The army behind the army

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.