Chapter I: Origins and Growth to 1919
Early History
The immediate antecedents of the Ordnance Department of the United States Army date back to the first days of the American Revolution. The Ordnance Department is first mentioned by name in a resolution of the Continental Congress in 1778 that assigned to certain artillery officers responsibility for issue of ordnance supplies to troops in the field. Throughout the Revolutionary War the Congress kept final control of munitions procurement in its own hands but gradually delegated considerable authority to particular officers: to a Board of War and Ordnance, which in turn appointed a Surveyor of Ordnance to inspect matériel; to a Commissary General of Military Stores to keep record of purchases and of stocks on hand; and to the commanding artillery officer of the Army as the officer in charge of ordnance field activities.1
Little provision could be made for design of weapons since a large part of the arms with which the Continental Army fought the war was imported from France and the West Indies, confiscated on the high seas by American privateers, or captured from British stores in America. British-made muskets owned by colonial militiamen and rifles and muskets produced by local gunsmiths supplemented supply. Cartridges, ball, and powder were made in small shops scattered through the countryside. Yet while the urgency of getting usable field pieces, muskets, and ammunition was too great to permit of elaborate plans for improving ordnance, the commanding artillery officer was empowered to recommend alterations; if these proposed changes were approved by the Board of War and Ordnance, the board passed on instructions to the “artificers and laboratory men.”2 Thus the functions of the Ordnance Department of World War II were also those of the “Ordnance Department” of the Continental Army.
For nearly thirty years following the end of hostilities in 1782, the Ordnance Department as a distinct unit of the United States Army ceased to exist. In that interim ordnance supplies were first entrusted to the Keeper of Military Stores, and then in 1792 the Congress created the office of Purveyor of Public Supplies whose duties extended to purchase of arms and ammunition for the Army. To release the new republic from dependence upon foreign arms-makers, the Congress, moreover, in 1794 empowered the President to establish two national armories. Thus the Springfield Armory, the first federal arms factory, was erected and by 1795 had completed its first 245 muskets. Harpers Ferry, the
Springfield Armory. The main arsenal as it appeared in 1852
southern armory, began operations in 1796. Additional arms for the State Militia and the United States Army were supplied by private contractors, most notable of whom was Eli Whitney.3 It was Whitney’s demonstration to officials of the War Department that first convinced doubting Thomases of the feasibility of making firearms on an interchangeable basis. Whitney’s performance was as dramatic as its effects were revolutionizing. At the invitation of Capt. Decius Wadsworth, later the first Chief of Ordnance, Whitney in 1801 brought to Washington ten sets of the components of musket locks. These he dumped in piles upon a table and then selecting parts at random he assembled ten complete firing mechanisms. Initial disbelief of his audience gave way before this proof that use of jigs and machine tools could make components so identical that filing and special fitting in assembly were needless. Official objections to Whitney’s delay in deliveries on his contract for muskets were thus stilled.4 Shortly thereafter, the government armories adopted the new system of
manufacturing and, by improvement in machine tools, gradually extended and perfected it.
The approach of war with Great Britain in 1812 stressed the wisdom of placing responsibility for munitions upon the Army. Accordingly, the Congress on 14 May 1812 formally created an Ordnance Department and appropriated $20,000 for its expenses. The Commissary-General of Ordnance was charged with inspection, storage and issue, and supervision of the government “laboratories” or workshops; where gun carriages, muskets and other arms were made.5 Elaboration of the duties of the Ordnance Department followed in 1815. The Chief of Ordnance thereafter was responsible for contracting for arms and ammunition, for supervision of the government armories and storage depots, and for recruitment and training of “artificers” to be attached to regiments, corps, and garrisons.6 By 1816 the federal arsenals numbered five: Springfield and Harpers Ferry making small arms; Watervliet, “the arsenal near Troy,” artillery equipment and ammunition; Watertown, in Massachusetts, small arms ammunition and gun carriages; and Frankford, near Philadelphia, ammunition. Only two more, Rock Island and Picatinny, were added after mid-century, while Harpers Ferry was destroyed early in the Civil War.
The importance of the role of the Ordnance Department was recognized from its beginning. Thus, the Secretary of War urged the Congress in carrying out proposed reductions in the size of the Army to exclude the Engineer Corps and Ordnance Department. “Their duties,” he wrote in 1818, “are connected with the permanent preparation and defense of the country, and have so little reference to the existing military establishment, that if the army were reduced to a single regiment, no reduction could safely be made in either of them.”7 Nevertheless, the reduction effected in 1821 officially merged the Ordnance Department with the Artillery. The arrangement endured for eleven years, but, inasmuch as the officers who were transferred to the Artillery continued to perform the duties assigned to Ordnance by the Act of 1815, the change was more apparent than real. At the end of the 1820s the Ordnance Department was spending about $1,000,000 a year for equipment.8 In 1830 the colonel on Ordnance service reported:
… extensive operations are conducted at ... two national armories, nine private armories, four cannon foundries, fourteen national arsenals, four ordnance depots, and an extensive region of public lead mines.
These establishments are situated in different parts of the Union, and they employ more than one thousand men, consisting chiefly of artificers and mechanics. They are all conducted under the general supervision, and, with the exception of the private armories, under the immediate and special direction of the Ordnance Department.9
Officers trained as artillerymen soon proved less qualified to handle this business than ordnance specialists. The upshot was the re-establishment of the Ordnance Department as a separate unit in 1832 with 14 officers and 250 enlisted men assigned to it.10 Occasionally in the course of the next century efforts were repeated to
reassign the control of Ordnance. Wider civilian superintendence, renewed merging of the Department with the artillery, supervision by officers of the line, consolidation of all Army supply under one War Department supply service—all were urged, all discarded.11 After 1832 the structure of the Ordnance Department remained unshaken; its functions continue today as they were established then.
Design of weapons had not originally been included specifically in the duties of the Ordnance Department, though Col. Decius Wadsworth, the first Chief of Ordnance, and his successor, Col. George Bomford, each played an active part in determining American ordnance designs and specifications. Colonel Bomford had in fact himself designed a “bomb-cannon,” the “Columbiad,” the first heavy shell-firing gun the United States Army ever employed.12 The Regulations of 1834 first officially placed responsibility for design upon the Ordnance Department. This did not mean either then or later that Ordnance officers or arsenal employees originated designs. Usually new models were tendered for trial by independent inventors or commercial companies sponsoring them. The Ordnance Department selected, adapted when necessary, and then standardized, that is, officially accepted models for government use. To ensure having modern types of equipment, in 1840 and again in 1848 the Department sent officers to Europe to study foreign design and production methods. Utilization of ideas acquired abroad, together with development of techniques originating in America, placed United States artillery in mid-century more nearly on a par with that of other nations than had been possible in the Republic’s infancy.13 But American aversion to preoccupation with military affairs obstructed ordnance developments after, as before, the Civil War.
Design of small arms was a somewhat different story. The westward movement across the continent, with its accompaniment of Indian warfare and frontier violence, kept Americans immediately concerned with the adequacy of shoulder arms. In the forties the Ordnance Department replaced the old smooth bore, muzzle-loading flintlock with the percussion musket and the cumbersome pistol with the revolver invented by Samuel Colt. Notable improvements in rifles, pistols, and particularly ammunition, as well as in methods of production, occurred in the 1850s as the beginning of an independent machine-tool industry and of precision gage making nourished the growth of a series of private companies engaged in small arms manufacture. In this work the government arsenals collaborated.14 Yet the conservatism of the Army was clearly
manifested in the decision at the outbreak of the Civil War to drop the plans to manufacture breech-loading rifles using metallic rim cartridges. Government armorers, considering the models still experimental, feared the delays that always retard mass production of any new weapon. Thus, while American manufacturers were outstripping European in the speed and accuracy of their production techniques, the Ordnance Department was supplying the US Army with rifles of a type that European manufacturers would have dubbed antiquated. Not until 1866 did the Ordnance Department succeed in converting its muzzle-loaders to breechloaders, and not until 1892 did the Army get bolt action rifles, modern by the standards of that day.15 Widespread interest in small arms design largely subsided about 1890, partly because the possible improvements in rifles had by then been pretty much achieved and partly because the settlement of the West and disappearance of the frontier turned public attention to other problems.
In the eighties the Congress authorized creation of a permanent Ordnance Board to serve as final judge of the utility of proposed new models of weapons. Before the end of the century the Gatling gun and heavy machine guns had been adopted; research upon semiautomatic rifles, which would fire eight shots without reloading, and upon more powerful machine guns was inaugurated in 1901, and the new Springfield rifle, elaborated from the Krag-Jörgensen and the German Mauser, appeared in 1903. Meanwhile, artillery design was a subject of much debate. Adoption of the Crozier-Buffington recoil mechanism for heavy gun carriages was heralded as a great advance and perhaps served to strengthen Americans’ belief in American technological superiority.16 Though the volunteer regiments of the US Army, supplied with black powder, fought the Spanish-American War against troops equipped with the newer smokeless powder, the speedy American victory quieted criticism. Confidence in American ordnance mounted steadily in spite of the discernible evidence that American equipment was consistently some years behind that of the European powers. On occasion the sharply revealed need of new models brought action. Just as Civil War combat proved the inferiority of the government-manufactured muzzle-loaders to the breechloaders of private manufacture that were purchased and issued in small numbers, so experience in the Philippine insurrection following the war with Spain impelled the Ordnance Department to seek a larger caliber side arm. Testimony of soldiers that their revolver shots failed to stop fanatical Moros from rushing to attack with their bolos led to adoption of .45-caliber instead of .38-caliber for the new automatic pistol M1911.17
Unlike design, responsibility for which was somewhat belatedly assigned to the Department, procurement was a major part of the Ordnance mission almost from the Department’s beginning. Purchase of matériel or manufacture in government arsenals became one of its stated functions in 1815. Attempt to curtail government manufacture of arms in the interest of
turning the business over to private industry was defeated in the fifties by the vigorous opposition of the Ordnance Department and the Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, and was never seriously urged again. Davis argued that government manufacture as well as government design guaranteed constant improvement in models and enabled the Ordnance Department to check not only on the quality of contractors’ output but also on their prices.18 Thus the Congress, backed by public opinion, quashed the development in this country of a private munitions industry comparable to those in Europe. The enduring consequences for the Ordnance Department have been of signal importance.
Government inspection of arms before acceptance imposed the necessity of supplying gages to both government inspectors and, after 1840, to government contractors. Before that date a contractor could check his work only by comparing it with a model weapon lent as a pattern by the government. Not until after the Civil War did the Ordnance Department evolve any reasonably satisfactory system of furnishing gages and not until World War I was it applied on any scale. From the 1880s to 1916 the Master Armorer at each government arsenal was responsible for all gages needed in manufacture of the arms for which his arsenal had “technical responsibility.” Under his eye, skilled workmen, rather than gage-checkers trained in mathematics, verified the accuracy of each gage. The artisan’s experience largely offset the paucity of the precision measurement devices then available.19 A separate gage unit within the Ordnance Inspection Division was a creation of World War I.
Contracting with commercial producers fell off somewhat toward the end of the nineteenth century. During the Civil War the impossibility of equipping the Union armies from stores on hand or by running the government arsenals at capacity had forced reliance upon private firms, but dependence upon inexperienced manufacturers whose output had to be reworked or assembled in government shops was expensive. All powder had to be purchased until 1907 when a plant was built at Picatinny Arsenal. After the standardization of the famous Springfield rifle M1903, government manufacture of small arms as well as most artillery became the general rule, and up to 1915 the art of ordnance-making in America was chiefly contained within the government establishments.20
While manufacture of arms on an interchangeable basis was achieved after a fashion long before the Civil War, in the nineteenth century it was still too little developed to enable the Ordnance Department to supply spare parts to maintenance companies in the field. Maintenance of his equipment was the user’s job; repair work went back to the government arsenals.
Hence, one of the knottiest recent problems of Ordnance Field Service was unknown in earlier years. During the Mexican War Ordnance rocket and mountain howitzer companies commanded by Ordnance officers served as combat troops, but thereafter Ordnance units in the field were assigned only to supply.21 Ordnance officers commanding depots or arsenals were responsible for storing and issuing arms and ammunition and, after troop demobilization, for collecting repairable weapons for arsenal overhaul and reconditioning. Periodic inspection of matériel stored in depots or at the arsenals obtained all through the years. But Field Service, as such, was not established until after World War I.
The Ordnance Department enjoyed wide public confidence during its first hundred years. Occasional criticisms of American military equipment were usually forgotten as soon as the Ordnance Department had remedied a particular weakness. As American industrial genius began to emerge just before mid-century, America’s faith in its own capacities, military and other, began to grow. Belief that American ordnance was equal to any demands that might be made upon it encouraged an unconcern over European munitions developments. What matter that foreign powers adopted machine guns a decade before the United States? If this country lagged behind a little in one field or another, when need arose American ingenuity could be counted on to overcome the handicap quickly. Entrenched on the North American continent with a friendly neighbor to the north and relatively feeble, even if troublesome, neighbors to the south, the United States felt no call to devote thought and money to making instruments of war. National energies were directed toward exploiting the natural resources of the continent and building up industrial might for peaceful ends. The Army had always fought through to victory in the past, so Americans reasoned, and, were ill chance to plunge the country into another war, again American arms would triumph. No one was troubled about deficiencies in American ordnance.
World War I
When war broke out on the continent of Europe in 1914, the American public refused to consider the possibility of United States involvement. The Ordnance Department in the preceding decades had developed orderly routines for supply of the small standing Army and as late as the fall of 1916 gave few signs of alarm at having the Congress make only moderate increases in appropriations.22 In fact, not the Congress, but the Chief of Ordnance himself in the prewar years recommended reduction of proposed appropriations for some items of equipment.23 The Chief of Ordnance, Brig. Gen. William B. Crozier,
included in his annual reports for 1915 and 1916 recommendations based upon observation of the form the war in Europe was taking, particularly urging the need of more powerful artillery and armored motor cars. He protested the continued insistence of Congress that government arsenals manufacture practically all ordnance material unless private concerns could compete on price, a condition rarely realizable; he pointed out that pursuit of this policy would delay expansion of manufacturing capacity badly needed in any future emergency.24 But he found reassurance in the number of American manufacturers that had undertaken large orders for munitions for European governments, although he recognized that plants set up to make foreign models could not immediately produce American arms and ammunition. “The time required for an unprepared adaptation of this kind is sometimes surprising, and in case of emergency would be serious.”25 Still, planning was unhurried. New designs for field and seacoast gun carriages were begun in 1916 and that summer, in order to equip and train militia in the use of machine guns, the War Department bought a few Lewis guns to supplement the meagre supply in the hands of troops on the Mexican border. Yet little more than six months before the United States was to declare war upon a major military power, the Department was just reaching a decision about how to spend the newly appropriated $12,000,000 earmarked for procurement of machine guns.26
Before 1918 determination of design and types of weapons for the United States Army lay chiefly with Ordnance officers. Although an Engineer officer, a Signal Corps officer, and usually both a Coast Artillery and a Field Artillery officer served on the Board of Ordnance and Fortification and so outnumbered the one Ordnance member, the Ordnance Department itself dominated this body whose recommendation was virtually fiat. Indeed, the authority exercised by the Chief of Ordnance over decisions as to what weapons the US Army should have seems to have grown during General Crozier’s regime. In the summer of 1901 the board had protested to the Secretary of War the Ordnance Department’s arrogation unto itself of the authority and functions vested by law in the board. The Secretary of War apparently ignored the complaint. In December General Crozier, newly appointed Chief of Ordnance, won a skirmish over the question of Ordnance Department power to direct field gun tests. The rest of the board had to back down when Crozier presented a message from the Secretary of War declaring that it was his intention “to have the test of field guns conducted by the Ordnance Department, through the instrumentality of Ordnance officers by the methods of the Ordnance Department, and at the Ordnance Department’s place.”27 Thereafter General Crozier, triply fortified by his position as Chief of
Ordnance, by his recognized stature as an engineer, and by his contributions in the field of artillery design, went through the motions of deferring to the board and of heeding reports of special Artillery committees or of Infantry Board members. But Ordnance Department influence was paramount. Crozier believed that the technician knew best what combat troops required.28 While occasionally the Secretary of War appointed special boards to pass upon the respective merits of models offered by rival inventors, ordinarily the services had little say about what equipment they would fight with. The Infantry could request a more effective service revolver, the Artillery longer range guns, the Cavalry improved saddles and holsters.29 But not until the 1920s were the using arms to play a primary part in determining military characteristics desired or in judging which model best met requirements.
The fact of the military unpreparedness of the United States in the spring of 1917 is familiar to all the generation that lived through that era and to all students of its history. The steps belatedly taken to overcome the shortages of trained men and equipment are less well known. Decision to adopt French artillery design in order to speed procurement for the US Army was made before the Ordnance Department discovered the inescapable problems of adapting French drawings to American manufacturing processes. Locating facilities to produce more familiar items such as propellants, rifles, and pistols, was accomplished more successfully. The first and continuing difficulty was finding enough men competent to cope with the task.
The Chief of Ordnance had long insisted that at least two years were needed to prepare an officer for Ordnance duty. Ordnance before 1917, as after, was a technician’s job. In April 1917, the Department numbered 97 officers; 11,000 Ordnance officers were needed for the projected 5,000,000-man army; in actuality 5,800 were commissioned from civilian life before the Armistice.30 While two Ordnance schools for training officers had been organized early in the century, both were closed in the summer of 1917, presumably because they could not accommodate enough students to warrant assignments of teachers. Officer training then became sheer improvisation.31 Candidates recruited by combing the training camps for men with some industrial engineering experience were hurried through special courses, commissioned, and assigned to work where it was hoped their civilian experience would count. So gas engine designers and manufacturers after a few weeks’
instruction became the Ordnance Department’s machine gun “experts,”32 while men familiar with materials or products somewhat analogous to those of Ordnance were converted into “specialists” on other weapons and equipment. Nor were all the men commissioned as Ordnance officers possessed of engineering knowledge. Many came from fields as remote from Ordnance as bookselling, law, and the teaching of the humanities. The resulting difficulties affected all aspects of the Ordnance mission from design to inspection. In production and procurement, for example, the difference between the tools and production methods of the arsenals and those of commercial industry had to be harmonized, but the first step had to be the education or re-education alike of Regular Army Ordnance officers and officers brought in from civilian jobs. That the hasty and inevitably superficial training turned out a corps of officers even moderately effective is the miracle.33
Whereas provision for officer training was insufficient, no plans for enlisted men’s training existed at all. In years past, troops in the line had themselves been expected to keep their equipment in serviceable condition; since equipment needing more extensive repairs had been sent to the government arsenals where workers as civilians were not subject to any Army training, the Ordnance Department had made no effort to develop courses of instruction for men in the ranks. Yet in a modern army the high degree of mechanization made special schooling for enlisted men essential, especially in techniques of maintenance. In September 1917 the Secretary of War authorized establishment of the first schools for “enlisted specialists,” where in manufacturing centers in America and later in France nearly 11,000 men were trained.34 Many times that number were needed.
But field maintenance depended upon more than trained officers and men back of the front lines; it depended upon an orderly flow of spare parts. Want of parts for automotive vehicles, in the judgment of one observer, came close to disrupting completely the AEF supply and transport system: “... it is generally conceded by those who were in authority and by those who were in a position to understand the situation that the Armistice came just in time to prevent this major catastrophe.”35 Exaggerated though this statement may be, the fact remains that a serious future problem was here foreshadowed. Lack of experience prevented sound guesses of what parts would be needed in what quantity, while improper numbering, a baffling multiplicity of parts, and, finally, faulty organization of handling contributed to the chaos. From the disastrous confusion over maintenance and supply, the Army learned that planned procedures must be evolved. Creation of the Division of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic in August 1918 eased matters for the last months of the war, and in 1919 the Ordnance Department was to organize its Field Service Division.
Even more alarming than the threatened breakdown in overseas maintenance was the initial lag in production of major
items—artillery, artillery ammunition, and, to a lesser extent, trench warfare matériel. The number of field guns manufactured in this country after 1 April 1917 and shipped to France before 11 November 1918 was only 815, and the AEF was almost entirely dependent upon the French and the British through 1917 and 1918 for everything except rifles and small arms ammunition.36 The large orders for American artillery in 1917 indicate not only fears lest foreign supply not suffice but also national pride in having the US Army equipped with American guns. The reasons for the production lag deserve scrutiny.
First, time was necessary for tooling up for any big production job. The Chief of Ordnance had repeatedly pointed out that eighteen months must be allowed from the placing of orders to the beginning of large-scale production, a warning that had fallen on deaf ears. The Council of National Defense, created in August 1916, and its subsidiary Advisory Commission formed in December, had evolved some sound general ideas of procurement procedures but, before the declaration of war, had barely begun to act upon them. Next was the slowness with which the War Department arrived at decisions about what weapons it wanted.37 It was two full months after the declaration of war before higher authority decided to adopt French artillery calibers and put in motion the plan to obtain drawings from the French Government for 75-mm. guns and 105-mm. and 155-mm. howitzers and ammunition. Six months after that the French drawings arrived, only to prove not immediately adaptable to American production processes. Indeed, the drawings for French shells were found to contain so many errors that the standard joke among the engineers of the Ordnance Department described these drawings as the ones the French had intended the German Government to obtain through secret sources. For manufacture of machine guns large orders were not placed until 20 June 1917; the special board had first to submit its recommendations and then wait for War Department red tape to unwind. Congressional adherence to peacetime restrictions on government spending further hampered negotiation of contracts; insistence on competitive bidding and allocation of funds for specified purposes were the chief sources of complications.38
The most frequently cited reason for the delays in producing complete ordnance items was the Department’s handicap in the race for facilities. War Department acquiescence in allowing the Navy first chance to contract with established industrial firms and the decision to permit companies with foreign orders to complete them left the Ordnance Department with
little choice but to build new facilities from the ground up.39 Competition within the Army accentuated the problem, as the Coast Artillery, Signal Corps, Corps of Engineers, and Medical Department also had huge procurement programs to meet, and, whenever possible, pre-empted factories, materials, and labor that the Ordnance Department needed desperately.40 Every service fended for itself as best it could. Before March 1918 when the President bestowed large powers on the War Industries Board, no clear scheme of priorities obtained and vital Ordnance orders got sidetracked. While it is a moot question whether or not the Department’s inability to commandeer plants for ordnance manufacture was the primary cause of the production lag, it was unquestionably one major contributing factor.
In addition to difficulties imposed from above, Ordnance suffered from some circumstances beyond the control of any government agency in 1917. Labor shortages in many areas impeded contractors. Facilities found, materials delivered, labor recruited, producers were still seriously handicapped by a dearth of men with industrial managerial experience. Less obvious than many elements in the procurement situation, this lack of experienced men at key points created much confusion otherwise avoidable.
On the other hand, the procurement program had some weaknesses that greater foresight within the Ordnance Department might have minimized, if not wholly eliminated. Most important was the lack of information on where bottlenecks were most likely to crop up and of planned procedures to anticipate them. Obviously, the number of weapons completed must hinge on the number of components shortest in supply, usually those most difficult to make. Thousands of rifle barrels could be of no use without thousands of receivers. Yet the Ordnance Department operated for over a year without any system for checking on balanced production of matériel. In late May 1918 a Progress Section in the Estimates and Requirements Division was set up. Thereafter, repetition of earlier mistakes whereby there were more guns than gun carriages, more gun carriages than recuperators, more machined shell bodies than booster assemblies was halted. But it was too late to have effect upon deliveries of completed weapons.41
Hence, some of the errors derived from policy made at higher levels and some were the fault of the Ordnance Department itself. False confidence in the adequacy of American production capacity at first encouraged the Department in a complacency later paralleled only by that of the American public in prophesying quick victory over Japan immediately after Pearl Harbor. The exaggerated assurance of April 1917 that everything was ready was in turn succeeded by belief that production was hopelessly behind requirements even in November 1918. General John J. Pershing had doubled General Crozier’s
Maj. Gen. William B. Crozier, Chief of Ordnance, 1901–18
original estimates of quantities needed, and scheduling that increase had further delayed the first deliveries. Out of the confusion came one clear fact: regardless of any mistakes the General Staff or Secretary of War might make, the Ordnance Department itself must have a more efficient scheme of action. It must reappraise its organization, plan industrial mobilization of the future, and train more men and officers more fully.
Experiments in departmental reorganization had begun early in 1918, immediately after General Crozier’s transfer to the War Council. But the new arrangement, based on a functional division of responsibility, heightened rather than lessened confusion because operating under separate divisions for procurement, manufacturing, inspection, and supply prevented anyone from knowing the exact status of any order or any equipment at any exact moment. A Control Bureau at the top, intended to coordinate activities, was unable to assemble necessary information quickly enough to apply it. Consequently upon Brig. Gen. Clarence C. Williams’ appointment as Acting Chief of Ordnance in May 1918, he substituted an Estimates and Requirements Division for the Control Bureau and introduced weekly conferences between division heads, which cut through much of the administrative tangle. More sweeping changes had to wait till after the war.42
Meanwhile, one significant change took place: the decentralization of procurement. The delays and complexities of having every Ordnance contract go through the office of the Chief of Ordnance led to the decision to delegate authority to district offices in eleven sections of the country. This innovation, later heralded as revolutionizing, lay less in the creation of geographically scattered offices with considerable independence of action than in the fact that civilians were put in charge. For the former, the federal system of local and national government offered precedent, while the regional Federal Reserve banks set a more explicit pattern. But the effectiveness of the new arrangement derived from turning over to local industrial leaders responsibility for mobilizing local civilian industry for war production. “The purpose of this unusual arrangement,” the Chief of Ordnance wrote after the war, “was to secure a measure of elasticity and a degree of discretion for the district chiefs which they could not obtain if they were
Maj. Gen. Clarence C. Williams, Chief of Ordnance, 1918–30
under military discipline; to inspire among manufacturers the sense of cooperation and reciprocal understanding the presence of a civilian chief was calculated to arouse. ... These objects were attained.”43
Responsibility placed upon district chiefs was coupled with authority. Because Col. Guy E. Tripp, who organized the districts, succeeded in finding unusually able men to head the districts, the delays in placing contracts and getting ordnance production started began to diminish immediately. Colonel Tripp, in civilian life chairman of the board of directors of the Westinghouse Electrical and Manufacturing Company, encouraged short cuts. Business procedures, direct and informal, superseded military. Although actual negotiation and execution of formal contracts remained in Washington, the preliminaries to the legal work, the later supervision of fulfilling the contracts, and finally the all-important inspections for acceptance of matériel fell to the district staffs. The pronounced rise in the production curve after the districts began to function cannot, of course, be attributed solely to their work:44 Yet Ordnance officers were so impressed with the value of the system that as the war went on the scope of district operations was widened and two more districts were added. Decentralization in Ordnance procurement was thus proceeding at the very time that centralization of controls at higher levels was being contrived by vesting power more largely in the War Industries Board. Though the Ordnance district offices disappeared after winding up their affairs in 1919, they were re-established in 1922 because they were believed to be the most effective agencies for industrial mobilization.
Published versions of what happened in 1917–18 have taken one or the other of two lines: violent criticism of the Ordnance Department for its slowness in meeting the Army’s needs, or extravagant eulogies of the efficiency that converted a cabbage patch into a munitions factory in eight months. Both are partly justified. Had France and Great Britain not supplied the
US Army with arms and ammunition almost to the end of the fighting, the achievement of United States readiness for full-scale production nineteen months after declaration of war would not have mattered. Defeat or victory would have been already determined. Yet, given time, the Ordnance Department proved it could organize a colossal production program. During the next twenty years, the Army was to apply many of the lessons of World War I. The assumption that the United States always could meet any emergency was never again to induce such far-flung, fateful complacency within the Ordnance Department.
In one realm, unhappily, the Ordnance Department failed to profit fully from experience. It failed to follow the work of foreign munitions makers closely enough to keep American ordnance abreast of significant new developments. Little use was made of information brought back by officers sent abroad. After the appearance of the important report submitted in 1919 by a carefully chosen group of Army officers, usually called the Westervelt Board, no similar bodies were created empowered to explore the whole field of ordnance design, foreign as well as American. Money to build American weapons incorporating European improvements would, to be sure, not have been forthcoming from the Congresses of the 1920s and 1930s—the nation was intent on forgetting about war—but the Army would at least have comprehended more clearly what it had to compete against. Military observers in London and Berlin in the 1930s were to tender numerous reports on changes in British and German equipment, but if officers in Washington gave weight to the information, they took no steps to establish an efficient routine that would permit Ordnance designers to adopt useful European innovations.45 Yet American ignorance of any details of German and French munitions developments preceding 1917 had admittedly had grave consequences. Realization that in twentieth century Europe a full-blown industry was giving constant attention to devising new weapons and refining old did not sink in sufficiently upon the War Department. Inattention to what competitors had available was eventually to prove extremely costly. Whether it stemmed from overconfidence in American technological genius or from apathy deriving from conviction that the Congress would not grant money for military research, this disregard of foreign developments after the early twenties must constitute a serious charge against the Ordnance Department.
In other fields Ordnance officers were to put their hard-won experience to effective use. Out of World War I came several important changes, changes in methods and planning and, still more basic, changes in thinking. The Ordnance Department had learned that it could not operate efficiently without a considerable body of trained men. Enlisted men as well as officers must be taught Ordnance techniques of supply and maintenance and be familiarized with some of the problems of design and production. The upshot was the launching, in the summer of 1919, of a school for enlisted men which in one form or another has carried on without break to the present. The Ordnance Department, like all other units of the Army and Navy, had
also discovered that careful plans for wartime use of private industry must be so complete that loss of time and waste effort in mass production would be reduced to a minimum. Much of the twenty years that followed the 1918 Armistice was to be dedicated, consequently, to producing blueprints for industrial mobilization. Establishment of the Army Industrial College in 1924 grew out of recognition that military procurement planning must have specialists trained for just that. A third lesson of World War I was the need for a staff within the Ordnance Department assigned to the sole task of organizing storage and issue of matériel and qualified to supervise maintenance of equipment. The creation of Field Service was the answer.
The final change in the workings of the Ordnance Department was the least immediately apparent but, in long-term effects, the most fundamental. The Chief of Ordnance ceased to be the Czar whose dictates on military characteristics and design of weapons the using arms accepted without demur. No General Crozier was ever again to issue to the Infantry or the Field Artillery or the Cavalry equipment that the Ordnance Department had decided was suitable. Partly because General Crozier’s prestige had been badly shaken by the Senate Investigating Committee in December 1917,46 and partly because General Williams, Chief of Ordnance from May 1918 to 1930, had himself seen overseas service, the combat arms thereafter were to have a constantly growing share in deciding what type and what model of weapons they would employ. General Williams is reported to have declared upon his return from Europe in the spring of 1918: “If the fighting men want elephants, we get them elephants.”47 Ordnance officers in Washington would no longer exercise their technicians’ prerogative to insist that mice or mules would suffice. How far General Williams’ influence counted in inaugurating the change whereby the Infantry Board and other service boards stipulated their requirements and passed judgment upon what the Ordnance Department produced to meet them may be a question. Certainly his attitude, born of personal observation of combat, made infinitely easier the transition to the new order. The Ordnance Department became to an ever greater degree the skilled servant, not the master, of the using arms.