Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 246, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 October 1918 — MAKINS GUNS FOR UNCLE SAM’S MEN [ARTICLE]

MAKINS GUNS FOR UNCLE SAM’S MEN

Day and Night Forces at Work on Weapons for Fighters. PRODUCTION IN YEAR’S TIME Plants for Manufacture of Ordnance Have Increased More Than 90 Per , Cent Since Beginning of the War.. (From the Cemtnittee on Public Information, Washington, D. C.) The foundries of 16 steel plants In the United States are today doing capacity business. Throughout the night the work will go on with slight interruption. The whistles that blow to announce closing time to one army of workers will be a summons to another shift to take its turn. The blast of chimneys will continue to roar, and the glittering white-hot streams of molten metal will flow into the molds. A year ago only two of .these sixteen foundries where cannon forgings are now being made were in existence. The foundries at Bethlehem and Midvale represented almost our entire resources for the making of cannon forgings. Today those two plants constitute less than 10 per cent of our total facilities for making such products.

In one year a new industry has been created in this country. It is new not only in the sense that the 14 foundries have been built, but that the processes of manufacture are new. Making gun forgings is different from making steel forgings for any other purpose. The heated steel must be pressed and not hammered. The methods of heat treating the steel, of cooling it, and of annealing the molten metal are all different. Yet, within one year, this new industry has been built up in this country, and today it provides the wherewithal for the carrying out of an artillery program the like of which has not been projected in any other country. Nor is that all.'ln more than a score of other factories gun carriages, recoil mechanisms and other parts of artillery are being made. For the making of those parts, new Industries have likewise been created. As an instance a new industry was established to manufacture glass of a quality available for use in telescopic sights on cannon. Such glass had never been made in the United Statesi before.

Handicapped at Start.

When we entered the war we were handicapped by a lack of technical knowledge. We had been a peaceful people; we had not trained our scientists and engineers in the art of munitions making. Therefore, we had but one ordnance expert for every 200 in Germany. We went into this war with an ordnance bureau consisting of 97 officers and -820 enlisted men. Not all of those 97 officers were ordnance experts. Some of them were only on detail to the ordnance department In fact, not more than eight of them were charged with the designing work in the manufacture of artillery. Before a year had elapsed, the ordnance department had grown into an organization of 5,000 men and 20,000 civilian employees. It has undergone a thorough reshaping to adapt itself to the extraordinary new conditions. The ordnance bureau in the first part of the war did a total business of $4,700,000,000. In peace times its average annual expenditures were $14,000,000. Large as these figures seem, astounding as this rate of expansion must appear, they give only a scant idea of the difficulties faced by the ordnance department in its year of preparatory work. Ordnance is a highly technical subject. The few who knew it thoroughly have had the- double task of furnishing ideas and perfecting designs and of imparting their knowledge to others. They had to be workers and teachers in the same day. The old ordnance, department of less than 100 officers was split up into a gun-carriage division, a cannon division, a small-arips division, and so on, each division being charged with the design and production of some part of ordnance material. Manufacture of ordnance material was carried on almost entirely in government arsenals. The problem of production was not difficult. A few officers could follow a gun through from the day that it was first sketched put on paper until it was turned over to a field' artillery regiment. But when the ordnance department was called upon to put through a program involving expenditures and contracts totaling more than $4,500,000,000 in a single year, the old way of doing business had to end and the old form of organization had to be abandoned.

Organized the Forces. To meet the new problem, most of the ordnance experts—the regular army officers —were n««sembled in wha* is known as the engineering bureau of the ordnance department, and to this bureau was given the task of designing ordnance material. How much designing work there is to be done in the ordnance department is suggested by t£e fact that 10,000 blue prints a day are turned out in Washington for the Information of manufacturers of ordnance material. The next big task of the ordnance department, after designing the material, was to place contracts and purchase orders. It was extremely difficult to find plants where ordnance maV r-’'--5 . ‘■

terlal be made, and in a great many cases it was necessary to have factories built, or to have them equipped throughout with new machinery and tools. Sometimes the ordnance department could not find anything more to begin with than a group of men who knew manufacturing methods. It would perspade them to undertake the making of some part, would finance them in building a plant and in buying machinery, and then would set them at work manufacturing the thing needed in the war program. It is clear that the work of placing contracts and orders on so large a scale, is an Industrial rather than a military function. Consequently an almost entirely civilian personnel was selected fol the procurement division, men who were experienced in the lines of industry affected, as, for instance, experts in shell Industry, in explosives, machine tools, textiles, etc. The orders placed, it was next necessary to follow them up in each of the more than 1,000 munitions factories engaged upon ordnance work. To do this, and to force quick production, a production division Was organized which has representatives in every plant and which is responsible for all production of material. This division, too, is made up almost entirely of civilians commissioned for the period of the war. An inspection division has the duty of making sure that guns and shells are up to specifications. After the material has been manufactured, inspected and accepted by the United States government, it is next necessary to supply it to troops in the training camps in this country and to the American expeditionary forces in France.

Numerous Articles Required. The extremely difficult problem of the supply division of the ordnance department is readily- understood when it is known that there are more than 10Q,000 different articles which must be furnished to our fighting forces and which must be distributed under the most difficult circumstances without a hitch. These 100,000 articles range from the small striker or firing pin of a rifle or a little nut or bolt to a mammoth railway mount for a 16-inch howitzer. Some of the artillery carriages have as many as 7,000 parts and It is the duty of the ordnance department to repair and maintain such material. ' The rifle ip the ready weapon of the infantryman. Owing to the changed conditions of modern warfare, it does not retain the extraordinary place of importance it once held. It is still, however, the principal stand-by of the American soldier, and the maintenance of an adequate reserve of rifles is, therefore, a matter of much concern. Have we enough rifles for our riflecarrying soldiers? We have. What is more, we are able to outfit them with the very best type of rifle known in the munitions world. For a number of years before the war the superiority of the United States model of 1903 (popularly called the Springfield) was well recognized. In five international meets, extending over a period of five years, our riflemen, using the Springefield, won first place every time, defeating the marksmen of 15 nations. Most of our opponents were armed with types of the Mauser rifle, which is used by the Germans. The new United States model of 1917 (popularly called the modified Enfield) is substantially the equivalent of the Springfield. It was decided to manufacture the modified Enfield our American factories, which had ac-’ cepted large contracts from Great Britain, could turn this weapon out in larger quantities than the Springfield, which had been made only at government arsenals.

Our rate of rifle production is today 50,000 per week. Every three months we are now making as many rifles as we had altogether at the beginning of the war. Yet that original supply (600,000 Springfields and 100,< 000 rifles of other sorts) was, from the start, sufficient to equip the rifle-carry-ing men of an army of a million. We can congratulate ourselves about rifles. Knottiest Problem of All. But artillery manufacture was the knottiest problem Of all. it is almost impossible to make the Jayman understand how difficult it is to manufacture a piece of modern artillery. Perhaps that was the reason, or one of the reasons, why public opinion in this country failed to listen to the warnings of ordnance experts and provide adequate appropriations for artillery manufacture years ago. For the last 12 years the war department has been telling congress that artillery ■ could not be made quickly after the outbreak of war. A year would be required to be gin deliveries on any guns in quantity, these experts told congress. To pro vide for artillery manufacture on a vast scale would take even longer, because in that event literally scores of new plants would have to be built, millions of dollars’ worth of machine tools and equipment would have to be provided and thousands upon thousands of men would have to be taught a line of work unknown to them at the outset. That Is precisely what the ordnance department has been doing since the declaration of war. It has been creating manufacturing facilities'to make, artillery. Arrangements were made to provide our troops with artillery of British and French manufacture while our own manufacturing resources were being developed. Although, thus far, this reliance upon the resources of our allies has proved satisfactory, naturally the war department is anxious 4o gain independence in Its artillery supply at the earliest possible moment, and that Is t)je task upon which the energies of the ordnance department are now concentrated. Every possible effort is being made to expedite production v artillery. . -