Photo by Signal Corps
HOSPITAL TRAIN IN UNITED STATES
CHAPTER X
ORDNANCE DEMOBILIZATION
When the average man speaks of munitions, he means ordnance and, even more specifically, guns and ammunition. In this he is nearly half right. Technically, the word “munitions” includes army supplies of all sorts, even to candy and cigarettes, and in this sense the word is used in these volumes; but of the total war business transacted for the Army, the procurement of ordnance supplies constituted 42 per cent. Ordnance was by far the largest class of munitions. Four thousand American manufacturing plants worked on ordnance contracts during the war. Nearly 3,000,000 men labored in these mills.
The mere size of the war ordnance industry would have made the problem of its demobilization a great one, but it was also complicated with peculiar difficulties. The production of most ordnance materials differed radically from that of any articles known in normal American industry. The Quartermaster Department procured for the Army food, clothing, shoes, hand tools, and many other supplies which, though they were frequently of special design, nevertheless were not much unlike the sorts of commodities with which the contractors were already familiar. The Engineer Corps used many materials commonly employed in the peaceful pursuits. Outside of ordnance, the manufacture of aircraft alone took our industries into virgin fields of endeavor.
Therefore, those factories which were making for the Army products essentially similar to products consumed by the civilian population, were ready after the armistice to resume their places in normal commerce with slight internal adjustment. But the ordnance factories—they were a different story. In ordnance production the war had witnessed some factory conversions of the most violent sort. Manufacturers of printing presses built gun carriages of new and difficult design; makers of sewing machines and automobiles undertook the difficult task of producing hydropneumatic recuperators for absorbing the recoil of field guns; producers of typewriters and water meters manufactured time fuses for shell; women’s cloak factories sewed silk powder bags; a phonograph maker produced aërial bomb sights; and one producer turned from the modern business of making corsets and took up the ancient occupation of tentmaker. For nearly all these factories the ordnance contracts virtually implied the physical reëquipment of their plants for quite different manufacturing processes. For them, too, demobilization meant a not less severe dislocation of equipment and processes in changing back again to their former work.
It was the problem of the Ordnance Department after the armistice to manage the liquidation of its great war business—to halt the work, to dispose of raw materials and materials left half completed when the wheels stopped, to do something with the special factories and even the complete towns built by the Government or for the Government in the prosecution of the war enterprise, to recoup the millions advanced to finance the ordnance producers, and finally to settle with cash the obligations of the Government to the producers incurred when the contracts were terminated.
Although in size and intricacy this problem was appalling, there was no hesitation in setting about solving it, no period when the enterprise hung in neutral, going neither forward nor backward. Ordnance work was reaching new peaks of production when the Ordnance Department in Washington took the first steps toward its dismemberment. In late October, 1918, when the Argonne-Meuse offensive was striking home and it was becoming evident that the curtain might at any time fall in the theatre of war, the chief ordnance officers held a secret meeting one Sunday afternoon in Washington and for the first time considered the possible demobilization. At this meeting the Chief of Ordnance appointed a commission to make a rapid study of the organization of the Ordnance Department to determine whether that organization was fitted to turn without change to the stoppage of work and the restoration of the industry to its former basis. This same commission later became the Ordnance Claims Board, the agency which supervised the entire demobilization of ordnance industry. It was, of course, like all the other bureau claims boards, subsidiary to the War Department Claims Board. The Ordnance Claims Board was formally created by order on November 2, and thus had been in existence for nine days when the armistice was signed. Its chief was Brigadier General W. S. Peirce. Its members were Colonel R. P. Lamont, who was president of the American Steel Foundries Corporation before and after his military service in the World War; Colonel G. H. Stewart, an ordnance officer of the Regular Army; Lieutenant Colonel M. F. Briggs, counselor at law, New York; Lieutenant Colonel F. R. Ayer, recorder of the Eastern Manufacturing Company, of Bangor, Maine; and Mr. Waldo H. Marshall, president of the American Locomotive Company, New York.
This board found an existing organization—the field administrations of the thirteen ordnance manufacturing districts—admirably adapted to the work of closing up the war business. The district organizations had been created to give the Ordnance Department a mechanism by which it could keep in immediate contact with the process of manufacture without congesting the headquarters in Washington to the point where competent management became impossible. They had been likened roughly to the fire exits of a theatre, distributed to prevent crowding at the front doors. In the district organizations were employed 33,000 civilians, uniformed officers, and enlisted men, and through this great force the office in Washington kept in as intimate touch with the work, the trials, and the accomplishments of its producers as if it had been employing the services of but a single factory. The ordnance field men knew the war factories as they knew their own offices. They were acquainted with the contractors, with the subcontractors, with the shop superintendents and foremen, and often with the workmen themselves. Obviously they were qualified to judge at what rate production could be stopped without injury to the industry or its workmen and to determine the settlement adjustments that would be fair to both sides.