Thinking about those 4200 cases of .303-caliber ammunition aboard the
Lusitania got me to thinking about how much it would cost to similarly equip myself in this day and age. Those rounds were made by Remington UMC, so let's find some similar stuff.
At
this site, a 20-round box is going for $20.95. They only have five boxes left, so there's no discount for buying by the 1000-round case. Usually, though, ammo sellers offer you a discount if you buy a case. We'll be generous and assume our hypothetical discount would be a whole dollar off, making the price $19.95 per box for a case price of $997.5. An ammo mountain like the one found on the
Lusitania would then run us just over four million dollars.
Yikes. :o
And that's the best price for Remington .303 I found.
Hmm...
You know, we don't have to go with the Remington brand. There are cheaper alternatives out there that will work just as well in an Enfield rifle. Let's shop around.
Ah,
here we go. British surplus, so it'll have corrosive primers, and that means you'll need to pour some boiling water down your rifle's barrel when you're done shooting. If you leave those corrosive salts in there, they'll rust and pit your barrel. But this is the cheapest stuff I can find. If you buy a whole 1000-round crate, then it'll run $250 even. 4200 crates would cost $1,050,000. And you get this cool and historical wooden box, too:
If you're not familiar with surplus ammunition, it's basically decades-old stuff that governments decide they don't want anymore, so they dump it on the civilian market. You can get ammunition made in a variety of countries, including the now-defunct Soviet Union. It's often 1950s, 60s, or 70s vintage, but you can purchase rounds made as early as the 1930s if you look around. And governments are pretty good at sealing that stuff up against the elements, so it should all still work, though it might be a bit tarnished. Also, surplus almost always has corrosive primers, and the whole benefit of that is that they last longer in storage. Non-corrosive ammo has a shorter shelf life.
But let's suppose you don't have time to hose down your rifle after shooting. You're price-sensitive, so you still can't afford the dollar-a-round brands, but you'd also prefer to stick with non-corrosive ammo. In that case, steel-cased or bi-metal cartridges are what you want.
Here's the best deal I found. It comes in lots of 280, but doing the math works out to $389.50 for every thousand rounds. Multiply that by 4200 and our ammo mountain will cost us $1,635,900.
So there you have it. No matter how you slice it, the
Lusitania was carrying over a million bucks (in 2018 prices) worth of .303.
At this site, there are a couple of photos of a few of the rounds that were recovered from the wreck.
By the way... 4.2 million rounds was a drop in the bucket compared to the number of rounds fired during the war. I've seen estimates of over a billion rounds of .303 fired by the British. And that's just one caliber from one country. The amount of men and resources squandered in that war is simply staggering. And we're still feeling the effects today.
Anyway... R.I.P., Lusitania victims, and R.I.P. to all you poor brave men of World War I. :(
