Chapter III: General Rule (4)

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The chief function of the Quartermaster Corps might be described, I suppose, as spending. It was, in fact, barring the Ordnance Department, the greatest spending agency in America, if not in the world, during the war. Not many persons are aware, however, I imagine, that it has a division whose sole purpose is saving. I refer to the Salvage Division. This was the only organization in the army which turned waste into profit. It was a ragpicker, a garbage-collector, a junk-dealer, and an ole-clothes man combined. While certain departments of the government seized on the great emergency to spend money like a drunken sailor, as the politicians put it, the Salvage Service was as systematic a saver as the late Russell Sage. And, like that famous financier, it was able to show something for its savings—to be exact, something over $100,000,000. It had a perfect passion for economy. It saved everything, from the pieces clipped from a soldier’s overcoat when it was shortened to the food which he left on his plate. Nothing was too large or too small to escape it. Indeed, the members of the Salvage Service should have adopted for their shoulder-badge a design showing an ever-open eye. If a locomotive was utterly demolished in a railway wreck the men of the Salvage Service appeared on the scene almost before the wheels had stopped turning and collected the splintered remnants. If a soldier tossed a pair of worn-out socks into the garbage-barrel, the Salvage Service fished them out and used them for something or other. In France it saved and sorted the millions of sand-bags which lined the parapets of the trenches; it untangled and rerolled for future use the millions of feet of twisted, rusted barbed wire which formed the entanglements in front of the trenches; it gathered and sorted and sent back for reloading the empty shells from the field-guns; it fumigated and cleaned and pressed the soldiers’ uniforms; it washed their shirts and socks and underwear; it mended their shoes; it transformed their obsolete campaign hats into felt slippers, and both in this country and abroad it collected the waste from the mess-tables as well as introducing various methods of food-saving; it operated hundreds of camp and mobile laundries, where for a dollar a month a soldier could have washed all the clothing he wished; it ran farms and truck-gardens at the camps and cantonments in order to supply the troops with fresh vegetables; it maintained printing-shops, wagon-repair shops, carpentry-shops, and paint-shops, and just as the Treasury Department appealed to the country to “Buy! Buy! Buy!” so the Salvage Service, by means of posters and placards, appealed to the army to “Save! Save! Save!”

In the happy, careless, easy-going days before the war, the question of repairing the worn shoes and clothing of the soldiers was not considered of sufficient importance to merit even passing attention from the War Department. The army was small, material was plentiful, and the clothing belonged to the soldier. The government issued a man a uniform and out of his pay required him to keep it clean and in repair; if his clothing did not present a neat appearance, he received a reprimand or a court martial. When his shoes wore out he had to have them mended at his own expense—all out of the munificent salary of fifteen dollars a month! But under the new system, introduced at the beginning of the war, the soldier’s clothing is the property of the government, and the government undertakes to keep it clean and in repair. And that is where the work of the Salvage Service comes in.

“The salvage service had a perfect passion for economy.”]

The salvage service fumigated, cleaned, pressed the soldiers’ uniforms, washed their shirts, socks, and underwear. It mended shoes and transformed campaign hats into felt slippers.

_Photograph by Signal Corps, U. S. A._]

The weary men returning from the trenches found the delousing and fumigating stations set up and awaiting them.]

Each of these units can wash the clothing of 10,000 men, fresh from the trenches, weekly.

_Photograph by Signal Corps, U. S. A._]

Within five months after its entry into the war the United States, profiting by the experience of the Allies, took steps toward the organization of a branch of the army which would devote itself to the conservation and reclamation of articles and materials which would otherwise be wasted. Pursuant to this policy there was established in October, 1917, the Conservation Branch of the Supplies Division of the Quartermaster-General’s Office with a personnel of two officers and a stenographer. Within less than a year this little nucleus had expanded into the huge Salvage Division of the Office of the Director of Purchase and Storage, with 500 officers, 20,000 enlisted men, and 2,000 civilian employees. The work of this division has consisted, generally speaking, in cleaning, laundering, repairing, renovating, and otherwise looking after the uniform and equipment of the American soldier, and in those cases where the uniform or equipment was too badly damaged to be worth repairing, the service has devised means of using the sound material for other purposes. During the six months beginning April 1, 1918, the service salvaged nearly 9,250,000 articles of clothing and equipment. The value of these articles when new was something over $41,000,000. After their repair it is estimated that their value was in the neighborhood of $29,000,000. The total cost of repair was a little more than $2,500,000, leaving a net saving due to this salvage operation of about $23,500,000. Quite a tidy sum. During four months of 1918 the Salvage Service collected approximately 43,000,000 pounds of junk, including old metals, iron, rubber, cotton and woollen rags, rope, paper, leather, and horsehair. About 3,000,000 pounds of this material, having an estimated value of $769,000, was reissued for army use, while 19,000,000 pounds was sold for $508,000, leaving 23,000,000 pounds still to be disposed of. Had it not been for the Salvage Service, practically all this would have gone to waste. In addition this division collected a great quantity of lumber, mostly odds and ends, of which $25,000 worth was reissued for army use and $475,000 worth was sold, leaving approximately 1,750,000 board feet on hand. From May to November, 1918, the Salvage Division collected and sold $300,000 worth of garbage, and nearly $200,000 worth of manure and condemned hay and straw, to say nothing of dead animals to the value of $5,000, thus netting upward of $500,000 from the swill-pail, the manure-pile, and the bone-yard alone! The American soldier likes to sit down to his meals with a heaping plate before him, and as he rarely eats everything on his plate, an enormous amount of perfectly good material finds its way to the garbage-barrel. It is estimated that prior to July, 1918, every man in the camps in the United States wasted approximately two pounds of food per day in this fashion. Then the machinery of the Salvage Service was set in operation, it being estimated that in five months, on the basis of 1,000,000 men, it saved _nearly a quarter of a billion pounds of foodstuffs_.

Another activity of the Salvage Corps was the operation of hundreds of camp and mobile laundries. When war was declared the government owned fourteen small steam-laundries which provided for the needs of the few hundred men stationed at the posts where they were located. But with the declaration of war and the concentration of hundreds of thousands of men in the various cantonments, the laundry question assumed such serious proportions that nineteen cantonment laundries were hastily erected and placed in operation. The urgent need for these laundries is illustrated by the fact that on September 1, 1918, nearly 6,000,000 pieces of clothing were awaiting laundering. Quite a wash-basket, wasn’t it?

The Mobile Laundry Unit was one of the novelties introduced by the Great War. Instead of the soldiers being compelled to take their soiled clothing to the laundry, the laundry came to them. No matter how remote the town in which their rest billets might be located, no matter how exposed it might be to the fire of the enemy’s long-range guns, the weary men, returning from the trenches, found the mobile laundry set up and awaiting them. Each unit consists of a large steam-tractor and four trailers. When erected for operation the trailers form a room thirty feet long and twenty-eight feet wide, with power provided from outside by the tractor. The trailers contain two large washing-machines, two extractors, a drying tumbler, hot and cold water tanks, a pump to lift water from wells and streams, a soap-tank, and a dynamo for electric lighting. Each of these units, by operating twenty-four hours a day, can wash the clothing of ten thousand men, fresh from the trenches, weekly. So rapidly and systematically was the work done that when the men left the “wash-up” and “delousing” stations, after having rid themselves of the filth and vermin acquired at the front, they found clean clothing awaiting them. And clean clothing—and this I say from experience—means more to the soldier than anything save a bath and food.

The Salvage Service has been one of the least advertised, as it has been one of the most efficient, branches of the army. Probably not one out of a thousand readers of this book was previously aware of its existence. Yet during the twelve months of 1918 it saved to the government, either in articles repaired and reissued or in materials saved and sold, _one hundred and one millions of dollars_. (If this does not impress you, let me remind you that the entire appropriation for the support of the army for 1898—the year of the Spanish-American War—was only a little over $70,000,000.) It has developed what was formerly a liability into a tremendous asset. It has conserved untold quantities of raw materials at a time when those materials were most vitally needed and were most difficult to obtain. By again and again repairing and using worn-out clothing and equipment and thereby permitting the shipment of vital necessities, it saved thousands of tons of shipping at a time when every ton counted.

If, in this impressionistic sketch of the activities of the Salvage Service, and of its parent, the Quartermaster Corps, I seem to have indulged too freely in the use of figures, it is because those figures are of vital concern to _you_. They represent _your_ dollars, Mr. Reader; they show where the money from _your_ Liberty Bonds has gone.

V

ORDNANCE

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.

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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.

Huge howitzers, streaked like zebras and spotted like giraffes, point their ugly snouts toward the sky.]

Camouflaged monsters on railway mounts which can drop a ton of explosives on a given target twenty miles away.]

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.

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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.”

The Ordnance Department effected the most complete mobilization of science and industry the world has ever seen.]

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.