One exception to this scheme is to be noted. The war-time producers of the 240-millimeter recuperators were two—the Otis Elevator Company at Chicago and the Watertown Arsenal. The Otis plant, originally having orders for 1,000 recuperators, was ordered to finish 250 of them after the armistice. Thereafter some of its machinery was transferred and stored at the Watertown Arsenal, which thus remains as the manufacturing center for this heavy mechanism.
There was no need for the Ordnance Department during the demobilization to exercise so much care looking to the future production of artillery carriages, and for the reason mentioned, that the manufacture of carriages was easier than the manufacture of guns and recuperators. Carriages can be produced with machinery essentially the same as that used in making motor trucks, street cars, and other heavy vehicles. Consequently, the War Department contented itself with reserving enough machinery to equip at Rock Island Arsenal a model carriage-building department large enough to maintain the existing reserves of artillery and to experiment with new designs. This plant can now manufacture every month one hundred carriages for the lighter field artillery—for the 75’s, the 4.7’s, and the 155’s, both howitzers and guns. In addition, at Rock Island have been concentrated jigs, fixtures, gauges, and special tools used by the war factories, this equipment being boxed, catalogued, and ready for instant shipment to commercial factories that may be called upon to build artillery carriages in a hurry. No machine tools used in carriage building, however, have been retained.
The same economic, military, and business reasons that influenced the post-armistice production of guns and recuperators, controlled also the closing down of the carriage plants. There was a considerable production of field artillery carriages after the immediate military need for them had passed.
The artillery war orders called for the production of about 20,000 complete units, a unit being a gun, recuperator, carriage, and accompanying limbers and caissons. The total production attributable to the war was 6,663 complete units, produced about half before the armistice and half afterwards. The value of this matériel, together with the semi-finished components retained, was about $300,000,000.
After the armistice the General Staff adopted the policy that in the demobilization sufficient mobile field artillery should be retained to equip an army of twenty divisions—800,000 men—with reserves to take care of battle wastage over a period of six months, during which interval a new artillery industry would be brought into existence. It is interesting to note how completely the Ordnance Department met this policy. Including the 6,000 field guns brought back by the American Expeditionary Forces (this figure not including captured matériel), the Army now has an equipment of about 10,000 artillery units.[7] The staff plan indicates 2,583 as the proper number of 75-millimeter guns to be in reserve: the Army actually possesses 6,000. The projected army of twenty divisions needs 986 155-millimeter howitzers: the War Department owns 2,171. The projected force should have 976 155-millimeter guns: the Army to-day owns 993. These liberal margins obtain throughout the range of mobile field guns.
On the theory (and it is a correct theory) that all the money put into artillery before the armistice should be charged off as part of the cost of victory, the post-armistice production of field artillery was a prudent transaction for the War Department. By spending $6,000,000 on the completion of 75-millimeter matériel after the armistice, the Government obtained property worth over $14,500,000. By spending $11,000,000 in the 155-millimeter gun project after the armistice, the Government secured artillery worth $18,000,000. By spending $9,000,000 for 155-millimeter howitzers after the armistice, the Government obtained matériel valued at $15,000,000.
The storage of the vast reserves of field artillery presented a special problem to the Ordnance Department after the armistice. Not only the guns themselves, but also the accessory vehicles, had to be stored, and the latter outnumbered the guns several times. For example, the American factories built 18,000 caissons and 20,000 caisson limbers for 75-millimeter guns alone, and accessory vehicles in like proportions were brought back from France by the A. E. F. It required about 5,000,000 square feet of storage space to house all the matériel. The Rock Island Arsenal was selected as the storage center for field artillery, augmented by storage facilities created at the Savanna Proving Ground in Illinois, the Erie Proving Ground in Ohio, and the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. Some of the artillery was stored at Raritan Arsenal in New Jersey and at Fort D. A. Russell in Wyoming. For storing the artillery the Ordnance Department used brick warehouses and also portable steel storehouses built originally to protect the reserve American artillery in France. The Ordnance Department retained a complete engineering collection of the captured enemy artillery, one example of every type, and this has been set up as an exhibit at Aberdeen. The collection includes a complete unit of the famous German 42-centimeter howitzer used against the fortifications of Liège and Verdun.
In demobilizing the industry which was producing our railway artillery, the Ordnance Department again availed itself of the opportunity to provide for the future defense of the United States; and in this branch of war industry, too, we find the same tapering-off process after the armistice, the completion of some materials which were nearing completion at the time of the armistice, and the retention of machinery to provide for a possible future industry. As a result of these measures, the Atlantic seaboard is now defended by a system of powerful guns mounted on railway cars and capable of being moved on the regular railroad tracks, supplemented by new tracks laid both during and since the war by the Coast Artillery Corps, to any point which may be in need of defense. Before 1917 all our coast-defense guns were mounted on fixed emplacements at the forts. Camp Abraham Eustis, which sprang into existence during the war as the embarkation camp for artillery at Newport News, has been turned over permanently to the Coast Artillery Corps and is now the headquarters for the Coast Artillery Railway Brigade. Fortunately the railway units nearest completion on the day of the armistice were those best suited for use along the seacoast.
The project to build railway artillery, it should be understood, was one of producing mounts for guns most of which were already in existence. These guns came principally from the fixed mounts in the coastal defenses, but some of them from the Navy and other sources. The guns ranged in size from the 7-inch rifles, procured from the Navy, to 16-inch howitzers, one of which had been built experimentally by the Ordnance Department before 1917. Two or three of the railway projects—such as that of the 7-inch navy guns and that of the three 12-inch guns originally manufactured for Chile, but commandeered at the gun plant by the United States—were complete on the day of the armistice. When the Ordnance Department faced the task of terminating the industry, there were eight incomplete projects in railway artillery. Two were canceled outright; in three others partial production after the armistice was permitted; and the final three were carried through completely.
One of the projects completed after the armistice was that providing for railway mounts for forty-seven 8-inch, 35 calibers, seacoast rifles. The two contractors—the Morgan Engineering Company of Alliance, Ohio, and the Harrisburg Manufacturing & Boiler Company of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania—had built eighteen complete units, each consisting of a gun car and numerous accessory ammunition and repair cars, a whole train in itself, and had manufactured all the parts for the rest. These parts were ordered assembled. This purely American mount possesses the advantage of permitting the gun to fire at any angle, the mount revolving upon a barbette carriage, and the disadvantage that in traveling on narrow-gauge track (such as is being laid at isolated places along the coast) its gun must be transferred to a special gun car—a transfer, however, quickly effected by the machinery which the gun train itself carries. Seventy-seven ammunition cars for these guns, built as they were for operation in French railway trains and therefore useless in this country, were sold to the French Government for about $250,000, a price which covered every cent spent in their production.