A second project completed after the armistice placed twelve 12-inch guns on French Batignolle railway mounts. This mount absorbs the gun recoil in an enormous hydropneumatic recuperator, permitting rapid fire and the fastening of the gun car to the track to avoid any retrograde movement. (Several of the railway mounts slid backward and had to be restored to aim after each shot.) The 12-inch mount, however, permits only a small traverse swing to the gun, which, for correct aiming, has, therefore, to run upon curved tracks, or epis, as they are called. These mounts were built by the Marion Steam Shovel Company with machinery partly the property of the Government. At the completion of the work this machinery was shipped to the Watertown Arsenal.
The final completed project was the mounting of ninety 12-inch mortars (seacoast weapons) upon railway cars. The Morgan Engineering Company built a special plant costing $3,500,000 for this one job, providing mount-building capacity twelve times that of the Watertown Arsenal before 1917—and that arsenal had been the Army’s sole source of big-gun mounts. On November 11, 1918, this plant had manufactured all the parts for all ninety mounts, and the assembling of these mounts was therefore ordered. About 100 ammunition cars of French design were sold to the French Government for about $350,000, thus returning most of the money put into them. The Alliance plant itself was too large and expensive to maintain as a stand-by plant; and, after shipping most of the special-purpose machinery to the Watertown Arsenal, the Ordnance Department disposed of the building to a private buyer.[8]
The armistice cut short the joint Franco-American project to mount thirty-six American seacoast 10-inch guns upon the Schneider railway mount, a French design, America to produce the parts for the mounts and France to assemble them. Four complete sets of parts had been sent to France before the armistice. The contractors were three: the Harrisburg Manufacturing & Boiler Company (mounts), the Pullman Car Company (trucks for the gun cars), and the American Car & Foundry Company (ammunition cars). The weapon is not ideal for coastal defense, because the mount allows no traverse aiming, and the car therefore must be used on curved track. The contractors were permitted to finish eighteen of these mounts in all.
A gigantic piece of ordnance was the 16-inch howitzer mounted on a railway truck during the war. In a project to build sixty-one such weapons by the year 1920 the Government spent $6,000,000 on a special plant at the mill of the Midvale Steel Company near Philadelphia. The whole project was abandoned after the armistice, but one building had been erected and the structural steel for the rest of the plant was on the ground. Meanwhile the toolmakers of the country were working on the vast projected manufacturing equipment for this plant; and a small amount of this machinery was completed after the armistice and sent to Watervliet and Watertown arsenals.
The Neville Island Gun Plant was projected in 1918 as a source of supply for guns of the largest size for mounting upon railway cars. The plant, which was to cost $150,000,000, a sum which would have made it by far the largest gun plant in the world, was expected to manufacture over 450 guns of the biggest sizes during 1919 and 1920—more railway guns than the Germans owned altogether. The enterprise, which was entirely abandoned after the armistice, cost the Government about $9,000,000. Every ordnance officer, however, believes that the mere project, actively started, had its effect in ending the war by depressing the enemy morale. The war cost us about $50,000,000 a day. If, therefore, the Neville project shortened the war by as much as three days, it wrote off its entire estimated cost.
The project, immature though it was when terminated, placed in the war reserves certain steel-working machinery of the heaviest sort. One 6,500-ton forging press, costing $500,000, was completed and turned over to the Navy Department for installation in the navy gun-forging plant at Charleston, West Virginia. Certain costly shell-making machinery was completed after the armistice and either sold to private buyers (at favorable prices, as compared with what the Ordnance Department could have obtained for the unfinished machines) or else stored at the Watertown Arsenal.
Watertown has thus become the producing center for railway artillery of the future. The liquidation of war industry enormously expanded that institution. Before 1917 the government investment in the Watertown Arsenal was less than $4,000,000. After the concentration there of the special-purpose gunmaking machinery acquired by the Government during the war, the arsenal was worth, at a conservative valuation, $20,000,000.
CHAPTER XII
AMMUNITION AND OTHER ORDNANCE
The armistice found in the United States an enormous industry devoted to the production of ammunition for the artillery. Including its powder-making plants and its plants for the production of the raw materials of powder, its scores of shell-making factories, and its loading establishments, this industry overshadowed, in money invested and operatives employed, even the artillery-manufacturing project. The demobilization of this vast enterprise, therefore, afforded the Ordnance Department one of its major problems after the armistice.
The production of powders, both high-explosive and propellant, in which about 70,000 persons were engaged at the time of the armistice, was terminated in a remarkably brief time. When the armistice was six weeks old all manufacture of high explosives on war contracts had ceased, and two weeks after that the last of the war-time propellant (smokeless) powder was made. This termination left on the hands of the Ordnance Department a considerable amount of special-purpose machinery which had little or no market value. This machinery was therefore retained and stored at various arsenals, particularly at the Frankford and Picatinny arsenals, the permanent army ammunition production centers.