War materiel

“ All arms, ammunition and implements of war and all specialized facilities for their production shall be held at the disposal of the Allies or destroyed. The maintenance and production of all aircraft and all arms. ammunition and implements of war shall be prevented. ”

“ That which has driven the masses of Europe into the trenches and to the battlefields is not their inner longing for war; it must be traced to the cut-throat competition for military equipment, for more efficient armies, for larger warships, for more powerful cannon. ”

“ Peace will leave at least 40 millions of the most efficient small arms ever known, probably 10 million machine guns of the same character; three hundred thousand cannon, large and small; thousands of war-ships, all with corresponding munitions and equipments for which the world will then have little use.
Peace will find most of these soldiers with three or four times their number employed as accessories to the army, discharged without vocation, and, perhaps, 100 million expatriated citizens, poor, helpless and starving men, women and children, wandering on the face of the earth. ”

“ In carrying out the measures by which these things are to be accomplished we should keep constantly in mind the wisdom of interfering as little as possible in our own preparation and in the equipment of our own military forces with the duty—for it will be a very practical duty—of supplying the nations already at war with Germany with the materials which they can obtain only from us or by our assistance. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Just as the Germans threw in new divisions of infantry and new batteries of artillery to check the Allies' offensive, so they sent aloft hundreds of new machines to contest for the mastery of the air, an important phase of modern war. ”

“ The backward condition of the sole arsenal of England during the long interval of peace seems at first sight remarkable, when we consider the amount of mechanical ingenuity which had penetrated into every factory in the kingdom; but when we remember that the instruments and munitions of war are special articles, wanted only for special periods, occurring at uncertain intervals of time, the wonder ceases. ”

“ For generations to come the soil of France will be disclosing to the peasants who till her fields, the fragments of war's destructive power and the bones of heroes who bled and died.
On the battlefields I saw innumerable [105] quantities of equipment, together with guns and ammunition, which had cost millions to produce but were valueless in so far as their future use was concerned. I saw the Place de la Concorde and the Tuileries Garden in Paris packed with one thousand captured German guns and more than a score of Boche planes and observation balloons. ”

“ It must be armaments and nothing but armaments with them. If there had been any possibility of success in that we should not now be entering upon the 8,000th or 9,000th war of written history. Armaments may be necessary, but they are not enough. Our plan is armaments plus education ”

“ And I saw a pile of discharged shell cases; copper was too valuable these days to leave in the mud. And as I saw them load and prepare to fire, each man doing his task with the speed and deftness of a whirling gear, I thought of it as one part of the war machine in which individuality was utterly lost in the gun; but that was before I went into the hole in the canal bank.
And then I saw that all the soldiers were holding their hands on their ears ”

“ 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. ”

“ To the difficulty provided by the desire for concealment necessary in all military organization, one must add the difficulty presented by the cross categories peculiar to this calculation. You have to consider not only the distinction between active and reserve, but also between men and munitions, between munitions available according to one theory of war, and munitions available according to another. ”

“ New weapons and devices are brought forth in every new conflict, and they greatly change the conditions of warfare. The great European struggle utilized the airplane, poison gas, incendiary bombs, gas shells, hand grenades, liquid flame, tanks, wireless telegraphy, wireless telephony, dirigible balloons, submarines, seaplanes, and artillery with a range of over fifty miles—none of these things figured in any previous war. ”

“ There is perhaps no operation of war more difficult than that which this country has to undertake in the embarkation of its army for a continental campaign. It is not merely as regards its personnel; but large reserves of ammunition and stores, and the armaments and equipments of the artillery, engineers, [Pg 11] medical, commissariat, clothing, and other departments have to be embarked, and all so arranged as to be prepared for rapid landing after a long voyage, and possibly in the face of an enemy. ”

“ Arms and munitions of war for an army of sixty thousand men have fallen into our hands, besides a large amount of other public property, consisting of railroads, locomotives, cars, steamboats, cotton, etc., and much was destroyed to prevent our capturing it. ”

“ Every nation has to contend with that problem. The feature about it that caused me to be called in was that such a quick and comprehensive chain for the revealing of ordnance and construction secrets had been established that the Germans actually were using our newest war weapons against us about as quickly as we could bring them into play ourselves.
“One of the most striking examples of this was the chloropicrin-phosgene gas mine. ”

“ England, for instance, at the outbreak of the conflict could import vast quantities of munitions and supplies from other countries. England, therefore, had a fourth alternative, one denied to us because the struggle is now world-wide. All of the materials of war that we furnish must come from the current energy of our own people. We must ourselves produce these ships, munitions, food supplies, and stocks in the coming months. There is no one else to do it for us. ”

“ In spite of all the losses, Germany’s mobile forces, ready at a moment’s notice, numbered 5,000,000 trained veterans with muscles of steel and equipment unparalleled in the history of warfare. Russia had 9,000,000 men armed and hardened by war, France had 3,000,000, Great Britain 3,000,000, Austria-Hungary 3,000,000, Japan 4,000,000. ”

“ The decisive factor in the sort of war we are now waging is production and right use of mechanical material; victory in this war depends now upon three things: the aeroplane, the gun, and the Tank developments. These—and not crowds of men—are the prime necessity for a successful offensive. Every man we draw from munition making to the ranks brings our western condition nearer to the military condition of Russia. ”

“ An all-round limitation of armaments must follow the present war if the world is to be permanently relieved of the nightmare which has weighed upon it for so long. We can no longer afford to listen to arguments as to the impracticability of such a course from those whose claims to the possession of human wisdom and experienced guidance have so utterly broken down.
Armament industry rests in government demand, and creates an economic force interested in war preparedness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What I am pointing out now is that whether we fight Germany or not, a time is drawing near when Germany will cease to be our war objective and we shall cease to be Germany’s war objective, and when there will have to be a complete revision of our 170military and naval equipment in relation to those remoter, vaster Asiatic possibilities. ”

“ Preparation strategy deals with the laying out of plans for supposititious wars and the handling of supposititious forces against supposititious enemies; and arranges for the construction, equipment, mobilization, provisioning, fuelling, and moving of supposititious fleets and armies. War strategy is vivid, stimulating and resultful; preparation strategy is dull, plodding, and—for the strategist himself—apparently resultless. Yet war strategy is merely the child of preparation strategy. The weapons that war strategy uses, preparation strategy put into its hands. ”

“ Life was worth while again. We all agreed that there were less comfortable places in which to have breakfast on rainy autumn mornings than German officers' dug-outs.
The haste with which the Germans abandoned their trenches was evidenced by the amount of war material which they left behind. We found two machine guns and a great deal of small-arms ammunition in our own limited sector of frontage. Rifles, intrenching tools, haversacks, canteens, greatcoats, bayonets were scattered everywhere. ”

“ Nothing can be clearer than the duty of the proper officers to consider all bids in the sunlight of the conspicuous events then passing. A terrible war was convulsing the Old World. Two mighty nations were in conflict, one of which was already prostrate and disarmed. Meanwhile came bids for arms and war material [Pg 17] on a gigantic scale, on a scale absolutely unprecedented. Plainly these powerful batteries, these muskets by the hundred thousand, and these cartridges by the million were for the disarmed belligerent and nobody else. ”

“ Smaller, more numerous and various and mobile weapons and craft and contrivances, manned by daring and highly skilled men, must ultimately take the place of those massivenesses. We are entering upon a period in which the invention of methods and material for war is likely to be more rapid and diversified than it has ever been before, and the question of what we have been doing behind the splendid line of our Dreadnoughts to meet the demands of this new phase is one of supreme importance. ”

“ Competition in armament, whether on land or sea, inevitably leads to war, and it can lead to nothing else. And yet, after the terrible lessons of the recent war, the race for armaments continued with increased momentum. France, Russia, and Poland maintained huge armies, while the United States and Japan entered upon the most extensive naval construction programs in the history of the world. Great Britain, burdened with debt, was making every effort to keep pace with the United States. ”

“ Force for defense vs. force for aggression.
The problem of the League of Peace is actually the problem of the use of force. Force internationally expressed is measured in armaments. The chief discussion which has been waged for the past decade between the pacifists and militarists has been over the question of armaments. The militarists claim that armaments insure national safety. The pacifists declare they inevitably lead to war. ”

“ High explosives, armor plate, modern weapons, modify the conditions of war, but as the Japs and Russians are teaching us to-day we can never do entirely without the individual initiative, without the courage necessary for the hand-to-hand conflict. ”

“ Strategy, command, leadership, courage, discipline, supply, organisation, and all the moral and physical paraphernalia of war are as nothing to a high superiority of weapons; at most they go to form the 1 per cent. ”

“ Each robs it of hundreds of thousands of men needed in the trenches, of the transports required to carry those men, of war-ships to convoy them, of hospital ships to mend them, of medical men, medical stores, aeroplanes, motor-trucks, ambulances, machine-guns, field-guns, siege-guns, and millions upon millions of rounds of ammunition. ”

“ Not while these people could turn their 143workshops into manufactories of war-missiles, and their prairie steeds into chargers, should an enemy—brother or stranger—take one right from the West by force. ”

“ The materials of war for the insurgent States were furnished, in a great measure, from the workshops of Great Britain, and British ships, manned by British subjects and prepared for receiving British armaments, sallied from the ports of Great Britain to make war on American commerce under the shelter of a commission from the insurgent States. ”

“ Between 2,000,000 and 3,000,000 casualties on one side of the balance sheet and a few square miles of uninhabitable ground on the other was the sum-total of these united endeavours, and all because no single army had, since 1870, realised the mechanical side of the science of war. ”

“ But the British navy being superior to the German, held Germany in siege.
THE SECOND SUMMER'S CAMPAIGN
Germany must make the best possible use of her comprehensive industrial organization and of her preparedness for war and throw the greatest possible number of men into the fighting line at the earliest possible moment. She was practically in a race against time; and time was with the Allies. While (p. 049) they retained command of the sea the United States and other neutral nations overseas, once their plants for manufacture were completed, could pour out supplies of munitions. ”