Benedict Crowell

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As to our own manufacture of artillery, when we had conquered all the difficulties—translated the drawings, built the new factories, equipped them with machine tools and dies, gages, and other fixtures needed by the metal workers, and had mobilized the skilled workers themselves—we forged ahead at an impressive rate. ”

“ The American soldier is fond of candy, tobacco, and chewing gum. The supply of these commodities brought much pleasure to the troops. Long lines of men waiting for free candy and tobacco in France, men who just came from the front, formed one of the interesting sights of the war. Tobacco has established its claim to a recognized place in the soldier's life. Probably 95 per cent of the soldiers of the American Expeditionary Forces used it in one form or another. In May of 1918 it was decided to adopt the practice of the allies, namely, to allow each soldier a certain amount of tobacco per day. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The old days of sighting a cannon point-blank at the visible enemy over the open sights on the barrel of the weapon passed with the Civil War. As the power of guns increased and their ranges lengthened, the artillerists began firing at objects actually below the horizon or hidden by intervening obstacles. ”

“ 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 warfare yearned for such supernatural gifts of sense that troops might detect the unseen presence of the enemy. Accordingly Science, the fairy godmother of today's soldiers, raised her wand, and lo, the Army was equipped with the wonderful ears of the fairy tale, uncanny no longer, but a concrete manufacturing proposition. ”

“ As the whole people have been called upon to make sacrifices for the war, all the people should be given an opportunity to know what has been done in their behalf in munitions production, and I therefore ask that you have prepared a historical statement of munitions production, so brief that all may have time to read it, so nontechnical that all may be able readily to understand it, and so authoritative that all may rely upon its accuracy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Sound ranging for the detection of airplanes at night requires an equipment which consists fundamentally of a sound-gathering device and a listening mechanism, the combination enabling the observer to tell the direction from which the sound is coming. When a bombing plane approaches at night the hum of the motor can be heard at a distance from 1 to 3 miles, or even more, depending upon conditions. But the direction of this sound is elusive to the unaided ear, as anyone can testify who has heard an airplane in broad daylight but could not locate it with his eyes. ”

“ Consequently when we trained a corps of aviators to fly at altitudes of 18,000 to 20,000 feet above the western front, it was necessary for us to design and manufacture for them the warmest clothing ever made. They were dressed more warmly than any Polar exploration party that ever set forth, more warmly in fact than any other class of men in the world. For we not only gave them the protection of all the fine wool, leather, and fur that they could wear without hindering their movements, but in addition we literally wrapped them in flexible electric heaters. ”

“ All through the history of the development of machine guns the tendency has been toward lighter weapons, but it was not until the great war that serviceable machine guns were made light enough to give them great effectiveness and popularity. Such intense heat is developed by the rapid fire of a machine gun that unless the barrel can be kept cool the gun will soon refuse to function. The water jacket which keeps the gun cool proved to be the principal handicap to the inventors who were trying to remove weight from the device. ”

“ Until after the Civil War, the operation of large units of troops was greatly handicapped by the limitations of military signaling as then [Pg 568] known. A force could not be effective in combat that could not be readily reached in all quarters by runners or riders or by visual signals. The development of the telegraph and telephone and the invention of radio changed all this, so that in the great war armies stretched out on fronts 100 miles or more in length with every part of them in immediate touch with every other part through the exact and complete systems of signaling on the field. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Artillery practice nowadays abhors the wasted shot. The time when cannon fired in the general direction of the enemy, and hoped to hit something, passed when the long-range rifles and howitzers, with their marvelously accurate sighting instruments, came into existence. Whole books have been written on the subject of pointing a modern cannon in the modern way. A great proportion of our industrial effort in the recent conflict was devoted to the sole end that we might aim our artillery accurately. ”

“ They had in their hands the power to draw freely upon the past experience and achievement of practically the entire world for any features they might decide to install in the model power plant to be produced. And this applied not only to the patented features of American motors, but also of foreign engines; for each man had exhaustively studied the leading European engines, including the Mercedes upon which Germany largely pinned her faith up to the end of the war.
With respect to American motor patents, an interesting situation had arisen in the automobile industry. ”

“ It is no easy trick to teach a man to cut meat properly; butchering is a skilled trade. As soon as it was apparent that the American Expeditionary Forces in France were to be greatly expanded in size, our officers overseas sent requests that several trained and experienced butchery companies be sent over to cut meats properly for the organizations abroad. In order to comply with this request there was added to the curriculum of the quartermaster training camp in Florida a butchery course in the cutting, boning, rolling, and tying of fresh and frozen beef. ”