Rearmament

“ He said that he had been ordered to build as rapidly as possible an air force five times as large as originally planned, to increase the speed of the rearmament of the navy and army, and to concentrate on offensive weapons, principally heavy artillery and heavy tanks. ”

“ But how is British rearmament in actual fact? The construction program of the Navy for 1938 has not yet been filled. Only mobilization of the reserve fleet. Purchase of fishing steamers. Considerable strengthening of the Navy, not before 1941 or 1942.
Little has been done on land. England will be able to send a maximum of 3 divisions to the continent. A little has been done for the air force, but it is only a beginning. AA defense is in its beginning stages. At the moment England has only 150 AA guns. The new AA gun has been ordered. It will take a long time until enough have been produced. ”

“ The crisis in Europe had by then increased congressional willingness to support a major rearmament effort, and at the same time the success of the German panzers highlighted the need for mechanization, however costly. ”

“ Simultaneously with the work of making the new, huge army, of housing and training it, meeting its immediate and preparing to meet its future needs of clothing and equipment, the War Department had to provide, against the time in a very few months when these troops would be at the front, the munitions with which it would fight—heavy and light artillery, machine guns, rifles, automatic pistols, grenades, bombs, gas shells, cartridges, every death-dealing instrument made necessary by modern scientific warfare. ”

“ We all know—the whole world knows—why the military power of England has not yet reached its full majesty. We all know that in the War of to-day a superabundance of munitions is demanded which none could have expected from the history of the past. Every form of military stores—guns, rifles, shell, ammunition—all must be provided on a scale of colossal magnitude. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If a man cannot move freely, he cannot fight. If a horse cannot move, what use is his rider? If the artillery-man cannot serve [80] the gun freely and the gun is immovable, field artillery is useless. Therefore, if gas becomes a standard weapon, we are left with the tank and the aeroplane as the sole effective arms for offensive action. Only as the static defenders of the fortified bases—the land-ports—of tanks and aircraft will there be a future for infantry and artillery, the former armed with super-heavy armour-piercing machine-guns, and the latter with anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns. ”

“ This development of modern warfare means that a million modern soldiers need four million modern rifles.
This indicates the enormous necessities which would devolve upon this country in case we were forced into a war. During the past week I have received a cable from an old friend in England who has been selling war munitions to the Allies. He asked me how quickly I could get a million rifles made in the United States. The best bids I have been able to obtain have guaranteed a first delivery at the end of one year and final deliveries at the end of three years. ”

“ The [Pg 4] race to possess more soldiers and more guns than one's neighbour was carried to an absurd extreme. The armaments which the nations had to bear had become so cumbersome as to be unbearable, and for long it had been obvious to everyone that the course entered upon could no longer be pursued, and that two possibilities alone remained—either a voluntary and general disarmament, or war.
A slight attempt at the first alternative was made in 1912 through negotiations between Germany and England respecting naval disarmament, but never got beyond the first stage. ”

“ This year, some of the most valuable exploratory work has been done, and is being done, by the League of Nations. The League of Nations has been occupied in considering this very question of disarmament, and the possibility of linking it up with guarantees of security, universal in their application as such guarantees must be: and such a universality is, indeed, a first and absolute essential to make any prospect hopeful of limitation of armaments. ”

“ The reports from the Ordnance and Mining Bureaus are very gratifying, and the extension of our means of supply of arms and munitions of war from our home resources has been such as to insure our ability soon to become mainly, if not entirely, independent of supplies from foreign countries. The establishments for the casting of guns and projectiles, for the manufacture of small arms and of gunpowder, for the supply of niter from artificial niter beds, and mining operations generally, have been so distributed through the country as to place our resources beyond the reach of partial disasters. ”

“ The essential point is that the new and telling types of armament will develop from these very peace industries. We are not merely concerned with their relative magnitude in a state of disarmament, but with the critical types which may develop from them. ”

“ It is a war of explosions, from bombs thrown by hand within ten yards of the enemy to shells thrown as far as twenty miles and to mines laid under the enemy's trenches; a war of guns, from seventeen-inch down to three-inch and machine-guns; a war of machinery, with man still the pre-eminent machine.
Guns mark the limit of the danger zone. Their screaming shells laugh at the sentries at the entrances to towns and at cross-roads who demand passes of all other travellers. Anyone who tried to keep out of range of the guns would never get anywhere near the front. ”

“ ARTICLE 192.—The warships in commission of the German fleet must only have on board or in reserve the allowance of arms, munitions, and war material fixed by the principal Allied and Associated Powers. Within a month from the fixing of the quantities as above, arms, munitions and war material of all kinds, including mines and torpedoes now in the hands of the German Government and in excess of the said quantities, shall be surrendered to the Governments of the said powers at places to be indicated by them. Such arms, munitions and war material will be destroyed or rendered useless. ”

“ The guns themselves are marvels of structure and power. All of those used in the United States navy are made by the government in the gun-shops at the Washington navy-yard, and are “built up.” The methods and tools required for this are the invention of Americans, as well as the complicated arrangements for closing the breech, and the carriages and mechanism for overcoming the tremendous recoil and handling the ponderous146 ammunition; the latter, often weighing hundreds of pounds, is handed up to the gunners from the magazines below by hoists worked by electricity. ”

“ The World Disarmament Agency shall immediately immobilize all such weapons and shall proceed with dispatch to dismantle, convert to peacetime use, re-cycle the materials thereof or otherwise destroy all such weapons. During the first operative stage of World Government, the ratifying nations may retain armed forces equipped with weapons other than weapons of mass destruction as defined and designated by the World Disarmament Agency. ”

“ Disarmament depends for success on the way in which we tackle certain critical cases, The carrying out of the more commonly considered forms of disarmament will give immensely added importance to other forms of warfare which have already challenged supremacy in the keen competitive atmosphere of the great world war. The outstanding example is the chemical arm, whose peculiar requirements in any scheme of disarmament have been but vaguely understood. ”

“ The anticipation is confidently adventured that a great revolution will be made in warfare by the magazine rifle with its increased range, the machine gun, and the quick-firing field artillery which will speedily be introduced into every service. It does not seem likely that smokeless powder will create any very important change, except in siege operations. On the battlefield neither artillery nor infantry come into action out of sight of the enemy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Armament.—The guns for arming the place should be placed in position or in store within the works before the beginning of hostilities. There should be mounted in commanding positions a sufficient number of high-power guns to hold the enemy’s first works at a distance and to fire upon his camps, etc., if placed too near. In addition to these, a full supply of light guns, including machine and rapid-fire guns, should be at all times equipped and supplied for immediate use in meeting an assault or surprise. ”

“ Without it, to send an army to battle with the superbly equipped German troops would be to send the brave fellows to certain slaughter. To equip an army of 4,000,000 men with field artillery alone would call for 20,000 3-inch guns; and the equipment with howitzers and machine-guns, to say nothing of rifles and ammunition of all kinds, would be on the same scale.
"Where are we going to obtain all this matériel? Practically all the arsenals, depots, gunshops, rifle factories, and powder works of the United States lie in that part of the country which is held by the enemy. ”

“ Suddenly we wanted 50,000 big guns, and 500,000 machine guns and 10,000,000 rifles with unlimited ammunition, more ammunition than men could dream of, with all sorts of new kinds of ammunition, bombs, handgrenades, aerial torpedoes, or flying pigs, flying pineapples, egg-bombs, hairbrush-bombs, Mills bombs, trench mortar bombs, such as men had never used. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The vastly expensive armaments of the present—the rifled breech-loader, the magazine rifle, the machine guns, the long-range field-guns, and so forth, are all accepted and paid for by the respective nations in the frank and naked expectation that these weapons will perform increased execution on the enemy in war time. ”

“ The introduction of modern breech-loading rifled guns, howitzers and mortars, rapid-fire and machine guns, and magazine small arms has brought with it the need of a higher grade of mechanical skill and improved machinery for making the ordinary repairs. This imposes upon both attack and defence the necessity for providing machine shops and tools fitted for work of this kind, with the steam power required to drive them. ”

“ Next were stacked boxes of machine-gun ammunition, hundreds and hundreds of them, occasionally interspersed with stray boxes of rockets, signal flares, Very lights and huge piles of rifles, of machine-guns and of empty brass shells of various sizes. The value of an average German city lay spread along that road all worthless to the former owners -all constructed for the purpose of killing their fellow men! ”

“ In the century we have seen the change from the smooth-bore to the rifle and from the ordinary to the repeating rifle. We have seen the modifications of artillery, which are beginning to give an application of the quick-firing principle to field artillery, and the use of high explosive shells, likely to affect by their explosion even those who are near the bursting shell and who are not struck by its fragments. ”

“ There are guns everywhere—machine guns, mountain guns, field guns, huge guns of position, 6-inch, 10-inch, 12-inch—which have been dragged or carried with all their mountings, their equipment, their tools and appurtenances, up to their stations, it may be, 3,000, 4,000, 6,000 feet above the level. And at those heights are the larders of shell which must always be kept full so that the carnivorous mouths of the man-eaters may not go hungry even for the single hour of the single day which, at any point, an attack may develop. ”

“ 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. ”