America's Munitions 1917-1918

2. Gun production 38 3. Mobile field artillery 56 4. Railway artillery 91 5. Explosives, propellants, and artillery ammunition 103 6. Sights and fire-control apparatus 135 7. Mo...

As our war against Germany recedes into the past its temporal boundaries become more sharply defined, and it assumes the character of a complete entity--a rounded-out period of...

To arm the manhood called to defend the Nation in 1917 and 1918, to make civilians into soldiers by giving them the tools of the martial profession--such was the task of the Ord...

The sole use of a gun is to throw a projectile. The earliest projectile was a stone thrown by the hand and arm of man--either in an attack upon an enemy or upon a beast that was...

The chance observer might assume that once the Ordnance Department had succeeded in putting in production the cannon of various sizes described in the preceding chapter the batt...

As soon as war was declared against Germany the Ordnance Department, in its search for an immediate equipment of strong artillery, surveyed the ordnance supplies of the country...

The Interallied Ordnance Agreement of the late fall of 1917, supplying to the United States as it did French and British artillery and other heavy ordnance supplies until the de...

At the threshold of the war with Germany we were confronted with the problem of providing on a large scale those instruments of precision with which modern artillerists point th...

Complete motorization of field artillery and its ammunition supply is almost certain to be one of the far-reaching and highly important results of our country's experiences in i...

The tank, more than any other weapon born of the great war, may be called the joint enterprise of the three principal powers arrayed against Germany--America, France, and Great...

The machine gun is typically and historically an American device. An American invented the first real machine gun ever produced. Another American, who had taken British citizens...

Although in the 19 months of American belligerency in the great war we had sent to France upward of two million soldiers, each rifleman among them as he stepped aboard his trans...

The American pistol was one of the great successes of the war. For several years before the war came the Ordnance Department had been collaborating with private manufacturers to...

Prior to the war with Germany the Ordnance Department, in providing .30-caliber ammunition for our Army rifles and machine guns, had thought in terms of millions and had placed...

Like many of the other war implements produced by the Ordnance Department for use in France, the weapons employed in fighting from the trenches were entirely novel to American i...

The miscellaneous ordnance equipment of the American soldier in the recent war--that is, articles which he carried with him and which added to his comfort, his safety, or his ef...

When the United States entered the war against Germany in 1917 there was no phase of her forthcoming industrial effort from which so much was expected as from the building of ai...

Sketchy and incomplete as was our knowledge of airplane construction in the early days of 1917, it was no more hazy than our notion of how many planes to build. What would const...

The Liberty engine was America's distinctive contribution to the war in the air, and her chief one. The engine was developed in those first chaotic weeks of preparation of 1917,...

The production of the Liberty engine so captured popular attention that the public never fairly understood nor appreciated the extent of another production enterprise on the par...

On one of the early days in the great war a Russian aviator, aloft in one of the primitive airplanes of that time, was engaged in locating the positions of the enemy when he cha...

Electrical science was called upon to furnish marvels and prodigies indeed during the recent war as aids to the American arms, but in no respect did it respond in more successfu...

When Stephen Montgolfier and his brother Joseph, in November, 1782, sent a sheep, a rooster, and a duck into the sky, lifted by a paper bag inflated with hot air, these Columbus...

In describing the activities of the Engineers, we are carried to the front itself, into the zone beaten by enemy fire, where machine-gun bullet, bursting shell, and deadly gases...

In establishing contact between our great bases of supply on the French coast and interior points, as well as with the fighters in the various fields of operations, the Departme...

A vast quantity of motorized or portable equipment was required by the Engineer units of the American Expeditionary Forces and this had in the main to be furnished under the sup...

In childhood we were enthralled by the tales of those magic persons whose keen hearing could detect even the whisper of the growing grass. As camouflage developed, modern warfar...

The first recorded use of suffocating gases in warfare was about 431 B. C., sulphur fumes having been used in besieging the cities of Platea and Belium in the war between the At...

During the spring and summer of 1917 two marked tendencies were to be observed in the fighting in France. One of these was the greatly increased use by both sides of poisonous g...

When the American soldier went to war against Germany he took his appetite with him. The task of keeping that appetite satisfied with good food (and the soldier, therefore, cont...

The Army raised against Germany had to have stout shoes for its feet. It required warm uniforms and overcoats and good socks and underwear. It had to have heavy blankets for its...

Sergt. Irving Berlin, one of the fountain sources of American jazz music, found a special job cut out for him when he was drafted into the military service. The needs of the war...

The punitive expedition into Mexico in pursuit of Francisco Villa marked the real beginning of the use of motor transportation for the Army, although for many years the motor tr...

Lest it be thought that the American Army was dependent in any way for its hospital facilities and surgical supplies upon private contributions, it may be said that the Governme...

Tables of statistics are apt to be tiresome affairs; but in the annals of the War Department, as part of the record of the American Army in the great war, there is a table of st...

This was a job magnificent in its proportions, carried out with a speed that was little short of magical. At 16 points, widely scattered over the country, the construction exper...

Great as was the job of building the army camps and cantonments, it was nevertheless only a part of the work which fell to the Construction Division, and much the smaller part a...

The spent runner who hurled himself through the gate of ancient Athens and with his dying breath gasped out the news of the brilliant success of the Athenian troops against the...