War machine

“ Soon the sight of tanks became part of the routine of existence, and interest in watching an advance centered on the infantry which they supported in a charge; for only by its action could you judge whether or not machine gun fire had developed and, later, whether or not the tanks were silencing it. The human element was still supreme, its movement and its losses in life the criterion of success and failure, with an eternal thrill that no machine can arouse. ”

“ They came singing and twirling their caps on their bayonets, as if fear were an emotion unknown to their hearts. They came brushing through the wheat, following the tracks the tanks had made; they came cheering up the ravines and laughing along the high-road. They came carrying rifles, machine-guns, trench-mortars, bombs—all the filthy inventions war has brought to perfection, whereby one man may torture another. They stuck wild-flowers in their tunics, as if off on a holiday. They never once acknowledged by word or gesture that, life might hold for them no more to-morrows. ”

“ In modern wars fighting of this kind has ceased. A battle has become a matter of machinery. The strong arm and stalwart heart are replaced by the bullet-flinging machine, and it is a rare event for a man to know to whose hand he owes wound or death. Such, at least, was largely the case in the war between Russia and Japan in 1905. But in recent battles we read of hordes of soldiers charging up to the muzzles of machine guns, and being mowed down like ripened wheat. ”

“ The brain and all prevailing power controlling its fighting force of four and half a million men--or taking the Triple Alliance into consideration--the forces of which would in the event of war be controlled from Berlin--a force in round numbers of 9,000,000 men is, however, not known. Here for the first time is published an account of the inside workings of the German War Machine as far as is possible for any one man to give. ”

“ Truly, it would be a strange thing, to use so noble and costly a machine, as a British army, with all its national reputation to support, as lightly as those Spanish multitudes, collected in a day, dispersed in an hour, reassembled again without difficulty, incapable of attaining, and consequently, incapable of losing, any military reputation. ”

“ Of course, the army must be equipped in the modern way and fought in the modern way with all the resources of science, with aeroplanes, bombs, motor transport, and heavy artillery. But without the full devotion of the individual, without the coöperation of his esprit, the army would be a dead machine, especially in this nerve-rending endurance contest of the trenches. Here is the Latin idea, which is absolutely opposed to the German machine theory of war.
The German staff has done marvels with its machine. ”

“ He said:
"Every man, in the draft age at least, must work or fight.
"This is not alone a war of military maneuvers. It is a deadly contest of industries and mechanics. Germany must not be thought of as merely possessing an army; we must think of her as being an army—an army in which every factory and loom in the Empire is a recognized part in a complete machine running night and day at terrific speed. We must make ourselves the same sort of effective machine. ”

“ Haven't I also looked across No Man's Land toward the enemy's parapet? Whoever has must have conjectured about a machine that would take frontal positions with less loss of life than is usual and would solve the problem of breaking the solid line of the Western front. The possibility has haunted every general, every soldier. ”

“ I do not find that any war between great nations was ever won by a machine. The Trojan horse will be trotted out against me, but that was a municipal affair. Wars are won by the temper of a people. Serbia is not yet defeated. It is a frenzied and desperate quest that the Germans undertook when they began to seek for some mechanical trick or dodge, some monstrous engine, which should enable the less resolved and more excited people to defeat the more resolved and less excited. If we are to be defeated, it must be by them, not by their bogey-men. ”

“ The Italian Army has drawn from our workshops and learnt from our experiments. The Serbian Army has been re-formed and re-fitted.
Let us sum up. The Germans, with years of preparation behind them, made this war a war of machines. England, in that as in other matters, was taken by surprise. But our old and proud nation, which for generations led the machine industry of the world, as soon as it realised the challenge—and we were slow to realise it!—met it with an impatient and a fierce energy which is every month attaining a greater momentum and a more wonderful result. ”

“ The American soldier should understand that much as we may wish for it, there is little hope that Britain and Russia alone could defeat the mighty German war machine, built as it was during the nine years while we slept. ”

“ It isn't half enough in a machine-made war to be dashing and picturesque. You must fight destructive machinery with still cleverer engines of relief. The inventive brain must operate as well as the kind heart and the spirit of fearlessness. It is in the combination of courage and mechanical versatility that the best of the American quality has been revealed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Our artillery, our transport, our medical service, our training, were highly efficient, as the Germans themselves admitted. The machine was as good as an English-built engine, and marvelous when one takes into account its rapid and enormous growth in an untrained nation. It was in the handling of the machine that criticism finds an open field—and it’s an easy game, anyhow!
Apart from Generals, staff officers, and battalion officers who came to our mess, there were other visitors, [Pg 266] now and then, from that remote world which had been ours before the war—the civilian world of England. ”

“ But the force of this new principle does not wholly reside in its destructiveness. Its advent introduces into warfare an element which never existed before—a fighting-machine without men as a means of attack and defense. The continuous development in this direction must ultimately make war a mere contest of machines without men and without loss of life—a condition which would have been impossible without this new departure, and which, in my opinion, must be reached as preliminary to permanent peace. ”

“ And these flying war machines, you know, were only one sort of the endless war contrivances that had been invented and had fallen into abeyance during the long peace. There were all sorts of these things that people were routing out and furbishing up; infernal things, silly things; things that had never been tried; big engines, terrible explosives, great guns. You know the silly way of these ingenious sort of men who make these things; they turn 'em out as beavers build dams, and with no more sense of the rivers they're going to divert and the lands they're going to flood! ”

“ The German war machine was efficient, but, as nearly always in the case of too much efficiency, it was utterly unprepared to cope with an emergency not contained in the proper statistics and text-books. ”

“ In order to strengthen our fire, at least in the most important parts of the chief theatre of war, it was necessary to create special Machine-gun Companies—so to speak, Machine-gun Sharp-shooters.’ Attention is also called in the German Commander’s authoritative Memoirs to the need of hand-mines, grenades, and all quick-loading weapons, and to the formation of storm troops. ”

“ The working machines carry guns, and fight when they have to, but the single-seater fighting machines are out for fight all the time, out to destroy enemy fighters, or to put out of action any enemy working machine they can come across. ”

“ For the past ten years conditions have been highly abnormal. The feverish preparation for war and the more feverish maintenance of the war effort engulfed all aspects of national economies. Machinery has fallen into disrepair or is entirely obsolete. Under the arbitrary and destructive Nazi rule, virtually every possible enterprise was geared into the German war machine. Long-standing commercial ties, private institutions, banks, insurance companies, and shipping companies disappeared through loss of capital, absorption through nationalization, or by simple destruction. ”

“ There is no machine so enormous, none that requires so much detail and fineness of adjustment. I've studied it from a soldier's point of view, ever since I've been in the army, and now that I'm trying to get my commission, I'm studying it all the closer.
"Men don't win a war. Guns don't win a war. Food and munitions don't win a war. You can have ten million men and a hundred million tons of food and munitions and what good will they be [Pg 187] unless the food gets to the men, the munitions to the guns, and the men and guns to the front? ”

“ This war has given us no new principles; but different mechanical appliances—and in particular the rapid improvement and multiplication of aeroplanes, the use of immense numbers of machine guns and Lewis guns, the employment of vast quantities of barbed wire as effective obstacles, the enormous expansion of artillery, and the provision of great masses of motor transport—have introduced new problems of considerable complexity concerning the effective co-operation of the different arms and services. ”

“ Six simple and unmistakable signals can easily be arranged and learned during peace training, which might prove invaluable in war, for “opportunity” is everything to the machine gunner, and is usually so fleeting as to demand instant action in order to obtain success. ”

“ Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!
You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.
Your task will not be an easy one. ”

“ Since America invented the machine-gun and also barbed wire, and since America furnished the inspiration for the tank with which to trample down the wire entanglements and stamp out the machine-guns, naturally people expected our army to come out with something better than anything produced by our allies. ”

“ Undoubtedly this means of fighting has developed the personal initiative of the soldiers, and the modern fighting machine of the nations is of a high standard, which, together with death-dealing weapons, has resulted in terrible havoc. Massed movements, such as carried on in the War of the Rebellion, have been practically done away with, and although there have been long and costly sieges, they have been carried on by tedious trench fighting, airships, hand grenades, and massive shells fired from guns of great caliber, and with a range which is really marvellous. ”

“ That the machine has worked smoothly nobody for one minute will assert—but it certainly has run sufficiently smoothly to show that, with some alteration which experience alone could suggest to be desirable, our military engine may very easily be made as perfect as those of the Continental Powers are popularly supposed to be. ”

“ Germany frantically endeavored to manufacture tanks to meet the Allied monsters, but their efforts were feeble when compared with the great output opposed to them.
Before considering other inventions used for the first time in this war, it is well to understand the tremendous changes in methods and tactics made necessary by these discoveries.
Put into a sentence, the changed warfare amounts to this: it is a mobilization of material, of railroads, great guns, machine guns, food, airplanes and other engines of destruction quite as much as it is a mobilization of men. ”

“ It is the sulkiest and the most abominable sound of this war—a perpetual reminder that machine guns can spray more death and wounds than shell fire. You can't be sure of the source or direction of machine gun fire. It may be after a number of targets, including your self. The red-headed brigade officer, experienced in such estimates, walked a little faster and hesitated before answering my question. ”

“ He admits, indeed, fully that machine guns, tanks, aeroplanes, and motor transport "have given a greater driving power to war," and that the country which possesses most of such things has an advantage over its opponents. But he insists that their only "real function" is to assist the infantry to get to grips with their opponents, and that of themselves "they cannot possibly obtain a decision." To imagine that tanks and aeroplanes can ever take the place of infantry and cavalry is to do these marvellous tools themselves a disservice by expecting of them more than they can perform. ”

“ All their skill was applied in their maze of machine-gun positions, to utilize every detail of advantage of that monstrously favorable ground of slopes, woods, and ravines. The American divisions, steeled now to this ruthless fighting against a hidden enemy, took machine guns only to find that there were machine guns behind them ”

“ With our seacoast cities and fortifications in the hands of the enemy, it would be possible for him, having at hand unlimited transport, a vast army, and complete equipment, to land in the first week of the war sufficient forces to capture all the arsenals, ammunition, supplies, and factories for the manufacture of guns, rifles, and powder, long before our widely-scattered mobile army of 30,000 regulars and 60,000 militia could be brought together, effectively to stay his progress. Modern wars, Mr. President, are machine-made, and without the proper machinery war cannot be waged. ”