The Army is celebrating its 250th Anniversary this week, and we hit the road to visit the museum dedicated to the American infantry, the grunts, and found some amazing guns.
The National Infantry Museum, located in Columbus, Georgia, just outside Fort Benning, is a non-profit organization that opened its 190,000 sq. ft. facility in 2009. It holds over 100,000 historical artifacts dating from the 1600s to the present, covering uniforms, equipment, bayonets (they have a whole wall of bayonets), small arms, relics, and trophies.
With so much to see, any visitor could spend days there and not be able to take it all in. We’ll do what we’re good at and stick to the guns, but encourage you to visit the museum yourself (it’s free) as we’re only covering a small portion of the exhibits.
Benning is the Army’s Maneuver Center of Excellence and supports over 120,000 active and reserve service members, their families, military retirees, and civilian employees daily. It spans some 182,000 acres across Georgia and Alabama. (All photos: Chris Eger/Guns.com)
The “Follow Me” sculpture at the entrance to the National Infantry Museum depicts a 1950s Korean War-era Soldier, complete with bayonet-affixed M1 Garand. The model for the statue was Eugene Wyles, a 20-year Army veteran, and was created by two soldiers.
The museum “emphasizes the values that define the Infantryman, as well as the nation he protects: Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity, and Personal Courage.”
One of the most striking parts of the museum is “The Last 100 Yards,” a chronological walk through the American infantry experience over the years, where the weapons and uniforms change, but the courage endures. It is as life-like as possible and gives the visitor a very immersive feel.
For instance, check out this display of the storming of Redoubt #10 at Yorktown in 1781, with the Colonials fighting the British at eyeball-to-eyeball range. The night assault on the key position helped seal Cornwallis’s fate, leading to the end of the Revolutionary War.
The brother-against-brother hell of Antietam. Of note, the figures in the Last 100 Yards are not mannequins; they are cast sculptures of Active-Duty Soldiers “who auditioned for the opportunity to represent their predecessors.”
Fighting inch-by-inch with the Doughboys “Over There” at Soissons, France in 1918. Note the M1903 and M1911.
Storming the beaches of Normandy on D-Day and landing atop the “Rock” at Corregidor on opposite sides of the world in WWII. Note the M1 Carbines, M1918 BAR, and M1 Thompson.
The bayonet charge of Capt. Lewis Millett up Hill 180 at Soam-Ni, Korea in 1951, leading his company of the 27th Infantry Regiment to rout the enemy.
Setting down from a Huey at Landing Zone X-Ray during the Battle of Ia Drang, where the 7th Cavalry Regiment was the first American unit to fight a set-piece battle against NVA regulars in Vietnam in 1965. Note the 40mm M79 “bloop gun,” the early M16, and the M60 GPMG.
The much more recent desert wars, with a dismount team and their Bradley. The era of M4s, M203s, and ACOGs.
The museum also has a sweeping series of galleries, highlighting the development of the U.S. Army over the years. For instance, the Revolutionary War, complete with British Brown Bess, French Charleville, and Colonial Committee of Safety flintlock muskets and assorted pistols.
The New Army, immediately after Independence, with the first Springfield Armory and Harper’s Ferry Model 1795 .69-caliber flintlock muskets. Of note, the musket on the Army’s Combat Infantry Badge is the Model 1795.
How about this impressive evolution, spanning from the left with the Model 1803, Model 1814, and Model 1817 flintlocks, to the M1841 percussion rifle made famous in the War with Mexico, the Model 1855 rifle with its interesting Maynard priming system? To the right are the Civil War-era Sharps and Spencer rifles, breechloaders with a rate of fire of 10 and 20 rounds per minute, respectively.
The innovative breech-loading Model 1819 Hall rifle.
This rare gem is a Lefever & Ellis .45 caliber percussion rifle used by a private of the 1st Battalion New York Sharpshooters during the Civil War. Made in Canandaigua, New York, it had a 30-inch octagonal barrel and an adjustable trigger. Never produced in great quantity, Lefever only supplied something like 75 of these guns with the sort of telescopic sight shown, complete with a crosshair reticle. You just don’t see these floating around.
Securing the Frontier with the Model 1866 Springfield Allin “Trapdoor” conversion rifles, which took .58 caliber percussion muzzleloaders and converted them to .50-70-450 caliber cartridge breechloaders. This led to the Model 1870, 1873, and 1884 Trapdoors in the now-famous .45-70 Government. The museum has all these incremental models on public display.
A 10-barrel Colt Model 1877 Gatling gun in .45-70. The Army used Gatling guns, which had a rate of fire as high as 200 rounds per minute, until 1911, when they were replaced by more modern machine guns.
The cavalry isn’t missed, for instance, showing the troopers from the Civil War (left) complete with their M1860 Colt revolver and M1859 Sharps carbine, next to the Indian Wars trooper with his M1873 Trapdoor and Colt Peacemaker. The circa 1916 cavalryman, of the era that chased Pancho Villa into Mexico, sports his M1911.
The Spanish-American War was a time of the side-loading bolt-action Krag-Jorgensen .30 caliber rifle, along with the Army’s staple revolvers of the time: the Colt 1873 in .45 and the S&W .44 top break. To the left is a captured German-made Spanish Mauser, brought back from Cuba in 1898.
The Great War, with the legendary M1903 Springfield, a French Mle 1907/15, and the dreaded Mle 1915 Chauchat LMG. With an open magazine like that in a muddy trench, what could go wrong?
Lots of other hardware abounds, including a British .303 caliber Mark III Lee-Enfield and Mark I Lewis gun, along with companion German Mauser Gew 98 and MG08/15 in 8mm.
Bringbacks from France in 1918, including a 35-pound German Tankgewehr 13.2mm anti-tank rifle and a Spandau MG08 machine gun, both captured by American troops.
The original “Belly Flopper,” an experimental two-man weapons carrier developed at Fort Benning in the 1930s, complete with an M1917 water-cooled Browning machine gun and not much else.
The iconic M2 .50 cal “Ma Deuce” has been around for over a century and is still “making friends and influencing people” worldwide. It is seen next to its smaller cousin, the .30-06 M1919 light machine gun. Both have the same father, John Browning.
The M3 Carbine, a select-fire version of the WWII-era M1 Carbine, was outfitted with an early infrared scope during the Korean War. With the battery pack, it “only” weighed 31 pounds.
A Viet Cong-made pistol captured in Vietnam. The museum also has a carbine that looks even crazier.
Cold War experiments on display include the circa 1964 SPIW, chambered in XM144 5.6x44mm with its box-magazine fed 40mm underbarrel grenade launcher.
Can you say, “Stoner?”
The museum has an amazing display on the evolution of the modern “black rifle” from the Winchester .224 caliber LWMR, Eugene Stoner’s early 5-pound AR-10s complete with carbon fiber furniture, and the slab-sided Colt-Armalite Model 01
…to the XM16E1 in gray phosphate to the rare M1 HAR, and the Colt “Shorty” whose 10-inch barrel led to the XM177 and today’s M4. The green guy in the corner is a drum-magged SPIW variant, of course.
The museum even has the Next Generation Squad Weapon winner, SIG Sauer’s M7 and M250…
…along with the other competitors in the NGSW program.
Who doesn’t love a good steel-on-steel Mossberg M590 12-gauge? The Army has used shotguns going back to World War I.
Speaking of shotguns, how about the M26 MASS? Fed via a 3 or 5-round detachable box magazine, this 3-pound 12-gauge can either be mounted Masterkey-style under the handguard of an M16/M4 or used in a stand-alone configuration.
A gold electroplated Romanian AKMS clone captured by the 3rd Infantry in Iraq in 2003. Even the internal parts are plated. Note the “Vader” style helmet of Saddam’s Fedayeen.
Hallowed relics: M4 and M249 remains after an IED strike in Iraq.
Again, we only scraped the surface of the holdings of the National Infantry Museum, and if you are ever within striking distance of it, you should stop by– and block off your day. It is ever more important to visit such places and remember why they are there.
Keep in mind that the Army plans to close more than 20 base museums in the next few years, and places like this carry the torch for future generations… lest they forget.
A U.S. Marine with 2d Battalion, 8th Marines, zeros his rifle during a live fire range as a part of a Service Level Training Exercise (SLTE) on Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, California, July 21, 2023. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance. Joshua Kumakaw)
Michigan-based Trijicon recently picked up an eight-figure contract from the Marine Corps Logistics Command.
The Marines widely use the Trijicon 4×32 TA31 ACOG as the service’s Rifle Combat Optic on its M16 and M4 platforms, a practice made standard in 2008 after the acquisition of some 104,000 of the devices, leaving iron sights behind almost altogether after 2011. The service also utilizes smaller numbers of Trijicon’s VCOG 1-8×28 LPVO, primarily on its HK-made M27 IAR platform, turning it into an ersatz DMR.
The new $20,702,792 contract stipulates that Trijicon will provide “all materials, labor, equipment, facilities, and necessary repair or replacement parts required to inspect, diagnose, test, and restore RCOs to a fully mission-capable condition.” The work will be performed at Trijicon’s Wixom, Michigan, with an expected completion date of June 2030.
The Corps had previously issued a $41 million repair contract to Trijicon for legacy ACOGs in 2020, which expired earlier this year.
While the Army also uses the ACOG, that service is currently fielding a $2.7 billion contract with Wisconsin-based Vortex for up to 250,000 XM157 Next Generation Squad Weapons-Fire Control systems. These optics will be used on the M7 rifle and M250 machine gun, 6.8x51mm platforms set to replace the 5.56 NATO-caliber M4 carbine and M249 Squad Automatic Weapon.
The Marine Corps Logistics Command last week announced that Michigan-based Trijicon has won a $41 million contract to remanufacture the Corps’ ACOGs.
The Devils evaluated the ACOG as the Rifle Common Optic (RCO) in the early 2000s and, after a recruit training company on Parris Island in 2011 using the optics produced 30 percent more rifle experts than the average company, moved to purchase upwards of 115,000 RCOs for general use.
The newer VCOG will be the SOC, with some 19,000~ acquired over the next few years, but the rest of the force will still be rocking ROCs (ACOGs)
And, even though they will be augmented by the newer Trijicon VCOG 1-8×28 as the service’s new Squad Common Optic (SCO), the RCO will likely endure for at least another decade or more.
In 1986, Glyn Bindon, a Ford aeronautical engineer who had previously worked on the F-8U Crusader project, started fooling around with a half pair of binoculars in his Detroit home and soon had the theory down for a project that would produce the Trijicon Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight (ACOG)– a minimalist battery-free optic that used tritium to provide a red reticle inside a sealed aluminum tube that could be used for rapid shooting in both day and night conditions.
The first 4×32 TA01 hit the market in 1987 and two years later a few were used by the military in the Panama invasion. Then, the SEALs started fielding them in Desert Storm.
Slowly, ACOGs grew more popular around the world with special operations units until 2005, when the Marines ordered 104,000 4×32 TA31’s to equip the rank and file riflemen.
“The ACOG mounted on the M16 service rifle has proven to be the biggest improvement in lethality for the Marine infantryman since the introduction of the M1 Garand in World War II,” later said Maj. Gen, J.N.Mattis, 1st MARDIV, Operation Iraqi Freedom.
