The M1906 maximum range was originally overstated. When the M1906 cartridge was developed, the range tests had been done to only ; distances beyond that were estimated, but the estimate for extreme range was incorrect by almost 40 percent. The range discrepancy became evident during World War I. Before the widespread employment of light mortars and artillery, long-range machine gun "barrage" or indirect fires were considered important in U.S. infantry tactics. When the U.S. entered World War I, it did not have many machine guns, so it acquired British and French machine guns. When those weapons were later replaced with U.S. machine guns firing the M1906 round, the effective range of the barrage was 50 percent less. Firing tests performed around 1918 at Borden Brook Reservoir (Massachusetts), Miami, and Daytona Beach showed the actual maximum range of the M1906 cartridge to be . Germany, which was using the S Patrone (S ball cartridge) loaded with a similar  flat-based bullet in its rifles, had apparently confronted and solved the same problem by developing an aerodynamically more refined bullet for long-range machine gun use. The s.S. Patrone was introduced in 1914 and used a  s.S. – schweres Spitzgeschoß (heavy spitzer) boat-tail bullet which had a maximum range of approximately .