V Ordnance
The history of mankind is punctuated by a few examples of endeavor which, by reason of their magnitude, cannot be fully comprehended by the human mind. That phase of America’s part in the Great War comprised in the work of the Ordnance Department of the Army is one of them. It has been termed, and without exaggeration, the greatest effort, directed by a single head, of all time. It was incomparably the greatest industrial undertaking that the world has ever seen. Therein lies the difficulty of writing an adequate story of ordnance—it is too big, too complex, for any writer entirely to grasp, for any reader completely to comprehend. It is like attempting to describe the grandeur of the Grand Canyon; so stupendous a thing can neither be translated into words nor encompassed by the mind. The best that I can hope to do is to sketch a few of the most salient features of the great story in barest outline.
First of all, I would wish to convey to you some conception of the vastness of the organization commonly referred to as Army Ordnance, the immensity of the sums which it expended, and the enormous quantities in which it dealt. It has been said that a billion is too huge a figure for any one to comprehend. Scarcely a billion minutes have elapsed since the birth of Christ. Yet the estimated cost of the ordnance required to supply our first 5,000,000 men was nearly thirteen billions of dollars. But that is, after all, merely an endless caravan of ciphers. Here is another way of expressing it. Between the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the declaration of war against Germany, the sixty-four successive congresses of the United States appropriated but twenty-six billion dollars for every purpose of government, including the cost of five wars, the pensions resulting from those wars, the upkeep of the Army and Navy, the activities of the State, Interior, Treasury, Agriculture, Commerce, and Post-Office Departments, the control of immigration, the administration of justice, river and harbor improvements, public buildings and public works of every description, the salary of every government employee from the President of the United States to the keeper of an obscure lighthouse in the Philippines, these countless items representing in the aggregate the total expenditures, over a period of more than seven-score years, of the richest nation in the world. Thus it will be seen that, had the war continued for another five months, a single branch of the army would have expended approximately one-half as much as the nation expended from its foundation to the date on which it entered the great conflict. Combine the wealth of all of America’s millionaires, add the value of all of America’s railways, throw in the Standard Oil, the Western Union, the Ford Motor Company, and the United States Steel Corporation for good measure, and you will still fall far short of the staggering total which the United States had planned to invest in ordnance. Or, if these comparisons are not sufficiently graphic, the Ordnance Department would have spent enough in the first two years of war to have built twenty-four Panama Canals, to have purchased the entire city of New York, at its assessed valuation, twice over, or to have built 36,000,000 Ford cars—one for every third person in the United States. That is the best that I can do to give you a realization of the immensity of the task assigned to the Ordnance Department.
Ordnance! No word in the whole lexicon of war held so much significance for the fighters at the front—and so little for civilians at home. For ordnance is the bed-plate of the whole military machine. If it breaks or gives way the machine instantly stops running. An army can fight without cavalry, without aircraft, without tanks, without machine-guns, yes, even without artillery, but no army can fight, or ever has fought, without ordnance. It is as essential to the functioning of an army as oil is to the burning of a lamp. Behind the belching soixante-quinze, behind the crackling musketry, behind the lumbering, elephantine tanks, behind the escadrilles of airplanes, was the huge organization, its head on the Potomac and its tentacles reaching westward to the Pacific and eastward to the Rhine, which provided the fighting-men with weapons and kept the voracious maws of those weapons supplied with their steel food. The combat troops up on the line knew that should the great Ordnance machine break down, even for an hour, they would be compelled to retreat or surrender. The generals knew it. The statesmen and politicians in Paris knew it, too. And the Germans knew it best of all, as is testified to by the labor troubles which they fomented and the fires and explosions which they caused. You didn’t know that the work of the Ordnance Department was so important, eh? Yet, if I remember rightly, you were always asking why the Allies didn’t end the war by destroying a certain German ordnance establishment called Krupps.
What is ordnance? It were easier to tell what it is not. It is artillery of all types and calibres, with mounts, carriages, and ammunition; small arms of every description; every kind of explosive used in warfare; an endless variety of gas-driven, steam-driven, horse-drawn, and hand-drawn transport; all harness and horse equipment, save that used by the Quartermaster Corps; tools, machinery, and material for making or repairing everything included in the term—in short, every tool used in the fighter’s trade.
Dawn on the Western Front. Everything is in readiness for a great infantry attack. For weeks past the preparations have been in progress. The roads leading to the front have been ground to powder by the endless processions of heavy-laden motor-lorries bringing up food, ammunition, and supplies. The advanced dumps are piled high with cases of rifle and machine-gun cartridges, trench-mortar ammunition, shell of every calibre and kind, all stencilled with the flaming bomb which is the trade-mark of the Army Ordnance. Up in the forward observation-posts intelligence officers are peering anxiously through periscopes into the fog-hung wastes of No Man’s Land. In the assembly trenches the storm troops are waiting in silence on the tapes which mark the positions of the various units, the faces of the men showing grim and determined under their steel helmets. Each wears a belt containing a hundred cartridges in clips; his bayonet is fixed. The men of the medical detachments, distinguished by the broad-bladed bolos at their hips, lean against their up-ended stretchers, waiting for the beginning of the bloody business which will stain those stretchers red. The officers, a trifle nervous and self-conscious, stroll up and down the ranks, examining their automatics or glancing at the luminous dials of their wrist-watches to note the approach of the zero hour. Rifles, bayonets, pistols, bolos, periscopes, cartridges, together with the clips which hold them and the belts in which they are carried—all are ordnance.
A mile or so in the rear the artillery is likewise waiting, every man at his post. The slim steel projectiles have been shoved home and the breech-blocks closed upon them; the barrage-tables have been worked out to a second, the ranges to a yard; the lids of the caissons are raised, revealing the brass heads of the shell waiting in their pigeonholes; the gunners are grasping the lanyards. Each battery commander stands motionless, one arm raised high, eyes glued to his carefully synchronized watch. The minute-hand, creeping forward slowly—oh, so slowly—rests at last upon the hour set for the beginning of the barrage. The upraised arms drop like semaphores, the watching gunners pull their lanyards, and the heavens seem to split asunder as tongues of flame leap from the eager guns. An instant later thunder and lightning burst above the distant German trenches. Steel falls upon them as water falls over the precipice at Niagara. The earth shakes, the air quivers to the hell of sound. The cannoneers, as though suddenly awakened from a trance, leap into action. Bearing in their arms the steel messengers of death, they dash between the caissons and the guns, sweating like stokers on a record-breaking liner. Farther to the rear are the midcalibre pieces, the “four-point-sevens,” the five and the six inch guns and howitzers, whose great projectiles go shrieking Rhineward with a noise like giants tearing mighty strips of linen. Huge howitzers, streaked like zebras and spotted like giraffes by the camoufleurs, their ugly snouts pointing toward the sky, some drawn by panting tractors, others mounted on the tractors themselves, come plunging and rocking across the broken and all but impassable terrain to take up new positions. The dusty roads are lined for miles with columns of gray trucks laden with ammunition, for the stream of shell between the dumps in the rear and the batteries at the front must never, even for an instant, halt or check. So close are the trucks that an active man could, it seems, travel for miles, without ever setting foot to the ground, by leaping from the tail of one to the hood of another. A fragment from a German shell shatters a gun and puts it out of action. As though by magic two great trucks, tabloid factories on wheels, one a mobile ordnance repair-shop, the other a storeroom of spare parts, appear on the scene, and skilled mechanics, wearing on their collars the bomb insignia of the Ordnance Department, repair the damaged gun, heedless of the fact that death is raining all about them, and put it into action again. From their cleverly camouflaged positions far in the rear the great 8 inch and 9.2 inch howitzers, and the 8, 10, 12, and 14 inch guns on railway-mounts are methodically pounding the enemy’s back areas, shelling his roads and bridges, destroying his ammunition-dumps and railroad-stations, their monster projectiles cleaving the air with a roar like invisible express-trains. Save only the men themselves, everything—guns and howitzers, shrapnel and high explosive, carriages, railway-mounts, tractors, trucks, limbers, caissons, even the harness on the horses—is ordnance.
From out of the smoke, so close behind the rolling barrage that they seem to be moving amid the bursting shell, a long line of tanks—elephantine monsters of the Mark VIII type and little, agile, humpbacked whippets—waddling forward across the welter of No Man’s Land, wading through ooze and slime, clambering over heaps of débris, crushing wire entanglements as easily as though they were made of string, rearing themselves against the walls of concrete pill-boxes and then crashing down upon them, straddling in their stride the yawning chasms of the German trenches, but always pushing forward, like terrible and ruthless prehistoric monsters, one-pounders and machine-guns spurting death from the loopholes in their armored flanks. Tanks and tank-guns are ordnance, of course.
The barrage abruptly lifts, and the eager infantry, pouring out of the trenches, sweeps forward with a roar. Out in front, forming a thin fringe to the leading wave of the assault, are the autoriflemen, playing streams of lead on the enemy trenches from their Brownings and Chauchats as a street-cleaner plays a stream of water upon the asphalt from his hose. As the barrage lifts, the Germans, emerging from the dugouts where they have taken shelter, man their parapets, but volleys of hand-grenades drive them back again. Through the wire demolished by the tanks and into the shell-shattered trenches swarm the cheering Yanks. Parties of “moppers-up” hasten from dugout to dugout, calling upon the occupants to come out and surrender, and when they do not comply, tossing hand or gas grenades into the entrances or wrecking the dugouts with mobile charges. The captured positions are quickly organized. Machine-guns and trench-mortars are brought up and placed in position. Carts and voiturettes, ammunition-laden, some drawn by mules, others by hand, come forward at the double. An enemy machine-gun nest is located and promptly demolished by a pair of Stokes mortars, which send their bombs somersaulting through the air, as a juggler tosses bottles, in an unending stream. Then the enemy launches a counter-attack, the gray-clad hordes advancing doggedly while the rifle-fire crackles along the trenches and the machine-guns go into action with a clatter which sounds like a boy drawing a stick along the palings of a picket fence. Rifle-grenades and shell from the little 37-mm. infantry cannon burst amid the advancing Germans, gaps appearing here and there amid their close-locked ranks as patches appear in a moth-eaten fur when it is beaten. Before this hail of death the counter-attack falters, checks, crumbles, and finally breaks, as an ocean roller dissipates itself against a concrete pier in futile spray. Everything used in the assault and in the repulse of the counter-attack—service and automatic rifles, 37-mm. cannon, rifle, gas and hand grenades, machine-guns and trench-mortars, ammunition-carts and voiturettes, mobile charges—is furnished by the Ordnance Department.
Reports come in that the enemy is reforming his shattered columns in the shelter of a ridge, preparatory to launching another attack, whereupon the brigade commander orders a machine-gun company to open indirect fire, the rain of bullets mowing down the unseen and now thoroughly demoralized Germans as effectually as though they were advancing in close order across the open. Not only the machine-guns themselves, the tripods on which they are mounted, the ammunition, the belts in which it is contained and the carts in which it is brought up, but the delicate scientific instruments necessary for indirect fire—panoramic sights, clinometers, transits, angle-of-sight instruments, alidades, squares, protractors—are all provided by Army Ordnance.
Meanwhile, simultaneously with the conflict on the ground, an aerial battle has been in progress high in the blue, the German airmen, clearly distinguished by the huge black crosses painted on the under side of their planes, attacking the American flyers who are engaged in locating and photographing the enemy positions and in directing the fire of the American guns. To the support of the slow-moving observation and artillery planes speed the fighters of the escadrilles de chasse, their stripped machine-guns, synchronized to fire between the blades of their propellers, blazing away at the rate of 1,200 shots a minute. Their machine-gun belts are loaded with tracer, armor-piercing, and incendiary cartridges in rotation, the first permitting the gunner to correct his aim by following the bullet’s flight, the second to pierce the armored tanks of the enemy machines, the third to set them on fire by igniting the leaking petrol or to destroy observation-balloons, while the belts themselves, made of disintegrating steel links, fall apart as they are fired. Giant bombing planes, keeping to the upper levels, head for the German back areas to drop their ugly eggs, ranging in size from the comparatively small bombs used against troops in the open to the 1600-pound monsters which produce craters 100 feet in diameter and 50 feet deep, upon the enemy’s dumps, warehouses, roads, bridges, and railway-stations. Everything save only the airplane itself—the synchronized machine-gun, the disintegrating belt and the special ammunition, the bombs in all their varying sizes, the mechanisms for suspending and releasing the bombs, the sights to determine the exact moment for release, even the ingenious electrical heaters for preventing the lubricating-oil in the guns from freezing at high altitudes—all these are provided by Army Ordnance.
Down upon our own back areas swoop raiding enemy aircraft, tiny specks against the blue, travelling at 140 miles an hour—the most difficult targets in the world. But complicated instruments, designed by Ordnance, are sighted upon them, determining their altitude, speed, and direction, and taking into account the windage and the trajectory of the shell, predicting the exact positions of the planes when our antiaircraft artillery opens upon them. The slim barrels of a battery of antiaircraft guns, mounted on motor-trucks for mobility, are raised to the indicated elevation, and a salvo of shell goes whining skyward, each projectile fitted with a special fuse so delicate in action that contact with the thin fabric of an airplane’s wing is sufficient to explode it, and yet so designed that it will not explode if, in loading, it should be accidentally dropped upon the ground. Ordnance again.
Night falls. The guns are silent. From along the line of the captured positions rise fireworks like those which delight the summer multitudes at Coney Island. Star-shell, fired from Veriy pistols, make graceful fiery arcs against the purple-velvet sky, bursting, as they descend, into fountains of sparks which illumine the positions where the weary Germans are. A night-bombing plane, prowling above the enemy’s lines, unable to see its target in the darkness, releases a parachute-flare which slowly sinks earthward, illuminating the ground for a radius of a mile as brilliantly as though it were day. From the American positions colored signal stars—red, green, white, or “caterpillar” combinations—fall slowly across the sky, conveying all sorts of cryptic messages to regimental and brigade headquarters in the rear, to the aircraft circling above, or to the patrols scouting in No Man’s Land. All these pyrotechnics were designed and made by Ordnance.
But the work of Ordnance does not end when the guns cease firing. Far from it. The wear of battle on weapons of all kinds is enormous: guns must be relined and fitted with new recoil mechanisms; shattered wheels and trails must be replaced; broken rifles, pistols, bayonets, machine-guns, scabbards, helmets, trench-knives, periscopes, caissons, limbers, tractors, trucks, tanks, must be collected and transported to the rear for repair or salvage. For the maintenance of its material Army Ordnance had in the field many special facilities: mobile repair-shops, miniature machine-shops mounted on trucks to accompany each division; semiheavy repair-shops mounted on five-ton trailers to accompany each corps; heavy semipermanent repair-shops for each army; railway repair-shops for the railway artillery, each successively less mobile but of greater capacity. In addition to this vast equipment for repair work in the field there were the complete expeditionary base repair-shops, requiring for their operation a personnel three times as large as the peace-time organizations of all the arsenals in the United States put together, capable of repairing each month 2,000 pistols, 7,000 machine-guns, 50,000 rifles, of overhauling 2,000 motor-vehicles, and of relining a thousand cannon. Ordnance once more.
And back of all this was the mammoth organization created by Army Ordnance in America itself: arsenals, gun-foundries, rifle and revolver factories, wagon-plants, ammunition-plants, nitrate-plants, silk-mills, tanneries, harness and leather-goods factories, 8,000 manufacturing plants in all, in which nearly 4,000,000 workers toiled day and night to produce the 100,000 separate Ordnance items required by our armies oversea. Beyond the activities that I have just sketched, the Ordnance Department didn’t do much in the war.
Now it must be kept constantly in mind that the Ordnance problem with which America was confronted upon her entry into the war was essentially a non-commercial one. By that I mean that the articles required by the Ordnance Department had an extremely restricted use, in many cases, indeed, no use at all, in the commercial life of the nation. In the piping times of peace what use did we have for field-guns, howitzers, machine-guns, automatic rifles, antiaircraft and railway artillery, shell, caissons, limbers, synchronizing devices, steel helmets, trench-mortars, periscopes, tanks, tracer, armor-piercing, and incendiary ammunition? Unlike the nations of continental Europe, we not only did not believe in war or anticipate war, but we deliberately blinded ourselves to the possibility of becoming involved in war, so that we were, consequently, wholly unprepared for war when it came. Hence, having no use for the tools of war in the pursuits of peace, we had little, if any, knowledge of how to manufacture them. The European Powers, on the other hand, having for centuries sat on a powder-magazine which, as they perfectly realized, might blow up at any moment, had prepared themselves to meet the conditions which would inevitably result from such an explosion by giving government support to private industry in the manufacture of war material. Thus were developed such vast ordnance industries as Krupp in Germany, Schneider-Creusot in France, Skoda in Austria, Ansaldo in Italy, which, though operating as private firms in time of peace, were always under government supervision, and automatically passed into government control in time of war. But even the great armaments maintained by Germany could not utilize in peace-time the enormous volume of war material produced at Essen. Yet it was imperative that the huge organization should be kept intact and ready for the war which would one day come. In order to maintain its organization and, so far as possible, its output, Krupp’s was encouraged, therefore, to seek foreign markets for its surplus products, Germany’s diplomatic, consular, and commercial representatives virtually becoming Krupp sales-agents in every corner of the globe. Thus it came about that wherever there was a promise of fighting, whether in China, in Mexico, in Abyssinia, in Venezuela, or in the Balkans, war material bearing the trade-mark of the great ironmaster of Essen was found in the hands of the prospective belligerents. If they could not pay cash, they were given credit, often long credit, and, when they did not possess credit, they usually were given the arms anyway. In this manner the German ordnance-machine was kept oiled and active, largely by foreign money, against the day when Germany would have need for its maximum output herself. Thus the government at Berlin had at hand, in time of peace, a tremendous and highly trained industrial organization which fitted neatly into the German war-machine in time of war. The same was true, though in lesser measure, of the great French, Italian, and Austrian ordnance concerns. We in the United States, however, had nothing of the sort. The Bethlehem Steel Company manufactured a limited amount of artillery, it is true, and the Colt, Winchester, Savage, and Remington corporations manufactured small arms, though mainly for sporting purposes, but they made them without any hope of government encouragement or co-operation, and they marketed them in foreign countries without any save the most casual assistance from our diplomatic and consular officials. In certain cases, indeed, the government actively discouraged American arms manufacturers from disposing of their wares to foreign belligerents.
By the assurance of steady employment and lucrative remuneration the great European ordnance manufacturers attracted to their employ men of exceptional technical ability, thus forming a large and highly trained personnel with long experience in manufacturing the tools of war. The traditional policy of the United States, on the contrary, was to maintain in government employ a small, a very small, group of technically trained officers who, according to our careless American theory, would be able to design and produce enough ordnance to meet the needs of our army in the remote and unlikely contingency that we should ever become involved in war. How ridiculously inadequate was this personnel will be realized when I say that there were but ninety-seven officers in the Ordnance Department at the outbreak of the war. How enormous were the requirements of the suddenly embattled nation is strikingly emphasized by the fact that 11,000 Ordnance officers were required for our first 5,000,000 men. All other branches of the service underwent similar expansion to a greater or less extent, it is true, but whereas Signal Corps officers could be recruited from the telegraph and telephone companies, Motor Transport officers from the automobile industry, Railway Transport officers from the great railway systems, Medical officers from the ranks of the country’s surgeons and physicians, Engineer officers from the various branches of the engineering profession, Quartermaster officers from the packing and produce concerns, the clothing manufacturers, and the building trades, paymasters from the banks and financial institutions, judge-advocates from the members of the bar, there was no field of American endeavor to which the War Department could turn for officers trained in the highly technical and specialized profession of ordnance design and manufacture. How could there be? There had never been any demand for tanks, for trench-mortars, for airplane drop-bombs. Ergo, there was no one in this country who possessed other than a vague and theoretical knowledge of how to design or manufacture them. Therefore, we had to set about training men to do these things. And we could not train these men in a week or a month. Ordnance designing, remember, requires the very highest form of mechanical and chemical engineering skill; its production is a highly specialized industry. A knowledge of its requirements was confined, as I have explained, to the ninety-seven Ordnance officers of the regular establishment and to a handful of highly salaried experts in the employ of certain private plants; the facilities for its production were limited to six government arsenals and to two large private concerns. The initial problem of Army Ordnance, therefore, was to disseminate on a nation-wide scale the special knowledge possessed by this handful of officers and experts and the special facilities possessed by these few arsenals and factories. In our endeavor to acquaint the nation with the requirements of the Ordnance Department we naturally turned to our Allies, who freely placed at our disposal the great volume of special data on the subject which they had collected during three years of war and which had resulted from the many costly experiments and investigations which they had conducted prior to the war—plans, specifications, working models, secret devices, jealously guarded formulas, even complete manufacturing processes. But, even with this great mass of detailed knowledge at our disposal, its translation into terms comprehensible to American engineers and practicable for American manufacturers was in itself a perplexing problem. The chief obstacles to our use of foreign designs, specifications, and formulas lay, in the case of French and Italian designs, in the fact that they were written in different languages and expressed in different units of measurement, the principal difficulty involved in the adoption of English ideas being the radical differences in the manufacturing practices of the two nations.
During the early days of the war it was repeatedly charged, both on the floors of both houses of Congress and in the editorial columns of newspapers and magazines, that, owing to a breakdown of the Ordnance Department, we were compelled to beg from our Allies war material which they could ill afford to spare. Let it be clear that I hold no brief for the Ordnance Department, but, in view of the wide circulation given to these unfounded assertions, I would like to disprove them by quotations from two official communications. The first is a telegram from the mission, headed by Colonel E. M. House and including Admiral Benson of the navy and General Tasker H. Bliss of the army, which was sent to Europe in the fall of 1917 for the purpose of ascertaining how the American Expeditionary Forces could most quickly be rendered effective. It reads:
“The representatives of Great Britain and France state that their production of artillery, field, medium, and heavy, is now established on so large a scale that they are able to equip complete all American divisions as they arrive in France during the year 1918 with the best make of British and French guns and howitzers. With a view, therefore, to expediting and facilitating the equipment of the American armies in France, and, second, securing the maximum ultimate development of the munitions supply with the minimum strain upon available tonnage, the representatives of Great Britain and France propose that the field, medium, and heavy artillery be supplied during 1918, and as long as may be convenient, from British and French gun factories.”
These offers were, of course, predicated on our continuing to furnish all raw material, all rough-machined forgings, and all finished components in quantities at least equal to those which we had been shipping to our allies since our entry into the war for finishing or assembly abroad. By our acceptance of these offers we not only obtained a breathing spell which enabled us to plan an ordnance programme which would insure the maximum production of artillery and artillery ammunition by the close of 1918, but the new arrangement, coming into effect at a period when the submarine sinkings were at their height, insured us against the possible loss of the raw material only and not also the time and labor which we would have had to put into the finished article. In other words, by this co-operative arrangement we increased our production to the maximum and reduced our possible losses to the minimum. How the French regarded this arrangement is shown by the words of M. André Tardieu, then French High Commissioner in the United States:
“From the industrial view-point the unity of effort created will produce happy results without precedent. From the financial standpoint it is possible to hope that the purchase by the United States of French artillery material will create an improvement in exchange, much to be desired. From the military point of view it is evident that uniformity of type of guns and munitions for armies fighting on the same battle-fields is an appreciable guarantee of efficiency.”
The adoption for our own manufacturing programme of the British types of heavy howitzers entailed no unusual complication, but the adoption of the French types of field-guns and light howitzers introduced a factor whose importance the lay mind had theretofore not fully realized. I refer to the French use of the metric system, in which, of course, all the plans, specifications, and drawings furnished us by the French were figured. One inch = 2.54001 centimetres. The full significance of this difference in the national units of measurement is not apparent until one reflects that not a single standard American drill, reamer, tap, or die will accurately produce the results demanded by the specifications on a French drawing. Furthermore, the French standards for bar stock, for rolled sheets and plates, for structural steel shapes such as angles and I-beams, even for rivet-holes and rivet spacing, are far different from American standards. Given complete, up-to-date drawings of French material (and in many cases these were not obtainable), the Ordnance engineer was immediately confronted with the necessity of either changing the American shop equipment—drills, reamers, taps, dies, and the like—to conform with French standards of measurement, thereby discarding the advantage of quick procurement of standard rolled stock, bolts, nuts, rivets, cotter-pins, or of doing what he did do—translating the centimetres in which the French specifications were figured into inches. But this was by no means all. French industrial practice develops the highly skilled all-round machinist to whom is left considerable discretion in determining finished dimensions and in fitting assembled parts; American industrial practice develops the machine specialist who works to tolerances—to maximum and minimum gauges—and whose output accordingly requires little or no hand-fitting of assembled parts. The French mechanic always sees the complete assembled unit; the American confines his attention to the particular component on which he is engaged and the gauges which check the accuracy of his work. So, in translating the French drawings, they had to be adapted not only to the material phase of American shop practice, but the personal equation of the American workman had also to be considered. Tolerances had to be prescribed, limit gauges had to be provided, jigs and fixtures, special milling cutters, and a hundred other tools and instruments had to be designed and manufactured. But our manufacturing difficulties did not end even there. Though the French gave us the drawings of even their most jealously guarded secret devices, they could not give us that intangible something which, for want of a better term, I can best describe as innate mechanical skill of so high an order that it approaches genius, which is so marked a characteristic of the best French artisans and mechanics. Take, for example, the problem involved in the manufacture of the hydropneumatic recuperator for absorbing the shock of recoil when a gun is fired—the recoil mechanism, as it is commonly called. This marvellous device performs a task equivalent to quietly halting the flight of a shell from a 75-mm. field-gun before it has travelled forty inches from the muzzle. So intricate is the mechanism, so delicately adjusted, that although it was introduced twenty years ago, it had never until recently been successfully manufactured outside of France. Though the Germans captured hundreds of these famous guns, the combined engineering skill of Krupp’s, with the model before them, was never able to manufacture a single one.
The inherent difficulties encountered in producing these new types of ordnance, great as they were, were dwarfed, however, by the vastness and variety of the quantities involved. Let me see if I can make this clear. Compare the question of ordnance supply with that of subsistence, for example. A man eats no more in time of war than he does in peace. Speaking roughly, it is fifty times as difficult to feed 5,000,000 men as it is to feed 100,000 men, whether the smaller force represents peace conditions and the larger one war conditions, or not. Consequently, the strain thrown upon the organization charged with the feeding of the army increased only in direct numerical proportion to the strength of the army. But, though war did not increase the demand of the individual infantryman for food, it enormously increased his demand for small-arms ammunition. Before the war each infantryman in the United States Army required 276 cartridges a year; during the war this jumped to 2,372 cartridges, an increase of 1,040 per cent. In peace-time each machine-gun used approximately 6,000 rounds of ammunition; after the declaration of hostilities each of these voracious little weapons required 228,875 rounds—an increase of 4,600 per cent. Likewise, the needs of the 3-inch field-guns increased 18,200 per cent and those for 6-inch guns 73,400 per cent over their peace-time requirements. Here is another way of stating the same thing. If a pound of bread a day satisfies a man’s appetite in time of peace, a pound of bread per day will satisfy it in time of war; but if a pound of metal represented the ordnance which he required in time of peace, from 10 to 700 pounds of metal would represent the ordnance which he will require upon going to war.
The constantly increasing tendency toward employing mechanical and chemical means of warfare produced another difficulty. Before the United States entered the war, a total of 50 machine-guns was the standard equipment of an infantry division. But when the Armistice was signed the tables of organization gave each division 768 automatic rifles and 262 machine-guns, an increase in this type of equipment of more than 2,000 per cent. Furthermore, the General Staff of the A. E. F. was working on plans for the reorganization of infantry units which would have increased the number of automatic rifles in each company to 24—approximately one for every ten men—and which would have established a new equipment of 192 automatic rifles for each artillery brigade. It is scarcely necessary to point out that every additional automatic arm, with its insatiable appetite for cartridges, necessitated a corresponding increase in the requirements for ammunition and for ammunition supply.
Before the United States entered the war, practically all field-artillery, including guns, howitzers, limbers, caissons, repair-wagons, and the like, was drawn by horses or mules, the Ordnance Department furnishing the harness and other horse equipment. The difficulty in obtaining an adequate supply of animals, however, together with the high rate of animal mortality, the constantly increasing weight of the guns, and the nature of the terrain, made necessary the wholesale motorization of the artillery, which was proceeding at an amazing rate when hostilities ended. Guns are now hauled by tractors; caissons and limbers have been displaced by motor ammunition-trucks; complete machine-shops, mounted on motor-trucks, supplant the old forge-limbers and battery and store wagons; machine-guns, instead of being packed on mules or drawn by horses, are usually moved to the front by various forms of motor transport and are often taken into action in tanks. Even the large-calibre field-pieces are now mounted on caterpillar tractors, which not only provide means of transportation for the guns but also the means for aiming them. These changes naturally brought others in their wake. The higher speed of motor-drawn artillery demanded rubber-tired wheels. The substitution of the automatic rifle, with its terrific burst of fire, for the ordinary shoulder rifle, entailed a tremendous increase in the capacity of the ammunition-trains. So, as the tools of war became more mechanically efficient, they became correspondingly more complicated to manufacture.
Now there were no limitations imposed as to where these tools should be procured. No one but a fool or an ignoramus would have insisted that, engaged as we were in a life-and-death struggle with a savage and ruthless enemy, we should only procure the weapons with which to subdue that enemy within our own borders. If there is a marauder in your grounds, your chief concern is to get a gun; you do not particularly care whether it is your own gun or one loaned you by a neighbor, so long as it will shoot and shoot straight. The problem of the Ordnance Department, then, was to procure arms for our armies, to procure them in sufficient quantities, and to procure them quickly—not to procure them in America only. To have set any such limitations on our effort, no matter how flattering it might have been to national pride, would have cost untold lives, it would have greatly prolonged the war, and it might well have produced a different and far less happy result. So, because our allies were both able and glad to supply us from their surplus store, and because it was the only way that we could obtain immediate delivery of certain things without which our armies could not fight, we purchased artillery abroad, as well as ammunition for that artillery; we also purchased airplanes, automatic rifles, clothing, food, surgical instruments, medicinal supplies; we sent our forestry battalions into the French forests for lumber—they produced 50,000,000 feet in the month of October, 1917, alone; we quarried their stone to build our roads; we drew on their reservoirs for water—all highly proper courses of action, adopted with the fullest approval of France and England, and, indeed, at their express suggestion, for the purpose of utilizing the available ship tonnage of the world to the best and quickest advantage in effecting the defeat of our common enemy. Critics have brought the charge that we purchased ordnance from our allies, intimating that it was a scandalous proceeding for which the Ordnance Department should hang its head in shame. Yet I do not recall that those critics ever completed the story by stating that we sold to our allies ordnance and raw materials for ordnance to a value five times greater than our purchases from them.
But even with free access to and unlimited credit in the markets of the world, grave questions of priority had to be decided; the impending exhaustion of the world’s resources in certain raw materials and certain classes of skilled labor demanded constantly increasing consideration. It was of paramount importance, of course, that our own preparations for war should not in the slightest degree delay or lessen the assistance which we had been rendering our allies, and which they had come to regard as perhaps the most important factor in calculating their ability to hold the enemy in check until our military effort could become effective. Furthermore, there had to be taken into consideration the demands of the American Navy, which required heavy forgings and other material, as well as trained labor, of the very type so necessary for the solution of the army ordnance problem. On the assumption that it would be of little avail to build ordnance for use in the field in France unless there were cargo-ships in which to transport it and war-ships to protect those cargo-boats against submarine attack, the requirements of army ordnance were made secondary to the demands of our allies, of our navy, and of our merchant marine.
The supreme difficulty encountered in the solution of the ordnance problem is best stated in the words of the Honorable Winston Churchill, then British Minister of Munitions, in his report to the British War Council for the year 1917:
“In the fourth year of the war we are no longer tapping the stored-up resources of national industry or mobilizing them and applying them for the first time to war. The magnitude of the effort and of achievement approximates continually to the limits of possibility. Already in many directions the frontiers are in sight. It is therefore not necessary merely to expand, but to go back over the ground already covered and by more economical processes, by closer organization, and by thrifty and harmonious methods to glean and gather a further reinforcement of war power.”
The situation in which the British found themselves in 1917, the critical year of the war, as depicted by Mr. Churchill, was also, though to an even greater degree, the situation of the French, and, to a lesser degree, our own. Due to the gradual but increasing exhaustion of the world’s resources of raw material and skilled labor, the production of ordnance, at first merely a manufacturing problem, became more and more, as the limit of expansion was produced, a problem of securing raw materials, skilled labor, and transportation. The cumulative effect of the difficulties which I have enumerated produced a task of such magnitude as to be literally beyond the conception of the human mind. It involved the mobilization of science and industry and their co-ordination with the military establishment to an extent approaching the limits of human endeavor. Indeed, I am indulging in no mere peroration, no idle figure of speech, when I assert that the Army Ordnance effort represented the application of a greater physical effort than was ever directed toward the accomplishment of a single purpose in the history of mankind.
Just as a track meet consists of various events—dashes, distance runs, broad jumps, high jumps, shot-putting, and pole-vaults—so there were numerous elements comprised in the ordnance problem. For Army Ordnance, the declaration of war was the starter’s pistol; the meeting of requirements by actual deliveries the goal. In estimating any accomplishment, whether it be the time in which a sprinter runs a hundred yards or a horse trots a mile, the altitude reached by an aviator or the speed of a transatlantic liner, it is necessary to take some accomplishment along the same or similar lines as a standard of comparison. It is generally admitted by athletes, for example, that for a man to run a hundred yards in ten seconds is an excellent performance; for him to run the same distance in nine seconds would be amazing. If, in view of this generally accepted standard of what constitutes a sprinter’s utmost exertion, a critic condemned a sprinter for not running a hundred yards in eight seconds, or in seven seconds, that critic would be branded by all intelligent persons as lacking in knowledge and judgment. So, in criticising the degree of success attained by the Ordnance Department during the war, it would be well for the critics to be quite certain that they have chosen just standards of comparison, and that they possess a sufficient knowledge of the problems involved in ordnance production to enable them to recognize a record-breaking performance if they saw one.
Generally speaking, it may be said that those phases of the ordnance programme which had the shorter time limits were unqualifiedly successful. There was never a time when the production of smokeless powder and high explosives did not equal our own requirements and still leave us with a surplus sufficient to provide large quantities for both France and England.
During the nineteen months of our participation in the war we produced over 2,500,000 rifles, a quantity greater than that produced during the same period by France (1,400,000) or by England (1,970,000), and this notwithstanding our handicap of a standing start. To use a fairer method of comparison, the average monthly production of France during July, August, and September, 1918, was 40,500; of England, 112,821; of the United States, 233,562. In other words, to again make use of the athletic simile, not only did America cover a greater total distance during the same period of time, but when the race was called off by the signing of the Armistice we were producing rifles at a rate double that of England and five times that of France.
Of small-arms ammunition (for pistols, rifles, and machine-guns) there were produced between April 6, 1917, and November 11, 1918, 2,879,148,000 rounds, a total equivalent to three cartridges for every minute which has elapsed since the beginning of the Christian era! True, this total fell slightly below that of England (3,486,127,000) and of France (2,983,675,000) for the same period, but it must be remembered that those nations had developed highly efficient manufacturing methods as the result of the experience they had gained during their nearly three years of war prior to our entry into the conflict. Notwithstanding their running start, before the Armistice we attained a speed in the manufacture of small-arms ammunition double that of France and 10 per cent greater than England’s.
During that period that we were at war we produced 181,662 machine-guns, a total slightly greater than that of England (181,404) and slightly less than that of France (229,238), but here again a comparison of total production is hardly a fair statement of relative accomplishment, for in machine-gun manufacture an enormous length of time is required to build factories, to equip them with machine tools, to design the necessary jigs, fixtures, dies, millers, profiles, and the innumerable limit gauges for testing the precision of the various parts. A fairer basis of comparison—the average monthly rate of production during the months immediately preceding the signing of the Armistice—shows that America was producing 27,270 machine-guns and automatic rifles a month—more than twice as many as France and nearly three times as many as England.
As to artillery ammunition, let us take the production of shell for the 75-mm. guns. Of this calibre we had produced 4,250,000 high-explosive shell, more than 500,000 gas-shell, and over 7,250,000 shrapnel when the Armistice was signed. From January 18, 1918, when the first complete American division entered the line, until firing ceased ten months later, our gunners used 6,250,000 rounds of 75-mm. ammunition. Prior to the Armistice we had shipped to France about 8,500,000 shell of this same calibre. Thus it will be seen that though American gunners admittedly made use of French-made ammunition from the Franco-American pool (thereby confirming the worst suspicions of the army’s critics), each round fired was made good prior to the signing of the Armistice with 33⅓ per cent margin.
Of the artillery programme proper, it is difficult to appraise the performance, for the reason that the race was called off before it was half run. It will be forever difficult to establish beyond question whether the American artillery programme at the time of the signing of the Armistice was as sufficiently far advanced as could be reasonably expected under the circumstances. Any attempt to pass on Ordnance’s accomplishment, or lack of accomplishment, in this respect must in justice take into account the best previous performance along these lines. Of all the countries engaged in the war the experience of England affords the closest parallel to that of the United States in respect to the initial stages of industrial and military preparation. In determining a standard of performance in the equipping with artillery of a hastily raised army by a peace-loving nation, permit me to quote a few significant sentences from a statement made by the British Ministry of Munitions:
“It is very difficult to say how long it was before the British Army was thoroughly equipped with artillery and ammunition. The ultimate size of the army aimed at was continually increased during the first three years of the war, so that the ordnance requirements were continually increasing. It is probably true to say that the equipment of the Army as planned in the early summer of 1915 was completed by September, 1916. As a result, however, of the battle of Verdun and the early stages of the battle of the Somme, a great change was made in the standard of equipment per division of the Army, followed by further increases in September, 1916. The Army was not completely equipped on this new scale until spring, 1918.”
Thus it will be seen that it took England nearly four years to completely equip her army with artillery and ammunition. On that basis we had two years and five months to go before incomplete equipment with American-made artillery could have been condemned, with justification, as poor performance. The nineteen months which the war lasted after America’s entry did not give sufficient time for our industrial power to make itself fully felt. Even so, I don’t suppose that any one, save perhaps the profiteers, would wish the war to have lasted long enough for us to prove that we could produce artillery as rapidly as our allies.
It should be kept in mind that proper strategy demanded an ordnance programme designed to insure an ultimate overwhelming and continuous rate of production rather than a lesser rate of production at an earlier date. What I wish to get across to you (pardon the slang) is that the primary object of Ordnance was not to obtain immediate production of enough artillery and ammunition to equip our little First Contingent, but to obtain a rate of production which would provide for the equipment of the army of 5,000,000 men which it had been decided to raise. Now it is perfectly obvious to any one that a housewife could buy a stove and bake a dozen loaves of bread in far less time than would be required to build a bakery and bake enough bread to feed an entire city. But the rate of production from the housewife’s oven would never feed the city. So it was with ordnance. By the sacrifice of far more important considerations, there is no doubt that enough guns could have been produced in a comparatively short time to equip the first few divisions. In order to do this, time was required for building plants capable of such a rate of production. We had to obtain designs and even, in certain cases, to discard existing designs, in order to get manufacturing plants on a basis permitting such a rate of production. It would have been madness to have sacrificed production in 1920 to force a quicker but far smaller production in 1918. The Ordnance Department was not directing its efforts to obtain for American arms an immediate but isolated success, gratifying as such a success would have been to American pride; instead it was building a machine which would make an ultimate and sweeping victory absolutely certain.
No branch of the army took up its war-task under such discouraging conditions as the Ordnance Department. It had 97 officers; it needed 10,000. But where were they to come from? It was and is impossible to improvise ordnance experts, like those of pre-war times, who were required to possess a thorough knowledge of all phases of ordnance work from design and development through procurement, production, and inspection to the supply of troops. But upon the outbreak of hostilities thousands of engineers, graduates of the world’s most famous technical institutions and many of them with wide experience in their respective branches of the engineering profession, offered their services to the Ordnance Department, and it is very largely due to their ability, experience, and devotion that the solution of many of Ordnance’s most perplexing problems is due. The industrial field, too, yielded a generous contribution of its best ability. To these men were often given strange tasks. They were called upon to procure materials with which they were unfamiliar in markets where no readily available supply existed. They had to design and erect complete manufacturing plants and to teach manufacturing methods which they themselves often had first to learn. Time after time they were ordered to manufacture articles of which they had never so much as seen a specimen before they entered the army. A huge personnel had to be organized to care for the inspection of this enormous volume of varied material, to prove it by means of firing tests at Aberdeen and elsewhere, and to develop it from the first rough model through all the interminable stages to the point of successful quantity production.
The advice, wishes, and requirements of our allies were given full consideration, often at a sacrifice of natural national pride. On their advice or at their formally expressed desire, we in many cases undertook the manufacture of components instead of complete assembled units: powder for propelling charges and high explosives for bursting charges of ammunition, instead of assembled shell complete in smaller quantity; black or rough-machined forgings for cannon, projectiles or recuperators in place of the corresponding finished articles; motors and structural steel work for standardized tanks for joint use in lieu of a smaller number of complete units for the use of our armies alone. We yielded priority on raw material sorely needed to make our own programme a success, but even more desperately needed by our allies to stave off defeat until we should arrive in force.
Every 15 pounds of finished smokeless powder requires 14 pounds of cotton and 700 pounds of mixed acid for its nitration, so we made the gun-cotton to the extent of more than 500,000,000 pounds on this side of the water, thus saving the excess tonnage that would have been required for the shipment of the raw materials. A similar condition obtained with regard to high explosives. Guided by the same sound principle, we shipped in bulk enough pierced shell blanks to keep the French and British factories going to the limit of their capacity, and so on through the endless list of articles or components required for our common use. For, be it remembered, it was not our war alone.
The quality of our product is attested by the almost pathetic eagerness of the poilu to acquire an American rifle with its beautifully adjusted sights, its admirable breech mechanism, and its rimless, non-jamming ammunition; by the universally acknowledged excellence of the American automatic pistol; by the purchase by the French Government of 550 155-mm. howitzers built in America from French designs; by the cabled request of the French Government for a continuous supply of 3,000 Browning machine-guns every month and 50,000,000 cartridges for them, after witnessing their performance under battle conditions; by the general order from British General Headquarters directing that on account of its greater uniformity, and consequent less danger to the troops advancing under its protection, only American-made powder be used for artillery barrages—all these are tributes to American science, American engineering, and American industry, as exemplified in American ordnance, by qualified judges who were backing their opinions with their lives.
American artillery may be roughly divided into four classes: light, medium, heavy, and railway. The light artillery consists of two types: the little, hard-hitting 37-mm. infantry-accompanying cannon, operated by two men, primarily designed for knocking out “pill-boxes” and machine-gun nests and, with a shortened barrel, for use in tanks, and the 75-mm. field-gun, an American adaptation of the famous French soixante-quinze, which, according to the admission of the French themselves, it in several respects excelled. Three types of weapons are included in the medium-calibre class: the 4.7-inch field-gun, which we had adopted and had manufactured in small quantities prior to our entrance into the war; the 155-mm. G. P. F. (Grand Puissance Filloux), really a big brother of the “seventy-five,” with correspondingly increased power and range, designed for interdicting crossroads and harassing the enemy’s middle areas, and the 155-mm. howitzer, which with its plunging fire is admirably adapted for trench and dugout demolition. In mobile heavy artillery we have the 8-inch and 9.2-inch howitzers, likewise designed primarily for demolition purposes. And, finally, the great 8, 10, 12, 14, and 16 inch pieces—guns, howitzers, and mortars—mounted on and fired from specially designed railway-trucks suited to the French road-beds—for incessant pounding of the depots, dumps, headquarters, and railways far behind the enemy’s lines. In addition to the above there are, of course, the various types of antiaircraft artillery, mainly of 75-mm. calibre, and the trench-mortars, ranging in size from the 3-inch Stokes, light enough to go over the top with the first wave of an attack and simple enough to be fired when supported only by the knees of a squatting soldier, up to the 240-mm. trench-mortar of position, whose great shell can blow the stoutest concrete fortification to smithereens. We also had in use at various times small numbers of miscellaneous calibres and types, but, as the result of the policy of reducing the number of types in order to simplify the problem of ammunition supply, our artillery had become fairly well standardized by the closing months of the war.
Years ago—though not nearly so long ago as it seems—when artillery was still hauled into position by sweating gun-teams, a veteran ordnance officer, addressing a scientific society, told his hearers that the weight of artillery was governed by the limited power of the horse. As a horse has a sustained pulling power of only 650 pounds, he explained, it was obvious that a 6-horse gun-team could not pull a gun and limber weighing more than 3,900 pounds. “If Divine Providence had given the horse the speed of the deer and the power of an elephant,” he added, “we might have had a far wider and more effective range for our mobile artillery.” Could that officer have looked a few years into the future he would have been astonished to see that, thanks largely to the genius of a Californian named Holt, there would be substituted for the horse a curious contrivance known as the caterpillar tractor, which possesses many times the power of an elephant. Though the tractor cannot be claimed, by any stretch of the imagination, to have the speed of a deer, it nevertheless has sufficient speed to keep pace with the infantry, or, indeed, should it become necessary, with cavalry. Few people appear to realize how enormous were the savings in men, animals, feed, railway facilities, and ocean tonnage effected by the motorization of our artillery. The motorization of one 155-mm. howitzer regiment saved 1,440 horses. One tractor for this howitzer is the equivalent of sixteen heavy draft-horses and three riding-horses, yet it is so compact that it occupies in packing a space of but 360 cubic feet, and can be operated by two men. Tractors are not only easier to conceal from enemy observation than horses, but a shell-burst which would kill every horse in a battery, would leave an armored tractor uninjured. Not long ago, at the Aberdeen Proving-Ground, one of these tractors, on which was mounted an 8-inch howitzer, sent through a dense wood, ran squarely into a live locust-tree which was seventeen inches thick at the base. Before the onslaught of the tractor the tree went down as though it were made of cardboard, whereupon the amazing machine crawled over the fallen trunk, slid into and clambered out of a ravine, emerged from the wood and took up its firing position—all in scarcely more time than it takes to tell of it. Before the war ended virtually every piece of American medium and heavy artillery was either tractor-mounted or tractor-drawn, and we were on the road toward motorizing the field-artillery—the “seventy-fives”—as well.
But, though the General Staff of the A. E. F. demanded mobility for the artillery, it also demanded increased weight and range. To meet this requirement there were devised various types of railway-artillery, ranging in size from 7 to 16 inch, thereby making available for use on the battle-front numerous guns from our seacoast fortifications which could not have been used otherwise. Early in the war the Army borrowed from the Navy a number of 7-inch naval rifles on pedestal mounts, for which the Ordnance Department provided specially designed gun-cars, thus affording a powerful and yet mobile form of defense for our coasts in the event of submarine attack. The next performance worthy of note was the mounting on railway-cars of ninety-six 8-inch guns taken from various seacoast fortifications. Both of the above types of gun, as well as the 12-inch mortars, were mounted on the so-called Barbette carriage, which permits of all-round fire at any desired elevation. The 10-inch seacoast rifle and all sizes above it were mounted on the Batignolles type of carriage, which depends primarily on the track arrangement for its direction of fire. Both the Barbette and Batignolles mounts had, after the initial setting, all the characteristics of fixed emplacements, but with the added advantage of being able to advance or retire with a minimum loss of time. A third type of railway-mount, which was used very successfully by the French and which was being adapted for certain of our 10, 12, and 14 inch guns when the war ended, was the Schneider, or sliding type of mount. Though this mount also depends upon the track arrangement for its direction of fire, it has none of the features of a fixed emplacement, the force of the recoil being taken up by permitting the entire mount to slide back on the track during the recoil of the gun. The “Chilean project,” as it was known, consisted in mounting six 12-inch guns, which had been manufactured in the United States for Chile and were on the point of delivery when they were commandeered by our government, on special sliding mounts designed by the Ordnance Department. Still another venture was the mounting for railway use of a number of 14-inch guns loaned by the Navy to the War Department. But the most ambitious project undertaken by Ordnance in connection with railway-artillery was the production of the huge 16-inch howitzer, to manufacture sixty-two of which an entirely new shop had to be erected by the Midvale Steel Company. This, the heaviest railway-mount of American design, weighs, with its gun, nearly a million pounds. The design and production of a device which would absorb its recoil of seven million pounds was in itself no inconsiderable engineering problem. Each of these monster railway-cannon has its own train, consisting of standard and narrow-gauge ammunition-cars, as well as cars for tools, for spare parts, for repair work, and for the crews. Huge as they are, rivalling in range and power anything which the Germans had at Metz or the British at Gibraltar, they are extremely mobile, any one of them being able to drop its load of high explosive far behind the enemy’s lines, “pull stakes,” and be miles away before the enemy could get its range.
Speaking of the range of artillery, some truly amazing results in this field were achieved by Major Forest Ray Moulton, one of America’s foremost mathematicians, who was professor of astronomy in the University of Chicago before he was given a commission in the Engineering Division of Ordnance and turned his knowledge of ballistics to military account. One usually thinks of a professor of astronomy as a highly impractical person whose mind is absorbed in comets, meteors, and stars, yet no individual in the armies of the United States did as much as Doctor Moulton toward perfecting devices for killing Germans at long range. Here is a sample of his achievements. As the result of a series of abstruse calculations he made a change in the shape of the copper driving-band on the 6-inch shell, whereby, without adding to the powder charge and with no modification whatever in the gun, he increased its range two and a half miles. What is even more remarkable and important, he so reduced the variation between successive shots that a given number of shell will fall into one-eighth the area formerly covered by their dispersion. Had the war continued a year or so longer, there is no saying where Doctor Moulton’s ballistic discoveries would have led. It was evidently of one of the shell designed by him that the negro soldier remarked:
“Ah could staht runnin’ at brekfus’-time an’ that theah shell ’ud git me jes’ when Ah got home foah suppah.”
Whereupon his companion exclaimed scornfully:
“All one of dem shells wants is jes’ yo’ address, niggah—jes’ yo’ address.”
No phase of the Ordnance Department’s work during the war came in for such severe criticism as the adoption and production of machine-guns. Now it so happens that I am thoroughly familiar with the details of the long and bitter controversy which began with the original rejection by the Ordnance Department of the Lewis gun and which ended with the eventual adoption of the Browning. Many of the attacks made on the War Department by the supporters of Colonel Lewis, as well as in the editorial columns of the newspapers, were not justified by the facts and showed an incomplete knowledge of the circumstances, yet, as an impartial observer with some inside knowledge of the situation, I freely admit that for certain of the criticisms there was ample justification. Let me remind you, moreover, that the Lewis being considerably heavier than the Browning machine-rifle and much lighter than the Browning machine-gun, could not satisfactorily have taken the place of either. With which passing comment we will let the machine-gun controversy rest.
Machine-guns of the so-called heavy type had been developed to a serviceable stage at the time of the Spanish-American War, but neither then nor in subsequent conflicts did they receive anything like the attention which they attracted immediately after the outbreak of the war in Europe. The Germans had apparently realized better than any one else the value of machine-guns in the kind of fighting which they expected to be engaged in, having had, it is reported, 50,000 machine-guns when hostilities opened. American appreciation of the rôle destined to be played in warfare by machine-guns is best evidenced by the fact that, when we entered the war, our tables of organization gave to each regiment four machine-guns!
When war was declared there were on hand in this country approximately 670 Benet-Mercie machine-rifles, 285 Maxim machine-guns, and 350 Lewis guns chambered for British ammunition. The machine-gun manufacturing facilities in the United States were also more limited than were the facilities for rifle manufacture, by reason of the fact that England and France had depended on their domestic resources to supply the bulk of their machine-guns. As a result there were only two plants in the United States which were actually producing machine-guns in quantity when hostilities began. Six days after our entry into the war the War Department ordered 1,300 Lewis guns (which order was subsequently increased) and, in June, 2,500 Colt guns, which were to be used for training purposes. The first division to be sent abroad was necessarily armed with the all-but-obsolete Benet-Mercie machine-rifle, but upon its arrival in France the French Government offered to equip the division with Hotchkiss machine-guns and Chauchat machine-rifles—the same automatic arms which the French had been using for three years. The offer was thankfully accepted, not only for the first division but for a number of succeeding divisions, thus insuring a supply of automatic weapons for our troops until we were in a position to supply them ourselves.
The result of a series of machine-gun tests held by a board appointed by the Secretary of War in May, 1917, proved conclusively that the gun invented by John M. Browning, a Utah gunsmith who already possessed a wide reputation as an inventor of automatic weapons, was the best type of heavy machine-gun known to the board, and that the light automatic rifle, also an invention of Browning, was likewise the most efficient weapon of its type. The Lewis and the Vickers, both of which had been extensively used by the British since the opening days of the war, were also favorably reported upon and it was recommended that their manufacture be continued. Acting on the recommendation of the board, the Ordnance Department immediately increased its orders for Lewis guns, placed orders with the Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company for Browning machine-rifles and machine-guns, and began the development of large manufacturing facilities for the last-named types in order that the quantities required could be produced within the time specified. Although the Colt Company was the owner of an exclusive right to build machine-guns and automatic rifles under the Browning patents, the Ordnance Department early recognized that no single plant could hope to produce a sufficient number of these weapons to meet the constantly increasing requirements of our armies. Arrangements were therefore made with the Colt Company and with the inventor, Mr. Browning, for the surrender of their exclusive rights, the United States being granted authority to manufacture these weapons wherever it saw fit during the period of the war. As a result of this energetic, action, by the early part of 1918 the Savage Arms Company at Utica, New York, was producing Lewis guns of the flexible type for use on aircraft (the large orders for Lewis ground guns having been diverted to aircraft use upon the cabled recommendation of General Pershing); the Marlin-Rockwell Corporation at New Haven was manufacturing large quantities of Marlin Aircraft machine-guns of the synchronized type; the Colt’s Company was building Vickers machine-guns of the heavy mobile type, while various factories selected by the Ordnance Department because of their facilities were energetically tooling up for the immense production of Browning machine-guns and automatic rifles which later followed. Early in March, 1918, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, to whom, as the result of the arrangement already referred to, the Browning plans and specifications had been turned over, produced the first Browning rifles, and two months later the New England Westinghouse Company turned out the first Browning machine-guns. When the Armistice was signed, the American Expeditionary Forces had been equipped with 41,348 Browning heavy machine-guns and 48,082 Browning rifles.
As the Marlin Aircraft machine-gun was available and was giving a considerable degree of satisfaction, no particular effort was made to push the development of the Browning Aircraft machine-gun, as it was feared that to do so might interfere with the production of the Browning machine-gun for ground use. Only a few hundred Browning Aircraft guns had, therefore, been produced up to the time of the Armistice. These had, however, been satisfactorily synchronized so as to fire through the airplane propellers, and had been speeded up to the amazing rate of fire of 1,300 shots per minute.
Upon their arrival in Europe the two Browning weapons created a marked sensation both in the armies of the Allies and in our own forces. Not only were they exquisite examples of the gunsmith’s art but they could pour lead into the enemy at an unheard-of rate, they were to all intents and purposes fool-proof, and they proved themselves capable of standing up under the most trying conditions. The Browning automatic rifle in particular, as beautifully finished and balanced as a trap-shooter’s double-barrel, formed a striking contrast to the clumsy French Chauchat, which looked as though it had been made by a village blacksmith. During the summer of 1918 our government was approached by representatives of England, France, and Belgium with inquiries as to the possibility of sufficient Brownings being produced to supply their armies as well as our own.
The 79th was the first division to enter the line equipped with Browning automatic rifles and machine-guns. In view of the various criticisms of these weapons which have appeared from time to time in the American press, it seems worth while to quote from the report of the Ordnance Machine-Gun Officer of that division:
“The guns went into the front line for the first time in the night of September 13th. The sector was quiet and the guns were practically not used at all until the advance, starting September 26th. In the action which followed, the guns were used on several occasions for overhead fire, one company firing 10,000 rounds per gun into a wood in which there were enemy machine-gun nests, at a range of 2,000 metres. Although the conditions were extremely unfavorable for machine-guns on account of rain and mud, the guns performed well. Machine-gun officers reported that during the engagement the guns came up to the fullest expectations, and even though covered with rust and using muddy ammunition, they functioned whenever called upon to do so.”
The design and adoption of the Browning gun not only gave our armies the most efficient and dependable weapon of its kind in the world, but it saved the American taxpayer $75,000,000. This figure is based on the difference in cost to the government of the Browning and its nearest equivalent, the Vickers—the latter at a price representing its cost after having been in war production for three years. The design and adoption of the Browning automatic rifle gave us far and away the best weapon of that type possessed by any army, and it saved the government nearly $13,000,000—not a very large figure, it is true, compared with war expenditures, but nevertheless worth saving.
When the war ended we had on hand 52,000 Browning automatic rifles and 29,000 Chauchats—a total sufficient to arm an army of approximately 3,500,000 men. On the same date there were completed 3,340 Hotchkiss, 9,337 Vickers, and 42,050 Browning guns, thus giving us enough heavy machine-guns to equip over 200 divisions, or an army of approximately 7,000,000 men. Thus it will be seen that, no matter what the future has in store for us, it will be a long time before we will have occasion to worry about a shortage in machine-guns.
Though less novel and, therefore, less interesting than certain other products of Ordnance, there were six items, all produced in stupendous quantities, which rendered greater service than all the big guns, tanks, and airplanes put together in nailing down the coffin-lid on Germany’s dream of world domination. I refer to rifles, pistols, revolvers, bayonets, helmets, and small-arms ammunition. They, with the gas-respirator, the water-bottle, the cartridge-belt, and the pack, constituted the equipment of the fighting Yank. They were the infantryman’s tools of trade.
When the news of the sinking of the Lusitania reached Paris, I heard the then American Ambassador to France assert, in the words of Mr. William Jennings Bryan, whose appointee he was, that were the United States to enter the war, a million men would spring to arms overnight.
“I’ll admit, Mr. Ambassador,” said a sceptical listener, “that we might get the million men. But where would we get the arms?”
“We’d stamp ’em out, sir,” replied the diplomat. “We’d stamp ’em out the way we stamp out tin plates.”
But, unfortunately, the matter of supplying weapons for our fighting forces was very far from being as simple as the ambassador seemed to think, for the modern high-power service rifle is a delicately adjusted and highly finished piece of mechanism, to manufacture which requires the finest quality of materials and the highest grade of expert workmanship. So, though we did not realize the dream of the ambassador by producing arms for a million men overnight, American Ordnance performed a feat almost as amazing by producing enough rifles to equip an army of seven million men in less than fifteen months.
Some years before our entry into the war a parsimonious Congress reduced the appropriations for the manufacture of small arms and small-arms ammunition to such an extent that it was found necessary to shut down the rifle-plant at the Rock Island Arsenal and to greatly reduce the output of rifles at the Springfield Armory and of cartridges at the Frankford Arsenal. This resulted, as might have been foreseen, in the dispersion of the large force of highly skilled workmen who had been in government employ, most of them seeking occupation with private concerns or turning to other vocations. When, therefore, our entry into the Great War made it necessary to take up the manufacture of small arms and ammunition on an unprecedented scale, the War Department was dismayed to find that it did not have nearly enough workmen, and that, owing to the enormous wages which were then being paid in other industries, it could not get them. Thus it became necessary, in order to obtain an immediate and adequate supply of weapons for the great new armies which we were raising, to enlist the co-operation of private manufacturers.
The three leading manufacturers of small arms in this country—the Winchester Repeating Fire Arms Company of New Haven, Conn., the Remington Arms-Union Metallic Cartridge Company of Ilion, N. Y., and the Remington Arms Company of Eddystone, Pa.—were devoting themselves at this time to the manufacture of the British.303 rifle, the production of which, however, due to the decrease in the requirements of the British Government, was gradually slowing down. But, though these plants had every facility for turning out in large quantities the British.303 Enfield, it would have required many months for them to alter their tools and machinery for the manufacture of the.30-calibre Springfield, which was the standard arm of the American service. The Ordnance Department found itself confronted, therefore, by three alternatives. It could change the equipment of these plants so as to permit of the manufacture of Springfield rifles—a proceeding which would have involved a delay of several months; it could adopt the British Enfield, which would also have necessitated the adoption of another calibre of ammunition—an unthinkable thing in time of war; or it could utilize the facilities of these three great plants by modifying the British rifle so that it would take American ammunition. The latter course was decided on.
The modification consisted in changing the magazine, chamber, and bore of the Enfield rifle so that it would take the U. S. service.30-calibre rimless cartridge instead of the British.303 rim cartridge. So rapidly were the plans worked out, the drawings and specifications produced, and sample rifles submitted and tested, that within less than eight weeks after the declaration of war orders were given to Winchester and the two Remington concerns for a million “modified Enfields,” as the new weapons were called. Putting aside the keen trade rivalry which had formerly existed, the three plants virtually operated as one mammoth rifle factory, so that when one shop found itself short of parts it was promptly supplied from another where there was a surplus. The combined factories had so fully gotten into their stride by the fall of 1918 that, when the Armistice was signed, they were turning out approximately 10,000 rifles a day, this being in addition, remember, to the spare parts which were being manufactured at all three plants as well as in the government establishments at Rock Island and Springfield. The records show that more than 2,500,000 rifles had been accepted by November 9, 1918. Add to this the 600,000 Springfields and the 160,000 Krag-Jorgensens which we had on hand at the beginning of the war, the 280,000 rifles which had been manufactured for Russia but which were taken over by the United States, and the 20,000 Ross rifles purchased from Canada, and it will be seen that we had a total of more than 3,500,000 rifles. As only about one-half of the troops in an American division carry rifles, we had, therefore, enough weapons to equip an army of 7,000,000 men.
In spite of the endless complications due to the use by our forces during the early days of the war of French machine-guns and automatic rifles of a calibre different from our own, and to the insistent demands of the Air Service for special types of cartridges—tracer, armor-piercing, and incendiary—there was never a time when we did not have enough small-arms ammunition to supply our forces in the field. I might mention in this connection that one of the most perplexing problems which had to be solved by Ordnance was the manufacture of ammunition which would function equally well in two rifles—the Springfield and the Enfield—and in seven different types of machine-gun—the Benet-Mercie, the Lewis, the Vickers, the Colt, the Marlin, and the light and heavy Brownings. In these machine-guns the firing-pin points, or strikers, are different in shape and size and function differently, each giving a different weight of blow on the primers of the cartridge, yet, notwithstanding this handicap, the success of the American ammunition in this respect was remarkable. The daily average of small-arms ammunition manufactured in the United States reached the enormous total of 14,900,000 completed rounds—a production equal to that of England and France put together. The total number of cartridges of all classes produced up to the end of the war was 3,500,000,000; enough, if placed tip to primer, to put a girdle of brass and steel around the globe.
At the outbreak of the war the Colt automatic pistol, of.45 calibre, was the standard arm of the American Army. This pistol was manufactured by Colt’s at Hartford, Conn., and by the government at the Springfield Armory. The Ordnance Department quickly realized, however, that even the combined capacity of these two plants would prove wholly inadequate to meet the demands of the new armies, whereupon it obtained permission from the War Department to supplement the supply of automatics with arms of other types, particularly Colt and Smith & Wesson.45-calibre revolvers—the famous “six shooters” of the plains. These revolvers did not take the rimless, or cannelured-head, cartridge used in the pistols, but this difficulty was overcome by means of a loading-clip, which had the additional advantage of enabling them to be loaded almost as quickly as an automatic. The revolver, which is somewhat less accurate and less powerful than the pistol, and which is considerably more tiring for the user, was adopted as an emergency measure only, due to the imperative necessity of supplying the troops. The demands of the A. E. F. increased so rapidly, however, that in the summer of 1918 contracts were let to eight other firms possessing equipment which could be converted to the manufacture of pistols and revolvers. It is interesting to note that among the concerns which turned from the manufacture of essentially peace-time devices to the production of implements for killing the Hun were the Burroughs Adding Machine Company and the National Cash Register Company. At the signing of the Armistice, there had been produced a grand total of 375,000 pistols and 268,000 revolvers, and the rate of production was rapidly increasing, thereby bringing us within sight of the day when, in accordance with the plans of the General Staff, it would be possible to arm every American soldier with that characteristically American weapon, the “shooting-
Another innovation introduced by the Great War was the steel helmet, which, barring a few European heavy cavalry regiments, had not been used by any civilized army since Cromwell’s time. The British helmet was originally adopted by our forces as a temporary expedient, in order to gain time until experiments would show whether it was possible to produce a better one. After a lengthy series of tests, however, it was decided to retain the British model, manufactured from steel with a considerable manganese alloy, rolled by an American process. Any possibility of the position of our troops being betrayed by the reflection of light from the surfaces of their “tin hats,” as was occasionally the case with the Germans’ steel head-gear, was eliminated by dipping the helmet in olive-drab paint, scattering sawdust over the surface with a blast of air, and then repainting after the first coat had hardened, thus producing an extremely coarse sanded appearance. The netting used in the lining of the American helmet was, however, a distinct improvement on the British design, as it lessened the inconvenience caused by the very considerable weight—slightly over two pounds—and the small pieces of rubber around the edge of the lining served to keep the metal away from the head, so that even relatively large dents caused by bullets or shell splinters did not reach the wearer’s skull. The task of designing our helmets and body armor was intrusted, fittingly enough, to Major Bashford Dean, who was admirably fitted for the duty by reason of the fact that he has been for many years curator of the armor collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is a curious fact, and indicative of the extent to which Army Ordnance converted to war purposes countless peace industries, that the steel for our helmets was furnished by the American Tin Plate Company—no wonder that the soldiers called them “tin hats”!—the linings were produced by various shoe manufacturers, and the helmets were assembled and painted by the Ford Motor Car Company!
I tried to make it clear at the very outset of this chapter that the story of Ordnance is so stupendous that the best I could hope to do in such a narrative as this would be to dwell briefly on its most salient points. This necessitates my passing by with a few words discoveries and developments of the greatest interest and importance, and of dismissing amazing achievements with a paragraph. Take the Nitrate Division of the Ordnance Department, for example. Were it to receive its due, an entire chapter should be devoted merely to outlining its problems, while a whole book could be written on how it solved them.
Nitric acid is the basis of all modern explosives. A country possessing no nitric acid would be virtually unable to fire a single shot. Before our entry into the war we depended for our supply of this essential ingredient upon the sodium-nitrate beds of Chile—the only country in the world where nitrates have been found. Germany had done the same, having had the foresight, moreover, to accumulate a reserve supply estimated at 375,000 tons. Had she not taken steps, however, to replenish this enormous stock by producing nitrates from the air by the so-called “fixation method,” she would inevitably have been compelled to capitulate when her supply became exhausted. It quickly became apparent that if we continued to rely upon Chile for our supply of nitrates we would be courting disaster, for Chile, though neutral, had decided German leanings, and there was always the danger, therefore, that German diplomacy or threats might cause her to place an embargo on nitrate exports. Even had this danger not existed, our available tonnage was extremely limited and a few torpedoings of nitrate ships would have stopped our supply, thereby automatically paralyzing our manufacture of explosives. It was determined, therefore, to make the United States wholly independent of any outside source by the erection of four enormous plants for the manufacture of nitrates by the synthetic ammonia and cyanamide processes.
Two of these projects—U. S. Nitrate Plant No. 1, at Sheffield, Alabama, and U. S. Nitrate Plant No. 2, on the Tennessee River at Muscle Shoals, Alabama—were both completed before the signing of the Armistice. Plant No. 1, which has a capacity of about 22,000 tons of ammonium nitrate a year, cost approximately $13,000,000. Plant No. 2 makes five times that amount of ammonium nitrate and cost five times that sum. Plant No. 3, at East Toledo, Ohio, and Plant No. 4, at Ancor, near Cincinnati, were about one-quarter completed when the Armistice was signed, but, because of the changed conditions governing the supply of Chilean nitrates as well as the facilities which we now possess in Alabama for manufacturing them ourselves, they have been discontinued. In addition to these enormous projects, a chemical plant was erected at Saltville, Virginia, at a cost of $2,750,000, for the manufacture of sodium cyanide to be used in the production of poison-gas. Though no operations are now (May, 1919) being carried on at any of these plants, it is believed that their products will be in wide demand for farm fertilizers, a project being under consideration whereby nitrates can be produced at these plants and sold to farmers at about three-quarters of the price paid for the Chilean product.
This chapter already so bristles with statistics that a few more can do no harm. They may open your eyes, moreover, to the magnitude of our preparations for producing nitrates—a project which has cost the American people more than $120,000,000, but of which not 1 in 10,000 of them has so much as heard. Take Plant No. 2, at Muscle Shoals, for example. I would be willing to wager almost anything you please that you have never heard of Muscle Shoals before. For your information it is on the Tennessee River, in northern Alabama, about midway between Nashville and Chattanooga. The power-house of this plant, with its capacity of 135,000 horse-power, has the largest annual output of any steam-power plant in the world, developing two-thirds as much power as all the hydroelectric plants at Niagara Falls put together. It contains a 90,000 horse-power steam-turbine—the largest ever built. The ammonia-gas plant is the largest in the world. The liquid-air plant is five times larger than any other installation of its kind in existence. At its peak the camp at Muscle Shoals had a total population of 21,000. One of its score or more of mess-halls seats 4,000 persons at one time; in it 750 gallons of soup have been prepared and 2 tons of meat have been roasted for a single meal. More than a thousand hogs were raised on the waste from this mess-hall alone. (Attention of Mr. Hoover!) The camp laundry washed 6,000 blankets in a single day. That may give you some idea of the labor and money involved in preparing to make our own nitrates.
When it is considered that the personnel of the Ordnance Department, at home and overseas, consisted of 6,000 officers and nearly 100,000 enlisted men—almost as many as we had in the entire Regular Army before the war—and that these officers and men were called upon to perform work of a highly technical and specialized nature, it will be seen how important was the work of the Training Division. Among the innumerable activities of this division was the Ordnance Engineering School, where in three months a technically trained engineer was given an insight into the design and manufacture of ordnance materials; the Powder School at Carney’s Point; the Ordnance Supply School at Fort Hancock, and the Machine-Gun School at Springfield. In addition to these there was a school for tractor operators, a school for instruction in the repair and maintenance of ordnance trucks, another for the repair and maintenance of railway-artillery, and still another for training men in the repair of optical and precision instruments. It is sufficient for an infantryman to know how to use a pistol, a rifle, and a machine-gun, but the men who wear on their collars the insignia of the Ordnance Department have to know not only how to operate those weapons, and how to give instruction in their operation to others, but they have to be familiar with every detail of their manufacture and repair.
By far the most fascinating feature of Ordnance activities in America is the great proving-ground at Aberdeen, Maryland, thirty miles from Baltimore, on the shores of Chesapeake Bay. On this remote and jealously guarded reservation is tested every weapon and device, with the exception of small arms, produced by the Ordnance Department. During the height of our war preparations, more shots were fired here in a single day than were fired at the old proving-grounds at Sandy Hook in a year. A far greater quantity of explosive was expended daily than was used in many of the important battles of the Civil War. Here can be seen in action every type of American artillery from the vicious, hard-hitting little 37-mm. infantry cannon to the camouflaged monsters on railway-mounts, streaked like zebras and spotted like giraffes, which can drop a ton of explosive on a given target thirty miles away. Giant tanks, looking for all the world like some strange species of prehistoric monster, smash their way through patches of woodland or take twelve-foot trenches in their stride; field-guns of all calibres, camouflaged and tractor-mounted, go rocking and reeling across the broken fields; airplanes, circling in the blue, drop their half-ton bombs upon the targets marked out on the fields below; showers of shrapnel from the antiaircraft guns burst about the target parachutes in suddenly unfolding blossoms of white and scarlet. In the recovery-fields hundreds of men are at work with pick and shovel retrieving the fragments from the shell-bursts in order that they may be studied by the experts in the laboratories. (In order to facilitate this extremely important work, there has recently been built a huge concrete reservoir, known as a “recovery-tank,” into which the shell are fired, the fragments being recovered by means of giant magnets.) In the powder-bag department one can see storerooms filled to the ceiling with rolls of the heavy silk used for making the bags in which the propelling charges are contained; in adjoining rooms—“sweat-shops” they are jokingly called—scores of enlisted men, trained in the clothing-shops of New York’s East Side, cut and stitch the silk into cylindrical sacks in sizes to fit the various calibres of guns, and some distance away, in small, isolated buildings, other men fill the sacks with greenish-yellow granules which look like mildewed macaroni, but which is really smokeless powder. Over ten thousand miles of this silk was required for our war programme. And it had to be the finest quality of silk, for no other material could be depended upon not to leave smouldering fragments in the barrel after its discharge, which would mean a burst gun and death to the crew when the next charge was inserted. Everything considered, one can get more thrills and see more things of interest at Aberdeen than at any place I know.
When time has given it the justice of perspective, the war-effort of Army Ordnance will be recognized as the greatest industrial achievement in the history of mankind. The more one learns of it the more it staggers the imagination. In nineteen months the Ordnance Department effected the most complete mobilization of science and industry the world has ever seen; it produced munitions of certain classes in unprecedented quantities; it developed and supplied material of such superior design and workmanship as to win the praise of our allies and the grudging admiration of our enemies; it designed, manufactured, and sent overseas the best service rifle, the best automatic rifle, the best pistol, the best machine-gun, the best field-gun, the best railway-artillery, the best tractor, and the best motor-truck possessed by any army in the world, and it stood ready, when the Armistice was signed, to turn loose on Europe such an avalanche of munitions as the world had never dreamed of. The American people seem to have completely overlooked the fact that we had in full swing, after we had been at war less than forty weeks, a mightier munitions programme than Germany could attempt after preparations which took forty years. But, though the American people did not realize the stupendous magnitude of their own effort, the Germans did. It was the news of the programme adopted by Army Ordnance, and the realization that it was going through, which, more than any single factor, perhaps, convinced Germany of the utter futility of further resistance. The Ordnance Department, like the biblical prophet, was not without honor save in its own country.