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.”
[Illustration: A SCENE IN AN AMERICAN ARSENAL.
The Ordnance Department effected the most complete mobilization of
science and industry the world has ever seen.]
[Illustration: FILLING A POWDER-BAG FOR A 16-INCH GUN.]
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.