Benedict Crowell

“ The American host which crossed to France went, almost to a man, uplifted and made heroic by the feeling that it was an army of crusaders fighting to end wars forever. No mere instinct of self-preservation, no simple prospect of a victory over a strange, foreign enemy in gray uniforms, could have inspired the morale of the American Expeditionary Forces, nor yet that of the forces in training in the United States, nor that of American industry in its eager, headlong devotion to the national undertaking. ”

“ The reader who has come to this point has before him the picture of the Nation's industry at war—the whole teeming effort in its main outlines, its myriad ramifications, its boundless activity, its ten thousand enterprises, its infinite toil, its hosts of workers, its wonders of scientific achievement, its attainments, even its failures—in short that humming complex of work, planning, ambition, disappointment, triumph, shortcomings, ability, and driving force which was a mighty people concentrated with all of its powers upon a single objective. ”

“ Governments fell as the war-ridden peoples of the earth blindly and brutishly vented their spleen and irritation for the hardships they had experienced upon those who chanced to be in power. Erstwhile statesmanship lapsed into a narrow, advantage-seeking partizanship that regarded not, it sometimes seemed in this country, even the fate of the world. The United States turned its back upon the League of Nations, which was the most ambitious attempt ever made by the nations of the earth to substitute a rule of reason for the rule of force. ”

“ They transformed their manufacturing plants with never a thought for the business they would one day have to resume. They undertook to produce, in quantities never before even projected, intricate materials of warfare the very names of which were unfamiliar to them. Despite the mounting costs of materials and labor, they managed to hammer down the prices of rifles, machine guns, explosives, shrapnel, and other important commodities, delivering to the Government not only a superior product, but a product costing the Government less than other nations at war paid for the same things. ”

“ It should be remembered that the war up to its last few weeks—up to its last few days, in fact—was a period of anxious suspense, during which America was straining her energies toward a goal, toward the realization of an ambition which, in the production of munitions, dropped the year 1918 almost out of consideration altogether, which indeed did not bring the full weight of American men and matériel into the struggle even in 1919, but which left it for 1920, if the enemy had not yet succumbed to the growing American power, to witness the maximum strength of the United States in the field. ”

“ The aviators had no equipment for battle; indeed, it was doubtful if the thought had occurred to either side to keep down the enemy's aircraft by the use of armed force borne upon wings. In the first months of aviation in the great war the fliers of both sides recognized a sort of noblesse oblige of the air, which, if it did not make for actual friendship or fraternizing between the rival air services, at least amounted to a respect for each other often evidenced by an innocuous waving of hands as hostile flying machines passed each other. ”

“ There was, of course, danger that the wholesale outpouring of ex-soldiers upon an industrial field already complaining of a labor surplus would precipitate a business crisis; yet it seemed certain that a wise guidance of the internal affairs of the nation could avert such a calamity. The world was short of almost everything which man consumes, and it seemed evident that it would take several years of brisk production in every field to build up the reserves wasted by war and overtake industrially the demands of the consuming public. ”

“ When the United States became a belligerent no American-built airplane had ever mounted a machine gun or carried any other than the simplest of necessary instruments. Such things as oxygen apparatus, electrically heated clothing for aviators, radio-communication with airplanes, landing and bombing flares, electric lighting systems for planes, bomb-dropping devices, suitable compasses, instruments for measuring height and speed, and the like—in short, all the modern paraphernalia that completes the efficiency of combat airplanes—these were almost entirely unknown to us. ”

“ No doubt there were hundreds of thousands of Americans who, immediately after the armistice, reading about the excess stores which were overflowing the Government’s enormous warehouses, expected to benefit personally and at once by the situation. It was the opportunity of a lifetime to pick up a new stock of kitchen utensils for a song, or a lawn mower, or a new Dodge car at a knock-down price, or, at least, new supplies of underclothing and other garments, or of food at figures which would make the corner grocer squirm. ”

“ Coming next to the more personal equipment of the soldier, we find the necessity confronting the Ordnance Department to manufacture shoulder rifles by the million and cartridges for them by the billion. The great war brought the machine gun into its own, requiring in the United States the manufacture of these complicated and expensive weapons by the tens of thousands, including the one-man automatic rifle, itself an arm of a deadly and effective type. ”

“ On Armistice Day, however, the industry was not more than six months away from the planned limit of its fecundity.
For the administration of the industrial enterprise the task ahead was first to bring that momentum to a halt and then to break up the machine. The easiest way was to throw a switch ahead of it—in other words, to issue a blanket stop-order on all military manufacturing projects. But to have done that would have been to court consequences as disastrous as those of war itself. Business and industry would have fallen into chaos and the country would have been filled with jobless men. ”

“ Carriage and recuperator, or recoil mechanism, together are known as the mount.
The forging, boring, reinforcing, machining, and finishing of the gun body is not half the battle of manufacturing a modern military weapon; it is scarcely one-third of it. No ordnance officer of 1917-18 will ever forget the heartbreaking experiences of manufacturing the mounts, a work which went along simultaneously with the production of the cannon themselves. The manufacture of carriages often presented engineering and production problems of the most baffling sort. ”

“ This was to be Armageddon, the last of wars, the war to make safe the unwarlike peoples of the world; and no cynical dictum that man is still too near his neolithic savagery to rely on anything other than might in his international contentions, no Chauvinistic picture of new migrations of Asiatic hordes, can change the fundamental fact that America went to war in the belief that its chiefest object was to end war forever. ”

“ For this purpose they borrowed from the experience of man running back to time immemorial. They took a leaf from the book of the Roman fire-ball throwers and developed the hand grenade beyond the point to which it had been brought in the European warfare of the last century. They called upon an industry which had once existed solely for the amusement of the people, the fireworks industry, for its golden rain and rainbow-hued stars for signals with which to talk to each other by night. ”

“ It is an exceedingly difficult trick to drop a bomb from any considerable altitude and hit what you are aiming at. The speed of the airplane, its height above the ground, the shape of the bomb itself, and the currents of air acting on the falling missile influence its line of flight. The aviator approaching an enemy target drops the bomb long before his airplane is directly above the object aimed at.
The line of the bomb's flight is a parabolic curve. The speed at which the airplane travels at first propels the bomb forward, almost as if it had been shot from a stationary gun. ”

“ It was soon evident to the conferees, however, that the cost-plus contract had come to stay in the war business, regardless of its obvious dangers and disadvantages. If an evil, it was a necessary one. True, the Government could still go into fixed-price contracts for the procurement of many important war supplies. These were such supplies as food, clothing, and tools—commodities essentially like those produced and consumed in time of peace. The producers of these commodities were not perplexed by costs; their facilities and processes were ready to begin production ”

“ It seems difficult now for us to realize how utterly unlearned we were, both in official and technical quarters, in the design, the production, or the use of aeronautical equipment in those early days of 1917. Here in America mechanical flight had been born; but we had lived to see other nations develop the invention into an industry and a science that was a closed book to our people. In the three years of warfare before American participation, the airplane had been forced through a whole generation of normal mechanical evolution. ”

“ In 1914 much was made of the thoroughness of German military preparation, which had been such that, when the fatal hour struck and the conscripts by hundreds of thousands left their homes and poured into the German barracks, for every man there was waiting ready a uniform, shoes, a helmet, underclothing, and everything needed to prepare him immediately for service in the field. What Germany had been able to accomplish by premeditated, long, and expensive effort, the United States now derives as a by-product of the war Germany forced it to fight. ”

“ One special requirement of the aircraft machine gun is that it must be reliable in the extreme. It is bad enough to have a gun jam on the ground, but in the air it may be fatal, for little can be done there to repair the weapon. A jam leaves the gunner to the mercy of his adversary, so in the production of aircraft armament there must be not only special care in the manufacture of the guns, but the ammunition, too, must be as perfect as human accuracy can make it. ”

“ Altogether, therefore, the Government has either paid out or obligated itself to pay out about one billion dollars for the benefit of men who served in the American forces during the World War.
So much for the post-armistice care of the wounded and otherwise disabled. The other principal phase of welfare work for the Army after the armistice had to do with the able-bodied soldiers; and, concretely, it meant getting jobs for them. The War Department did not regard a soldier as completely demobilized until he was once more placed in an occupation in civilian life. ”

“ 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 Ordnance Department in the late war.
The off-hand thought may identify ordnance as artillery alone. It may surprise many to know that in the American ordnance catalogue of supplies during the recent war there were over 100,000 separate and distinct items. Thousands of the items of ordnance were distinctly noncommercial, meaning that they had to be designed and produced specially for the uses of war. ”

“ There is perhaps no branch of modern mechanical development to which applied science pays more attention than it does to perfecting the means of communication. Progress is rapid, and therefore any large reserves of supplies set aside by the Signal Corps were likely to become obsolete and without value after a few years. Moreover, although the war industry of the Signal Corps scored its greatest production records with such common things as telephone and telegraph instruments and wire, all this equipment was of special design unknown in ordinary commercial use and therefore without value to it. ”

“ There was not one of these beautiful mechanisms, in France the product of patient handiwork on the part of metal craftsmen of deep and inherited skill, that eventually did not become in American workshops a practical proposition of quantity production.
The problem of building French recuperators in the United States, in short, may be regarded as the crux of the whole American ordnance undertaking in the war against Germany, the index of its success. It presented the most formidable challenge of all to American industrial skill. ”

“ Only through the development of a great independent aircraft industry in this country can the Government be assured of the existence of facilities upon which it can rely to give this nation great power in the air. As conditions now are, the Government itself must be the chief customer of the airplane industry, and on the government orders the industry must live until commercial flying begins to develop on a scale comparable at least to the early development of railway transportation in the United States. ”

“ While the principles of fighting essentially have changed not one whit since the age when projectiles were stones hurled by catapults, nearly every advance in mechanical science has had its reflection in warfare, until to-day the weapons which man has devised to destroy the military power of his enemy make up an intricate and an imposing list. ”

“ The building industry of the United States—and it is one of the largest and strongest of our industries—had never before been called upon to provide such expansion in an equal time. It follows that the entire building industry must have been engaged in the construction enterprise, that every available man who could drive a nail or lay a brick must have been employed upon government work. ”

“ The United States carried further than any other nation in the war the substitution of mechanical power for the power of draft animals in the movement of field artillery. Nothing in our army equipment in France did the French, themselves the premier artillerists of the world, admire more than our motorization of artillery. ”

“ Not only was it necessary to exclude the roar of the engine and the rattle of the machine gun from the ears of the men receiving the radio communication, but it was also necessary to filter out these sounds from the telephone transmitter. Every person who has ever shouted into a telephone knows how sensitive the ordinary telephone transmitter is to extraneous noises. It requires no wide stretch of the imagination to hear in fancy how an ordinary transmitter would behave when beside the exhaust of a 400-horsepower Liberty engine. ”

“ The British war subsidies went all through their war industry. For instance, in order to stimulate production, the British Government had paid subsidies to the makers of silica brick, used in building steel furnaces. The British asked us to stand a part of this subsidy, inasmuch as some of the shell supplied to us had been produced from furnaces built of subsidized brick. The Commission retorted by asking why Great Britain did not also ask us to share the subsidy on the bread the British steel workers had eaten while they were working on the American artillery and shell orders. ”

“ 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 industry; and in the production of them we find the same story of the difficulties in the adoption of foreign designs, of the development of our own designs, of the delays encountered and mistakes made in equipping a new industry from the ground up, but, finally, of the triumphant arrival at quantity production in a marvelously brief time, considering the obstacles which had to be overcome. ”

“ The great reserves of engineering supplies in France, as contrasted with permanent installations, were indeed an asset, but not so much of an asset as one would think. In the first place, to sell them to private buyers in the European markets would have been a work of several years, during which time the American Government would have had to maintain in France216 a force of perhaps 5,000 men. Moreover, all that time the engineering stores would have been constantly deteriorating, so that their average value would not have been nearly so great as their value at the time of the armistice. ”

“ Efficiency in war is a matter of teamwork. Every vital branch of the military organization must do its part well if the whole effort is not to fail. The weak link in the chain might well have been the construction organization of the Army, for here was an emergency job on a scale beyond anything in the experience of our greatest builders. America in her first 18 months of war was able to send to France across 3,000 miles of dangerous water more men than the United Kingdom in a similar period could send to the front over the netted and laned 40 miles of English Channel. ”

“ Many Americans have doubtless wondered why we built our own engine instead of adopting one or more of the highly developed European engines then at hand; and no doubt our course in this vital matter has sometimes been set down to mere pride in our ability and to an unwillingness to follow the lead of other nations in a science in which we ourselves were preeminent—the science of building light internal-combustion engines. ”

“ Packed away compactly were the tools and machinery of an embryonic war industry ready to be expanded at will in the event of another war. Materials, largely of special war value and therefore normally to be regarded as scrap and junk, had been sold to the tune of billions, the exercise of ingenuity in the sales department producing a recovery that was remarkably large, averaging 64 per cent of the war cost.
Such was our war demobilization. No other single business enterprise in all human history compared with it in magnitude ”

“ Thus, all during the age of iron, gun development went steadily forward. Every military power was always striving by the aid of its best engineers, designers, and manufacturers to get a stronger gun, either with or without a heavier projectile, but in every case striving for greater power. As a special development we find in March, 1918, the now famous long-range gun of the Germans, which was at that time trained upon Paris, where it successfully delivered a shell approximately 9 inches in diameter, punctually every 20 minutes for a good part of each day until the gun was worn out. ”

“ The word "steel" for the purpose of producing guns means much more than is ordinarily carried by the word in its everyday and most commonly accepted use. Only steel of the very highest quality is suitable for gun manufacture, as was indicated previously when attention was directed to the complete reliance which the operating crews must place in their guns and the severity of the uses to which the big guns are put.
Let us take a hasty trip through a big gun plant, watching the processes through which is finally evolved from the raw materials one of our hardy and efficient big guns. ”

“ Within the Government, too, there was a growing spirit of criticism of the bargaining method of settling the contracts, even though the bargains had been highly advantageous to the Government. It was felt that more conventional methods should be employed. The result was a marked slowing down in the rate of industrial demobilization in the Ordnance Department.
It seems fitting here to say a word for the men who manufactured our ordnance during the war. The popular picture of a war contractor is that of a man swollen with new wealth and spending his money in riotous extravagances. ”

“ American exporters generally for many years have had the reputation of packing goods improperly for overseas shipment. Time and again travelers and investigators in foreign lands have pointed out that if America expected to compete successfully with other manufacturing nations in foreign trade, she must learn to pack goods so that the packages will not break en route and damage the contents. When we sent an Army of over 2,000,000 men to France, it was evident that unless we learned quickly how to put up our supplies properly for overseas shipment, our lack of knowledge would be costly to us. ”

“ The nation does not award medals and other honors to those who restore the conditions of peace. The people themselves were satiated with war and desired nothing so much as a space in which they could forget battles and campaigns. At best, demobilization was to be a thankless job. Moreover, many of the executives, particularly those in the industrial organization, were men of large personal affairs, serving their country at a sacrifice. ”

“ An American invented the first real machine gun ever produced. Another American, who had taken British citizenship, produced the first weapon of this type that could be called a success in war. Still a third American gave to the allies at the beginning of the great war a machine gun which revolutionized the world's conception of what that weapon might be; while a fourth American inventor, backed by our Ordnance Department, enabled the American forces to take into the field in France what is probably the most efficient machine gun ever put into action. ”