Photo by Howard E. Coffin
FRENCH AND GERMAN AIRPLANE ENGINES AFTER COMBAT
Photo by Howard E. Coffin
RUINED TANKS NEAR CAMBRAI
General rules and policies could at best serve the field men of the Ordnance Department only as rough guides. Each of the nineteen gun factories supplied its own special problems in demobilization. The process of closing down the factories may be shown by the example of what went on after the armistice at the plant of the Bullard Engineering Works at Bridgeport, Connecticut.
This was a plant producing 155-millimeter guns—the tubes only. The 155, a French weapon, was the highest-powered fieldpiece used by the A. E. F., the railroad guns not being considered to be field guns. The supply of the useful 155 was never equal to the demand. The French factories could not deliver as many as the A. E. F. needed; and, because of the difficulty of producing the recuperator, our own industry did not succeed in turning out a single completely assembled unit before the armistice, although all parts had been successfully produced ready for assembling. Here, then, was an important class of artillery in which a shortage existed, and therefore the Ordnance Department was liberal in allowing production after the armistice.
The Bullard Engineering Works held contracts calling for the production of 1,400 155-millimeter gun tubes. On the first day of the armistice it had delivered forty-five finished tubes, and 500 others were progressing through the plant in various stages of completion. Many of these incomplete units had passed through the difficult shrinking process. Guns are built up in layers of steel, each one heated, superimposed upon the adjoining one, and then shrunk on in various cooling processes, thus putting into the steel strata a compression that enables the gun to sustain tremendous interior pressures without distortion. The ordnance officers looked at the status of work at the Bullard plant and ordered the completion of the 500 units in process, terminating the rest of the great contract.
This action was taken on the eleventh day of the armistice. The company expected to be able to complete the remaining 500 guns in six months, a course that would enable the manufacture to taper off and the gunmakers to find other employment. Two months later it was found that other industry was readily absorbing the excess labor of the gun plant, and therefore another cut was made in the contemplated production, the number of completions ordered being reduced to 262 in number. These were to be finished by April 15, 1919, after which war work at the plant was to cease entirely.