Part 16

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.