. for 500,000 pistols and 100,000 revolvers, and to the Smith & Wesson Co. one for 100,000 revolvers. Although these contracts were not placed until June 15, in the certainty that funds would eventually be available both concerns had been working on the production of weapons on these expected contracts for many weeks.