CREATING A MUNITIONS INDUSTRY
Simultaneously with the work of making the new, huge army, of housing
and training it, meeting its immediate and preparing to meet its future
needs of clothing and equipment, the War Department had to provide,
against the time in a very few months when these troops would be at
the front, the munitions with which it would fight--heavy and light
artillery, machine guns, rifles, automatic pistols, grenades, bombs,
gas shells, cartridges, every death-dealing instrument made necessary
by modern scientific warfare. And it had not even the facilities
with which to make most of them. The few existing plants had to be
enlarged, new ones erected, and even the tools for the making of some
of the munitions had to be manufactured before work could begin upon
the arms themselves. For many years the whole nation had set its
face against increase in the army or in the providing of supplies
for it in excess of peace time needs. The commercial manufacture of
munitions was repugnant to the spirit of American industry, which had
never engaged in it to more than a very slight extent. The making of
ordnance is a highly specialized form of manufacturing industry and
when we entered the war there were in the United States only two large
private concerns and six Government arsenals which were versed in its
special processes. In the Ordnance Division of the War Department there
were only 97 commissioned officers whose training had given them the
knowledge necessary to supervise and direct ordnance manufacture.
Conference with our co-belligerents resulted in a scheme of coöperation
in the making of munitions which pooled the resources of all the
associated nations in raw materials, manufacturing facilities, labor
and finished products in order to make more rapid the production by
each and all of them of all death-dealing weapons.
America laid out at once a great and thorough-going munitions program
and the War Department plunged into it and speeded it at a furious
pace. New designs were made and tested, new plants constructed and
a big organization for the carrying on of the work was built up
so rapidly that office forces doubled and trebled in a few weeks
and sometimes even within a few days. In the Ordnance Division the
officers’ personnel increased within a year from 225 to 4,600 and the
enlisted from a little more than 800 to 47,500. Scores of technical,
scientific, professional and business men left their private affairs
and joined the working forces of the War Department to aid in rushing
its munitions program. Upward of 16,000 contracts were quickly placed
that required the working up into missiles of death of thousands of
tons of raw material by hundreds of thousands of workmen. When the
armistice was signed there were in the United States nearly 8,000
manufacturing plants employing 4,000,000 persons engaged in the making
of ordnance. Manufacturing concerns of every imaginable sort converted
their plants to the production of the direct materials of warfare for
the use of our fighting men.
A corset factory was using its plant for the making of grenade belts.
A manufacturer of machinery for popping corn was turning out hand
grenades instead. A fireworks establishment was making bombs. A
typewriter company was furnishing signal pistols. A big radiator works
was an important producer of shells. Artillery carriages were being
made by a boiler company, a steam shovel company, and an elevator
company. These carriages are very complex, each one consisting of from
three to six thousand pieces, exclusive of rivets. So many were needed
that, notwithstanding all the help from private industry, in order
to insure the necessary quantity production the government built for
their manufacture twenty-six plants, all of which were in operation
in August, 1918. The intricate and delicate recoil mechanism which
sewing machine and other companies began early to furnish was also made
in these immense factories. In one industrial district alone, that
of Pittsburg, not less than 2,000 industrial concerns were busy in
September, 1918, on munitions work. They were employing nearly 200,000
men, with a pay roll of $2,000,000 a day, and their war contracts
exceeded in value $2,500,000,000. In that month this district mobilized
for coöperation to fill an order for prompt delivery of 33,000,000
semi-steel shells. Shell steel was then being produced at the rate of
500,000 tons per month.
Sixteen new plants for the forging and machining of cannon were built
by the Government at a cost of $35,000,000. Two siege gun plants and
twenty-six plants for the making of gun carriages and recoil mechanism
were completed at a cost, altogether, of $65,000,000. One of the plants
for the making of cannon, of which the construction is typical of all,
was wholly brought into being after our entrance into the war. Ground
for the factory was broken in July, 1917, and in nine months from that
date the first completed gun was ready for shipment. The decision early
in our participation in the war that our artillery equipment should
conform in general to the standard calibers of our war associates made
it necessary to alter our existing facilities and create new ones, but
the coöperation it made possible resulted, in the end, in a more rapid
equipment of our Expeditionary Forces although it delayed somewhat the
beginning of our production.
Ordinarily it takes a considerable time to manufacture artillery, big
guns requiring two years and lighter ones from six to ten months. We
had to create new plants, new tools, new processes. But at the end
of the war we had done all this and had produced 5,000 trench guns,
4,900 light and medium guns, 695 heavy guns and 19 railway guns and
mounts--more than 10,000 complete artillery units, and a total of
30,880 units had been contracted for. Many gun forgings and completed
guns had been sent to England and France and many spare parts had
been supplied to our own Expeditionary Forces. At the signing of the
armistice an output of about 500 guns a month had been reached. Among
them were 155 mm. howitzers, of which we had reached a sufficient
production to exceed our own needs and 600 had been sold to France.
There were also 7-inch, 14-inch and 16-inch guns, mortars and howitzers
mounted on railway carriages that could be moved quickly from place to
place. A 75 mm. field gun and an 8-inch howitzer, each self-propelling
and mounted on a caterpillar tractor that could climb hills and knock
down trees, were ready to be sent overseas and were the advance
couriers of a quantity production in these types that was already
beginning. Several kinds of caterpillar tractors of from two to ten
tons were designed, produced and put to the service of the artillery.
Machine guns became of more and more importance as the war progressed
and by the time of the entrance of the United States the demand for
them was urgent and prodigious. Their manufacture in the United States
was delayed somewhat for the completing and testing of the Browning
machine gun, in order to secure a standard gun superior to the older
types which could be produced in quantity, and the working out of plans
for its manufacture. It soon proved its superiority in the speed and
surety with which it works so triumphantly that both the French and
British governments asked for whatever surplus over its own needs the
United States could give them. The tools for the making of the guns
had first to be produced and work that would ordinarily have taken a
year was rushed through in half the time. But within a year quantity
production of guns had been reached. Of machine guns and automatic
rifles we produced during nineteen months a total of 181,662, and
during the months immediately preceding the armistice we had reached
a monthly production rate more than twice that of France and nearly
three times that of England. The production of heavy Brownings began
in March, 1918, and by the end of the following October there had been
made of these 39,500 and of light Brownings 47,000.
When we entered the war we had only two plants capable of making our
own rifles, which were of a different caliber from those of any other
nation. One of those factories had been shut down and dismantled and
the other, which had been making rifles continuously for the United
States for over a hundred years, was producing only twelve hundred
rifles per month. The appropriation by Congress for the preceding
fiscal year had been for rifles and pistols combined only $250,000. The
work was immediately begun of adapting the British Enfield rifle, which
was rechambered for our cartridges because they are more powerful than
the British and do not jam. But manufacture of this Modified Enfield,
Model 1917, was started during the summer of 1917 and over 2,000,000
of them had been produced by the end of October, 1918. During the same
time Springfields, which are still used for certain purposes, to the
number of 844,000, had also been manufactured, and the Springfield
Armory was then producing more rifles in a day than it had formerly
made in a month.
To the making of the Modified Enfield rifle go 84 parts and a total
of 164 pieces. These parts were all standardized so that any of those
made in either of the three large plants that manufactured this rifle
could be used in any other. This made possible the rapid rate at which
they were turned out. Rigorous tests for each part and close inspection
of every process, together with the enthusiastic interest of the
employees, made the number of rejected rifles negligible. The employees
of one concern, of their own inspiration and desire, adopted the slogan
of “one million rifles for 1918” after they had subscribed $1,000,000
to the third Liberty Loan. This plant, which had under roof more than
thirty-three acres, was built in 1915 to manufacture rifles for the
British Government, but soon after our entrance into the war signed a
contract with the United States. It speeded production so rapidly that
by mid-summer of 1918 it was two months in advance of its expected
production.
Automatic pistols proved of so much value at the front that General
Pershing, as soon as the American troops had got well into the
fighting, asked for the supply to be quadrupled and at once numerous
private plants began to manufacture them. One firm that had been
steadily turning out automatics at the rate of 1,500 per day prepared
to double its capacity when the front line needs were made known. Of
these and revolvers there had been sent to the front 600,000 up to
the end of September, 1918. Of small arms ammunition, including that
for machine guns, rifles, pistols and revolvers, American factories
produced a total of about three billion rounds. Monthly production had
reached a rate of 289,000,000 rounds. The armor piercing, tracer and
incendiary bullets used in the Aircraft Service and in anti-aircraft
defense were developments of the war and had to be designed for our own
guns and to have special facilities for their production.
For the loading of shells four huge government plants were constructed
with a combined loading capacity of more than 5,000,000 shells per
month. They were larger than any similar plants in the world. One of
them covered nearly 3,000 acres and was built and put into operation,
from the breaking of the ground, in a little more than six months.
For the housing of its employees a town was brought into existence,
within that time, with heating, lighting and power plants, police and
fire departments, cottages for families, dormitories with hot and cold
shower baths for single men, club-houses, a theater, restaurants, a
baseball field and tennis courts. Of high explosive shells of all sizes
there had been made, at the end of September, 1918, 2,500,000; of low
explosive shells, 3,100,000; of shrapnel, 5,800,000; and of grenades of
all types 11,870,000. One grenade factory had established a pace of a
million per month.
The tank, which was the answer to the machine gun, was one of the
important new weapons evolved by the war, its basic idea having been
suggested by the American farm caterpillar tractor, from which a
British engineer worked out the formidable engine of battle which
it became. Early in our participation the American Government began
arrangements for a considerable tank production and experiments and
investigations were started to better the design of those in use in the
Allied armies. A Tank Corps was formed to have charge of the recruiting
and training of the personnel, which numbered thousands of well trained
men, but design and production remained in the hands of the Ordnance
Department. The United States adopted two types, one the smaller form
used by the French Army, of which 4,000 were being made, and the other
a modification and improvement of the large tank used by the British,
with whom a joint program of tank construction was being carried out
when the armistice was signed. Liberty motors furnished motive power,
which gave a speed of eleven miles per hour, and each carried a crew
of eleven men, two six-inch guns and several machine guns. Some were
equipped with wireless.
This huge tank, finished examples of which had been tested and
approved, was forty feet long and could climb steep hills, cross
trenches and smash down large trees. It would have been taken across
the ocean by hundreds during the winter and great companies of them
would have plunged into the enemy’s lines with the resumption of
fighting in the spring of 1919. The component parts of a goodly number
had already been made in the United States and sent to England for
assembly.
A considerable part of the needs of our co-belligerents for propellants
and explosives was being met in the United States when we entered the
war and it was necessary that we provide our own supplies without
interfering with this production for them. In all, four nitrate plants
were constructed or started, and work upon them was rushed as fast
as the supply of labor and materials made possible, while extensions
and additions were made to existing facilities. Many scientists and
technologists constantly carried on experimental and research work
upon processes for the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen and other
problems connected with the supply of nitrates, and always with the
aim in view of developing methods that would have economic as well
as military value. The results were such as to make the nation for
the first time in its history independent of any foreign country for
the charge in the guns of its soldiers and also to bring much nearer
the day when the United States would be independent of the nitrate
deposits in foreign lands for its commercial and agricultural needs.
The toluol for the manufacture of nearly all of the TNT used in loading
high explosive shells was recovered as a by-product in the manufacture
of illuminating gas. At the works of twenty-eight gas companies in
different parts of the country plants were constructed, placed in the
charge of experts and skilled workers and kept under the closest and
most vigilant guard for the recovery of this important product, of
which hundreds of thousands of gallons were necessary. As a result of
the measures taken and rushed through, the supply of propellant and
explosive material needed by our war associates was not interfered with
and the loading of American ammunition was not delayed.
The hideousness of war was immeasurably increased during the world
conflict by the new uses that were made of chemical science. When these
new applications of the death-dealing possibilities of chemistry were
first made by the German army the civilized world drew back, horrified
and appalled. But when a barbarous foe makes savage use of science
those who are fighting him must, in sheer self-defense, meet him with
similar weapons. Therefore, when America became a belligerent, averse
as all her people were to the use of such weapons, regard for the
safety of her troops at the front made it necessary to prepare for this
peculiarly hideous and detestable form of war. As with other munitions,
the industry to produce the implements of chemical warfare had first to
be created. The Government built great plants and the immediate need
stimulated scientific investigation, with results that were like a tale
of magic, so rapidly did these and contributory chemical industries
grow.
The American Government did not overcome its reluctance to use toxic
gases until we had gone forward several months in war preparations,
when it was found, just as the English and the French had found,
that it would have to be done. It was November, 1917, when ground was
broken on a Maryland riverside farm for a huge plant that would produce
overwhelming quantities of chlorine, phosgene and mustard gas. When
the armistice was signed a year later the three hundred acres were
covered with vats and kilns, refrigerators, boilers, steel towers,
chimneys, pipe lines, railways, and all the other means for carrying on
the most deadly manufacturing processes known to man. For much of the
machinery needed there were no existing models and many important parts
of the immense plant were designed while it was being built. Experts
from the French and British gas factories who came to assist in this
development saw it rapidly evolve beyond their own knowledge and stayed
to learn rather than to teach. Subsidiary plants were built also, and,
altogether, American poison gas factories had a total production,
during the last weeks of the war, of an average of two hundred tons per
day. The British production, speeded to its highest possible point,
was never more than thirty tons per day, the French was much less and
the German is supposed to have been between thirty and fifty tons per
day. Airplanes had been made and successfully tested for the dropping
upon German fortified places, such as Metz and Coblenz, of containers
holding a ton each of mustard gas with time fuses fitted for explosion
a few hundred feet above the forts. Heavier than air, the gas from
each container, settling to earth, would not have left a living thing,
human or animal, upon, above or under the ground, within or outside of
buildings, on a space the size of a large city block.
A new poison gas was developed, far more deadly than any previously in
use, and its manufacture carried on with the greatest secrecy. At the
end of the war ten tons a day were being produced and it was estimated
that a single ton dropped in bombs and containers upon a city of a
million inhabitants would have killed them all. Three thousand tons of
it were to be ready in the battle zone by March 1, 1919.
Knowledge of these preparations and surety of what would, therefore,
happen in the early spring of 1919 are believed by military authorities
to have been an important factor in the sudden collapse of the German
military plans.
Gas was employed in offensive operations in many and varied ways and
these and defensive measures were so important that the necessity for
a new division of military activities resulted in the organization of
the Chemical Warfare Service in the summer of 1918. Five months old at
the end of hostilities, the Service then contained 1,600 commissioned
officers and 18,000 men. Defensive measures also had been rushed
steadily forward, investigation and experiment had produced a better
and more comfortable gas mask than was in use and a big Government gas
defense plant had been built, equipped and started upon production with
skilled workers. The monthly production of gas masks in the autumn of
1918, of which this plant made the major part, had reached 925,000.
The total production for the year and a half was over 5,000,000, with
3,000,000 extra canisters, 500,000 horse masks and large quantities of
ointments, antidotes and suits for protection against enemy mustard
gas. The American gas mask was recognized by all the war associates as
the best on the Western front.
In the Chemical Warfare Service at the end of hostilities were 1,700
chemists from civil life who had worked steadily to aid in its rapid
and efficient development. Under the furious goad of war the Service
succeeded in reducing the cost of phosgene gas from $1.50 to 15
cents per pound and therefore increasing very greatly its usefulness
in various industries, especially that of dyestuffs. The record of
development and production in chemistry is one of the fairly amazing
war achievements of this country and is replete with possibilities for
the peaceful uses of industry.
When America entered the war, problems and needs rose up at every hand,
like dragons springing from the ground, and all of them, in all their
number and complexity and variety, had to be met and conquered at the
same time. None of them was more difficult than this problem of the
creation of a munitions industry, for it demanded a highly specialized
manufacturing equipment of enormous capacity and great variety which we
did not have, concerning which we had in the past known but little and
for which we had always had slight regard. We possessed for it neither
the plants, the skilled labor nor the experience. New industrial
organizations had to be created and financed, plants had to be built,
all the complicated and varied weapons of modern scientific warfare
had to be designed and manufactured, and so also did many of the great
number and variety of the tools with which they would be made. Not only
had mechanics to be trained for much of this skill exacting work, but
the enormous expansion in the Ordnance Department made necessary rapid
development of knowledge and skill among the big proportion of its new
members. There is nothing more interesting in the detailed story of
the munitioning of our army than the frequency with which one comes
upon the statement that “a school was established” for the training of
personnel in this, or that, or another phase of ordnance duties.
The bare figures of the cost of all this enormous creation and
expansion, made many times greater by the necessity of haste at
whatever cost, give a vague sort of measuring stick of the energy and
the grim purpose that went into the providing of munitions for our
army. In a year and a half of war the amount of money expended or
obligated for ordnance totaled $13,000,000,000--thirteen times what it
cost to run the entire government for a year in the years just before
the war.