Why This ‘Brittle’ American Fighting Knife Lost to a Knife Made to Open Cans D

The blade comes off the grinding wheel with an edge on both sides of it, tapering the whole length to a needle. It will not saw a branch. It will not pry a crate. It will not open a can. It is being made in a cutlery works at Camillus, New York, in the winter of 1942, and it is the first knife in the history of the United States Marine Corps to be designed by a Marine officer.

They will make 14,370 of them. Then, they will stop. At the other end of the same state, another knife is coming together, and by every measure that mattered, it is the lesser object. It was not designed by a Marine officer, or if it was, nobody can now say which one. The Corps’ own paperwork calls it a knife, fighting and utility, a bureaucratic way of admitting it is also a tool.

A drill instructor at Camp Elliott handed one to a recruit named Eugene Sledge, and told him he would open far more ration cans with it than anything else. The Marine Corps issued a weapon and described it out loud as a can opener. Now, look at what the can opener did. Roughly 966,000 of them were made in the Second World War.

It is still in production today, from the same company town in western New York. And against the purpose-built fighting knife, the one designed by an officer for killing and nothing else, it was built in a ratio of 67 to 1. Knife, fighting utility, 1219 C2. Later, the Marine Corps Mark 2 combat knife. Universally, the K-Bar.

This is the story of what that ratio cost, and of who paid it. One of these knives has a designer, and the other one has a brand. Start with the designer, because he is the part of this that is not in dispute. His name was Clifford H. Shuey. In 1942, he was a lieutenant colonel, and he was the officer in charge of the engineer division of the Quartermaster Department at Marine Corps headquarters.

He would end his career a brigadier general. He’s credited with the design of the Marine Raider stiletto, and the source for that credit is a contemporary one. An article titled “A New Marine Corps Knife”, written by Captain P. D. Carlton of the Marine Corps Reserve, published in the Marine Corps Gazette in January of 1944.

I want to be straight with you about that citation before we build anything on top of it. That article is referenced everywhere in the literature on this knife. I have not read the page myself. Everything I am telling you about Shuey’s authorship travels through people who say they have. What Shuey drew was not an original shape.

It was modeled on the Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife, the British commando dagger, a long slender double-edged blade that comes to a point fine enough to go between ribs and is not much use for anything that is not a man. That was deliberate. The Marine Raider Battalions were the Corps’ commando experiment and a commando knife is a specific object with a specific job.

And the Raiders themselves understood exactly what they had been given. Their own illustrated history, “A Kind of War”, published by the United States Marine Raider Association, defends the knife in terms nobody could improve Bruce N. Canfield quotes the passage verbatim in his article, “Marine Corps Knives of World War II”, in American Rifleman, the National Rifle Association’s magazine.

“The stiletto”, it says, “was not designed to be used for opening ration cans or as a pry bar to open cases. After all, the knife was designed for one purpose, killing the enemy, and its design was not compromised.” No, the stiletto was a finely designed, almost delicate, single-purpose weapon. Read that again because it is the case for the defense and it is a good one.

Not compromised. That is not an apology. That is a boast, written decades later by the association of the men who carried it, and they are right that a knife built to do one thing will do that one thing better than a knife built to do six. The trouble is the other word in that sentence, delicate. Here is a Marine who used it.

Oscar F. Peatross served with the Second Raider Battalion, went to shore at Makin Island, and retired a major general. In his memoir of the Raiders, Bless ‘Em All, The Raider Marines of World War II, he sets down what the men were actually told and what they actually found. “It should never be thrown,” he writes, “as it was designed as a handheld weapon to be used only in combat.

” It was also pointed out that it was brittle and would break even if just dropped, particularly the point. “Brittle.” “Would break even if just dropped.” “Particularly the point, which is to say, the only part of it that did the job.” That is a major general of the Marine Corps writing about the first knife in Marine Corps history designed by a Marine officer.

And the sentence he chose to preserve as a warning not to drop it. One of these knives has a designer, and the other one has a brand. Every figure in this video was read off a printed document, and the document is named. The book is built the same way. 30 Allied Weapons, Armor, Anti-Tank, Artillery, Machine Guns, 182 pages, three editions, and every plate reproduced from the manual that issued it.

Then the part, no other reference prints, what each one cost to build, contract prices, man hours per gun, factory output by year. Four entries carry no cost figure at all, and each of those says why, rather than guess. The plate archive comes with it, and every future revision, free. And if you would rather not spend anything, there is a second book, 20 Rifles, complete and free.

Both links are in the description and the pinned comment. So, while Camillus was grinding needles in Central New York, something else was being argued out about 200 miles west in Olean. Union Cutlery Company was there. Its president was a man named R. Danforth Brown. The company that exists today tells the story in its own corporate history, and it tells it in one sentence.

Working with United States Marine Corps Captain Howard America and United States Marine Corps Colonel John Davis, Danforth Brown submits a fixed blade knife design to the Marine Corps for consideration. Hence is the whole origin of the most famous American knife of the 20th century, and we’re going to come back to how thin it is.

What went into the core was not a dagger. It was a compromise, and every part of it is a compromise you can point out. The blade is 7 in long and single-edged with a clip point. The top edge swept down and sharpened only at the tip. So, the point is fine enough to stab with, but the spine behind it is thick enough to lean on. 12 in overall.

A fuller ground down the flat of the blade, which lightens it without weakening it. A crossguard of steel, not the softer metals used elsewhere. And the handle, leather washers punched and stacked one after another down the tang and then compressed with the pommel peened over the end of the steel so that the whole assembly can never come apart.

The credit for those changes, the longer, stronger blade, the fuller, the guard, the peened pommel, the stacked grip, goes in the literature to Colonel John M. Davis and to Howard America. Greg Walker sets it out that way in his book Ka-Bar, The Next Generation of the Ultimate Fighting Knife, published by Paladin Press in 2001 on pages 13 to 20, and the company’s own timeline agrees with him.

Procurement was approved on the 23rd of November, 1942. The first shipment went out on the 27th of January, 1943. Canfield puts it at 2,100 knives. Navy took the same design and called it the United States Navy utility knife, Mark 2 utility. The word is right there in the Navy’s name for it, and the Navy was not wrong.

Ka-Bar in a lot of American houses, in a drawer, left by a grandfather nobody thought to ask. Subscribing is what keeps stories like his getting made. Now, back to the two knives because from 1943, the Marine Corps is carrying both of them, and the men are settling the argument themselves. Eugene Sledge was a private first class in Company K, third battalion, fifth Marines, first Marine Division, and he wrote the best known American memoir of the Pacific War, With the Old Breed, published in 1981. He remembered being issued the new knife at Camp Elliott, and he remembered what the drill instructor said as he handed them out. The substance of it was this, “You will open far more ration cans with this than you will ever do anything else. But if the enemy ever gets into your hole with you, you’re better off with this than with any other knife, because it is the best there is and it is rugged.” That is an institution describing its own product with complete accuracy and no pride whatsoever. The Corps handed a

young man a weapon, told him it was mostly a tool, and told him that it would also save his life, in that order, in one breath. Nobody said anything like that about the stiletto. Nobody had to. It had been sold to the Raiders as a killing instrument and it was one, and the men who were given it discovered what a single-purpose object is like to own in a war that asks you to do everything.

You cannot open a ration can with it. You cannot lever open a crate of ammunition with it. You cannot throw it. You’re told not to drop it. And so Raiders traded them away for watches, for pistols, for things that did something on a day when nobody was close enough to stab. Here is the money number, 67 to 1.

14,370 stilettos, the entire Camillus production run, per Canfield in American Rifleman, against roughly 966,000 Mark IIs in the Second World War. The knife designed by a Marine officer for the purpose of killing was outproduced by the knife the Corps called a utility knife, 67 to 1. One of these knives has a designer and the other one has a brand.

And now the honest part, the part where the knife I have been calling the winner has to stand still and be looked at. The K-Bar was not an ideal fighting knife and nobody involved claimed it was. It is heavier than a dagger and slower in the hand. It is sharpened on one side, so it cuts on one side.

Its handle is made of leather in a war fought largely in wet heat, and leather in wet heat does what leather does. Its point is the compromise made visible, clipped and thinned enough to penetrate, but sitting behind a spine built to be hammered and prized and levered, which is exactly the mass a duelist does not want.

A line from the January 1944 issue of American Rifleman, volume 92, number one, page 26, is quoted in the literature on this knife as saying that it was not an ideal fighting knife, but was nevertheless a highly effective weapon in jungle fighting. I could trace that quotation only as far as a footnote. I could not put my hands on the page.

Take it as reported, not as read. So, the Raider Association is right. Their knife really was better at the one thing. If the entire war had been two men in a hole in the dark, the stiletto wins, and it is not close. That was not the war. The war was 500 days of carrying, digging, opening, chopping, and prizing, punctuated at random by 4 seconds in which a man needs to kill someone with his hands.

A weapon that is useless during the 500 days does not survive to be present for the 4 seconds. The stiletto’s flaw was not that it was badly made. Its flaw was that it was made honestly for exactly the job it was given by people who had correctly identified a job that almost never came up. The Ka-Bar’s compromise point is the reason it was on the man’s belt at all when the 4 seconds arrived, which brings us to the bill, and this is the part where I have to be honest with you about what this channel can and cannot establish. I cannot tell you who designed the Ka-Bar. Not hedging. The record does not resolve. Bruce N. Canfield in American Rifleman and Ka-Bar’s own published corporate history both say the winning design was submitted by Union Cutlery Company of Olean. Steve Shackleford in Blade’s Guide to Knives, 7th Edition, page 387, cited by Wikipedia and the reference site www.us edb both say it was Camillus Cutlery Company. Those are two published suitable answers to a simple question

and they named different companies. The same split runs through everything downstream. Who shipped first on the 27th of January 1943? Canfield says Union Cutlery, 2,100 knives. Shackelford says Camillus. How many were made? Canfield’s roughly 966,000 for the whole war against Shackelford’s over 1 million by Camillus alone.

Figures that cannot both be describing the same thing. And Colonel John M. Davis and Howard E. America, the two Marine officers who supposedly shaped the blade into what it became, appear in every account in the same sentence and almost nowhere else. There is no independent archival trace of either man’s part in it that I could find.

America’s rank is given as captain in some accounts and major in others. Two men are credited with designing the most issued American fighting knife of the war and the sources cannot agree what one of them was called. Even the name is contested by its own owner. The story everyone tells is of a fur trapper’s letter so badly written that only three of the words could be made out.

KA-BAR from a sentence about a jammed rifle and a knife used to kill a bear. KA-BAR’s own published history does not tell that story. It quotes a Union Cutlery sales training manual by a vice president named M. L. Brown describing an Alaskan hunter who killed a Kodiak bear and sent the skin to Wallace Brown, after which management coined the trade name from Kodiak and bar. Both accounts are in print.

I’m not going to pick one for you. So, here is the ledger and it is short. The knife that lost has a designer, Lieutenant Colonel Clifford H. Shuey, Engineer Division, Quartermaster Department, Headquarters Marine Corps, later Brigadier General, first man in the history of the Corps to design a Marine Corps knife as a Marine officer.

His name is on no blade. It survives in one wartime magazine article and in the footnotes of people who have read it. The knife that won has a brand. It carries the mark of a cutlery firm and the record cannot say with confidence which firm earned it or which officers drew the changes that made it work.

And the company’s case in its own terms is not a weak one. A maker’s mark is not an author’s signature and never has been. A cutlery firm that tools up a factory, buys the steel, cuts the leather, meets the delivery date and carries the commercial risk, stamps its name on the product because that is how the trade has worked since there was a trade.

Nobody at Olean was stealing credit from a lieutenant colonel. They were doing what every manufacturer does. The name on the blade was never a claim about who thought of it. It is simply that the name on the blade is the only name that lasted. The two books are still linked in the description. One of them is free.

The blade comes off the grinding wheel with an edge on both sides of it, tapering the whole length to a needle. It will not saw a branch. It will not pry a crate. It will not open a can. It is being made in a cutlery works at Camillus, New York in the winter of 1942 and it is the first knife in the history of the United States Marine Corps to be designed by a Marine officer.

14,370 of them. Then they stopped. And the other knife, the compromised one, the one the paperwork called a utility knife, the one a drill instructor at Camp Elliott introduced to Eugene Sledge as a can opener, is still coming off a line in Western New York this morning, 80-odd years on, with a company’s name on the blade and nobody’s name behind it.

67 to 1. That is what the purpose-built fighting knife was beaten by and that is what it was beaten by, a tool. The weapons were the story. The men behind them were the proof.