Anybody know the story of how the army chose the 1911? Here's how I heard it:
Finding the .38s they were using ineffective against large adversaries(Samoians I think..pardon my spelling) They decided to test different calibers. They did this by hanging human sized monkey corpses and measuring the swing of the corpses when they where shot. The .45 won. True story.

i dont know about that. the 1911 was chossen after many a test shoots, including one against a 45 luger. it preformed well and must have  outshot the luger, cause it won.

It was the jacked up Filipinos they were having
problems with. They reverted to the SAA and
then decided that the .45 would be the caliber
and went looking for a better delivery system.
I got this from Gary Cooper himself.

Hangfire is correct. They just did a special on guns of the century on the History Channel and they said the .38 wasn't stopping the tribal philipinos that were high on Lord knows what, so they went to the .45 for more stopping power

The Moro tribesmen in the Philippines had a pre-battle ritual involving the chewing of coca leaves and tying wet rawhide thongs around their testicles.  The rawhide would dry and shrink, putting constant painful pressure on their testicles.  Once they had become used to the pain (or dulled sufficiently from the coca) they would attack, believing that if they could withstand that kind of pain, not much else would stop them. (No, I am NOT making this up)

The prevalent round at the time was the .38 S&W, and proved to be an insufficient manstopper against the coked-up, ball-squeezing Moros who would take round after round from the .38 and keep on attacking, usually living well long enough to inflict serious if not lethal injuries against their American 'subduers' before they bled out.  It was decided at that time that something that would not only prove lethal but had sufficient stopping power to make even a drug-hazed Moro pause and reflect was required.  

A few of the troopers in the Philippine Campaign had .45 Colt SAA 'Peacemakers' left over from the 'good ol days' and anecdotal evidence sent back to the War Department indicated that with decent bullet placement, a .45 would generally do the trick, but the .45 Peacemaker was by now considered somewhat fragile and obsolete in the face of much newer technology (i.e. the self-loading pistol).

The basic concept of the modern day 1911 had already been designed by John Browning and introduced by Colt by the turn of the century.  It was agreed that the .45 ACP cartridge (basically a scaled-up .38 Colt Auto or 'Rimless') was suitable (after testing vs. the 9mm, which was then prevalent in Europe), but the handguns then available for the cartridge did not suit themselves well to a combat environment due to poor handling and field (i.e. cleaning/maintenance) characteristics.  As already noted, Browning's 1905 redesign in .45 ACP (an updated, somewhat beefier version of his M1900, originally chambered itself in .38 'Rimless') was pitted against the 1908 toggle-action design submitted by George Luger.  The Browning pistol was conditionally accepted and adopted as the M1905 due to ease of mass assembly, reliability, and cost to produce.  The Luger design (an improvement over the original Borchardt toggle design) had many expensive machined parts that required careful fitting and close tolerances, and was by comparison, insanely expensive to mass-produce.  

The M1905 was produced from 1905 to 1911, being replaced by the M1911 in late 1911.  Additional modifications were added in 1913 to the safety system, and this weapon was produced until signficant modifications were adopted in 1924, resulting in the M1911A1.  The 1924 design has remained fundamentally unchanged since.

Yea! you get a bunch of filipinos on drugs. I read some place you could bayo them and they would still run up the knife to kill you. Time out!

Not to nitpick, LuvmyAR, as you were almost completely accurate, but the .38 cartridge was the .38 long colt. And at the time they did not have coca in the Phillipines, so they were most likely chewing betel nut.

Hmmm
Indigenous people from the tribe Moro who tied rawhide around their balls for self inficted pain.  No wonder the term 'moron' means a stupid person.

Kharn