Our development in armor also produced an aviator's chair weighing 60 pounds. It would protect the pilot from injury from below and from the back, withstanding armor-piercing bullets fired at a distance of 50 yards. Since the piercing of the gas mask canister by a bullet might result in the death of the soldier by admitting gas directly into the breathing system of his mask, the Ordnance Department designed an armored haversack for the gas mask and its canister, this haversack incidentally serving as a breast defense.
BAYONETS AND TRENCH KNIVES.
Another large ordnance operation was the production of bayonets for the service rifles. The British bayonet had proved to be highly satisfactory in the war; and, since it was already designed to fit the Enfield rifle, which we had adopted for our own, we took the British bayonet as it was and, with only one slight alteration, set out to produce it in this country.
The Government found both the Remington Arms-Union Metallic Cartridge Co. at its Bridgeport, Conn., works, and the Winchester Repeating Arms Co. building these bayonets for the English Government. The latter's bayonet needs by 1917 were being well supplied by home manufacture, and this permitted us to buy approximately 545,500 bayonets which had already been manufactured for the British.
The Ordnance Department at once started out these two concerns on contracts for bayonets for the American Government, Remington with total orders for 2,820,803 bayonets and Winchester with orders for 672,500. Remington delivered in all 1,565,644 bayonets and Winchester 395,894. This was a total of 1,961,500 bayonets.
The total production of 1917 rifles was about 2,520,000. These figures indicate that we were short over 500,000 bayonets at the time hostilities ceased; and as a matter of fact this shortage had already become acute, especially in the training camps.
The bayonets had not come as rapidly as we had expected, because to produce them at the rate originally planned would have interfered with the more essential production of rifles by these same companies. Accordingly in 1918 additional contracts for bayonets were made. Landers, Frary & Clark, of New Britain, Conn., engaged to manufacture 500,000 bayonets, and the National Motor Vehicle Co., 255,000. These latter contracts, however, were suspended after the armistice was signed. The additional orders had made it certain that there would be no bayonet shortage by the spring of 1919.
While this production was under way we were also manufacturing bayonets for the model 1903 Springfield rifle. The Springfield Armory produced 347,533 of these and the Rock Island Arsenal 36,800. In addition the Springfield Armory delivered 50,000 bayonet blades as spare parts.
We not only had to provide bayonets but also the scabbards to hold them in. The scabbard of the 1917 bayonet was of simple manufacture and there were no difficulties in securing sufficient quantities. The Jewell Belt Co. delivered 1,810,675 of them; Graton & Knight delivered 1,669,581; while the Rock Island Arsenal produced 3,000. This gave us a total of 3,480,000 scabbards, a quantity greatly in excess of the production of either bayonets or rifles.