By August 1 the new design had been developed on paper and much of the new machinery required had been produced and installed in the plants, which were ready to go ahead immediately with the production. It is a tribute to the patriotism of the manufacturers who lost time and money by this change that little complaint was heard from them by the Government.
In the production of hand grenades the most difficult element of manufacture and the item that might have held up the delivery of completed mechanisms was the Bouchon assembly. There was an abundant foundry capacity in the United States for the production of gray-iron castings for grenade bodies, and so this part of the program gave no anxiety. The Bouchon assembly threatened to be the choke point. In order to assure the success of defensive-grenade production, the Precision Castings Co. of Syracuse, N. Y., and the Doehler Die Castings Co. of Toledo, Ohio, and Brooklyn, N. Y., worked their plants 24 hours a day until they had built up a reserve of Bouchons and screw plugs and removed all anxiety from that source. The total production of Bouchons eventually reached the figure 64,600,000.
The first thought of the Ordnance Department was to produce grenades by the assembling and quantitative method; that is, by the production of parts in various plants and the assembling of those parts in other plants. But, due to delay in railway shipments and difficulties due to priorities, it was discovered that this method of manufacture, however adaptable it might be to other items in the ordnance program, was not a good thing in grenade production; and when the war ended the tendency was all in the direction of having the assembly contractors produce their own parts either by purchase from subcontractors or by manufacture in their own plants.
The orders for the redesigned grenades called for the construction of 44,000,000 of them. So rapidly had the manufacturers been able to reach quantity production this time that a daily rate of 250,000 to 300,000 was attained by November 11, 1918, and by December 6, less than a month after the fighting stopped, the factories had turned out 21,054,339 defensive grenades.
It should be remembered that the great effort in ordnance production in this country was directed toward the American offensive expected on a tremendous scale in the spring of 1919. Had the war continued the fragmentation grenade program, in spite of the delays encountered in its development, would have produced a sufficient quantity of these weapons.
Special consideration is due the following-named firms for their efforts in developing the production of defensive grenades:
- Caskey-Dupree Co., Marietta, Ohio.
- Spacke Machine & Tool Co., Indianapolis, Ind.
- Stewart-Warner Speedometer Co., Chicago, Ill.
- Miami Cycle & Manufacturing Co., Middletown, Ohio.
- American Radiator Co., Buffalo, N. Y.
- International Harvester Co., Chicago, Ill.
- Doehler Die Castings Co., Brooklyn, N. Y.
- Precision Castings Co., Syracuse, N. Y.
The American offensive grenade was largely the production of the Single Service Package Corporation of New York, both in the development of its design and in its manufacture. The body of this grenade was built of laminated paper spirally wound and waterproofed by being dipped in paraffine. The top of this body was a die casting, into which the firing mechanism was screwed. Practically no changes were made in the design of this weapon from the time it was first produced, and the production record is an excellent one.
Our earliest thought was that we would need some 7,000,000 of these grenades and orders for that quantity of bodies were placed in January and March, 1918, with the Single Service Package Corporation. Then it became necessary to discover factories which could produce the metal caps. The orders for these were first placed with the Acme Die Castings Co. and the National Lead Casting Co. for 3,375,000 castings from each concern. But these companies failed to make satisfactory deliveries, and in May, 1918, a contract for 5,000,000 caps was let to the Doehler Die Castings Co. which reached quantity production in August. After that the Single Service Package Corporation, the chief contractor, forged ahead in its work and on November 11 was producing the bodies for offensive grenades at the rate of 55,000 to 60,000 daily. By December 6, 1918, the Government had accepted 6,179,321 completed bodies. The signing of the armistice brought to an end a project to build 17,599,000 additional grenades of this type.