Industrial warfare

“ No nation can hope to make a stand in modern warfare, much less to make headway in warlike [Pg 311] enterprise, without the most thoroughgoing exploitation of the modern industrial arts. Which signifies for the purpose in hand that any Power that harbors an imperial ambition must take measures to let its underlying population acquire the ways and means of the modern machine industry, without reservation ”

“ The growth of handicraft had much to269 do with making the large states practicable and with supplying the material means of large-scale warfare; while the traffic of dynastic politics in that time had in its turn very much to do with bringing that era of industrial and commercial enterprise to an inglorious close. The new industry supplied the sinews of war, and the wars ate up the substance of the industrial community. ”

“ The essentials of warfare are dreadfully simple—the production manager of any great industrial concern deals with most of them every day. You have to get materials and equipment; train men to use certain tools and instruments; bring power to bear at chosen points, in sufficient quantity, at the right time, for the right length of time; you have to combine the various kinds of force at your disposal, and arrange a schedule, as there is a schedule for chassis and body work in a motor car factory, so that the right chassis is in the right place as its body is lowered upon it ”

“ Main headquarters authorizes you to use these credits to an unlimited extent for the purpose of destroying factories, workshops, camps, and the most important centers of military and civil supply belonging to the enemy. In addition to the incitement of labor troubles, measures must be taken for the damaging of engines and machinery plants, the destruction of vessels carrying war material to enemy countries, the burning of stocks of raw materials and finished goods, and the depriving of large industrial centers of electric power, fuel and food. ”

“ It was not until the Government of Britain, representing the Community, invited Capital, Management, and Labor to meet in common, and policies were arrived at as the result of Round Table Conference, that the necessary adjustments of industry were so arranged as to make possible the vast production of munitions required to win the War. What was necessary to the winning of the War is equally necessary to the winning of Peace — which we can hardly say exists so long as international strife gives way only to industrial unrest. ”

“ It took seven million workers, men and women, to operate the war industrial machine—seven million Americans delving in the earth for ores, chemicals, and fuels, felling the forests, quarrying the rocks, carrying the raw materials to the mills, tending the fires and the furnaces, operating the cranes, guiding the finishing machinery with a precision never before demanded, slaughtering the beeves, curing the meat, packing the vegetables, weaving the fabrics, fashioning the garments, transporting all, and accomplishing the million separate tasks necessary to the munitioning of the Army. ”

“ Today thousands of England's industrial plants are being operated as government factories for the production of war materials, and many other thousands of plants, still under private control, are centering their energies in this same direction.
"We have here in the United States vast resources in manufacturing and producing equipment, but they are unorganized and uneducated for the national service. Our observations of the European War have taught us that it is upon organized industry that we must base every plan of military defense. ”

“ A mania for increasing armaments has thus been produced, and although this state of things is far less destructive and demoralizing than actual war, it lays a burden upon Europe which is fast becoming intolerable. For the modern development of industry has given rise [Pg 187] to problems that press for solution, and no satisfactory solution can be reached in the midst of this monstrous armed peace. Competition has reached a point where no nation can afford to divert a considerable percentage of its population from industrial pursuits. ”

“ Everywhere you go on the continent of Europe at this hour you see the conflict between militarism and industrialism. You see the expansion of industrial power pushed forward by the energy, hope, and thrift of men, and you see the development arrested, diverted, crippled, and defeated by measures which are dictated by military considerations. ”

“ The acceptance by the civilian population of sacrifices, caused by the diversion to war uses of the productive capacity of industry, will have a direct bearing upon the industrial capacity of that State. ”

“ But, apart from this actual destruction on the battlefield and on the sea, the tools and equipment of industry over the greater part of the earth remain untouched. It is true that, owing to the preoccupations of the war, not so much work as usual is being put into the upkeep and repair of our railways, factories and other industrial tools. ”

“ No matter how the battle lines yearn for men, the workers in the factories that send goods across the sea are kept at their task. This diagram is the barometer. For exports keep up the rate of exchange and husband gold.
England is creating a whole new line of industrial defence. The manufacture of dyestuffs will illustrate: This process, which originated in England, was permitted to pass to the Germans, who practically got a world monopoly in it. ”

“ When the whole industry of a nation is mobilized behind the fighting line, it is not merely finished munitions that must be given priority in transportation, but also the materials and fuel for further munitions production. The food supply of the industrial population, as well as that of the army, has a claim to priority. So also have clothing supplies, lumber for housing, and whatever else is essential to working efficiency. In production it would be impossible to fix definite limits upon the application of the priority principle. ”

“ The aim of the scientific soldier, like that of the soldier of the past, was to cut his enemy’s communications, to intercept and hamper his supplies; and the obvious way to attain that end was by ruthless disorganization of industrial centres, by letting loose a famished industrial population to trample and devour his crops. Manufacturing districts, on either side, were rendered impossible to work in by making them impossible to live in; and from one crowded centre after another there streamed out squalid and panic-stricken herds, devouring the country as they fled. ”

“ We simply produced, in our factories as well as on our farms, more things that other nations wanted, and we could offer them at prices with which other nations could not compete. This golden key of industrial progress and peaceful commercial methods opened to our trade many doors which seemed to be closed against it by all sorts of artificial obstructions; and this peaceful expansion of our foreign commerce went steadily on, while other nations that had an overabundance of battalions, batteries and warships vainly struggled to keep pace with it. ”

“ To reply that they have the big war machines because they can afford to pay for them, is no conclusive answer. The organizing of nations for war came into present-day society with the present industrial system. Industrial leaders have engaged in a great competitive struggle from which the final appeal was always the appeal to arms. Furthermore, one of the most profitable businesses has been that of making the munitions and supplies required for the prosecution of war. ”

“ This war has been such a jar to industrial conditions that many manufacturers are reducing their daily output considerably, while others who have a capital are afraid to invest, and are hoarding it in the banks. ”

“ The world situation had forced us to turn American industry into a vast munitions plant which, at the cessation of hostilities, was just beginning to get into production with some of the most essential materials of warfare. ”

“ There would have been no sense in choking the armed forces with zealous men for whom there were no weapons. Nor would there have been any sense in turning men out of their jobs in the so-called ‘unessential’ industries before the munitions factories were ready to employ them on new jobs. What needs now to be investigated is the pace of industrial mobilisation during the first nine months of war. A word needs first to be said about the balance between the Services and industry. ”

“ How we have worked up our output of high explosive shells to a point where it leaves the German factories far behind—and less than two years ago Germany was turning out a hundred times as many of these shells as we were; how we have grappled with and solved pretty nearly every one of the technical problems that the war has sprung upon us, and how in doing so we have had to turn all our industrial arrangements upside down and to create what is nothing less than a new industrial order—all this it would need a volume, and a very fascinating one, to describe. ”

“ Let labor splendidly do its part in bringing victory and its future influence will expand beyond the dreams of its prophets....
"Labor and victory are inseparable; nay more, the one may command the other, and thus it may control the fate of the world."
INDUSTRIAL MEANING OF WAR
Mr. H. E. Coffin, Chairman of the Committee on Industrial Preparedness, described the European War in its last analysis as a war of munitions, a war of factories, of producing powers, of sweating men and women workers. ”

“ Such vast quantities of manufactured products—machines, munitions, clothing, food, supplies of every sort—were consumed in the war and had to be speedily produced for immediate destruction that for the first time in the history of the world the forces of production at home became of as much consequence for the winning of the war as were the fighting forces at the front. ”

“ With these pregnant facts before us, it is very strange that it should not be perfectly plain to every one that what is true of labor-saving machinery in peace is likewise true in war. It is [83] very strange indeed that there should be intelligent men and women among us unable to see and to understand that labor-saving machinery and labor skilled in its use are as applicable and as indispensable to successful warfare as to peaceful industry. ”

“ When the guns are hushed you will find that national and industrial defence among the warring countries will be one and the same thing. The Allies learned to their cost that the economic advance of Germany was merely part of her one-time resistless military machine. Her trade and her preparedness went conqueringly hand in hand. Henceforth that game will be played by all. England, for instance, will manufacture dyestuffs not only for her textile trades, but because coal-tar products are essential to the making of high explosives. ”

“ We have, in the first place, the largest war and munition program of any Ally; in the second place, as I have shown above, we are, with the exception of the United States, the greatest industrial arsenal among the Allies; that necessarily involves large imports. We send a great deal of steel from England to our Allies; we have to replace it by steel from here. We make rifles for Russia; we have to import the steel to make them. We send boots to Russia; we have to import the leather needed. ”

“ The high stage of world-industrial development in capitalistic production finds expression in the extraordinary technical development and destructiveness of the instruments of war, as in their practically uniform degree of perfection in all belligerent countries. ”

“ Everyone is familiar with the facts presented by farmer and industrial employer. In sections whose activity has been stimulated by the production of war products, such as Bridgeport, Connecticut, other 136 industries and mercantile establishments have found it impossible to run as usual owing to the presence of munition plants, which attract an abnormal number of workers. ”

“ Labor may very rightly ask that their patriotic work should not be used to inflate the profits of the directors and shareholders of the various great industrial and armament firms, and we are therefore arranging a system under which the important armament firms will come under Government control, and we hope that workmen who work regularly by keeping good time shall reap some of the benefits which the war automatically confers on these great companies. ”

“ Telephones, automobiles, railways, long-range guns, 260and incalculable supplies of munitions have completely changed the methods of attack and defence. This war is less a war of men against men and courage against courage than a war between two industries. It is iron-mines, coal, chemical factories, huge furnaces, that conduct the war, and also the brains of inventors and manufacturers. The soldier of to-day is a courageous and intelligent machine who, with the life that he risks, works for this giant industry of the nations. ”

“ The manufacture of all these and many other accessories had to be instituted and rushed forward and, because of the shortage in skilled labor and the need for it in so many kinds of war production at the same time, workers had frequently to be trained for the making of them. At the end of hostilities between three and four hundred manufacturing concerns, employing over 200,000 skilled workers, were supplying the various needs of this highly specialized branch of warfare. ”

“ It was said that finance and commerce, interlocked and internationalized, would compel a speedy cessation of hostilities by exhaustion of the combatants. We were assured that the industrial armies of the workshops could not be mobilized for mutual destruction. ”

“ The lesson for us, from England's experience, is this: that every factory in the United States, now turning out luxuries, should be taken over by the government to turn out munitions; that every loom and lathe, forge and hammer, every mine and forest and shipyard should be dedicated to this one task—of winning this war for humanity and liberty. ”