Demobilization

There was a great deal more to the demobilization of the war ordnance industry than the mere office operation of settling with the contractors. It included an immense field activity of utmost practical interest both to the War Department and to the public. The armistice found the United States in a state of industrial preparation for war that would have been unattainable under any other circumstances. The world situation had forced us to turn American industry into a vast munitions plant which, at the cessation of hostilities, was just beginning to get into production with some of the most essential materials of warfare. That plant had been acquired only at the cost of heavy mortgage (in the form of government war bonds) placed upon the future, and hence it would have been folly to close out the business entirely with nothing to show for the whole effort but debts and the realization that the existence of the business had had a psychological effect in winning the war and protecting the United States. The sensible thing to do was to save out of the dismantling of war industry a material equipment which should afford national military insurance for years to come; and that was what the Ordnance Department did.

In building up this equipment the Ordnance Department was confronted with the three major questions of (1) what quantities of materials to allow the industry to go on and produce before closing down finally, (2) what to do with the buildings and machinery which the Government had provided for the enterprise, and (3) what disposition to make of surpluses of both materials and facilities beyond the Government’s future needs.

Artillery constitutes the most important of all war supplies. Upon the production of artillery and its ammunition the Government expended more money than upon any other single class of materials. From a manufacturing standpoint, a unit of artillery consists of three principal parts—the gun tube itself, the recuperator (or recoil mechanism), and the carriage with its attending caissons. Each of these manufacturing phases called into existence during 1917–1918 huge industries. On the day of the armistice nineteen mills, built new from the ground up, were turning out gun and howitzer tubes at the rate of nearly 800 a month, a figure that may be contrasted with the annual American production of seventy-five guns before 1917. Five great plants, built new at a cost of many millions, were engaged in building recuperators of French design, and other producers were manufacturing American- and British-type recoil mechanisms. The carriages, limbers, and caissons, being, after all, wheeled vehicles, offered no particular manufacturing problem, and it was therefore unnecessary to create a new industry to produce them. Nevertheless, the carriage contracts engaged a large section of the car- and truck-building industries of the United States. Yet, for the reason that the vehicle builders could come quickly into the production of artillery carriages, the physical demobilization of this branch of the industry offered little difficulty, the chief problems centering around the termination of the production of gun tubes and recuperators. These problems involved questions of reserves to be produced before the industries were dissolved and the storage afterwards of the manufacturing facilities to give the United States a potential producing capacity that could be quickly utilized in the event of another war.

Several important considerations influenced the responses to these questions. In the first place our whole artillery manufacturing project had been aimed at the year 1919, and in the interim the American Expeditionary Forces purchased heavy quantities of artillery in France and England—in all, nearly 5,500 field guns of the latest and best designs. Including captured matériel, the A. E. F. sent back to the United States after the armistice about 6,000 guns, with their full equipment of limbers, caissons, and supply vehicles. This in itself was a quantity sufficient to arm a large field force; and, on the face of it, this reserve seemed to make unnecessary any post-armistice production at all from our own ordnance plants. As a counterbalance, however, there was the industrial situation. The gun plants were heavy employers of labor. To close them all down forthwith might have created a serious amount of unemployment, to the detriment of the national prosperity. Then, too, it was good business to order the completion of matériel almost complete on the day of the armistice, and this procedure was adopted as a general policy.

General rules and policies could at best serve the field men of the Ordnance Department only as rough guides. Each of the nineteen gun factories supplied its own special problems in demobilization. The process of closing down the factories may be shown by the example of what went on after the armistice at the plant of the Bullard Engineering Works at Bridgeport, Connecticut.

This was a plant producing 155-millimeter guns—the tubes only. The 155, a French weapon, was the highest-powered fieldpiece used by the A. E. F., the railroad guns not being considered to be field guns. The supply of the useful 155 was never equal to the demand. The French factories could not deliver as many as the A. E. F. needed; and, because of the difficulty of producing the recuperator, our own industry did not succeed in turning out a single completely assembled unit before the armistice, although all parts had been successfully produced ready for assembling. Here, then, was an important class of artillery in which a shortage existed, and therefore the Ordnance Department was liberal in allowing production after the armistice.

The Bullard Engineering Works held contracts calling for the production of 1,400 155-millimeter gun tubes. On the first day of the armistice it had delivered forty-five finished tubes, and 500 others were progressing through the plant in various stages of completion. Many of these incomplete units had passed through the difficult shrinking process. Guns are built up in layers of steel, each one heated, superimposed upon the adjoining one, and then shrunk on in various cooling processes, thus putting into the steel strata a compression that enables the gun to sustain tremendous interior pressures without distortion. The ordnance officers looked at the status of work at the Bullard plant and ordered the completion of the 500 units in process, terminating the rest of the great contract.

This action was taken on the eleventh day of the armistice. The company expected to be able to complete the remaining 500 guns in six months, a course that would enable the manufacture to taper off and the gunmakers to find other employment. Two months later it was found that other industry was readily absorbing the excess labor of the gun plant, and therefore another cut was made in the contemplated production, the number of completions ordered being reduced to 262 in number. These were to be finished by April 15, 1919, after which war work at the plant was to cease entirely.

Note, now, the measures adopted in terminating the work. It is evident that the post-armistice operation was going to deliver to the Government 262 finished guns and 238 unfinished ones. The latter would stand for a government expenditure of millions of dollars. As an industrial commodity these unfinished tubes would have value only as scrap steel, to be melted up and made into other things. Yet to the Government they possessed a real military value. In the event of another war occurring before the present-day types of artillery become obsolete, the Army would need not only reserves of guns ready for use, but also another great gunmaking industry, to produce for an indefinitely expanding field force. Therefore proper war reserves should consist not only of guns, but also of reserve facilities for manufacturing guns—machinery and tools, designs, plans, and instructions, and, especially, the rough forgings of gun elements, so that, the moment a new gun factory was organized and equipped, it could start working, without having to wait weeks and months until the raw materials came up from the forging plants. The Bullard Works were instructed to stop work on the incompleted units at such points as would enable future gunmakers, if necessary, to resume the work without difficulty. All incomplete units, however, were to be carried through the shrinking process before being dropped. The various hoops and jackets which are shrunk upon gun tubes are machined to a precision expressed in thousandths of an inch. In heavy metal working, such exactness is ordinarily unknown. It is evident that only a little rusting would destroy the fit of the contact surfaces and ruin the unassembled jackets and hoops, and therefore the company was instructed to assemble these otherwise perishable elements before stopping the work. After the shrinking, all uncompleted pieces were slushed in grease, packed for protection, and stored away, to be used, according to the plan, in the manufacture which will be necessary in the peace-time maintenance of the artillery equipment. Some of the incomplete Bullard tubes of the 155’s were later transferred to the Watervliet Arsenal and finished with the machinery there. The arsenal completed 300 guns of this size after the armistice.

This, essentially, so far as the partially finished units were concerned, was the procedure followed by the Ordnance Department in all nineteen emergency gun plants. Although the mills turning out rough forgings for the gun plants were taken from this branch of war work immediately after the armistice, the Ordnance Department reserved and stored a supply of forgings in order to keep the future gun plants in operation until new forging mills can come into production.

Seventeen of the emergency gun plants were closed out altogether after the armistice. Two remain among the war assets of the United States, held “in ordinary,” as the phrase goes, meaning that they are closed, but ready with machinery and materials in all stages of completion to start up in full operation as soon as the workmen can be recruited and the fires started. These two additions to our arsenal system were named the Rochester Gun Plant and the Erie Howitzer Plant; and at these two plants and at the government arsenals the Ordnance Department concentrated the great equipment of machinery, tools, plans, and materials left on its hands after the dissolution of the gunmaking industry created by the war, all stored so systematically that the War Department, at any time for years to come, can, in theory, at any rate, quickly reëstablish a gun industry on the scale known in 1918. Recently it has been proposed to transfer the facilities at Rochester to some other place.

The existence of this manufacturing equipment in the possession of the Ordnance Department gives the United States a stronger military potentiality than the nation ever possessed before. For the first time in our history the Government itself during peace is in possession of extensive facilities for the manufacture of light and medium-heavy artillery. Before the war the Army procured all its field guns (and those only in negligible quantities) principally from private makers. Its two gunmaking arsenals, Watertown and Watervliet, turned out principally large guns for fixed mounting at the coastal forts. Before showing what was done at the Rochester and Erie plants, it is worth while pausing to note the legacy received from the war industry of 1917–1918 by the two established gunmaking arsenals.

The Watertown Arsenal is to-day the War Department’s chief permanent establishment for the production of gun forgings. Watervliet is the great gun-finishing plant. At a cost of many millions these two institutions were built up and expanded on a vast scale during the war. After the armistice these two arsenals received the reserve supply of machinery and materials used in making the heavier field guns—principally 155-millimeter guns and 240-millimeter howitzers—forging machinery at Watertown, finishing machinery at Watervliet. For the manufacture of lighter guns, the machinery has been stored principally at the new Rochester and Erie plants.

With the new equipment installed at the Watervliet Arsenal during the war, that institution reached a productive capacity of sixty 155-millimeter guns a month and sixty 240-millimeter howitzers. These facilities to-day are set up and ready for immediate operation. But in addition to the arsenal’s own proper plant, the Ordnance Department has stored at Watervliet reserve machinery sufficient to manufacture fifty-two 155-millimeter howitzers, seventeen 4.7-inch guns, and forty-nine 75-millimeter guns every month. This machinery, in the event of another war, is to be shipped to emergency war plants and set up in them. Besides this, all the war-time equipment for producing anti-aircraft guns has been stored at Watervliet. One of the later inventive developments of the World War was to increase the power of the already powerful 155-millimeter gun by increasing its caliber to 194 millimeters and adding to its length, making an entirely new weapon, but one of the same type as the 155. None of these guns was actually built during the war, but machinery able to produce twenty of them every month is included within the equipment at Watervliet, one-third of this machinery set up and needing only slight rearrangement and modification to be ready for immediate operation.

All this equipment at Watervliet for the production of medium-weight field guns is idle and probably will remain so as long as the great reserve of finished artillery accumulated during the war continues to have military value. Unless another great war comes to upset the plans, the only production of light field artillery in this country for many years henceforth will be that resulting from the operation of a small experimental gun plant at Watervliet, to be maintained in operation to the sole end that the United States may keep pace with the progress of artillery manufacture. Whenever improvements are devised, the necessary changes will, if Congress provides the funds and present ambitions are realized, be made in the reserve machinery to enable it to turn out the improved models from the start of operation.

Meanwhile Watervliet and Watertown will continue to be what they were before 1917—the main reliance of the Army for its guns of the largest calibers for use at the coastal forts and on railway mounts. At best, the production of such weapons is a slow and intricate process, and the only way to procure a supply of them is to keep producing them all the time. Watertown makes the forgings for these guns, and Watervliet, with its own great equipment augmented by machinery from the dismantled war plants, can now manufacture guns up to 16 inches in caliber and howitzers from 12 to 16 inches. At Watervliet, too, has been stored some of the machinery from the American Ordnance Base Depot in France for relining big guns and restoring them to use.

Now let us look at the two chief auxiliaries to the two gunmaking arsenals, the Rochester Gun Plant and the Erie Howitzer Plant, which are now “stand-by” factories for the production of field artillery of the smaller sizes—75-millimeter and 4.7-inch guns and 155-millimeter howitzers. The Rochester Gun Plant, with its own war tools and with the equipment concentrated there during the demobilization, is now equipped to turn out 360 75-millimeter guns every month. Its equipment includes not only the elaborate finishing machinery, but also a shop capable of heat-treating and rough-machining 200 sets of black forgings for the gun every month. This plant alone can produce 75’s to keep pace with the needs of a great army, including its battle wastage, until a new gun industry can come into existence. All the buildings are new steel and concrete structures. The plant was built on twelve and a half acres of ground at Rochester during the war by the Symington-Anderson Company for the Government. This site is now leased by the Government. Its purchase would guarantee the continued existence of this important military asset.

The Rochester plant is held entirely in ordinary: machinery slushed in grease and boxed, and materials at hand in every department ready for machining, but watchmen the only occupants of the buildings. Not the least important part of the plant’s equipment is a book containing a detailed mechanical description of every one of the 521 manufacturing operations in the production of a 75-millimeter gun, and including even a chart showing the correct organization of the working forces at the plant. Even such complete plans, however, cannot be made to include the small kinks and short cuts of shop practice, which must be developed and learned by actual experience at the machines. Any future force of plant operatives, therefore, would have to learn the obscure secrets of manufacture before the plant could reach great efficiency.

At the Erie Howitzer Plant a similar procedure was followed. Here, on eleven acres of what had been vacant ground in August, 1917, the American Brake Shoe & Foundry Company six months later turned out finished 155-millimeter howitzers and reached a productive capacity of twelve howitzers daily before the armistice. The plant stands to-day as a complete gun factory, although all its equipment is greased and housed up, and its bays echo only to the steps of watchmen. While it was selected chiefly to be the stand-by plant for the production of 155-millimeter howitzers, at the shop has been concentrated the machinery and tooling used by the Northwestern Ordnance Company to produce 4.7-inch guns at its war plant at Madison, Wisconsin. This machinery had a capacity of four such guns daily. The howitzer shop and the gun shop occupy separate buildings. In the third building has been installed machinery for producing shell for 155-millimeter guns.

The machinery set up at Erie is designed to allow for increases in the powers of the two weapons to be made there. The howitzer can be increased in length (thereby increasing its range), and the 4.7-inch gun can be increased to 5 inches in caliber, without requiring fundamental changes in the machinery.

The present industrial position of the United States with respect to the manufacture of mobile field artillery may be seen in the following tabular summing up of the preceding paragraphs:

These fine weapons, all but one of which were designed by the French, the builders of the finest field artillery known, and manufactured only in France before the war, would be useless without recuperators, the recoil-absorbing mechanisms which make modern quick firing possible. Along with the guns there came to us the designs for the four French hydropneumatic recuperators. The French hesitated in the beginning about giving us their recuperator plans—not because they did not desire us to have the best in artillery, but because they thought, with much justification, that we should never be able to build them in time to be of service in the World War, although it was possible that after the war, by long and determined effort, we might be able to train mechanics who could make them. Only the sudden termination of the war, however, kept American-built French recuperators from serving at the front, for every one was successfully produced in this country before the armistice, including a single specimen of the perplexing 75-millimeter recuperator. Three immense, specially equipped plants and two government arsenals produced them.

Millions of dollars were spent in preparing to build French recuperators. The Singer Manufacturing Company built a great plant at Elizabethport, New Jersey, to make 75-millimeter recuperators. The Rock Island Arsenal equipped a new department to build this same mechanism. Dodge Brothers spent $11,000,000 on an immense plant at Detroit for the manufacture of the recuperators for 155-millimeter guns and howitzers, separate designs, and separate manufacturing propositions. The fourth type, the 240, was put in production at a plant equipped for the purpose at Chicago by the Otis Elevator Company. Only one of the mechanisms, the 155-millimeter howitzer recuperator, reached the stage of quantity production before the armistice. For the millions spent on the others the Government had only the experience and a quantity of forgings and semi-finished recuperators possessing only scrap value as they existed on the day of the armistice. Therefore the Ordnance Department did not stop this vital production at once after the armistice.

The Singer Company was working on orders for 2,500 75-millimeter recuperators. Although it had not succeeded in turning out a single acceptable recuperator by November 11, 1918, its processes had been refined almost to the point where they could begin producing these beautiful pieces of metallic sculpture in quantity. The Willys-Overland Company had built about 300 carriages for the French 75 by the date of the armistice, and it was decided to allow the Singer Company to build recuperators for these carriages and an additional 450 as a reserve. Considerations of economy later held the Singer Company to a total production of 247 recuperators, resulting in a shortage as compared with the carriages.

Meanwhile, be it remembered, the Rock Island Arsenal was working on 75-millimeter recuperators. It was decided to retain the recuperator department as an active branch of the arsenal. The arsenal was a little ahead of the Singer Company in the development, for it had actually produced an acceptable recuperator before the armistice; and it had 542 others in process in the shop. The arsenal’s production proper was therefore limited to this number, but the incomplete units from Elizabethport were later transferred to Rock Island, and the arsenal eventually completed 555 75-millimeter recuperators before closing down the department. These were pronounced to be in every way the equal of the French product.

The War Department provided no arsenal facilities for the production of recuperators for the 155-millimeter guns and howitzers, but centered its entire program for both mechanisms in the Dodge plant at Detroit. After the armistice it was first decided to retain the Dodge factory as a stand-by recuperator plant. All machinery and materials were protected against deterioration, and the plant, under guard, was added to the arsenal system, ranking as a subsidiary to the Rock Island Arsenal. Later the Dodge plant was sold, and nearly half of its machinery was moved to Rock Island.

The plan of artillery demobilization and industrial preparedness in this direction is now evident. Watertown Arsenal is the development center for the raw materials of artillery manufacture. Watervliet Arsenal, with its stand-by plants at Rochester and Erie, is the gun-producing center. Rock Island Arsenal is the center for gun carriages and recuperators.

One exception to this scheme is to be noted. The war-time producers of the 240-millimeter recuperators were two—the Otis Elevator Company at Chicago and the Watertown Arsenal. The Otis plant, originally having orders for 1,000 recuperators, was ordered to finish 250 of them after the armistice. Thereafter some of its machinery was transferred and stored at the Watertown Arsenal, which thus remains as the manufacturing center for this heavy mechanism.

There was no need for the Ordnance Department during the demobilization to exercise so much care looking to the future production of artillery carriages, and for the reason mentioned, that the manufacture of carriages was easier than the manufacture of guns and recuperators. Carriages can be produced with machinery essentially the same as that used in making motor trucks, street cars, and other heavy vehicles. Consequently, the War Department contented itself with reserving enough machinery to equip at Rock Island Arsenal a model carriage-building department large enough to maintain the existing reserves of artillery and to experiment with new designs. This plant can now manufacture every month one hundred carriages for the lighter field artillery—for the 75’s, the 4.7’s, and the 155’s, both howitzers and guns. In addition, at Rock Island have been concentrated jigs, fixtures, gauges, and special tools used by the war factories, this equipment being boxed, catalogued, and ready for instant shipment to commercial factories that may be called upon to build artillery carriages in a hurry. No machine tools used in carriage building, however, have been retained.

The same economic, military, and business reasons that influenced the post-armistice production of guns and recuperators, controlled also the closing down of the carriage plants. There was a considerable production of field artillery carriages after the immediate military need for them had passed.

The artillery war orders called for the production of about 20,000 complete units, a unit being a gun, recuperator, carriage, and accompanying limbers and caissons. The total production attributable to the war was 6,663 complete units, produced about half before the armistice and half afterwards. The value of this matériel, together with the semi-finished components retained, was about $300,000,000.

After the armistice the General Staff adopted the policy that in the demobilization sufficient mobile field artillery should be retained to equip an army of twenty divisions—800,000 men—with reserves to take care of battle wastage over a period of six months, during which interval a new artillery industry would be brought into existence. It is interesting to note how completely the Ordnance Department met this policy. Including the 6,000 field guns brought back by the American Expeditionary Forces (this figure not including captured matériel), the Army now has an equipment of about 10,000 artillery units.7 The staff plan indicates 2,583 as the proper number of 75-millimeter guns to be in reserve: the Army actually possesses 6,000. The projected army of twenty divisions needs 986 155-millimeter howitzers: the War Department owns 2,171. The projected force should have 976 155-millimeter guns: the Army to-day owns 993. These liberal margins obtain throughout the range of mobile field guns.

On the theory (and it is a correct theory) that all the money put into artillery before the armistice should be charged off as part of the cost of victory, the post-armistice production of field artillery was a prudent transaction for the War Department. By spending $6,000,000 on the completion of 75-millimeter matériel after the armistice, the Government obtained property worth over $14,500,000. By spending $11,000,000 in the 155-millimeter gun project after the armistice, the Government secured artillery worth $18,000,000. By spending $9,000,000 for 155-millimeter howitzers after the armistice, the Government obtained matériel valued at $15,000,000.

The storage of the vast reserves of field artillery presented a special problem to the Ordnance Department after the armistice. Not only the guns themselves, but also the accessory vehicles, had to be stored, and the latter outnumbered the guns several times. For example, the American factories built 18,000 caissons and 20,000 caisson limbers for 75-millimeter guns alone, and accessory vehicles in like proportions were brought back from France by the A. E. F. It required about 5,000,000 square feet of storage space to house all the matériel. The Rock Island Arsenal was selected as the storage center for field artillery, augmented by storage facilities created at the Savanna Proving Ground in Illinois, the Erie Proving Ground in Ohio, and the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. Some of the artillery was stored at Raritan Arsenal in New Jersey and at Fort D. A. Russell in Wyoming. For storing the artillery the Ordnance Department used brick warehouses and also portable steel storehouses built originally to protect the reserve American artillery in France. The Ordnance Department retained a complete engineering collection of the captured enemy artillery, one example of every type, and this has been set up as an exhibit at Aberdeen. The collection includes a complete unit of the famous German 42-centimeter howitzer used against the fortifications of Liège and Verdun.

In demobilizing the industry which was producing our railway artillery, the Ordnance Department again availed itself of the opportunity to provide for the future defense of the United States; and in this branch of war industry, too, we find the same tapering-off process after the armistice, the completion of some materials which were nearing completion at the time of the armistice, and the retention of machinery to provide for a possible future industry. As a result of these measures, the Atlantic seaboard is now defended by a system of powerful guns mounted on railway cars and capable of being moved on the regular railroad tracks, supplemented by new tracks laid both during and since the war by the Coast Artillery Corps, to any point which may be in need of defense. Before 1917 all our coast-defense guns were mounted on fixed emplacements at the forts. Camp Abraham Eustis, which sprang into existence during the war as the embarkation camp for artillery at Newport News, has been turned over permanently to the Coast Artillery Corps and is now the headquarters for the Coast Artillery Railway Brigade. Fortunately the railway units nearest completion on the day of the armistice were those best suited for use along the seacoast.

The project to build railway artillery, it should be understood, was one of producing mounts for guns most of which were already in existence. These guns came principally from the fixed mounts in the coastal defenses, but some of them from the Navy and other sources. The guns ranged in size from the 7-inch rifles, procured from the Navy, to 16-inch howitzers, one of which had been built experimentally by the Ordnance Department before 1917. Two or three of the railway projects—such as that of the 7-inch navy guns and that of the three 12-inch guns originally manufactured for Chile, but commandeered at the gun plant by the United States—were complete on the day of the armistice. When the Ordnance Department faced the task of terminating the industry, there were eight incomplete projects in railway artillery. Two were canceled outright; in three others partial production after the armistice was permitted; and the final three were carried through completely.

One of the projects completed after the armistice was that providing for railway mounts for forty-seven 8-inch, 35 calibers, seacoast rifles. The two contractors—the Morgan Engineering Company of Alliance, Ohio, and the Harrisburg Manufacturing & Boiler Company of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania—had built eighteen complete units, each consisting of a gun car and numerous accessory ammunition and repair cars, a whole train in itself, and had manufactured all the parts for the rest. These parts were ordered assembled. This purely American mount possesses the advantage of permitting the gun to fire at any angle, the mount revolving upon a barbette carriage, and the disadvantage that in traveling on narrow-gauge track (such as is being laid at isolated places along the coast) its gun must be transferred to a special gun car—a transfer, however, quickly effected by the machinery which the gun train itself carries. Seventy-seven ammunition cars for these guns, built as they were for operation in French railway trains and therefore useless in this country, were sold to the French Government for about $250,000, a price which covered every cent spent in their production.

A second project completed after the armistice placed twelve 12-inch guns on French Batignolle railway mounts. This mount absorbs the gun recoil in an enormous hydropneumatic recuperator, permitting rapid fire and the fastening of the gun car to the track to avoid any retrograde movement. (Several of the railway mounts slid backward and had to be restored to aim after each shot.) The 12-inch mount, however, permits only a small traverse swing to the gun, which, for correct aiming, has, therefore, to run upon curved tracks, or epis, as they are called. These mounts were built by the Marion Steam Shovel Company with machinery partly the property of the Government. At the completion of the work this machinery was shipped to the Watertown Arsenal.

The final completed project was the mounting of ninety 12-inch mortars (seacoast weapons) upon railway cars. The Morgan Engineering Company built a special plant costing $3,500,000 for this one job, providing mount-building capacity twelve times that of the Watertown Arsenal before 1917—and that arsenal had been the Army’s sole source of big-gun mounts. On November 11, 1918, this plant had manufactured all the parts for all ninety mounts, and the assembling of these mounts was therefore ordered. About 100 ammunition cars of French design were sold to the French Government for about $350,000, thus returning most of the money put into them. The Alliance plant itself was too large and expensive to maintain as a stand-by plant; and, after shipping most of the special-purpose machinery to the Watertown Arsenal, the Ordnance Department disposed of the building to a private buyer.8

The armistice cut short the joint Franco-American project to mount thirty-six American seacoast 10-inch guns upon the Schneider railway mount, a French design, America to produce the parts for the mounts and France to assemble them. Four complete sets of parts had been sent to France before the armistice. The contractors were three: the Harrisburg Manufacturing & Boiler Company (mounts), the Pullman Car Company (trucks for the gun cars), and the American Car & Foundry Company (ammunition cars). The weapon is not ideal for coastal defense, because the mount allows no traverse aiming, and the car therefore must be used on curved track. The contractors were permitted to finish eighteen of these mounts in all.

A gigantic piece of ordnance was the 16-inch howitzer mounted on a railway truck during the war. In a project to build sixty-one such weapons by the year 1920 the Government spent $6,000,000 on a special plant at the mill of the Midvale Steel Company near Philadelphia. The whole project was abandoned after the armistice, but one building had been erected and the structural steel for the rest of the plant was on the ground. Meanwhile the toolmakers of the country were working on the vast projected manufacturing equipment for this plant; and a small amount of this machinery was completed after the armistice and sent to Watervliet and Watertown arsenals.

The Neville Island Gun Plant was projected in 1918 as a source of supply for guns of the largest size for mounting upon railway cars. The plant, which was to cost $150,000,000, a sum which would have made it by far the largest gun plant in the world, was expected to manufacture over 450 guns of the biggest sizes during 1919 and 1920—more railway guns than the Germans owned altogether. The enterprise, which was entirely abandoned after the armistice, cost the Government about $9,000,000. Every ordnance officer, however, believes that the mere project, actively started, had its effect in ending the war by depressing the enemy morale. The war cost us about $50,000,000 a day. If, therefore, the Neville project shortened the war by as much as three days, it wrote off its entire estimated cost.

The project, immature though it was when terminated, placed in the war reserves certain steel-working machinery of the heaviest sort. One 6,500-ton forging press, costing $500,000, was completed and turned over to the Navy Department for installation in the navy gun-forging plant at Charleston, West Virginia. Certain costly shell-making machinery was completed after the armistice and either sold to private buyers (at favorable prices, as compared with what the Ordnance Department could have obtained for the unfinished machines) or else stored at the Watertown Arsenal.

Watertown has thus become the producing center for railway artillery of the future. The liquidation of war industry enormously expanded that institution. Before 1917 the government investment in the Watertown Arsenal was less than $4,000,000. After the concentration there of the special-purpose gunmaking machinery acquired by the Government during the war, the arsenal was worth, at a conservative valuation, $20,000,000.