Munitions plant

“ The thing that really bothers, though, is the danger of death or injury from their own weapons or ammunition. You see, many times there is such a thing as a faulty shell, although careful inspection in the munitions plants has reduced this danger to a percentage of about one in ten thousand.
"At the beginning of the war when every little tin shop all over the world was converted into a munitions factory to supply the great need of shells, much faulty ammunition reached the front lines. Some of the shells would explode almost as soon as they left the gun. ”

“ I put in, mindful of a previous case of Kennedy's. "We all know that inventors have been working for years on the idea of making explosives obsolete and guns junk. If some one has hit on a way of guiding an electric wave through the air and concentrating power at a point, munitions-plants could be wiped out." ”

“ These ingots are the raw material of the shell casing only. The production of the explosive that serves as the bursting charge is an industry in itself, while the construction of the mechanism of the fuses requires almost as much skill as watch-making.
In the first year of the war, the critical period of the conflict, France led all the Entente nations in the production of shells. As was the case with guns, France had to supply her ally, Russia, with the munitions so necessary to the effectiveness of the armies fighting in Poland and the Carpathians. ”

“ The few existing plants had to be enlarged, new ones erected, and even the tools for the making of some of the munitions had to be manufactured before work could begin upon the arms themselves. For many years the whole nation had set its face against increase in the army or in the providing of supplies for it in excess of peace time needs. The commercial manufacture of munitions was repugnant to the spirit of American industry, which had never engaged in it to more than a very slight extent. ”

“ But in November, one month later, the requirements for 1945 had to be increased another 10 percent, sending the production goal well above anything we have yet attained. Our armed forces in combat have steadily increased their expenditure of medium and heavy artillery ammunition. As we continue the decisive phases of this war, the munitions that we expend will mount day by day. ”

“ The fire of the batteries is directed upon all the works of the place within range, but with greater vigor upon the more important, and especially upon those near the point of attack. The fire against powder-magazines and storehouses should be uninterrupted, to prevent the removal of powder and munitions. If the artillery of a part of the work is silenced, the fire upon it may be slackened, but some fire, especially vertical, should be kept up. ”

“ The concrete example of this is the transformation of the plants of the Renault automobile works to the making of munitions. In one factory, formerly wholly concerned with the forging and fitting of motor machinery, 15,000 men and 4,000 women are now employed 24 hours of each day grinding and filling high-explosive shells. ”

“ Notwithstanding the tremendous calls upon the man power of the country for the ever-increasing needs of the army, the supply of munitions has steadily increased. In addition to large consignments to other fronts of the war, there has been an increase of 30 per cent. in all kinds of guns and howitzers, and of over 100 per cent. in heavy guns and howitzers in the recent offensive in France, as compared with those of last year. ”

“ Engineer, signal and medical equipment still continued to have a value, but if the race for militarism is maintained it is hard to see how the quantities of war munitions can fail to escape the scrap heap in a few years' time. ”

“ During the last offensive the total expenditure amounted to twelve million projectiles of all calibers.
This incomparable war industry has permitted us not only to fight, to defend ourselves and to [Pg 101] attack the enemy, but also to supply our friends, our Allies, with the munitions necessary to fight. Up to January, 1918, these are the amounts of munitions France was able to hand over to the nations fighting at her side in Europe:
And to France has come the honor of making the light artillery for the American Army—amounting to several hundred guns per month. ”

“ No reserves may be formed, and all existing armaments, guns, and stores above the limit fixed must be handed over to the Allies for disposal. No poisonous gas or liquid fire shall be manufactured or imported, nor any tanks nor armoured cars. The Germans are obliged to notify to the Allies for approval the names and situation of all factories manufacturing munitions, together with particulars of their output. The German Government arsenals are to be suppressed and their personnel dismissed. Munitions for use in fortified works will be limited to 1500 rounds apiece for guns of 10·5 cm. ”

“ Thus there can be no limitation to the amount of artillery and the quantities of explosives serviceable in this kind of warfare. No one of the armies has ever had anything like enough shells. None ever can. Five hundred guns of all ranges set back of one another from 3,000 to 20,000 yards' range to a mile could be placed, or 225,000 for the western front, and they could readily use five million shells a day in this contest of munitions and manufacturing resources. ”

“ The German threw up the sponge before then. If he had waited he would have been literally blown out of his trenches and his chief cities.
In one sense, of course, we never had enough, but if I were asked to name a date on which a serious shortage of munitions ceased I should say September 19th, 1915, on the eve of the battle of Loos. On that date, a year after Trench War began, word was passed around to the batteries of the British line in a phrase copied from the provision shops of London: "Ammunition is cheap to-day." ”

“ One of the very first Acts to provide for placing educational production of munitions of war stipulated that initial orders placed with any person, firm, or corporation for supplying such munitions, accessories, or parts, could include a complete set of such gages, dies, jigs, tools, fixtures, and other special aids and appliances, including drawings as needed for the production of munitions in quantity in the event of emergency. ”

“ It is munitions that, thrown from our howitzers, make level roads through the tangles of wire on which, in the old days, the corpses of whole platoons of our men were hung up to rot and look, from far off, like washing put out to dry on thorned hedges. It is munitions that, when we attack, hold back the hostile supports behind a wall of falling bullets as hard to pass as Adam found the flaming sword at the gate. It is, then, not without reason that in this sheaf of drawings of the war on the Western front are included some drawings of guns and shells in the making. ”

“ American munitions production, which for some time has been in your charge, played an important part in the early decision of the war, yet the very immensity and complexity of the problem has made it difficult for this accomplishment to be adequately understood by the public or in fact by any except those who have had occasion to give the matter special study. ”

“ These portable and easily laid field railways twist and turn and coil like snakes among the gun positions, the miniature engines, with their strings of toy cars, puffing their way into the heart of the artillery zone, where the ammunition is unloaded, sorted, and classified in calibers, and then artfully hidden from the prying eyes of enemy aviators and from their bombs. ”

“ Some of these improvements were produced and put in the field, the others were under development at the signing of the armistice. The whole tendency toward motorization served to complicate ordnance production in this country, not only in the supply of the weapons and traction devices themselves, but in the production of increased supplies of ammunition, since these improvements also tended to increase the rapidity with which bullets and shell were consumed. ”

“ From there and for miles back the car crept slowly past gun positions and batteries beyond count or reckoning, jolted across the metals of a railway line that was already running into the captured ground, past “dump” after “dump” of ammunition, big shells and little piled in stacks and house-high pyramids, patches of ground floored acre-wide with trench mortar bombs like big footballs, familiar gray boxes of grenades and rifle cartridges, shells again, and yet more shells. ”

“ The delay was still with the guns and the munitions. A heavy gun is not the product of a week or of a month, and before a great increase can be made in the output of shells the machinery for producing them has itself to be produced. ”

“ Such effort has been expended on the building up of a munitions industry to support the armed forces of the Soviet Union in an emergency. These efforts have been quite successful in the creation of an airplane industry, a tank building industry, and in the great improvement in the entire metallurgical field. All activities of the munitions industry are grouped in a separate commissariat in order to achieve greater coordination and in order that first priority may in all necessary cases be secured for munitions programs. ”

“ Even amid the booming of the anti-aircraft batteries and the sharper staccato reports of the machine guns from various parts of the field, all blending into an unearthly din, the droning of the motors high in the air could be distinctly heard. Like a pyrotechnic display, luminous bullets, searching for the invaders, shot up into the sky, often piercing the low-hanging clouds; and mingling in with them were vicious little spurts of fire which told of the explosion of shrapnel shells. ”

“ Such a method would also be likely to lead to much waste of the enemy's ammunition. We have all read again and again of terribly expensive assaults made on particular positions bristling with machine guns, such as the Hohenzollern Redoubt, and how our men were mown down directly they left their trenches. Not doubting that such attacks could be rendered far less costly, I wrote about a year ago to a friend in the War Office, suggesting that chemists should be invited to consider the best form of smoke-producing bomb or shell. ”

“ The result was an enormous production of propellants and explosives in the United States during the period of American belligerency, no other prime phase of the ordnance program being carried to such a stage of development. The reader will clearly see the distinction between propellants and explosives. The propellant is the smokeless powder that sends the shell or bullet from the gun; the explosive is the bursting charge within the shell. ”

“ In addition to the ordinary manœuvre period in which cavalry and infantry participate, artillery units go every year to a practice camp which is a special area set apart for the firing of live shells, with a view to giving officers and men alike training in the realities of their work. The so-called smokeless powder—which in reality is not smokeless—used on these occasions, together with the passage of a shell through the rifling of the gun, renders the cleaning of the bore an even more messy business than that incurred in firing blank ammunition during tactical exercises. ”

“ The output of high explosives has been sufficient to meet the increased demands of our armies, to build up stocks, and to supply part of the needs of the Allies. There has been a steady improvement in the detonating value of gun ammunition and a continuous reduction in the number of premature explosions. In addition to guns, shells, and rifles, the demands of the military and naval forces during the year for aircraft, tanks, mechanical transport, railway material, and equipment of every sort and kind have been endless. ”

“ The ammunition-train in process of being unloaded is a fearsome affair. You may see all conceivable ammunition, from rifle cartridges to a shell whose weight is liable to break through the floors of lorries, all on one train. And not merely ammunition, but a thousand pyrotechnical and other devices; and varied bombs. An officer unscrews a cap on a metal contraption, and throws it down, and it begins to fizz away in the most disconcerting manner. ”

“ As each gun was able to fire twenty shots a minute, they hurled over one thousand high explosive shells from all of the guns each minute.
This multiplied by sixty, to represent an hour, and then by five to get the grand total, in point of time, makes more than three hundred thousand missiles distributed over an area of less than five square miles. Imagine, if you can, what it would mean to have ten of those terrific shrapnel shells explode over every acre in that region. No wonder that human flesh cannot stand that sort of warfare. ”

“ It is not strange that the airman does not worry much over the regular steel ammunition of the machine gun, for like other similar dangers, while they are the most fatal, they cannot be seen, so, he is oblivious to their presence; but when the guns are using tracer and incendiary bullets, the stream of fire is not unlike a miniature fire rocket and behind each of the pretty fire rockets comes two silent, fatal 171ball cartridges, for, indeed, the very object of “tracer” ammunition is to show the path the bullets are taking. ”

“ They can't, and never will, compete with the artillery, where range and great accuracy are the most important factors. The efficiency of artillery gas shell or artillery smoke or high explosive shell is only one-fifth that of the projector. Hence, for economy and efficiency, the artillery will be used to fire gas, smoke, high explosive, and incendiary materials only at ranges beyond those reached by the gas troops. ”