why no .30-06?

[Darrell]

I emailed RAAC about the Saiga .30-06, just got their reply:

Thank you for your interest in our products. The 30-06 is very popular but only a few of them have come into the country. We have them on order but they keep pushing the arrival back. So we have only brought in about 50 of them. It will be next year or longer before we receive any of them.

[SeekHer]

First let me say that the .30/06 Springfield round was and is an excellent cartridge that fostered many off spring on us in the form of wildcats and mainstream cartridges but it would not have been if one thing didn’t happen—The Depression!

You see the Dept. Of the Army was getting complaints even from boot camp about the horrific recoil of their new /06 cartridge in the M1903 Springfield bolt action rifle which was designed to fire the .30/03 (1903) cartridge which wasn’t near as powerful…

The War Department had exhaustively studied and dissected several examples of the Mauser Model 93 rifle captured during the Spanish-American War and combined features of both the U.S. Krag Rifle Models 1894 -1898, and the Mauser Model 93, to produce the new U.S. Springfield Rifle, Model 1903. Still, the 1903's used so many design features from the German Mauser that the U.S. government paid royalties to Mauserwerke.

The Ordnance Board started trials to find a replacement for it and came to recommend the. 276 Pederson, produced in 1929 by the Frankford Arsenal for the Military and were going to incorporate it as the designated caliber for the military and then Black Monday and the Market Crash of 1929 hit and so ended the introduction of new calibers…The Original Garand and Johnson rifles were started with the .276 in mind but had to remain with the official caliber so the .30/06 made its way into the infantry’s hands through two World Wars and Korea…It was going to be the .276 in rifles and the .30/06 in machine guns—that is bi/tripod mounted, crew served, belt fed full automatic weapons…

Had it not been for Black Monday the .30/06 cartridge would not have such a lofted place in cartridge history and especially as a hunting and experimental round—thanks to the billions of cartridges made a lack of cases wasn’t an issue for wildcatters…

[DwightG]

Actually, IIRC from Hatcher's Book of the Garand, the first prototypes of the Garand even in the early '30s, after the '29 crash and were made in .276 Pedersen. It's actually pretty amazing and forward looking that they were undertaking the development of a new state of the art auto-loading rifle considering the economy of the times. What really killed the .276 was Douglas MacArthur who was in charge of the War Dept. or some such and insisted the new rifle be made in .30-06 because of the large stocks of left over WWI ammo. Yes, it was partly an economic decision so the Depression had an effect but the main reason was Gen. MacArthur had a little more vision than most at the time and saw the hand writing on the wall with regard to the militarization of Japan and Germany. Ultimately a wise decision that prevented us being in a multi-caliber logistics nightmare like Japan was.

[SoupOrMan]

Huh. It looks almost like they wanted to switch to the military equivalent of a .270 Winchester then?