Part 18

When war was declared there were on hand in this country approximately 670 Benet-Mercie machine-rifles, 285 Maxim machine-guns, and 350 Lewis guns chambered for British ammunition. The machine-gun manufacturing facilities in the United States were also more limited than were the facilities for rifle manufacture, by reason of the fact that England and France had depended on their domestic resources to supply the bulk of their machine-guns. As a result there were only two plants in the United States which were actually producing machine-guns in quantity when hostilities began. Six days after our entry into the war the War Department ordered 1,300 Lewis guns (which order was subsequently increased) and, in June, 2,500 Colt guns, which were to be used for training purposes. The first division to be sent abroad was necessarily armed with the all-but-obsolete Benet-Mercie machine-rifle, but upon its arrival in France the French Government offered to equip the division with Hotchkiss machine-guns and Chauchat machine-rifles—the same automatic arms which the French had been using for three years. The offer was thankfully accepted, not only for the first division but for a number of succeeding divisions, thus insuring a supply of automatic weapons for our troops until we were in a position to supply them ourselves.

The result of a series of machine-gun tests held by a board appointed by the Secretary of War in May, 1917, proved conclusively that the gun invented by John M. Browning, a Utah gunsmith who already possessed a wide reputation as an inventor of automatic weapons, was the best type of heavy machine-gun known to the board, and that the light automatic rifle, also an invention of Browning, was likewise the most efficient weapon of its type. The Lewis and the Vickers, both of which had been extensively used by the British since the opening days of the war, were also favorably reported upon and it was recommended that their manufacture be continued. Acting on the recommendation of the board, the Ordnance Department immediately increased its orders for Lewis guns, placed orders with the Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company for Browning machine-rifles and machine-guns, and began the development of large manufacturing facilities for the last-named types in order that the quantities required could be produced within the time specified. Although the Colt Company was the owner of an exclusive right to build machine-guns and automatic rifles under the Browning patents, the Ordnance Department early recognized that no single plant could hope to produce a sufficient number of these weapons to meet the constantly increasing requirements of our armies. Arrangements were therefore made with the Colt Company and with the inventor, Mr. Browning, for the surrender of their exclusive rights, the United States being granted authority to manufacture these weapons wherever it saw fit during the period of the war. As a result of this energetic, action, by the early part of 1918 the Savage Arms Company at Utica, New York, was producing Lewis guns of the flexible type for use on aircraft (the large orders for Lewis ground guns having been diverted to aircraft use upon the cabled recommendation of General Pershing); the Marlin-Rockwell Corporation at New Haven was manufacturing large quantities of Marlin Aircraft machine-guns of the synchronized type; the Colt’s Company was building Vickers machine-guns of the heavy mobile type, while various factories selected by the Ordnance Department because of their facilities were energetically tooling up for the immense production of Browning machine-guns and automatic rifles which later followed. Early in March, 1918, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, to whom, as the result of the arrangement already referred to, the Browning plans and specifications had been turned over, produced the first Browning rifles, and two months later the New England Westinghouse Company turned out the first Browning machine-guns. When the Armistice was signed, the American Expeditionary Forces had been equipped with 41,348 Browning heavy machine-guns and 48,082 Browning rifles.

As the Marlin Aircraft machine-gun was available and was giving a considerable degree of satisfaction, no particular effort was made to push the development of the Browning Aircraft machine-gun, as it was feared that to do so might interfere with the production of the Browning machine-gun for ground use. Only a few hundred Browning Aircraft guns had, therefore, been produced up to the time of the Armistice. These had, however, been satisfactorily synchronized so as to fire through the airplane propellers, and had been speeded up to the amazing rate of fire of _1,300 shots per minute_.

Upon their arrival in Europe the two Browning weapons created a marked sensation both in the armies of the Allies and in our own forces. Not only were they exquisite examples of the gunsmith’s art but they could pour lead into the enemy at an unheard-of rate, they were to all intents and purposes fool-proof, and they proved themselves capable of standing up under the most trying conditions. The Browning automatic rifle in particular, as beautifully finished and balanced as a trap-shooter’s double-barrel, formed a striking contrast to the clumsy French Chauchat, which looked as though it had been made by a village blacksmith. During the summer of 1918 our government was approached by representatives of England, France, and Belgium with inquiries as to the possibility of sufficient Brownings being produced to supply their armies as well as our own.

The 79th was the first division to enter the line equipped with Browning automatic rifles and machine-guns. In view of the various criticisms of these weapons which have appeared from time to time in the American press, it seems worth while to quote from the report of the Ordnance Machine-Gun Officer of that division:

“The guns went into the front line for the first time in the night of September 13th. The sector was quiet and the guns were practically not used at all until the advance, starting September 26th. In the action which followed, the guns were used on several occasions for overhead fire, one company firing 10,000 rounds per gun into a wood in which there were enemy machine-gun nests, at a range of 2,000 metres. Although the conditions were extremely unfavorable for machine-guns on account of rain and mud, the guns performed well. Machine-gun officers reported that during the engagement the guns came up to the fullest expectations, and even though covered with rust and using muddy ammunition, they functioned whenever called upon to do so.”

The design and adoption of the Browning gun not only gave our armies the most efficient and dependable weapon of its kind in the world, but it saved the American taxpayer $75,000,000. This figure is based on the difference in cost to the government of the Browning and its nearest equivalent, the Vickers—the latter at a price representing its cost after having been in war production for three years. The design and adoption of the Browning automatic rifle gave us far and away the best weapon of that type possessed by any army, and it saved the government nearly $13,000,000—not a very large figure, it is true, compared with war expenditures, but nevertheless worth saving.

When the war ended we had on hand 52,000 Browning automatic rifles and 29,000 Chauchats—a total sufficient to arm an army of approximately 3,500,000 men. On the same date there were completed 3,340 Hotchkiss, 9,337 Vickers, and 42,050 Browning guns, thus giving us enough heavy machine-guns to equip over 200 divisions, or an army of approximately 7,000,000 men. Thus it will be seen that, no matter what the future has in store for us, it will be a long time before we will have occasion to worry about a shortage in machine-guns.

* * * * *

Though less novel and, therefore, less interesting than certain other products of Ordnance, there were six items, all produced in stupendous quantities, which rendered greater service than all the big guns, tanks, and airplanes put together in nailing down the coffin-lid on Germany’s dream of world domination. I refer to rifles, pistols, revolvers, bayonets, helmets, and small-arms ammunition. They, with the gas-respirator, the water-bottle, the cartridge-belt, and the pack, constituted the equipment of the fighting Yank. They were the infantryman’s tools of trade.

When the news of the sinking of the _Lusitania_ reached Paris, I heard the then American Ambassador to France assert, in the words of Mr. William Jennings Bryan, whose appointee he was, that were the United States to enter the war, a million men would spring to arms overnight.

“I’ll admit, Mr. Ambassador,” said a sceptical listener, “that we might get the million men. But where would we get the arms?”

“We’d stamp ’em out, sir,” replied the diplomat. “We’d stamp ’em out the way we stamp out tin plates.”

But, unfortunately, the matter of supplying weapons for our fighting forces was very far from being as simple as the ambassador seemed to think, for the modern high-power service rifle is a delicately adjusted and highly finished piece of mechanism, to manufacture which requires the finest quality of materials and the highest grade of expert workmanship. So, though we did not realize the dream of the ambassador by producing arms for a million men overnight, American Ordnance performed a feat almost as amazing by producing _enough rifles to equip an army of seven million men in less than fifteen months_.

Some years before our entry into the war a parsimonious Congress reduced the appropriations for the manufacture of small arms and small-arms ammunition to such an extent that it was found necessary to shut down the rifle-plant at the Rock Island Arsenal and to greatly reduce the output of rifles at the Springfield Armory and of cartridges at the Frankford Arsenal. This resulted, as might have been foreseen, in the dispersion of the large force of highly skilled workmen who had been in government employ, most of them seeking occupation with private concerns or turning to other vocations. When, therefore, our entry into the Great War made it necessary to take up the manufacture of small arms and ammunition on an unprecedented scale, the War Department was dismayed to find that it did not have nearly enough workmen, and that, owing to the enormous wages which were then being paid in other industries, it could not get them. Thus it became necessary, in order to obtain an immediate and adequate supply of weapons for the great new armies which we were raising, to enlist the co-operation of private manufacturers.

The three leading manufacturers of small arms in this country—the Winchester Repeating Fire Arms Company of New Haven, Conn., the Remington Arms-Union Metallic Cartridge Company of Ilion, N. Y., and the Remington Arms Company of Eddystone, Pa.—were devoting themselves at this time to the manufacture of the British .303 rifle, the production of which, however, due to the decrease in the requirements of the British Government, was gradually slowing down. But, though these plants had every facility for turning out in large quantities the British .303 Enfield, it would have required many months for them to alter their tools and machinery for the manufacture of the .30-calibre Springfield, which was the standard arm of the American service. The Ordnance Department found itself confronted, therefore, by three alternatives. It could change the equipment of these plants so as to permit of the manufacture of Springfield rifles—a proceeding which would have involved a delay of several months; it could adopt the British Enfield, which would also have necessitated the adoption of another calibre of ammunition—an unthinkable thing in time of war; or it could utilize the facilities of these three great plants by modifying the British rifle so that it would take American ammunition. The latter course was decided on.

The modification consisted in changing the magazine, chamber, and bore of the Enfield rifle so that it would take the U. S. service .30-calibre rimless cartridge instead of the British .303 rim cartridge. So rapidly were the plans worked out, the drawings and specifications produced, and sample rifles submitted and tested, that within less than eight weeks after the declaration of war orders were given to Winchester and the two Remington concerns for a million “modified Enfields,” as the new weapons were called. Putting aside the keen trade rivalry which had formerly existed, the three plants virtually operated as one mammoth rifle factory, so that when one shop found itself short of parts it was promptly supplied from another where there was a surplus. The combined factories had so fully gotten into their stride by the fall of 1918 that, when the Armistice was signed, they were turning out approximately 10,000 rifles a day, this being in addition, remember, to the spare parts which were being manufactured at all three plants as well as in the government establishments at Rock Island and Springfield. The records show that more than 2,500,000 rifles had been accepted by November 9, 1918. Add to this the 600,000 Springfields and the 160,000 Krag-Jorgensens which we had on hand at the beginning of the war, the 280,000 rifles which had been manufactured for Russia but which were taken over by the United States, and the 20,000 Ross rifles purchased from Canada, and it will be seen that we had a total of more than 3,500,000 rifles. As only about one-half of the troops in an American division carry rifles, we had, therefore, enough weapons to equip an army of 7,000,000 men.

In spite of the endless complications due to the use by our forces during the early days of the war of French machine-guns and automatic rifles of a calibre different from our own, and to the insistent demands of the Air Service for special types of cartridges—tracer, armor-piercing, and incendiary—there was never a time when we did not have enough small-arms ammunition to supply our forces in the field. I might mention in this connection that one of the most perplexing problems which had to be solved by Ordnance was the manufacture of ammunition which would function equally well in two rifles—the Springfield and the Enfield—and in seven different types of machine-gun—the Benet-Mercie, the Lewis, the Vickers, the Colt, the Marlin, and the light and heavy Brownings. In these machine-guns the firing-pin points, or strikers, are different in shape and size and function differently, each giving a different weight of blow on the primers of the cartridge, yet, notwithstanding this handicap, the success of the American ammunition in this respect was remarkable. The daily average of small-arms ammunition manufactured in the United States reached the enormous total of 14,900,000 completed rounds—a production equal to that of England and France put together. The total number of cartridges of all classes produced up to the end of the war was 3,500,000,000; enough, if placed tip to primer, to put a girdle of brass and steel around the globe.

At the outbreak of the war the Colt automatic pistol, of .45 calibre, was the standard arm of the American Army. This pistol was manufactured by Colt’s at Hartford, Conn., and by the government at the Springfield Armory. The Ordnance Department quickly realized, however, that even the combined capacity of these two plants would prove wholly inadequate to meet the demands of the new armies, whereupon it obtained permission from the War Department to supplement the supply of automatics with arms of other types, particularly Colt and Smith & Wesson .45-calibre revolvers—the famous “six shooters” of the plains. These revolvers did not take the rimless, or cannelured-head, cartridge used in the pistols, but this difficulty was overcome by means of a loading-clip, which had the additional advantage of enabling them to be loaded almost as quickly as an automatic. The revolver, which is somewhat less accurate and less powerful than the pistol, and which is considerably more tiring for the user, was adopted as an emergency measure only, due to the imperative necessity of supplying the troops. The demands of the A. E. F. increased so rapidly, however, that in the summer of 1918 contracts were let to eight other firms possessing equipment which could be converted to the manufacture of pistols and revolvers. It is interesting to note that among the concerns which turned from the manufacture of essentially peace-time devices to the production of implements for killing the Hun were the Burroughs Adding Machine Company and the National Cash Register Company. At the signing of the Armistice, there had been produced a grand total of 375,000 pistols and 268,000 revolvers, and the rate of production was rapidly increasing, thereby bringing us within sight of the day when, in accordance with the plans of the General Staff, it would be possible to arm every American soldier with that characteristically American weapon, the “shooting-

Transcriber’s Note: The end of this paragraph will remain a mystery, as it was omitted from the original printing (multiple copies were checked to ascertain this).

Another innovation introduced by the Great War was the steel helmet, which, barring a few European heavy cavalry regiments, had not been used by any civilized army since Cromwell’s time. The British helmet was originally adopted by our forces as a temporary expedient, in order to gain time until experiments would show whether it was possible to produce a better one. After a lengthy series of tests, however, it was decided to retain the British model, manufactured from steel with a considerable manganese alloy, rolled by an American process. Any possibility of the position of our troops being betrayed by the reflection of light from the surfaces of their “tin hats,” as was occasionally the case with the Germans’ steel head-gear, was eliminated by dipping the helmet in olive-drab paint, scattering sawdust over the surface with a blast of air, and then repainting after the first coat had hardened, thus producing an extremely coarse sanded appearance. The netting used in the lining of the American helmet was, however, a distinct improvement on the British design, as it lessened the inconvenience caused by the very considerable weight—slightly over two pounds—and the small pieces of rubber around the edge of the lining served to keep the metal away from the head, so that even relatively large dents caused by bullets or shell splinters did not reach the wearer’s skull. The task of designing our helmets and body armor was intrusted, fittingly enough, to Major Bashford Dean, who was admirably fitted for the duty by reason of the fact that he has been for many years curator of the armor collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is a curious fact, and indicative of the extent to which Army Ordnance converted to war purposes countless peace industries, that the steel for our helmets was furnished by the American Tin Plate Company—no wonder that the soldiers called them “tin hats”!—the linings were produced by various shoe manufacturers, and the helmets were assembled and painted by the Ford Motor Car Company!

I tried to make it clear at the very outset of this chapter that the story of Ordnance is so stupendous that the best I could hope to do in such a narrative as this would be to dwell briefly on its most salient points. This necessitates my passing by with a few words discoveries and developments of the greatest interest and importance, and of dismissing amazing achievements with a paragraph. Take the Nitrate Division of the Ordnance Department, for example. Were it to receive its due, an entire chapter should be devoted merely to outlining its problems, while a whole book could be written on how it solved them.

Nitric acid is the basis of all modern explosives. A country possessing no nitric acid would be virtually unable to fire a single shot. Before our entry into the war we depended for our supply of this essential ingredient upon the sodium-nitrate beds of Chile—the only country in the world where nitrates have been found. Germany had done the same, having had the foresight, moreover, to accumulate a reserve supply estimated at 375,000 tons. Had she not taken steps, however, to replenish this enormous stock by producing nitrates from the air by the so-called “fixation method,” she would inevitably have been compelled to capitulate when her supply became exhausted. It quickly became apparent that if we continued to rely upon Chile for our supply of nitrates we would be courting disaster, for Chile, though neutral, had decided German leanings, and there was always the danger, therefore, that German diplomacy or threats might cause her to place an embargo on nitrate exports. Even had this danger not existed, our available tonnage was extremely limited and a few torpedoings of nitrate ships would have stopped our supply, thereby automatically paralyzing our manufacture of explosives. It was determined, therefore, to make the United States wholly independent of any outside source by the erection of four enormous plants for the manufacture of nitrates by the synthetic ammonia and cyanamide processes.

Two of these projects—U. S. Nitrate Plant No. 1, at Sheffield, Alabama, and U. S. Nitrate Plant No. 2, on the Tennessee River at Muscle Shoals, Alabama—were both completed before the signing of the Armistice. Plant No. 1, which has a capacity of about 22,000 tons of ammonium nitrate a year, cost approximately $13,000,000. Plant No. 2 makes five times that amount of ammonium nitrate and cost five times that sum. Plant No. 3, at East Toledo, Ohio, and Plant No. 4, at Ancor, near Cincinnati, were about one-quarter completed when the Armistice was signed, but, because of the changed conditions governing the supply of Chilean nitrates as well as the facilities which we now possess in Alabama for manufacturing them ourselves, they have been discontinued. In addition to these enormous projects, a chemical plant was erected at Saltville, Virginia, at a cost of $2,750,000, for the manufacture of sodium cyanide to be used in the production of poison-gas. Though no operations are now (May, 1919) being carried on at any of these plants, it is believed that their products will be in wide demand for farm fertilizers, a project being under consideration whereby nitrates can be produced at these plants and sold to farmers at about three-quarters of the price paid for the Chilean product.