Then those innovations of the great war—the tanks—the 3-ton "whippet," built to escort the infantry waves, the 6-ton tanks, most used of all, and the powerful Anglo-American heavy tanks, each mounting a 37-millimeter cannon and four machine guns.
The war in the air put added demands upon ordnance. It required the stripped machine gun firing cartridges so rapidly that their explosions merged into a single continuous roar, yet each shot so nicely timed that it passed between the flying blades of the propeller. There had to be electric heaters for the gun mechanisms to prevent the oil which lubricated them from becoming congealed in the cold of high altitudes. The airplane guns required armor-piercing bullets for use against armored planes, incendiary bullets to ignite the hydrogen of the enemy's balloon or to fire the gasoline escaping through the wound in the hostile airplane's fuel tank, and tracer bullets to direct the aim of the aerial gunner. Other equipment for the airman included shot counters, to tell him instantly what quantity of ammunition he had on hand, and gun sights, ingeniously contrived to correct his aim automatically for the relative speed and direction of the opposing plane. These were all developments in ordnance brought about by the great war, and in each case they involved problems for the production organization to solve.
Then there were the drop bombs of aerial warfare, of many gradations in weight up to 500 pounds each, these latter experimental ones forecasting the day when bombs weighing 1,600 pounds would be dropped from the sky; then bomb sights to determine the moment when the missile must be dropped in order to hit its target, sights which corrected for the altitude, the wind resistance, and the rate of speed of the airplane; and then mechanisms to suspend the bombs from the plane and to release them at the will of the operator.
The list might be stretched out almost indefinitely—through pyrotechnics, developed by the exigencies in Europe into an elaborate system; through helmets and armor, revivals from medieval times to protect the modern soldier from injury; through the assortment of heavy textiles, which gave the troops their belts, their bandoleers, their haversacks, and their holsters; through canteens, cutlery for the mess in the fields, shotguns, and so on, until there might be set down thousands of items of the list which we know as modern ordnance.
It will be noted that the most important articles in this range are articles of a noncommercial type. In other words, they are not the sort of things that the industry of the country builds in time of peace, nor learns how to build. Many other war functions came naturally to a country skilled in handling food supplies for teeming populations, in solving housing problems for whole cities, and in managing transportation for a hundred million people; there was at hand the requisite ability to conduct war enterprises of such character smoothly and efficiently. Yet there was in the country at the outbreak of war little knowledge of the technique of ordnance production.
The declaration of war found an American Ordnance Department whose entire commissioned personnel consisted of 97 officers. Only 10 of this number were experienced in the design of artillery weapons. The projected army of 5,000,000 men required 11,000 trained officers to handle every phase of ordnance service. While a portion of this production would have to do with the manufacture of articles of a commercial type, such as automobiles, trucks, meat cans, mess equipment, and the like, yet the ratio of 97 to 11,000 gives an indication of the amount of ordnance knowledge possessed by the War Department at the outbreak of war as compared to what it would need to equip the first 5,000,000 men for battle.
The Government could obtain commissary officers from the food industry; it could turn bank tellers into paymasters, or convert builders into construction quartermasters; find transportation officers in the great railway systems, Signal Corps officers in the telegraph companies, or medical officers in professional life. But there was no broad field to which ordnance could turn to find specialized skill available. The best it could do was to go into the heavy manufacturing industry for expert engineers who could later be trained in the special problems of ordnance.
Prior to 1914 there were but six Government arsenals and two large private ordnance works which knew anything about the production of heavy weapons. After 1914, war industry sprang up in the United States, yet in 1917 there were only a score or so of firms engaged in the manufacture of artillery ammunition, big guns, rifles, machine guns, and other important ordnance supplies for the allies. When the armistice was signed nearly 8,000 manufacturing plants in the United States were working on ordnance contracts. While many of these contracts entailed production not much dissimilar to commercial output, yet here is another ratio—the 20 or more original factories compared with the ultimate 8,000—which serves as an indication of the expansion of the industrial knowledge of the special processes incident to ordnance manufacture.
When we found ourselves in the war the first step was to extend our ordnance knowledge as quickly as possible. The war in Europe had developed thousands of new items of ordnance, many of them carefully guarded as military secrets, with which our own officers were familiar only in a general way. As soon as we became a belligerent, however, we at once turned to the allies, and they freely and fully gave us of their store of knowledge—plans, specifications, working models, secret devices, and complete manufacturing processes.
With this knowledge at hand we adopted for our own program certain French types of field guns and howitzers and British types of heavy howitzers. The reproduction of the British types caused no unusual difficulties, but the adoption of French plans brought into the situation a factor the difficulties of which are apt not to be appreciated by the uninitiated.