America's Munitions 1917-1918

by Benedict Crowell; United States. War Department

In the novelty class were helmets and armor. There is a widespread impression that helmets and body armor passed away with the invention of gunpowder and because of that invention. This impression is not at all true. Body armor came to its highest development long after gunpowder was in common use in war. The sixteenth century witnessed the most extensive use of armor; yet at that time guns and pistols formed an important part of the equipment of every army, and even a weapon which is generally fancied to be ultramodern, the revolver, had been invented.

The fact is that not gunpowder but tactics caused the decline of armor. Not that armor was unable to stop many types of projectiles shot from guns, but that its weight hampered swift maneuvering, caused it to be laid aside by the soldier. The decline of armor may be said to date from the Thirty Years' War. The armies in that period, and particularly that of the Swedes, began making long marches for surprise attacks, and the body armor of the troops was found to be a hindrance in such tactics. Thereafter armor went out of fashion.

Yet it never completely disappeared in warfare. Gen. Rochambeau is said to have worn body armor at the siege of Yorktown. Great numbers of corselets and headpieces were worn in the Napoleonic wars. The corselet which John Paul Jones wore in his fight with the Serapis is preserved at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The Japanese army was mailed with good armor as late as 1870. Breastplates were worn to some extent in the Civil War in the United States, and an armor factory was actually established at New Haven, Conn., about 1862. In the museum at Richmond, Va., is an equipment of armor taken from a dead soldier in one of the trenches at the siege of that city. There was a limited use of armor in the Franco-Prussian War. Some of the Japanese troops carried shields at Port Arthur. Helmets were worn in the Boer War. A notorious Australian bandit in the eighties for a long time defied armed posses to capture him because he wore armor and could stand off entire squads of policemen firing at him with Martini rifles at close range.

Thus it can not be said that armor, in coming into use again in the great war, was resurrected; it was merely revived. In its static condition during most of the four-year period, the war against Germany was one in which armor might profitably be used. This opportunity could scarcely be overlooked, and indeed it was not. Everybody knows of the helmets that were in general use; yet body armor itself was coming into favor again, and only the welcome but unexpected end of hostilities prevented it, in all probability, from becoming again an important part of the equipment of a soldier.

As a consequence of the attenuated but persistent use of armor by soldiers during the past two centuries and of the demand of the aristocratic for helmets and armor as ornaments, the armorer's trade had been kept alive from the days of Gustavus Adolphus to the present. The war efforts of the United States in 1917 and 1918 demanded a wide range of human talents and special callings; but surely the strange and unusual seemed to be reached when in the early days of our undertaking the Engineering Division of the Ordnance Department sought the services of expert armorers.

Through the advice of the National Research Council, which had established a committee of armor experts, the Ordnance Department commissioned in its service Maj. Bashford Dean, a life-long specialist in armor, curator in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an institution which, learning of the Government's need, at once placed at its disposal its wonderful specimens of authentic armor, its armor repair shop where models could at once be made, and the services of Maj. Dean's assistant there whom he had brought from France, Daniel Tachaux, one of the few surviving armorers, who had inherited lineally the technical side of the ancient craft.

It may be said that there were but two nations in the great war which went to the Middle Ages for ideas as to protective armor—ourselves and Germany. The Germans, who applied science to almost every phase of warfare, did not neglect it here. Germany at the start consulted her experts on ancient armor and worked along lines which they suggested. The German helmet used in the trenches was undoubtedly superior to any other helmet given a practical use.

The first helmets to be used in the great war were of French manufacture. They were designed by Gen. Adrien, and 2,000,000 of them were manufactured and issued to the French Army. These helmets were the product of hasty pioneer work, but the fact that they saved from 2 to 5 per cent of the normal casualties of such a war as was being fought at once impelled the other belligerents to adopt the idea. Great Britain, spurred by the necessity of producing quickly a helmet in quantity, designed the most simple helmet to manufacture, which could be pressed out of cold metal.