Part 20

Now spruce, curiously enough, had not been considered a valuable wood for the ordinary lumber trade; the lumbermen held it a doubtful asset that was hardly worth the cutting. As a result of this condition, the commercial supply was neither large enough nor well enough selected and prepared to meet our aircraft requirements when the declaration of war suddenly made it one of the most desired and most valuable woods in existence. Thus it came about that, the lumbermen being unable to supply the demand, the army had to go instantly into the business of producing this wood in theretofore undreamed-of quantities. The work of getting out the spruce fell, rather oddly, to the men who had been among the first to volunteer for extrahazardous service in France. Before the war, when airplanes were looked on merely as toys of the rich, the supervision of military aeronautics was assigned to the Signal Corps, on the assumption that if flying had any part in warfare it would probably be that of signalling, for which reason, and the more potent one that no other branch of the service knew what to do with it, it had to be wished on some one. And of all the branches of the army, possibly none save the Flying Section of the Signal Corps—as the Air Service was then known—had a more adventurous and devil-may-care personnel. The Signal Corps made its original appeal to the men who wanted to get out and do things: to be in front, to wave the little red-and-white flags under shell-fire, to sound the long yell, to see the enemy first, to be the eyes and ears and nerves of the whole army. But, as I have already explained, the army had to have the spruce in order to carry out its aviation programme, and aviation was under the Signal Corps, and it was from the Signal Corps, therefore, that the men were drawn to go out to the Northwest and get the spruce. Thus it came about that the boys who enlisted at the very beginning in order that they might have the danger and excitement of laying the field telegraphs and telephones, of dashing madly along shell-swept roads on roaring motorcycles, of wig-wagging and semaphoring word of the enemy’s movements from in front of the armies, were shipped westward instead of eastward, were given axes instead of Enfields and peaveys instead of pistols, and fought their share of the war in the gloomy depths of the primeval forest, or on the logging railroads and in the sawmills which they built in bitter cold and driving rain.

Labor conditions were undeniably bad in the Northwest at the beginning of the war. There is an old proverb that “A farm lease is a conspiracy on the part of the tenant and the absentee landlord to rob the land.” Lumbering was almost as bad. The owners were avaricious and arrogant, the men stubborn and defiant. The owners would not make camp improvements because “the men would not stay on the job,” and the men would not stay because “the owners didn’t make things decent.” And, to make things worse, the paid German propaganda was rampant, unchecked in the woods, for the Wilhelmstrasse fully realized how vital it was to cripple the American air programme. Germany knew better than we did the war possibilities of the Pacific Northwest. She couldn’t buy spruce there for her planes, but she could mobilize her spies and trouble-makers and hinder the production for and the delivery of spruce to the United States and her allies. And she did her worst. Some day there will be told the story, the “inside” story, of the campaign waged in the Great Woods by the secret forces of Germany—a campaign consisting of strikes, I. W. W. demonstrations, forest-fires, railway wrecks, dynamited bridges, damaged machinery, infernal machines, shootings, systematic intimidation, and all the other deviltries of a vicious and unscrupulous enemy. The spies and secret agents which Germany planted in the forests of the Northwest formed a part of the vast army of which the Kaiser boasted to Ambassador Gerard. But the Hun made a miscalculation. There were not enough spies; there were too many Americans.

The War Department has rarely shown greater wisdom than when it gave a colonel’s commission to Brice P. Disque, an ex-captain of Regulars who had left the army to accept the wardenship of the Michigan State Prison, and put him in charge of spruce production. Captain Disque had his blanket-roll packed and aboard ship for service in France when he was called to Washington, just as the transport was setting sail, and ordered to go to the Northwest and investigate lumbering conditions. His report showed that the right man had been found to direct the Titanic job of getting out the spruce; he was commissioned a colonel and later a brigadier-general, and the story of the spruce production tells the rest.

To the tact and vision of General Disque is due the creation of that remarkable organization known as the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen, an association conceived to bring capital and labor together in one mighty machine driven solely by patriotism. Under the inspiration thus provided, both sides agreed to submit their differences to the United States Army, as represented in the person of General Disque, as final arbiter. The eight-hour day was agreed to; camp sanitation and better living conditions of every kind were demanded; a uniformly liberal wage-scale for all classes of labor was adopted; a standard mess was arranged to check the inordinate waste of food in the lumber-camps; the owners were given profitable prices for their output under the new conditions, and the small men were assured of receiving a square deal from their powerful corporate rivals. Some of these questions were settled through regular military channels, but most of them through the medium of the L. L. L. L. Once a matter could be shown to be reasonable and fair to every one concerned, it was officially adopted, as by a majority vote, and business as well as patriotic reasons demanded that every one should cheerfully acquiesce in the decision. The Loyal Legion works—for it has been made permanent—through its local assemblies; any local disagreement is taken to the district council—which is formed from local representatives of both employer and employees, there being eight of these district councils in the Coast Division and four in the Inland Empire. Any question which cannot be settled by a district council goes to the Central Council, composed of one employer and one employee from each district; while General Disque, as the head of the Legion, has been the final arbitrator in such questions as the Central Council could not settle. Since this plan was definitely adopted, however, so strong a spirit of patriotic fairness has been developed on both sides that nothing has gone to him for settlement or revision. Nothing could more strongly emphasize the success of the Legion, which now has a membership of nearly 130,000, than the fact that at a mass convention, held shortly after the signing of the Armistice, at which more than 900 local councils were represented, it was voted almost unanimously to perpetuate the organization, to continue the publication of its official bulletin, and to invite General Disque to continue as the Legion’s head. Were the people of the Pacific Northwest to receive no other reward for their sacrifices in the war, they have reason to feel amply repaid by the creation of the Loyal Legion and the resultant ending of the long-standing feud between capital and labor, the expulsion of the I. W. W.’s and similar discordant and dangerous elements, the betterment of working and living conditions for the lumbermen, and the commencement of an era of peace and prosperity in the Great Woods.

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Unless you have been in the Northwest during the rainy season you can have no adequate conception of the difficulties under which the spruce squadrons labored. The coastal districts of Oregon and Washington have one of the heaviest rainfalls recorded anywhere on earth. Unkind people have said of the Pacific Northwest that it has but two seasons—the rainy season and August. But that is an exaggeration. The local newspapers alternately boast of and apologize for the reputed 180 inches, or 15 feet, of annual precipitation. With that as a basis for one’s calculations, the old man who sold the town site of Simescarey, the terminus of the spruce road which the government has built into the Olympic Peninsula, has had 450 feet of water descend upon his head—for the inhabitants of that region scorn umbrellas—in the thirty years that he has resided there. After a winter spent in the Northwest—and having passed one there, I know whereof I speak—one might easily believe that the sentry at an Oregon spruce-camp was not joking when he came in to the commanding officer to report the damages done by the rain.

“Sir,” he apologized, “I don’t like to be a pessimist, but things ain’t going right to-day. Most of the fish in the lake are dead since last night’s rain. The lake raised so fast that some of ’em got beyond their depth and was just naturally drowned; the rest couldn’t swim up fast enough, and bein’ surface fish and not used to much depth, their bladders busted and there ain’t a fit fish left in the whole bunch. Every duck but one is dead, too; the rain beat their heads into a mush—all but the one that got caught in a steel trap set for a muskrat and that saved his life—he stayed under water where it was dry. Believe me, sir, that was the wettest rain last night I ever see.”

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Because, as I have already explained, the lumbermen did not consider spruce a profitable wood to handle, few of the spruce forests had been penetrated by railroads. So Disque and his Legionaries set out to build railways themselves—13 lines with more than 300 miles of trackage. The forests tapped by these new lines and their branches have, it is estimated, an ultimate production of 33,000,000,000 feet of lumber, a quantity almost beyond the comprehension of the human brain. In order to visualize it, it must be translated into commonplace, every-day terms. Let us assume that it requires 20,000 feet of lumber to build an average 5 or 6 room house. Taking this as a basis, the railways built by Disque and his spruce squadrons have brought within the reach of commerce enough timber to build almost 2,000,000 of these comfortable American homes, with sufficient waste wood to keep them heated for a generation. When the war ended, 174,000,000 feet of aircraft lumber had been cut and shipped—enough to build dwellings for the inhabitants of a good-sized city.

The government planned to have all the airplane stock from the Northwest cut at the one great cut-up plant at Vancouver, near Portland. This huge mill, the largest in the world, was built by the army in forty-five days and has handled more than a million and a half feet of lumber in twenty-four hours. But with the extension of the airplane programme, whereby the Spruce Division was called upon to furnish stock for all the Allies, more capacity was required and three other great plants of almost equal size were planned, one being ready for opening, one almost completed, and one projected when the Armistice was signed. These four huge mills would, it is estimated, have furnished the United States and her allies with close to 100,000,000 feet of airplane lumber a month.

The silent, peaceful forests of the Northwest seemed separated from the war by a million miles, a score of generations. But when the word was flashed from Washington to Disque to “Go ahead,” the primeval silence of the woods was suddenly shattered by a million bellowing echoes of battle. The war had come to America. Almost overnight the battle-front moved 6,000 miles westward—from the forests of the Argonne to the forests of Oregon. The trucks were brought in—endless caravans of grunting, straining monsters; the soldiers came, 30,000 in all; the loggers, graders, hard-rock men, sawyers, surveyors, engineers; the pile-drivers, the donkey-engines, the steam-shovels perched on wheels, the train-loads of food and tools and powder; the patient, sweating horses and the creaking wagons, thousands upon thousands of them. The wood roads were black with traffic; they fairly smoked with the fierce fight for speed. The highways were dust in the early fall, where the 5 or 15 ton loads ground the roads to powder. Then the wet weather came—fogs, mists, drizzles, showers, floods—the rainy season that grows the incomparable forests of the Northwest.

They splashed through it all, soldiers and Legionaries alike; they waded, they swam, they shivered and swore, and beat their hands over the brush fires—but the stream of supplies never stopped nor checked. The railway gangs, following close on the heels of the axemen, laid their twin lines of steel through the dripping forest faster than Kitchener laid down his desert railway to Khartoum, the locomotives crawling one mile, two miles, deeper into the wilderness each night. Night and day the forest trails were busy. Shuttling back and forth, loaded both ways with materials and men, teams and trucks and trains struggled for speed. Headlights, lanterns, shouted warnings, guided the night traffic along the sombre, shut-in ways. Clankings, clatterings, gasoline coughings, the honk of horns and the hoot of locomotives filled the air. The silent forest became a bedlam of sound, of action.

The spruce! The fir! The wings of victory! Berlin heard it, saw it first. The splitting blasts that showered the forest lakes with stones, the shouting, heaving din of the construction-camps, the crash of the trees as they fell before the axe and saw of the woodsmen, the whine of the cables through the sheaves as the huge logs were snaked into position for loading, the rumble and roar of the heavy-laden log-trains, the shriek of the giant saws in the mills—all these sounds fell upon the listening ears at German Great Headquarters with a growing menace, as ominous as the tattoo of the machine-guns, as the thunderous blast of the great Allied cannon, as the victorious cheers of the charging Yanks. They meant that the spruce was coming! The planes were coming! A few months more and the boasted Hindenburg Line would be a joke. The Germans knew that they could not build trenches in the clouds. That was the real reason why they were attacked by yellow fever in the fall of 1918.

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The engines and the planes themselves being in production, the next problem to be solved by the War Department was to provide our new aerial navy with armament in the form of machine-guns. Fighting in the air, it should be remembered, is entirely a development of the Great War, the adaptation of machine-guns for airplane use having practically all taken place since 1914. Though the records show that a machine-gun was successfully fired from an airplane in this country in 1912, and though the French had a few heavy planes fitted with mitrailleuses at the outbreak of the war, it was not until 1915 that machine-guns were carried by planes on active service. Prior to that time aviators depended on service and automatic rifles, pistols, shotguns shooting large shot held together by wires—miniature editions of the chain-shot used by early sea-fighters—and also carried darts and grenades to drop on the enemy. As a matter of fact, in one of the first aerial combats of the war, which took place on the Eastern Front between a Russian aviator and an Austrian, weapons were not used at all. The Russian determined to wreck his adversary and, in pursuance of this plan, so manœuvred his plane that the tips of his wings were just beneath the wings of the Austrian. He then suddenly elevated that end of his plane, hoping to upset the Austrian, but the result was that both machines collided and fell to the ground. Major Eric T. Bradley, formerly in the British Army but now an officer of the American Air Service, tells of having flown over the lines in 1915 armed with a twelve-gauge double-barrel shotgun loaded with buckshot tied together with wire, which swished through the air like the lash of a whip and occasionally hit something—usually by chance.

The development of methods for controlling machine-guns so that they can be fired through the area traversed by the propeller has had a vast effect on aerial combat, and an understanding of the problems involved is necessary in order to appreciate the difficulties which had to be overcome. The various devices which have been developed for controlling the fire of a machine-gun so as to cause the bullets to miss the blades of the propeller are commonly known as synchronizing or interrupter gears. These terms are, however, somewhat inaccurate, as it is only occasionally that the speed of the propeller is equal to the rate of fire of the gun, which is the condition of synchronization; moreover, the gun is not interrupted, but is caused to fire at the proper moment so that the bullet will miss the propeller-blade. “Gun control” would be a more descriptive name for the device.

Tractor airplanes—those which have the engine and propeller in front—were early found to be better suited to combat work than planes of the “pusher” type, which have the propeller behind, because they possess greater manœuvring powers and are better able to defend themselves. With these planes was developed the fixed aircraft machine-gun. This gun is fixed rigidly to the plane, pointing straight ahead, parallel to the line of flight. The first fixed guns were mounted on the upper plane so as to shoot over the arc described by the propeller, but these were not satisfactory owing to the difficulty in reloading the gun. To overcome this very obvious disadvantage the gun was lowered, which brought its line of fire inside the arc described by the propeller blades. Thus arose the difficulty caused by shooting into the propeller, to solve which countless experiments were made and numerous expedients tried. At first the blades were armored at the points where the bullets would strike, with steel of a shape calculated to cause the bullets to glance off, but this system was never satisfactory. Then the experiment was tried of wrapping the propeller with linen to keep it from splintering, as it was found that several bullets could be fired through a propeller thus treated without causing it to break. Throughout the summer of 1915 all of the Nieuport fighting-planes used by the French were fitted with fixed guns shooting through the propeller—if a bullet hit the propeller it either went through it or it wrecked it.

There is considerable disagreement as to who invented the device for controlling the fire of a machine-gun so as not to strike the blade of the propeller, but it is admitted that the Germans were the first to make any extensive use of it, introducing it on the Fokker monoplanes, which caused so much damage on the Western Front in 1915. Shortly thereafter the Allies adopted similar devices. When the United States entered the war neither the Ordnance Department nor the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps had had any experience worthy of the name with aircraft guns. And if they were ill-informed on the subject of guns, they were appallingly ignorant on the subject of gun controls. A few months of study and experiments served to materially increase the War Department’s knowledge along these lines, however, and by the time the planes were ready to receive the guns we had adopted a device known as the Constantinisco control. I should explain, perhaps, that there are two distinct types of gun control, both of which were in use when hostilities ceased. One is hydraulic, the other mechanical. The operation of both types is somewhat similar. In each case a cam mounted on the shaft of the engine actuates a plunger which in turn operates the rest of the mechanism. In the mechanical gun control the impulse of the cam is transmitted to the gun through a series of rods, causing the gun to fire at the exact moment when there is no propeller-blade in front of the muzzle. In the hydraulic type the impulse of the cam is transmitted to the gun through a system of copper tubes containing oil under high pressure. The hydraulic control, known as the Constantinisco, was adopted for use on American planes, particularly the De Havilland 4, which carries two fixed Marlins, each firing at the rate of 650 shots a minute. By employing the maximum rate of fire, 1,300 shots could be fired in a minute through the blades of the propeller, which would make 1,600 revolutions in the same space of time—without the blades being struck by a single bullet.

A machine-gun intended for aerial use must be absolutely reliable in operation. If a gun jams on the ground there is usually time to overhaul it or to replace it. Not so in the air. There a jam or a malfunction is almost certain to prove disastrous, if not fatal, to the gunner, who is left completely at the mercy of his adversary. An aircraft gun must also function properly in any position in which it is likely to be placed by the manœuvres of the plane. Likewise, an intensely high rate of fire is essential. For groundwork 500 shots per minute is reckoned as sufficient for the machine-gun, for a higher rate of fire would only result in several bullets hitting the same man. But a considerably higher rate of fire—up to 1,000 shots a minute, in fact—is demanded of aircraft guns, this being necessitated by the great speed at which airplanes move. The gunner, remember, can train on his target for only a few seconds, sometimes for only a fraction of a second, at a time, and it is essential, therefore, that he should have at his command the greatest possible volume of fire. Do you appreciate that, were an airplane flying parallel to, say, a high board fence, at a speed of 100 miles an hour, and shooting at right angles at that fence with a gun firing 880 shots a minute, _the bullet-marks on the fence would be ten feet apart_?

Single-seater machines carry only fixed guns, which are mounted with the barrel parallel to the axis of the airplane. These guns, which are synchronized so as to shoot through the propeller, are put into action by a trigger on the “joy-stick” of the plane and are aimed by pointing the entire airplane at the enemy. Flexible guns are used only on two-place machines, being operated by the observer or gunner. They are carried on the Universal mount, which permits of the gun being pointed in any direction. All of the flexible aircraft guns used by the Allies were based on the principle of the Lewis gun, the invention of a retired American army officer, Colonel Isaac Lewis. The chief difference between the ground and aircraft models is that in the latter the cooling radiator is eliminated, as aircraft guns are never fired continuously for any length of time.