Chapter 7: Research and Development, 1919–40
The Westervelt Board Report
No lesson of World War I was plainer to the United States Army than its need of modern ordnance. Aviation, signal equipment, chemical warfare materials, medical and engineer supplies must also receive study, but the Army’s need of more effective artillery was the most obvious want of all. Accordingly, a month after the Armistice General Peyton C. March, Chief of Staff, appointed a board of seven officers to draw up recommendations for field artillery for the US Army of the future. Special orders directed the board to convene in France at the earliest practicable time “to make a study of the armament, calibers and types of matériel, kinds and proportion of ammunition, and methods of transport of the artillery to be assigned to a Field Army,1 The board was to map out a comprehensive development program. Headed by Brig. Gen. William I. Westervelt from whom it derived its name, the board first met at Chaumont, France, on 12 January 1919. It accumulated its data over a period of months through interviews with French, Italian, and British artillery experts, examination of both Allied and enemy matériel, inspections of plants, and conferences with American generals who had commanded line troops in the AEF. Returning to Washington in April, the “Caliber Board” digested its findings, consulted with the chiefs of Ordnance, Coast Artillery, Field Artillery, and Chemical Warfare, and submitted its report on 5 May 1919. The report was approved by the Chief of Staff on 23 May of that year.2
This broad, penetrating survey showed that, as General Westervelt expressed it, “every item of the hardware of war needed improvement”—every type of gun, howitzer, projectile, gun mount, carriage, and vehicle that the US Army used.3 The report outlined clearly the mission of divisional, corps, and army artillery, pointed out the distinctive problems of each, and
made definite recommendations.4 The last three sections analyzed the existing inadequacies of American ordnance. The section that dealt with projectiles emphasized the need for a great variety of developments in fuzes, powders, and shell. The board noted: “There are investigations under way by the Ordnance Department covering this entire subject and the Board recommends that these be continued. It is to be expected that the subject will require extended investigation and is one which can only be adequately handled by a continuing technical body.5
The heart of the report was Section IV, “Types of Artillery Recommended: Ideal and Practical.” For each class of artillery the board described the characteristics of an “ideal” weapon, and then advised what should be used as a “practical” one. The “ideal” light field artillery piece was of about 3-inch caliber, on carriage, using fixed ammunition and smokeless, flashless propellant—one charge for 11,000 yards, a second for 15,000 yards—time fuzes for shrapnel, and superquick and selective-delay fuzes for shell. It should have maximum ballistic efficiency and maximum bursting charge, the same ballistics for shell and shrapnel and for every type of ammunition used, and a maximum rate of fire of twenty rounds per minute. While work should proceed toward the ideal weapon, the board set as a practical measure the use of 50 percent 75-mm. guns, Model 1916, and 50 percent French 75-mm’s. The difference between the “ideal” and the “practical” typified the distance Ordnance designers had to span in nearly all Westervelt projects. A partial summary of recommendations is given in Table 10.
For artillery transport, the board advocated immediate motorization of all weapons larger than 75-mm. guns and 4-inch howitzers. It proposed immediate adoption of the 5-ton and the 10-ton artillery tractors as standard vehicles and the exclusive use of four-wheeled-drive cargo trucks for artillery supply and ammunition trains. In addition to recommending ample reserves of spare parts and adequate repair facilities, the board cited certain particular needs: supply trucks furnished with suitable tool chests and cabinets; immediate manufacture of 150 standard 3-ton, four-wheeled-drive trucks to motorize one regiment of 155-mm. howitzers; caterpillar treads of improved design and construction; artillery tractors with lowered unit ground pressure, improved grousers, and noiseless engine exhausts; waterproofing to allow engines to run submerged for short periods; and a simple form of coupling for towing guns, tractors, or trucks in tandem. Although American mechanical transport appeared to be far ahead of European, the board warned against complacency.6 Admitting the rapidity of American progress since 1914 when the Ordnance Department began practical experiments with the caterpillar for artillery transport, the report stated:
Mechanical transport is the prime mover of the future. ... It is urgent that study
Table 10: Partial Summary Of Caliber Board Report
| Class of Artillery | Projectile Weight (Pounds) | Maximum Range (Yards) | Elevation (Degrees) | Traverse (Degrees) | Other Characteristics Desired |
| Light Field | |||||
| 3” Gun | 20 | 15,000 | -5 to +80 | 360 | Mechanical transport; 20 rounds per minute. |
| 105-mm. Howitzer | 30-35 | 12,000 | -5 to +65 | 360 | Mechanical transport; split-trail carriage. |
| Medium | |||||
| 4.7” to 5” Gun | 60 | 18,000 | -5 to +80 | 360 | Split-trail carriage; 12,000 lbs. (wheeled), 15,000 (caterpillar); 8 miles per hour; 16 rounds per minute. |
| 155-mm. Howitzer | 100 | 16,000 | -5 to +65 | 360 | Split-trail carriage; 8 miles per hour; 5 rounds per minute. |
| Heavy | |||||
| 155-mm. Gun | 100 | 25,000 | 0 to +65 | 360 | Motorized; 6 miles (caterpillar), 12 miles (wheeled). |
| 8” Howitzer | 240 | 18,000 | 0 to +65 | 360 | Motorized; 4 miles per hour. |
| Of Greater Power | |||||
| 194-mm. to 8” Gun | 220 | 35,000 | Same carriage as 155-mm. gun. | ||
| 9½” Howitzer | 400 | 25,000 | 0 to +65 | 360 | Caterpillar; 20 tons; 6 miles per hour. |
| Super Guns (seacoast and field) 8” or 10” Gun | 240 (8”) or 510 (10”) | 35,000 | 0 to +50 | 360 | Universal barbette mount; railway carriages (for all super guns); 50 calibers long; 1 shot per minute. |
| 14” Gun | 1,400 | 40,000 | 0 to +50 | 360 | 50 calibers long; firing time, 1 hour (prepared position); 8 hours (unprepared). |
| 12” Howitzer | 1,046 or 700 | 18,000 or 25,000 | +25 to +60 | 360 | 20 calibers long; 1 hour to occupy field position; railway mount. |
| 16” Howitzer | 1,600 | 30,000 | +25 to +65 | 360 | 25 calibers long; railway mount. |
| AA Guns, Light | |||||
| 3” Gun | 15 | 0 to +80 | 360 | 2,600 feet per second initial velocity; caterpillar transport; 12 miles per hour. | |
| 4.7” to 5” | 45 | 0 to +80 | 360 | 2,600 feet per second initial velocity; self-propelled caterpillar; maximum weight 10 tons. | |
| Pack Artillery | |||||
| 3” Gun | 5, 000 | 0 to +45 | Use division gun projectiles; telescopic sight. | ||
| Infantry Accompanying Gun | |||||
| 2.5” | 10 | 2, 500 | -6 to +50 | 6 | 2.5 calibers long; maximum weight 300 lbs.; telescopic sight. |
| Trench Artillery | |||||
| 6” Mortar | 50 | 4, 000 | +40 to +65 | Great simplicity in design. | |
In general a smokeless, flashless powder was specified for each weapon.
Source: Caliber Rd Rpt, pars. 29-76, OKD 334.3/1.3, Ord Tech Intel files.
and development be vigorously carried on along these lines, as we are on the verge of changes fully as radical as the introduction of the long recoil field gun carriage, and the country first utilizing the new capabilities opened up by mechanical traction and the caterpillar, will have a great advantage in the next war.7
These are only the highlights of the report. The whole was greeted simultaneously with interest, surprise, skepticism, and enthusiasm, General Westervelt in 1920 wrote: “The ideal set by the Board is not an easy one to reach, and I frequently think of the politely amazed look upon the faces of many hardened veterans in high places to whom the Board first revealed its dream of complete motorization,”8 Apart from small arms projects, most of the developments at which the Ordnance Department aimed for the next fifteen years were those outlined in the Westervelt Board report. The postwar innovation whereby not the Ordnance Department but the using arms stated their needs and specified the military characteristics new equipment should have sometimes delayed initiation of new projects, but down into the mid-thirties users and Ordnance Department alike were strongly influenced by Westervelt Board recommendations. Indeed in 1939 and 1940 officers still cited the board as the incontrovertible authority on armament.
Developments in Ammunition
The most complicated task of development confronting the Ordnance Department at the end of World War I lay in the field of ammunition. Combat experience had shown the inadequacies of much of what had been used in 1917–18—inaccuracies, failures, lack of safety features, and a host of needless complexities. But whereas Artillery officers could specify rather exactly what the requirements of guns and vehicles should be, for the development of explosives, propellants, projectiles, and fuzes their recommendations had to be couched in general terms. Here were problems of basic research that ammunition experts themselves had to define, often seeking immediately only interim solutions and waiting till greater knowledge could supply better answers. Hence the ammunition designers had free rein within budgetary limits. Over the twenty years of peace the Ordnance Department dedicated more money to the ammunition program than to any other development work.
Research upon ammunition in the first postwar years was inspired not only by the Caliber Board but also by the necessity of preserving ammunition stored after the Armistice. The latter task involved a series of experiments with methods of determining the stability of smokeless powder, of so storing it as to lengthen the duration of stability, and of drying it more efficiently than by processes formerly used. A good deal of valuable information on these subjects was assembled at Picatinny Arsenal before 1926, notably that on feasibility of the vapor method of drying, which reduced drying time from months or weeks to days.9 But a more permanent solution of some phases of the powder storage problem would be to develop new non-hygroscopic powders, which because of their chemical composition would not absorb
enough moisture to affect their ballistics or chemical stability even when stored in a damp atmosphere. If at the same time flashless and smokeless qualities could be incorporated, the advantages would be still greater. The search for flashless non-hygroscopic powders, FNH, was accordingly pushed vigorously. The DuPont Company by a special agreement with the Ordnance Department followed one line of investigation, Picatinny Arsenal another, each with considerable success. The peacetime development of a complete line of single-based and double-based non-hygroscopic powders, flashless in many weapons, was one of the most useful accomplishments of the Ordnance Department before 1940.
Meanwhile, other highly important studies went forward on fuzes, on bombs and artillery projectiles, on high explosives and pyrotechnics, on artillery ignition systems, and on improved methods of loading bombs and shells. Special attention was directed toward development of bombs since the relative ineffectiveness of the World War I tear-shaped type and the growing role of air warfare made better bombs imperative. The results of twenty years’ work gave the Air Forces of the 1940s a series of cylindrical bombs of greatly increased accuracy and deadliness. Still the number of ammunition projects, all important and frequently interrelated, coupled with the meagreness of funds prevented rapid progress on any one undertaking.10 In developing artillery ammunition, a particular handicap was the small number of pilot weapons available to test ammunition, for ammunition development could never precede and could only partially parallel development of the weapon for which it was intended. Thus, for example, the abnormal variations in range and velocity that occurred in firing in the low zones with the high-explosive shell M1 designed for the 105-mm. howitzer were not satisfactorily eliminated until rather late in World War II, largely because the 105’s were not fired frequently enough during the peace years to provide the data on which to base corrective measures,11 Nevertheless, while no project could be labeled completed, the work of the ammunition experts between 1919 and 1940 was extremely useful in defining objectives, blocking off blind alleys of research, and carrying forward a number of important investigations.
Perhaps the single most significant achievement was the development of a complete system of artillery fuzes interchangeable in practically all artillery projectiles. The Caliber Board’s recommendations emphasized the need of bore-safe fuzes for high-explosive shells and urged reducing the number of types for any particular weapon but did not expressly stipulate combination fuzes or indicate the extent to which the same fuze should be usable in different calibers. The Ordnance Department’s work on these problems was along entirely original lines. Design of bore-safe fuzes, so constructed as to prevent detonation of the main charge before the shell had left the gun’s muzzle, required a radical departure from World War I safety features and revision of earlier concepts of the quantity of explosive to be used. It was clear that the best way to limit the number of types was to develop combination fuzes, such as combination superquick delayed-action, or
combination time and superquick, in which a change in setting would make one fuze usable for more than one purpose. One major difficulty was finding designs that would lend themselves to quantity production; during the twenties several types functioned satisfactorily when built in laboratory or experimental shop but proved faulty when produced on a factory basis.12
By 1932 several new fuzes had been standardized, but many gaps in any complete system remained. Consequently, that year the Ordnance Department initiated a study of requirements for a series of point-detonating fuzes and arrived at the conclusion that tactical needs demanded four classes of fuzes for high-explosive shell or shrapnel fire, at ground and aerial targets, at both long and short ranges. The study showed the tactical advantages of having all fuzes identical in contour and weight, and designed with setting lugs and threads that would fit all fuze setters and permit both interchangeability in all point-fuzed projectiles and use with all fire control directors and range tables. If time fuzes could be used interchangeably as detonating fuzes in HE shell and as igniting fuzes in shrapnel, and if substantially the same mechanism could be used in all fuzes employing a superquick element, or a delay, powder-train time, mechanical time, or detonator safety element, the simplification for the artilleryman in the field and for the producer alike would be enormous.13 Upon this difficult task effort was bent from 1934 on. The first satisfactory member of the new “family” of interchangeable artillery fuzes to be completed was a mechanical time fuze (30 seconds), the M43. The second was a combination superquick delayed-action fuze originally issued for use with the 75-mm. pack howitzer, later used with larger calibers. This point-detonating fuze, the M48, adopted in June 1938, was an achievement; unlike the earlier designs of a dual-purpose fuze, it was safe, reliable, easily set, acceptably accurate. In the course of the next two years another superquick delay and a time superquick fuze were adopted as well as a 75-second mechanical time fuze. These five, mechanically and ballistically interchangeable, constituted the series most extensively used during World War II.14
Closely allied with fuze development was the redesign of shells. During World War I the US Army had largely depended upon the French for its shells; the only American-designed type was the 3-inch, the shortcomings of which had been apparent. The increased range, greater accuracy, and higher lethality desired in artillery ammunition were to be obtained only by the development of a complete series of shells in which contour, form, and location of the rotating bands, composition of steels calculated to produce the most effective fragmentation, powder charges, and a number of other design features all had to be considered. One early discovery was that elongating and streamlining the shape of the projectile increased the range of a gun without any modification whatsoever in the weapon itself. Yet every change tended to start a chain of new problems. For example, to give projectiles for heavy, mobile artillery the best ballistic shape and maintain stability in flight, designers at first resorted to
use of so-called false ogives, that is, light hollow tips. Not only did these thin steel ogives prove hard to manufacture and difficult to secure to the projectile, they also were likely to be dented or injured in shipping. Improved shipping containers met the latter difficulty but the false ogive was nevertheless abandoned for all shells save the 8-inch gun as soon as alternate design progressed further. New testing devices, especially wind tunnels in which the air resistance of variously shaped projectiles could be measured accurately, facilitated all work on shell design. By 1940 standard HE shell had been developed for all weapons from 75-mm, through 240-mm. in a series of projectiles that had the range, accuracy, and killing power sought by the Caliber Board in 1919. Furthermore, small arms ammunition, mortar shells, projectiles for small caliber cannon, and packing of all types had similarly been extensively improved.15
Small Arms Projects
Notwithstanding the Ordnance Department’s concern to improve artillery and to achieve Westervelt’s “complete motorization,” development of small arms also absorbed considerable time and money. Perhaps, indeed, before 1936 design of a semiautomatic rifle netted more attention than larger weapons. This concentration of effort upon a small arms project is probably partly attributable to its long prewar history. As early as 1900 the Chief of Ordnance had proposed design of a semiautomatic rifle, and from 1901 to 1916 a great deal of work had been expended on various experimental models, both foreign and American. It was only logical to resume this work which, though interrupted by the war, appeared to be well along in 1919.16 Doubtless at that time no small arms expert would have believed that acceptance of a suitable model would take another seventeen years. The course of events leading up to adoption of the Garand semiautomatic rifle is worth review because it well illustrates the long-drawn-out process of getting matériel standardized.
In October 1919 John C. Garand went from the Bureau of Standards to the Springfield Armory on express assignment to design a semiautomatic rifle. The problem occupied other designers too, notably Capt. Julian S, Hatcher and John D. Pedersen. With Pedersen, the Department entered into formal contract. The characteristics required for an acceptable design included weight as close to 8 pounds as possible and not in excess of 8,5; caliber as close as possible to .30, with .276 the minimum; muzzle velocity of at least 2,450 feet per second; and accuracy up to 800 yards. As the result of careful tests on several competing models in 1920–21, the Ordnance Committee in 1923 recommended that twenty-four Garand rifles be made for test by the Infantry and Cavalry. Informed Ordnance technicians were optimistic that acceptance would not be long delayed; in February 1924 General Williams told a House subcommittee that the Ordnance Department had a semiautomatic rifle that promised to be satisfactory,17 The twenty-four rifles were completed in the spring of 1925, tested at Aberdeen Proving Ground, and then sent to Fort Benning, Georgia, for further
John C. Garand, designer of the MI rifle
tests. On the basis of these tests Springfield Armory made some modifications and then shipped the rifles to Fort Benning and to Fort Riley, Kansas, for new trials. Meanwhile, models of Pedersen’s design were tested and retested.
Expectations for quick completion of the project were not realized. In the summer of 1929 elaborate formal tests of eight types of semiautomatic rifle narrowed the choice to two, the Garand .276-caliber and the Pedersen .276-caliber. After a thorough canvas of the performance and production problems involved in each rifle, the special board of officers charged with making a final decision voted in favor of the Garand. In the interim Garand had begun work on a .30-caliber rifle and soon found that the light weight believed attainable only in the smaller caliber was possible in the larger. The Chief of Staff, General Douglas MacArthur, at this point insisted upon abandoning work upon the .276 and concentrating upon the .30-caliber. By the next year Garand had completed one experimental .30-caliber model, which successfully passed tests at Aberdeen.18 The Ordnance Department then ordered eighty of this model manufactured for final test by the using arms. Springfield Armory began manufacture in 1932 and finished the job in 1934. Exhaustive tests of the seventy-five rifles sent to the
Infantry and Cavalry Boards showed so many stoppages that the rifles were returned for modifications. After some redesign, Ordnance tests indicated a greatly improved rifle, and 1935 tests by the Infantry and Cavalry Boards substantiated this finding,19 On 9 January 1936 the weapon was standardized as Rifle, Semiautomatic, M1.
Thirty-five years had elapsed since the initiation of the project, nearly seven since the decision to use a .30-caliber gas-operated type. The slowness of progress was partly caused by lack of any sense of great urgency. Let the new rifle be as nearly perfect as possible before standardizing. Full approval of the using arms was clearly desirable before accepting new or radically modified weapons, but the consequent delays were a drawback. Production problems were still to be solved. By 30 June 1936 design of tools, jigs, and fixtures was 95 percent complete, and, as money for tooling became available, production got under way in the latter half of the year. Yet innumerable small alterations were made during the next two years, and changes in details of design, tests, and actual manufacture proceeded simultaneously. By 1938 only some 2,000 rifles had come off the assembly line.20 The chief consolation over lack of quantity came from testimony on quality; comments of the troops to whom the first production rifles were issued in August 1937 were immediately enthusiastic—and this despite the high popularity of the predecessor, the Springfield rifle M1903. With the new MI the average rifleman could fire forty shots a minute, and some soldiers as high as a hundred a minute.21
Nevertheless, Congressional criticism of the slowness of work on the M1 and of Ordnance development programs as a whole was sharp. One Congressman observed in 1937, “The war has been over nearly 20 years, and we have 80 semiautomatics in the service; and we are still experimenting.”22 As far back as 1926 the Secretary of War had tried to hasten the process of standardization of all matériel, but in 1935 the Chief of Staff was still concerned with the problem. At its root lay a philosophy of perfection held by many members of the General Staff, the using arms, and the Ordnance Department itself, General Malin Craig, Chief of Staff from 1935 to 1939, proposed a system of yearly standardization and annual revision that resulted in a directive ordering use in the 1937 program of only standardized equipment, and freezing the design of standardized items from the moment cost estimates were submitted until manufacture was concluded,23 But this measure was at best only an alleviation. Difficulties continued. Unequal rates of standardization of closely related items caused great trouble. For example, the 37-mm. infantry gun and carriage was standardized in 1937 but had no ammunition approved for use.24 Furthermore, unequal rates of standardization of particular components held up acceptance of end items. Of the search for ideal weapons and the delays that
search entailed, one observer later wrote: “The best is the enemy of the good.”25
Not all development projects, to be sure, ran an unduly long course. Modification and redesign of machine guns, begun immediately after World War I, made comparatively rapid progress. Efforts to improve the ballistic and cooling characteristics of the earlier .30-caliber Browning machine guns produced the M1919A4 in 1925, while later collaboration of Ordnance, Air Corps, and Colt Company representatives developed the .30-caliber M2, which could be either fixed or flexible and permitted either right- or left-hand feed. Similarly useful work on mounts went forward.26 Still more significant in terms of World War II was the development of the .50-caliber machine gun. In 1930 when the water-cooled .50-caliber Browning machine gun, M1921A, was standardized, the Coast Artillery was satisfied, but Air Corps, Infantry, and Cavalry still lacked what the Chief of Ordnance described as “suitably specialized Brownings.”27 The Air Corps needed lightness, rapid rates of fire, and right- and left-hand belt feeds; tanks required heavy barrel guns with reliable cooling systems. Neither the using arms nor the Ordnance Department believed it possible to have a single machine gun serve several diverse purposes, but in the two years between 1931 and 1933 Dr. Samuel G. Green of the Ordnance Department succeeded in modifying the Browning to make a single basic gun which, varied by special features for special purposes, could meet requirements for all services. The new model, the .50-caliber M2, was so designed that the operating mechanism was the same for each type of gun. The heavy barrel of the tank gun, the water jacket, sleeve, and 45-inch barrel of the antiaircraft gun, and the lighter parts of the aircraft gun, could each be affixed without modification of the receiver. Here was an outstanding achievement, the benefits of which were to be felt all during World War II; manufacturing, maintenance, and troop training were all eased by this simplification of design.
When the Spanish Civil War provided evidence of the operational value of various items of ordnance, American experts began to question whether the .50-caliber machine gun were not really obsolete both for aircraft and antimechanized use. The using arms therefore ran large-scale tests of the .50-caliber in competition with several types of light automatic cannon. The verdict was in favor of the machine gun.28
Artillery Projects
While small arms improvements, albeit slow, were thus reasonably satisfactory, artillery development, the primary objective of the Westervelt Board report, made scant headway. The program of research and development had started off energetically in 1919 and 1920, but with the reduction in funds after 1921 it contracted “to cover reasonably well only infantry, pack and divisional matériel, the smallest
The 75-mm. Gun M1923E. This is the improved model
caliber of antiaircraft matériel and one type of tank.”29 Corps, army, and seacoast artillery projects, relegated to second place, scarcely moved forward at all. When, for example, tests of 240-mm. howitzer matériel, conducted at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 1924 and 1925, showed the need of modifications, the work was indefinitely postponed till money should be available.30
The smaller calibers fared somewhat better. Completion of a satisfactory 75-mm. mortar, the 1922E, was a source of special gratification, inasmuch as its predecessor, the Stokes mortar used in World War I, had proved dangerous to the user. The new mortar had a 50 percent greater muzzle velocity, 150 percent greater range, and fired a standard artillery-type shell with fragmentation superior to that of the Stokes mortar.31 Ordnance engineers also took pride in the design and manufacture of a 75-mm. gun to supersede the French 75, which the AEF used in World War I. Between 1920 and 1925 the Ordnance Department spent over $500,000 on this assignment and turned out eight different models. After thorough testing by the Field Artillery, the 1923E with split-trail carriage was standardized in 1926, and the
next year the Field Artillery received its first battery of these new 75’s.32 As aircraft assumed a larger role, attention focused on antiaircraft weapons, particularly a 3-inch gun. Joint antiaircraft exercises held yearly after 1925 by the Air Corps, Signal Corps, Corps of Engineers, Coast Artillery Corps, and Ordnance Department gave opportunity to test all features of new matériel. The performance of the 3-inch antiaircraft gun, standardized in 1926, and of new computers, searchlights, and sound-locator systems was considered good, although the percentage of hits on aerial targets remained low. In the manufacture of the 3-inch gun, Watertown Arsenal applied for the first time in production the process of autofrettage or radial expansion. While French producers had long used this process, improvements in the method devised by arsenal engineers produced a superior forging so quickly and economically that the technique was soon applied to manufacture of other guns. Another innovation was the use of removable liners on the 3-inch gun, a scheme that the Chief of Ordnance estimated as saving 50 percent of the cost of retubing by earlier processes.33 But since the gun had to be returned to the arsenal to have the liner replaced, the advantage of the system during World War II was nil.
These achievements were only a fraction of what Ordnance Department plans encompassed. Modernization of existing guns and carriages about 1930 was given precedence over development of new with the result, deplored by many officers, that design of new matériel was brought practically to a standstill for some years.34 The scope of research and development work on artillery before 1940 is perhaps best shown by sketching the progress on four items. The choice of the 75-mm. pack howitzer, the 37-mm. antitank gun, and the 105-mm. and 240-mm, howitzers is based upon the contemporary importance attached to the first two and upon the faith combat troops later placed in the last two.
75-mm. Pack Howitzer
The 75-mm. pack howitzer belongs to the specialized group of weapons assigned for use in mountainous country where motorized or horse-drawn artillery cannot go. Easy disassembly for packing on mule-back is essential. Before World War I the Ordnance Department had spent a good deal of effort designing a mountain gun better than the English Vickers—Maxim 2.95-inch then in use, but the project was dropped when it was apparent that the AEF would have no use for mountain guns. In 1919 the Westervelt Board, reviving the project, pronounced a pack howitzer to be “one of the items of artillery in most urgent need of development.”35 The ideal weapon should have a caliber of about 3 inches, possible elevation of 45 degrees, a minimum range of at least 5,000 yards, and should be capable of being packed in four separate loads of about 225
The 75-mm. pack howitzer M1920. The tube load is shown here; the recuperator and other four loads are packed similarly
pounds each. A first postwar model, the M1920 which incorporated these features, was soon found unsatisfactory, chiefly because recuperator, piston rod, and trail were inadequate.36 The next six years saw intensive work on models designed to correct these weaknesses and to furnish a mountain gun at least as powerful as new foreign types. Greater range was particularly desired. The weapon standardized in 1927 as the 75-mm. Pack Howitzer M1 had a range of 9,200 yards and weighed 1,269 pounds in firing position. It took rank as one of the most efficient artillery weapons yet devised.37 The Chief of Field Artillery asserted: “It is a remarkable weapon with a great future , . , . In its adaptability under pack it has exceeded any expectations which could reasonably have been held considering the power of the weapon.”38 Some modifications, chiefly of the recoil mechanism, and a new carriage were completed during the thirties.
But in spite of faith in the usefulness of this weapon, only thirty-two pack howitzers had been manufactured by 1 July 1940.39
37-mm. Antitank Gun
What the ideal future antitank gun should be the Caliber Board made no attempt in its 1919 report to state in detail, for the board assumed that developments of tank armor would necessitate use of a base-fuzed shell, probably of about 75-mm. caliber.40 It was a singularly prophetic view. While a 37-mm. model for the Infantry was designed and standardized in the late twenties, development of a modern antitank gun was not begun in earnest until 1936. Long before then, European nations had been working on so-called antimechanization weapons. Abroad, stopping the tank was considered the number one military problem. In America as late as the summer of 1931, the Field Artillery Board had announced its continuing confidence in the recommendations of the Caliber Board of twelve years before: ,50-caliber machine guns, 37-mm. guns with armor-piercing shot, and 75-mm, guns were suitable means of attacking tanks as built in World War I. “There has been,” stated the Field Artillery Board, “no change in armor protection since then to warrant changing the recommendations of the [Caliber] Board.”41
When the service tests conducted in 1932 convinced both the Field Artillery and the Infantry that the 37-mm. gun, the M2A1, should be marked for obsolescence, the Infantry was left with only an ineffective 1916 37-mm, model. It was another three years before the using arms proposed development of a weapon based upon revised military characteristics. Tests of a Hotchkiss 25-mm. automatic antitank gun during 1935 had produced little useful information. Then in December reports from the military observer in Berlin stirred the Field Artillery and the Infantry to request trial of a German antitank gun that the Rheinmetall Company was offering to foreign governments for test and quantity purchase.42 This launched the Ordnance Department upon serious study of anti-mechanization weapons.
After formal request of the Infantry for a new 37-mm. gun and the purchase of a Rheinmetall model for test, Infantry, Field Artillery, and Ordnance spent over a year preparing, revising, and again restating desired military characteristics in keeping with what was feasible.43 In September 1937 the Chief of Staff injected a note of unexpected urgency in his instructions to the Chief of Ordnance:
2. It appears that none of the greater Powers have failed to develop and to have now in use effective anti-tank and intermediate anti-aircraft weapons, while we, on the other hand, have no weapons of this type whatever.
3. I regard it as of urgent importance that the Ordnance Department concentrate
The 37-mm. gun M1916, with flash hider attached to barrel
intensively on the development of efficient weapons of these two types, putting both of them on an equal first priority, and procuring, or developing something which has already been procured, so that in time of need we may be on a substantially equal footing with a possible enemy.44
The program from that moment moved more quickly. The comparison of the German 37-mm. gun with the American experimental model evolved during 1937 appeared to be all in favor of the latter. Where the German gun with a muzzle velocity of 2,650 feet per second would penetrate 15/8-inch armor plate at 730 yards at normal angle of fire and at 440 yards at a 20 degree angle, the American gun with a muzzle velocity of 2,600 feet per second would penetrate at 1,060 yards and 800 yards respectively. A French 25-mm. and a German 47-mm, gave less satisfactory performance than either 37-mm. The Chief of Infantry therefore recommended that the specifications of the new medium tank then under consideration include armament of the “37-mm. anti-tank gun now being developed by the Ordnance Department.”45 The design that was eventually accepted closely resembled the German Rheinmetall weapon though, by the time the American 37-mm. antitank gun M3 was adopted, the German Army had antitank weapons ranging from 50 to 80-mm., and the Red Army had an
excellent 45-mm. gun battle-tested in the Spanish Civil War.46
The American gun was designed for use not only on tanks but also as a light field gun mounted on its own carriage, adapted to towing either by truck or tractor or by its crew of four men. Hence the Infantry was insistent that the weight of gun and carriage together must not exceed 1,000 pounds. This weight limit precluded a gun of larger caliber. The gun itself was basically one and the same whether mounted on a carriage or in a tank, but because the gun when mounted in a tank had to be shortened six inches, it was redesignated the 37-mm. M5, and later, with a change in the breech mechanism, the M6. The antitank gun M3, for mounting upon the carriage M4, kept a hand-operated breech mechanism. This gun was 6 feet 10.5 inches long, weighed 191 pounds, had a muzzle velocity of 2,600 feet per second, a range of about 12,000 yards, and could fire 25 rounds a minute. Ordnance engineers expended only less effort upon the carriage than upon the gun, inasmuch as the traverse, elevating mechanism, and locking devices were fixed to the carriage.47 The requirement for ammunition was armor-piercing shot capable of penetrating 1.5 inches of armor on impact 20 degrees from normal at a range of 1,000 yards. By 1938 armor-piercing shot M51 was standardized with tracer, and later also a high-explosive shell with the M38A1 base detonating fuze.48
Thus, some four years were devoted to development of the US Army’s first antitank gun which, in terms of what the Soviet Union and Germany had ready by 1939, was obsolete before it was standardized. From a military observer in Europe word had come of developments in Germany, and observers in Spain during the Spanish Civil War had opportunity to note the outstanding performance of the Russian 45-mm. antitank gun. Yet the decision to push the 37-mm, was not rescinded. In August 1938, before the Ordnance Department had proceeded far with procurement, the War Department issued explicit instructions to the Chief of Ordnance:
1. The Infantry is designated as the most interested using arm for the 37-mm antitank gun under AR 850-25.
2. No development funds will be expended by the Ordnance Department during the Fiscal Years 1939 or 1940 in the development of antimechanized weapons of larger than 37-mm caliber. If the necessity for an antitank gun of larger than 37-mm caliber develops, the arm responsible for its development will be designated at that time.49
This decision of the General Staff, closing the door to alternative design, was deplored by many Ordnance officers. The chief of the Artillery Branch of the Manufacturing Division from 1937 to 1939 later stated:
The Ordnance Department was well aware that the 37-mm gun was totally inadequate as an antitank gun, and many and repeated efforts were made to convince the various interested using services personnel of this fact.
The Infantry personnel were very much impressed with the compact design of the Rheinmetall 37 and at one time in fact demanded a duplicate. The deciding criterion was the overall weight ... 850 pounds.
This was considered the maximum that four men could comfortably wheel over the ground.
It is my opinion that all of the early artillery of World War II ... suffered from the continued insistence by the using arms on mobility even at the expense of striking power.50
This testimony leads to the conclusion that General Williams’ scheme of allowing the using arms to have the final say about types of equipment had been carried to an extreme where Ordnance experts could no longer greatly influence important decisions. Yet a proposal of the Field Artillery in December 1938 indicates that the Ordnance Department missed an opportunity partially to redeem the error imposed by the Infantry demand for a light mobile gun and the consequent directive to design nothing larger. The Chief of Field Artillery, citing observers’ information on the antitank guns being built in Europe, requested that the War Department’s instructions be rescinded and a more powerful weapon be produced for the Field Artillery. The proposal was for a truck-drawn weapon weighing about 1,500 pounds with a muzzle velocity sufficient to penetrate 2.5-inch armor at impact 20 degrees from normal at a range of 1,000 yards. But the Chief of Ordnance objected that the introduction of an additional weapon with new types of ammunition would complicate production and supply, that the 75-mm. howitzer and 75-mm. field gun effectively supplemented the 37-mm. as antitank weapons, and that the gun requested by the Field Artillery could not weigh less than 2,700 pounds. The Field Artillery withdrew its request.51 Sixteen months later the Chief of Staff reviewed the question. “It occurs to me,” wrote General Marshall in June 1940, “that we should initiate development of a heavier caliber antitank gun than the 37-mm. Reports from abroad indicate that the 37-mm, has been found comparatively ineffective against the heavier type tank armor and that a 47-mm. gun (possibly on a self-propelled mount) may be necessary as an arm for corps and division antiaircraft battalions.”52
General Wesson’s reply evinced no corresponding anxiety. He repeated the substance of his earlier statement that for its weight the 37-mm, antitank gun was very effective; it would penetrate the armor on American light and medium tanks. The 47-mm., a study of which had been conducted in 1939, was not enough more powerful than the 37-mm, to justify development. At least a 57-mm. would be needed, and in view of the existence of the 75-mm. field gun, work on a 57-mm. seemed uncalled for. The 37-mm. supplemented by the 75-mm. with armor-piercing ammunition appeared to be adequate, though perhaps a more powerful gun might be needed to combat heavy tanks,53 In conclusion he declared that the best way to supply self-propelled antitank artillery was to mount antitank guns on tanks.54 Six weeks later an observer in
London was again to protest large-scale production of an “antitank gun whose power does not guarantee success in engaging tanks known to be used by any prospective enemy.55 But the program for 37-mm, antitank guns continued.56
105-mm. Howitzer
In World War I the United States Army had used the 155-mm. howitzer as a divisional artillery piece, but its unsuitabilities for that purpose—its lack of sufficient mobility to be a companion piece to the 75-mm. gun, its wasteful consumption of ammunition, and its lack of volume of fire—combined to convince the Westervelt
Board that a howitzer of about 105-mm. caliber should be developed. The reasoning of the board was stated thus:
The consensus of opinion of artillery officers is that the division artillery missions are best fulfilled by a light field gun and a light field howitzer. ... There are many instances where the terrain offers such protection to infantry that the field gun cannot bring an effective fire. The howitzer has the great advantage that with a proper set of charges and therefore a choice of trajectories for the same range, protected positions can be chosen for howitzers that guns could not use, and angles of fall on objectives obtained that the normal ammunition of guns would not give. The low muzzle velocity of howitzers admits of their use in harassing fire and allows the use of a projectile double the weight of that of the field gun. Such a howitzer renders excellent service in wire cutting and is a useful projector of gas shells. To insure the mobility required of all divisional artillery, the weight of the howitzer and carriage should not exceed that of the field gun and carriage, or about 4,500 pounds.57
The board specified a howitzer mounted on a carriage permitting a vertical arc of fire of from minus 5 degrees to plus 65 degrees and a horizontal arc of fire of 360 degrees. The carriage should be usable interchangeably for either howitzers or divisional light guns. The projectile should weigh about 30 to 35 pounds and should include both shrapnel and shell. A maximum range of 12,000 yards would answer. Semifixed ammunition and zone charges were to be used.
Based upon this recommendation, experienced Field Artillery and Ordnance officers jointly drew up specifications, and in 1920 four carriages and four howitzers were built for test. These models were unsatisfactory. In the course of the next year, at the request of the Field Artillery, a box-trail carriage was designed and tried out with some success, although the Field Artillery Board was unwilling to abandon altogether the split-trail type of carriage because of the wider traverse it permitted. In the meantime, while the Ordnance Department worked upon improved American models of both carriage and howitzer, the Field Artillery tested some of the German 105’s captured in World War I and rechambered to take American ammunition. The using arm’s enthusiasm over the German matériel was such that the Field Artillery Board recommended its adoption for service use, but shortage of proper ammunition, the cost of putting the 300 German howitzers into condition, and the lack of uniformity in those on hand from which to prepare drawings for later quantity production led the Chief of Ordnance to protest. The decision of the General Staff was therefore to put the German
howitzers in storage and have one battery of four new American models manufactured for service test.58
For the next three years work upon the 105 was pushed as rapidly as appropriations allowed, for, as the Chief of Ordnance announced in 1926, the development of a satisfactory 105-mm. howitzer was considered the most pressing Ordnance problem. Some $400,000 had been spent upon the project since the end of the war. Cancellation of the requirement of a carriage so constructed as to be interchangeable for gun or howitzer hastened successful design of a carriage, and in January 1928 a split-trail type manufactured at Rock Island Arsenal was standardized as the carriage MI. The howitzer standardized at the same time had a range just under the 12,000 yards desired. A greater deviation from the original specifications was a horizontal traverse of only 45 degrees instead of the 360 degrees stipulated at first. Over-all weight of howitzer and carriage was 3,750 pounds.59 Before any of this model was produced, modification of the chamber was initiated in order to make possible loading of shrapnel as fixed ammunition. The altered howitzer was called the M2 and officially adopted in 1934. Later, the requirement for shrapnel was canceled.60
Fourteen M2 models were manufactured and twelve were issued to the Field Artillery for extended service test between 1928 and 1933. Two were kept at Aberdeen Proving Ground for use in developing ammunition. The howitzer proved satisfactory, but in 1933 the Field Artillery requested redesign of the carriage to provide high-speed characteristics and to eliminate the need of a recoil pit. After thorough study of the problem, design of a new recoil mechanism and of a lighter carriage equipped with pneumatic tires and antifriction bearings began in 1936. Though a satisfactory recoil mechanism was completed in 1939, both experimental carriages had deficiencies. Reduction of weight was particularly important: to effect this, new military characteristics were drawn up. Of the two new models designed according to the revised specifications, the Field Artillery Board in January 1940 pronounced one acceptable if certain minor defects were corrected in production models.61 The carriage M2 was accordingly standardized on 28 March 1940.
Thirteen of the existing fourteen M1 carriages were modified by adding adapters, drawbars, and brakes to make them suitable for use as truck-drawn artillery, and these modified carriages, designated M1A1, were classified as limited standard. At the same time design of the howitzer was slightly altered by change in the trigger shaft and minor redimensioning of other parts. These changes, applied on a production order for forty-eight M2 howitzers placed in the summer of 1939, occasioned the change in nomenclature to the 105-mm. howitzer M2A1.62 This was
the divisional artillery piece that reached quantity production early in the war and, used in numbers by troops in every theatre, won the appellation, “work-horse of the Army.” Its rate of fire was twenty rounds a minute; it fired thirteen different kinds of shell.
240-mm. Howitzer
The 240-mm. howitzer development project is of peculiar interest. in spite of its short span of life during the peace years, for the plan to design- a self-propelled mount for so big a weapon was audacious in 1919. Like the other major artillery items upon which Ordnance designers worked before 1940, the original impetus to develop this huge howitzer came from the Caliber Board. Intent upon rounding out divisional and corps artillery with powerful field army pieces, the Caliber Board recommended an 8-inch gun with a maximum range of 35,000 yards and a 240-mm. howitzer with maximum range of 25,000 yards. The 240-mm. howitzer 1918M1 of World War I with a range of about 16,000 yards would serve as a point of departure-in designing the more powerful weapon, but the carriage, to be of a type requiring the least possible preparation for firing, was a knottier problem, “No type of road mount is known which is satisfactory in this respect,” stated the report, “but the Board has in mind the development of a caterpillar type. The maximum speed need not exceed six miles per hour,”63 Its difficulties notwithstanding, this project was included in the list of developments upon which the Ordnance Department immediately embarked. But the 240-mm,, because of the high cost of developing it, stood low on the list.
In March 1920 the Artillery Division of the Ordnance Department informed the Technical Staff that mounting on a caterpillar-type carriage a howitzer of the power recommended would bring the weight to some 115,000 pounds, far in excess of the 40-ton limit the Corps of Engineers set for its highway bridges. Dividing the load would therefore be necessary.64 Accordingly, after careful study of alternatives, the decision was reached a year later to design a caterpillar mount driven by an electric motor supplied with power from a gas-electric generator set upon a separate vehicle. The specifications also called for a howitzer with a vertical arc of fire from zero degrees to 65 degrees and for a 345-pound projectile. In order to assemble ballistic data, firing tests of the French Schneider 240-mm. howitzer M1918 and the American model 1918M1 proceeded at both Aberdeen Proving Ground and Fort Bragg during the succeeding two years, but no draftsman was assigned to design of the carriage. While the Ordnance Department realized that the problems involved must make redesign of the howitzer and new design of the carriage a time-consuming undertaking, the priority given the project was too low to permit it to survive the cuts in appropriations of 1924. It was suspended till more money would be available. That time did not come for over fifteen years,65
Development of Combat Vehicles
Tank Doctrine and Policy Statements
For tanks, problems in research and development were heightened by difficulties that did not obtain in other fields. Experimentation with small arms and small arms ammunition had been a major concern of the Ordnance Department for over a hundred years. For artillery, the Caliber Board’s recommendations of 1919 created a consistent pattern of development, whether acceptable to the using arms in all particulars or not. But for tank development, the War Department made no such far-sighted, long-term plans. Suggestions from the Chief of Ordnance in October 1919 that a tank board be appointed to recommend a permanent tank development policy netted no action. In fact, within the next few months the General Staff, without making any study of the future of combat vehicles, arrived at two important decisions that gravely and most adversely affected development for years to come.
The first decision was to abolish the Tank Corps created in 1918. The Tank Corps, the only unit of the US Army that had war experience with tanks, was imbued with enthusiasm and possessed of progressive ideas on tank development. The dispersal of the corps was disheartening to tank advocates and, as one officer later wrote, “was a clear indication that the future use of tanks in war was considered of little importance.”66 The second decision, assignment of tanks exclusively to the Infantry, soon proved to be still more shortsighted. Other nations, to be sure, at the time were similarly making the tank an adjunct of the Infantry, but in the United States the General Staff got this decree incorporated as law in the 1920 National Defense Act. The purpose was to prevent the Tank Corps from ever being reconstituted to plague the Infantry and other arms as a separate mechanized force comparable to the Air arm. The result was twofold: for years it precluded the growth of any interest in cross-country combat vehicles by arms other than the Infantry, and later, when interest widened, it hampered plans to extend the use of tanks in war. As long as tanks were regarded solely as support for the riflemen in attack, Infantry concepts of their use necessarily predominated. When early in the thirties the Chief of Staff recognized the interest of the Cavalry in mechanized equipment, the War Department had to resort to elaborations of nomenclature in order to adhere to the letter of the law: Cavalry tanks were labeled combat cars until in 1940 a separate Armored Force was established.
In the year following the Armistice, while the Ordnance Department waited for the General Staff to announce its policy on postwar tank development, Maj. R. E. Carlson, an American member of the Anglo-American Tank Commission, made a complete survey of the situation and tendered recommendations on types for future development.67 With these data as a guide and with the approval of the Chief of the Tank Corps and the Chief of Infantry, the Ordnance Department then embarked upon design of a fast medium tank. But tanks are costly. Obviously it was
unsound to spend large sums of money in producing models that the General Staff would not approve. In a machine so complex as a tank, achieving one desired characteristic often necessitates sacrifice of another. Determination of what is to be a primary consideration in design, what a secondary, must depend on clear understanding of the tactical use intended.
Though the Infantry, as the using arm after June 1920, was charged with stipulating the tactical requirements for tanks, these requirements in turn had to fit the general principles of use which only the General Staff was empowered to decide.
Between 1919 and 1922 the General Staff made no move to commit itself. The Ordnance Department had already spent much money on tank development. Some official statement of policy was imperative. In March 1921 the Ordnance Department submitted to the War Department an expanded version of the Carlson report and two and a half months later requested a formal declaration of approved policy and tactical requirements for all tanks.
The answer, sent in an endorsement through The Adjutant General’s office in April 1922, established the principal basis for tank development for the next decade. It read:
1. The primary mission of the tank is to facilitate the uninterrupted advance of the riflemen in the attack. Its size, armament, speed and all the accessories for making it an offensive force must be approached with above mission as the final objective to be obtained in development.
2. As a matter of economy and simplicity in organization, the number of types of tanks should be kept at a minimum. Reliance cannot safely be placed on a single type of tank, but two types, a light and a medium, should be capable of fulfilling all assigned missions.
3. These types should be as follows:
(a) The light tank not exceeding 5 tons in weight and capable of being transported on heavy motor trucks.
(b) The medium tank not exceeding 15 tons in weight, thereby bringing it within the limits of average highway bridges, the capacity of railroads and the limit of 15 tons placed by the War Department on the medium pontoon bridge.
4. Inasmuch as certain progress has already been obtained toward developing tanks of the medium type, first consideration should be given to that type, which is capable of doing all that is required of a light tank, except being transported on trucks. In the development of the medium tank, consideration should be given to the essentials necessary to make it a fighting machine. Its speed should be the greatest possible consistent with the limitation in weight, economy in fuel, and radius of action. The control of speed should permit a reduction to that of the advancing riflemen.
5. The armament of medium tanks should consist of machine guns and guns of heavier caliber. The guns should be capable of firing upon enemy troops in trenches, and engage hostile tanks on a basis of equality; they should, therefore, be of as large caliber as is consistent with prescribed weight limits and ammunition supply, but no necessity is seen for high angle fire. The radius of the action, vision and maneuverabilities of tanks should permit complete fulfillment of the assigned mission. These essentials should be determined after thorough study and experiment and concurrent with the development of pilot tanks. Auxiliary vehicles, except signal tanks, should not be of a type special to the tank service alone.
6. The tank is not likely to decrease in importance as a war weapon, but tank construction is expensive and it must be expected that funds will be limited. It is, therefore, directed that developments be conducted along the following lines:
a. The Chief of Ordnance will be allowed great latitude in the development of pilot tank for test purposes, in close cooperation with the Chief of Infantry.
b. The first program will be the development of suitable medium pilot tanks with their equipment, of a weight not exceeding 15 tons, and of a maximum speed
of not less than twelve miles per hour.
c. That for the present funds and effort will be applied principally to development purposes rather than to the construction of complete tank units.
d. The manufacture of complete tank units will not be undertaken until suitable medium pilot tanks have been developed and have been approved by the War Department as the best available type.
e. Tanks will not be designed with a special adaptation to chemical warfare, except that if it be found practicable to do so the tanks should be made gas-proof and supplied with a means of producing nontoxic smoke clouds. In this development, the Chief, Chemical Warfare Service, will be consulted.
f. The development of special auxiliary vehicles for tank service alone will not be undertaken; but there is no objection to the consideration of general purpose vehicles capable of meeting the general needs of the Army, as well as the special requirements for tanks.
g. Expenditure of funds on existing tanks will be limited to the amount necessary to keep those in actual service in repair, and those in storage from deterioration.68
The most significant feature of this outline of policy is that it was an outline only. Its two pages are in marked contrast to the fifty-odd closely typed pages of the Caliber Board report. Where the latter gave detailed analysis of artillery items and explored doctrine of use, the General Staff announcement of tank doctrine lay in the single sentence: “The primary mission of the tank is to facilitate the uninterrupted advance of the riflemen in the attack.” On this lone commandment hung all the law and the prophets. Apart from specifying weight limit and speed requirements, the General Staff delegated to the Chief of Ordnance and the Chief of Infantry all responsibility for deciding the principal features of tanks. But the 15-ton weight limit in itself made a radical change in the policy Ordnance and Infantry had agreed upon and amounted to scrapping the work already accomplished on 20-ton tanks. The General Staff statement was both belated and restricting. Because of the money involved and because final authority to approve or reject an experimental model could not be delegated along with initial responsibility for design, the lot of the Chief of Ordnance, like the policeman’s, was not a happy one. His staff had to use its best judgment in selecting design features; the resulting tanks, built at great cost, must satisfy not only the using arm but the General Staff. The declaration, “The Chief of Ordnance will be allowed great latitude in the development of pilot tanks for test purposes,” gave no specific instructions. Later attempts to get the General Staff to amplify this original statement of policy produced various enunciations, but some of these served chiefly to sharpen the controversies that inevitably emerged. A case in point was the switch in emphasis from medium to light tank development. In the considered judgment of the men most familiar with problems of tank design, development before 1931 suffered immeasurably “for lack of a definite and fairly constant policy.”69
It is true that the General Staff had no more experience than Infantry or Ordnance officers on which to base a sound doctrine of tactical use of tanks. As with any major innovation, such as fighter planes and bombers, doctrine must be
worked out by trial and error, and World War I had ended before sufficient combat data had been accumulated. Furthermore, it is important to note that experiments in employment of tanks were limited by the capabilities of the tanks available at any given time for tests or maneuvers. Doctrine depended upon what tests proved tanks could do, just as development of models possessing certain capabilities depended on designers’ understanding of what was needed. Some money and time had to be dedicated to exploring and charting blind alleys. Unlike modifications of a rifle design, changes in tank design cost thousands of dollars. The circle was endless: doctrine depended on tactical use intended; tactical use depended on what tanks were capable of; what tanks were capable of depended on developing models for predetermined use. Had higher authority consistently given the Chief of Ordnance the “great latitude” mentioned in the communication of 1922 and invariably accepted as final the decisions that Ordnance and using arms jointly reached, progress, engineers were convinced, would have been greatly speeded.
While producing no new formal statement of doctrine, in 1927 a terse directive from General Charles P. Summerall, then Chief of Staff: “Organize a Mechanized Force,”70 was in time to influence strongly the course of development. From the small detachment assembled at Fort Eustis, Virginia—a detachment consisting of a few picked men from the Infantry, from the tank units of the Infantry, from the Cavalry, the Artillery, the Engineers, the Signal Corps, and the Ordnance Department—there emerged a unit whose ideas and experimentation with mechanized equipment laid the groundwork for much of the useful work that followed. The ability and enthusiasm of these men, in the face of the ridicule frequently directed at them by officers of the older arms, was fortified in 1931 by the succeeding Chief of Staff, General MacArthur. “Every part of the army,” he directed, “will adopt mechanization and motorization as far as practicable and possible,”71 This revolutionizing order, though really only a repetition of Westervelt Board recommendations, had the effect of arousing all parts of the Army to interest in mechanization. Furthermore, MacArthur’s order to the Cavalry to take over the mechanized force project and, with Fort Knox, Kentucky, as headquarters, to expand it, opened the way to a reappraisal of the doctrine enunciated in 1922.
Ten years after the appearance of the first brief policy statement, General MacArthur thus summarized General Staff views in a report to the Secretary of War:
Upon this arm [Infantry] has always fallen the brunt of the task of dislodging the enemy from defensive positions. The ideal machine for assistance in this mission must of necessity have a high degree of tactical mobility, even at the expense of reducing, if necessary, road or strategic mobility. Remembering that the greatest obstacle to tactical mobility is the band of fire laid down by the defense, an essential requisite in the assaulting tank is sufficient armor to protect against the preponderant mass of this fire, namely, that from all types of small arms. More than this is impractical, at least at present, because every increase in armor means a corresponding loss in speed and cross-country ability. Sufficiently heavy armor to protect from field guns would completely immobilize any machine of usable size. For protection of this kind the tank must rely upon rapid
movement, surprise, proper use of ground, and the supporting guns of its own army.72
While noting that the airplane had by this time entered into the field of reconnaissance, MacArthur indicated the new role of the Cavalry in mechanized warfare:
… the traditional Cavalry missions of covering the advance or retreat of the main army, of conducting terrestrial reconnaissance, and of exploiting victory by pursuing a disorganized army remain unchanged. Cavalry interest in mechanization has therefore been centered principally in armored cars and cross-country vehicles possessing a high degree of strategic mobility, with fighting power and tactical mobility an important though secondary consideration.73
Recognition that Cavalry as well as Infantry had an interest in mechanization henceforward gave ordnance designers the advantage of the mechanized Cavalry’s active participation in the experimental program but at the same time obliged the Ordnance Department to find compromises to satisfy both using arms. Funds were too small to permit development of a series of tanks for a variety of purposes. Therefore the general solution attempted was to develop tanks for the Infantry, modify these to adapt them to the Cavalry mission, name the Cavalry tanks combat cars, and add a line of fast, armored, wheeled scout cars for Cavalry reconnaissance.
As the 1930s wore on, War Department concepts of what were essential requirements for tanks changed somewhat. Ordnance experts for fifteen years had deplored the imperviousness of the General Staff to the idea that heavier protective armor and, particularly, more powerful guns were of even greater importance than high speed. The Chief of Staff in 1932 had admitted that recent developments in armor-piercing ammunition were complicating tank design and that the new high-velocity bullets promised penetration of any armor then carried on American tanks.74 But this admission led to no immediate revision of tank requirements or doctrine. In fact in 1933 the Secretary of War announced that it was “absolutely essential … to insure, for any vehicle intended for use primarily with the Cavalry or Infantry Division, the production of a vehicle to weigh not more than 7½ tons (preferably less) and to cost substantially less to manufacture than present types.”75 The weight limit was predicated upon the supposition that tanks had to be transported into battle on trucks. Partial conversion to a different view began when observers’ reports started to pile up evidence from battlefields of the Spanish Civil War.76 From this came indisputable proof of the vulnerability of light tanks.77 Two-man crews, no space for radio, insufficient armor to withstand even .30-caliber armor-piercing shot all added up to
ineffectiveness.78 The General Staff and Infantry belief that protection from small arms fire was all that was necessary was further shaken by reports that foreign countries were building tanks with much heavier armor and greater fire power than any the US Army had. And finally, tank maneuvers revealed the weaknesses of the American combat vehicle.79 As a result of these discoveries, speed ceased to be the first requirement.80 Yet official announcement of revised doctrine failed to appear. Not until the Armored Force was created in July 1940 and the wishes of the Infantry ceased to dominate and those of the Cavalry prevailed did any basic change occur. The thesis proclaimed in a 1939 War Department field manual largely repeated that of the 1923 regulations: tanks were to be employed to assist the advance of Infantry foot troops; mechanized Cavalry would exploit successes. Tanks were to be GHQ reserve.81
Progress of the Tank Development Program
Within this framework, built of shifting and often conflicting ideas of what characteristics ideal tanks should have, the Ordnance Department’s program of research and development had to proceed. The tank designer of every country is faced with the highly technical problem of finding a balance between the three essential features of tanks: the guns to provide the fire power with which to fight, the armor plate to give crews protection and keep the vehicle in action, and the chassis and power train to give mobility.82 Powerful guns and turret mountings to insure coverage of the field of fire and armor plate heavy enough to minimize the destructive effects of armor-piercing ammunition immediately build up the weight the chassis must carry. A chassis strong enough to carry a heavy superstructure must have very powerful engines and a sturdy suspension system. Unless the suspension be reasonably shockproof, a tank cannot long withstand the wear and tear of cross-country operations, or travel far by road without extensive overhaul. Unless engines can be designed so extraordinarily compact as to give the needed power without taking up most of the interior of the tank, the frame of the chassis must be wide or high. A high silhouette makes a relatively easy target for enemy fire. A very wide vehicle has less road maneuverability than a narrow one, may be unable to cross bridges, and may seriously impede military highway traffic.
Weight and over-all dimensions thus became vital considerations; but power plants, armor, and armament were equally important for fighting vehicles. The Corps of Engineers stressed the first, for theirs was the responsibility for bridges and roads. The using arms were primarily concerned with getting easy maneuverability, speed and, later, fire power and protective armor. The Ordnance Department, whose mission encompassed maintenance, regarded engines and suspension systems of
utmost importance. In all the discussion that follows, the reader must bear in mind these desiderata which, by their tendency to mutual irreconcilability, induced prolonged controversy.
Furthermore, the degree to which want of money hamstrung developments can be gauged by a brief comparison of costs and appropriations. In 1931 the cost of a single Christie tank without armor, engines, guns, or radios was $34,500. Seven years later the Chief of Ordnance estimated the cost of a medium tank at about $50,000.83 While sums allotted to tank development before 1925 were relatively large, from 1925 to 1939 the average was about $60,000 a year. That precluded building more than one experimental model in any one year. But to work out improvements without making test models was to relegate problems to the realm of abstraction. Commercial corporations such as General Motors had annual research budgets in these years running up to $20,000,000. For all development projects, not merely automotive, Ordnance Department funds in the mid-thirties averaged about $1,680,000. At the end of 1939 the Chief of Ordnance begged for $100,000 solely for development of diesel engines for tanks.84 For nearly fifteen years appropriations permitted steady progress, but at a snail’s, not even a caterpillar’s pace.
The tank had first been used in combat by the British in the Somme offensive of September 1916. In the next two years the United States, collaborating with the British and French, designed and built several types: a 44-ton heavy tank, the Mark VIII; a 40-ton steam-propelled tank; and a Ford 3-ton and a Renault 6-ton tank. Influenced by its experience with these, the Army after the Armistice inclined to favor development of some heavy and some very light tanks. A small tank force, which could be rapidly expanded if war came, was to be kept as a nucleus for training. Yet the first project launched was the design of a medium tank, which, it was hoped, would constitute an “all-purpose” Infantry tank.85
Heavy Tanks
The heavy tank program was short lived. In March 1920 Brig. Gen. Samuel D. Rockenback of the Tank Corps assured a Congressional committee that a few more months would see the development of a much improved heavy tank, “equal to any five of the Mark VIII.”86 His optimism was unfounded. Had the Tank Corps been perpetuated, perhaps objections to heavy tanks would have been withdrawn. But when the National Defense Act named the Infantry as the using arm, work on design of heavy models was canceled and for the next twenty years revival of the project received no encouragement from the General Staff. The reasons were three. First, any tank weighing more than twenty-five tons was too heavy for the emergency bridges already developed by the Corps of Engineers unless the bridges were
reinforced, and reinforcement was time consuming. The Engineers, themselves short of funds for new development and fearful lest increasing weights make bridge construction a matter of days rather than hours, protested against the adoption of heavy tanks. The second reason for vetoing heavy tanks was the growing conviction that smaller tanks had greater tactical usefulness. British thinking was influential here: the opinion of the British, whose Army first used tanks in battle, was long deferred to as authoritative.87 And, finally, the cost of building test models of heavy tanks was so much greater than the cost of light and medium tanks that it seemed wiser to spend the limited available funds upon design of types that had prospects of meeting the avowed wishes of the using arms than to invest money in building pilot models with which to demonstrate the capabilities of 40-ton types. So, in the face of occasional protests from the Ordnance Department, heavy tank design was virtually abandoned till combat experience in World War II forced the Army to revise its views.88
Light Tanks
Light tanks, though officially approved by the War Department’s statement of 1922, received little attention before 1926. The objective set had been a tank of not more than five tons, transportable by truck. Portee, or transport to the line of action, was to avoid needless wear of tracks and chassis. The specifications first laid down by the Infantry Board are of interest because they were so far removed from later concepts. They included a cruising radius of fifty miles, speed of from two to twelve miles an hour across country, armor proof against .30-caliber armor-piercing bullets, armament of one .30-caliber machine gun and one 37-mm. gun so mounted as to be operable by one man, and provision for a crew of two. Work along this line was never pushed far. By 1926, when the Infantry’s interest in light tanks began to grow, requirements were altered to attain speed of twelve to twenty miles an hour, weight of not more than six tons, and a gun mount in which a .50-caliber and a ,30-caliber machine gun would be interchangeable.89 The preference for light, fast tanks over heavier ones was nourished, if not induced, by study of British ideas both as expressed in the writings of Liddell Hart and as reported by the Secretary of War after a visit to Aldershot in 1927. A 1928 revision of the Ten-Year-Program called for 72 light tanks, though originally no light tanks had been included, and the reduction of the number of medium tanks from 64 to 16. Up to 1935 emphasis upon speed and maneuverability mounted steadily, culminating in instructions to the Ordnance Department to design a three-ton tank.90 Impractical though this particular project soon proved, the work expended on 5-, 6-, and 7-ton models between 1926 and 1935 gave engineers much useful data on which to proceed later.
By 1935 the experimental light tanks, T2E1 and T2E2, were given limited
procurement status. This designation usually meant that full standardization and large procurement orders would follow unless the items were superseded by something better in the interim. These models later became the M2A1 and M2A2. Manufactured at Rock Island Arsenal in 1935, they differed from each other chiefly in that the M2A1 had a single turret surmounted by a cupola and weighed 18,790 pounds, while the M2A2 had two round turrets and weighed 19,100 pounds. Each was armed with one .50-caliber machine gun and three .30-caliber machine guns. Maximum armor thickness was 5/8 of an inch. The transmission was a sliding gear type. Continental W-670 gasoline engines using 92 octane gasoline gave a maximum speed of 45 miles an hour. In the next two years, in order to meet the demands of the Cavalry for vehicles with 360 degree turret traverse, two models of what were then called “combat cars” were turned out.91 Most characteristics of these, however, so closely paralleled those of Infantry tanks that the distinction of name was dropped in 1940 and the original combat car M1 was redesignated the light tank M1A2, combat car M2 the light tank M1 Al. The most important feature introduced in the original combat car M2 was the Guiberson T1020 Series 4 diesel air-cooled radial engine as an alternate power plant. With the appearance of another light tank model in 1938, the Ordnance Department began to increase the thickness of protective armor and slightly reduce road speed. The pilot tank of the next development, the M2A4, first manufactured at Rock Island in 1939, carried still further the trend toward greater weight and more power. This model, under production as the German panzers swept into Poland, embodied many of the principles continued in later tanks. It marked a turning point in light tank design.92
The M2A4 light tank was designed for a crew of four, a driver and assistant driver in the hull, a gunner and a commander-leader in the single turret. Entrance to the vehicle was through armored hatches, which were provided with peep-holes for vision in combat areas. In noncombat zones, the hatches could be opened, permitting direct vision and better ventilation. Armor was of thicknesses up to one inch, with heaviest armor on vertical and near vertical surfaces, which experience had shown were most likely to be hit. The turret could be rotated through 360 degrees by means of a handwheel-controlled mechanism. Power was supplied by either a Continental radial air-cooled aircraft-type engine that operated on 80 octane gasoline or a Guiberson diesel engine. The transmission was of the synchromesh type, with five forward speeds and one reverse. The vehicle was supported by two bogies or suspensions on each side, trunnioned on the front and rear axles. Each bogie consisted of two solid-rubber-tired rollers which, mounted on volute springs, rode the inside of the endless rubber-block track. The action of the volute springs and articulating bogie links kept track tension constant while negotiating obstacles or irregular terrain. The most important change from earlier models was the addition of a 37-mm. gun. Three more .30-caliber machine guns were emplaced, one in the right bow and one on each sponson. Although 27-mm. guns had been used on light tanks in World War I, later military
thinking had limited armament to .30-caliber and .50-caliber machine guns. This opinion was now discarded. The weight, just over twelve tons, brought this light tank near the weight limit formerly set for medium tanks.93
Medium Tanks
Medium tank design had meanwhile pre-empted much concentrated effort, more than was expended on either heavy or light tanks during the 1920s. From 1919 till the early 1930s, Ordnance engineers believed it feasible to achieve a model that would combine the essential characteristics of both the heavy and light tanks used in World War I, provided that weight not be restricted to fifteen tons. The first two postwar models, the medium tanks M1921 and M1922, weighed over twenty tons each. While these designs were not completely scrapped and revisions of the former were carried on for several years, War Department policy as set forth in the 1922 endorsement quoted above made a lighter model necessary. The fifteen-ton tank, Model 1924, was the Ordnance Department’s attempt to meet this requirement, but any possibility of success was precluded by specifications of the Infantry and of the Tank Board. The board insisted on armor protection against .50-caliber armor-piercing bullets, a requirement that meant plate an inch thick; provision for a four-man crew; one six-pounder and one machine gun, independently operable; and a speed of twelve miles an hour.94 The Chief of Infantry and the Chief of Ordnance both concurred in the protest of the president of the Tank Board, Col. Oliver S. Eskridge: “... everyone familiar with the tank situation knows that an attempt to build a satisfactory tank within the 15-ton limit is a waste of funds.”95 Reluctantly, the General Staff in 1926 approved shift of emphasis to a 23-ton tank, but ordered continued attention to a 15-ton. Study of both types was therefore carried on for the next nine years. Some of each type were designed, built, and tested, but none was standardized.96
In summarizing the accomplishments of tank development work up to 1929, a competent Ordnance engineer stressed the accumulation of data and experience in this field which lacked any technical history to draw upon. But William F. Beasley, in his capacity of automotive man on the Ordnance Technical Staff, observed that progress had been greatly hampered by “making perfection in an experimental vehicle the criterion for its standardization” and by “too great a faith on the part of the non-technical people ... that any difficulty can be overcome by research and development,”97 These comments held true for the next decade. Furthermore, Beasley contended, another source of delay in arriving at a basic design during the twenties had been the dispersion of effort and money upon development of accessories. Compasses, gun mounts, sighting devices, armor plate of increased resistance per unit of thickness, all needed improvement. And a tank commander badly needed some better method of communication with his crew and with other tanks than shin-kicking and waving signal
flags. Hindsight, in the opinion of some Ordnance engineers, suggested that the Department would have been better advised to concentrate exclusively upon development of a successful chassis. Officers of the using arms, on the other hand, firmly believed that more effective tanks depended as much upon having dependable accessories as upon a reliable track and engine.98
Perhaps another impediment to the evolution of a satisfactory full-track medium tank was expenditure of time upon so-called Christie or convertible types, designed to operate either on tracks or on solid-rubber-tired bogie wheels. A wheeled vehicle could of course travel over roads at higher speeds without excessive wear on chassis and tires than could a caterpillar-treaded vehicle. The tracks could be put on for cross-country maneuvers. Over the advantages and drawbacks of Christie tanks controversy raged for more than twenty years and, indeed, is occasionally revived today in discussions of Russian tanks that for a time were based on Christie patents.
Engineers agreed that the convertible principle was attractive even though “two-purpose equipment is in general violation of good engineering practice.”99 The Tank Corps, anxious to try out convertible models, in 1919 urged negotiation of a contract with Walter Christie who had already devoted extensive study to the problem. In November 1919 an order for one experimental model was placed and soon afterward the Ordnance Department bought a license to all Christie patents. Christie’s first product was tested, returned for modifications, and in 1923 retested exhaustively. But this, like later models Christie built, the Ordnance Department felt displayed major weaknesses, primarily mechanical unreliability. Notwithstanding the defects of the succession of convertible models tested, the using arms persisted in requesting development of this type of tank. Their insistence derived from their conviction that it could keep up with other motor vehicles better than any other kind of tank. Christie’s Model 1940, so-called because in 1929 its proponents considered it “easily ten years ahead of its time,” in first trials achieved 42.55 miles an hour on tracks and 69.23 miles an hour on wheels. Though these speeds were admittedly possible only under favorable conditions of terrain and highway, the officials of the American Automobile Association who supervised the test were impressed. The Infantry was enthusiastic. Following a test held before a board of high-ranking officers of various arms and services, the Ordnance Department was instructed to procure six of the tanks.100 Still, most Ordnance officers remained skeptical, believing that the speed of the Christie failed to compensate for its light armor. light fire power, inability to make long runs without overhaul, and lack of room inside for guns, radio, and ammunition. In early 1932 the Chief of Ordnance reiterated a list of practical objections to the convertible type chassis, the tactical and strategic value of which had not, he believed, been fully demonstrated. But, he wrote, in view of opinion prevailing among the users, the Ordnance Department must pursue the development until it arrived at
conclusive results, pro or con.101 So the T3 and T4 experimental medium tanks built in the mid-thirties were both convertible types. Not until 1938, when the T5 appeared, was the convertible principle abandoned.102
Christie himself dropped the convertible feature from his models after the mid-thirties, but other elements of his designs continued to attract attention, notably the suspension system he employed. Independently sprung wheels gave the vehicle good riding qualities and increased maneuverability over rough terrain. But Christie always submitted his tanks for trial without guns or gun mountings. The tests therefore could not give final proof of the tanks’ durability. Spectacular performance of test models unencumbered with the weight that armor plate, turret, and guns must add was no proof of what the vehicles could withstand when those essentials were added.103 Examination of Christie’s new “High Speed Model T12,” demonstrated in 1938, convinced Ordnance automotive experts that this tank, like its predecessors, lacked the features essential in a fighting vehicle. The fighting compartment was much too small, the tank accommodated only a driver and one gunner, the liquid-cooled engine, though powerful, was an aircraft type that would be difficult to procure, and the tracks were of a kind guaranteeing only relatively short life. In short, the disqualifying weaknesses of this light “High-Speed” tank were those of earlier Christies,104 The suspension system, while having some advantage, was considered not sufficiently sturdy. Instead of adopting the Christie suspension, the Ordnance Department resorted to heavy volute springs as promising far greater strength and hence longer life. Though rubber torsion suspension had been tried out for light vehicles in 1936, either horizontal or vertical volute spring suspension was used in every American tank built after 1938 until in 1942 torsion bar suspension was developed to a point where it could be used for combat vehicles.105 Unfortunately, the faith in Christie’s suspension system, which was cherished by some politicians, newspaper reporters, and officers of the using arms who were not in a position to recognize the defects in the design, gave rise to the notion that the Ordnance Department to save face was stubbornly refusing to accept a superior tank simply because it was the work of an independent designer. Mistaken identification of Christie’s independently sprung wheels with torsion bar suspension persisted long after the war and accounts for much of the criticism of the Ordnance Department’s rejection of Christie’s design.106
The year 1938, which saw the appearance of Christie’s new “High-Speed” light tank, also brought forth the T5 models of medium tanks. The most prophetic
Medium Tank T3, one of the Christie tanks
development in these was the experimental mounting of a 75-mm. pack howitzer in the turret of one model. A few Cavalry and Ordnance officers had indeed advocated this as early as 1935. Now it was a clear recognition of trends in European design. In 1937 German experts, after visiting Fort Knox, are reported to have stated that the United States led the world both in tank design and in organization of mechanized units. If that was truth, not flattery, the lead was lost in 1938. In spite of a report from Berlin describing the German experimental mounting of an 88-mm. gun in a tank, the Chief of Infantry declared so powerful a weapon as a 75-mm, needless.107 As a result of this judgment, the pilots of the M2 and M2A1 medium tanks, built the next year, were each armed only with a 37-mm. gun, eight .30-caliber machine guns, and a .45-caliber submachine gun. Meanwhile, the mechanized Cavalry was clamoring for a self-propelled cannon to neutralize enemy antitank guns. Only when the War Department conceded that a 75-mm. howitzer mounted on a combat car chassis was virtually a tank was a new decision reached; approval of designing a tank equipped with a 75-mm. howitzer came at last in July 1940. The Armored Force, headed by a Cavalry officer, Brig. Gen. Adna R. Chaffee, was established that month.108
It is worth repeating that between 1919 and 1938 none of the tanks developed was
standardized.109 The T5 was the first to be approved. Accepted in June 1939, it was designated the medium tank M2. The medium tanks T4 and T4E1 were shortly thereafter designated Medium Tank M1, Convertible, Limited Standard, though the eighteen manufactured and used at Fort Benning were declared obsolete in March 1940. The caution that characterized the Army expenditure programs during the twenty years between world wars doubtless accounts for the refusal to standardize any tanks, no matter how promising. But Ordnance automotive designers felt that this retarded tank development. They deplored the policy on the grounds that use by troops in training and on maneuvers revealed weaknesses susceptible of improvement in a fashion that proving ground and formal service tests could not do. The perfectionism complained of in 1929 still obtained in 1938. This view the Infantry and Cavalry did not share; they considered it the Ordnance Department’s job to get “the bugs out of a design” before shipping a model to troops in the field.110
Opportunity to try experimental models on maneuvers did exist, to be sure, after the first units of a mechanized Cavalry brigade were organized in 1931. The mechanized force, assembled at Fort Meade in the summer of 1928 in response to General Summerall’s famous four word directive, had paved the way by trying out tactical employment of the tanks then on hand, and in the fall of 1930 that force’s successor, a group at Fort Eustis, Virginia, carried on. When some months later the unit was transferred to Fort Knox, Kentucky, to form the nucleus of the first mechanized Cavalry, collaboration of designers and users of combat vehicles was assured. Still, the projected regiment of mechanized Cavalry did not materialize; funds were insufficient to equip it. As late as mid-1939 the tank forces consisted of only one mechanized Cavalry brigade of half strength, the small, partially equipped tank companies with Infantry divisions, and the GHQ units of 1,400 men.111 The small scale of operations possible with the few tanks available for field trial during the 1930s gave indication rather than conclusive proof of what American experimental models were capable and, still more important, of what they were incapable. Officers of the mechanized Cavalry averred that evolution of tactical doctrine was not affected by delays in delivery of equipment, that fundamentally principles of tactical use of horse Cavalry applied to an armored brigade. But the Ordnance Department continued to believe that the want of enough tanks, armored cars, and auxiliary motor vehicles to conduct extensive maneuvers left automotive engineers with only sketchy evidence on which to base attempts at improved design. Only 19 light tanks were completed in 1936, 154 in 1937, and 74 in 1938. Medium tanks finished were fewer.112
One handicap in the development of all types of combat vehicles during the twenty years of peace calls for special mention. This was the lack of suitable engines. The Ordnance Department itself never had money enough to develop an ideal tank engine and, as private industry
had no need for an engine designed to meet the peculiar requirements of tank power plants, there was no commercial development. The lack of power obtainable with the slow-speed marine engines used first and in the later adaptations of aircraft engines affected all other features of design. It lent color to arguments favoring development only of light tanks. Because liquid-cooled engines were thought to be more vulnerable than air-cooled, the automotive engineers centered attention upon air-cooled types. To the success with these before 1938, the Chief of Ordnance, with a touch of complacency, attributed “the superiority of our equipment over that of foreign armies.”113 In 1936 Guiberson air-cooled diesels were first tried. But when the later 1930s brought aircraft needs to the fore, the Air Corps protested Ordnance pre-emption of aircraft engines for tanks just as the Navy later reserved diesels for Navy use. The Ordnance Department was therefore obliged belatedly to find some other solution of its problem. The compromises arrived at, as the development story of World War II will show, gave far from ideal answers.114
Auxiliary Vehicles
Apart from the achievements on tanks and combat cars, fulfillment of the Caliber Board’s hopes for motorization of the US Army fell far short of the goal. Complete motorization would have meant self-propelled mounts for every weapon the foot soldier could not carry and motor transport for men and supplies as well. About motorization of supply trucks and personnel carriers there was little argument; these vehicles by the terms of the 1920 National Defense Act were a responsibility of the. Quartermaster Corps. The motorization of artillery, on the other hand, early came to be a controversial matter. In the years immediately following the appearance of the Caliber Board report, the Ordnance Department undertook a series of development projects on self-propelled gun mounts, but in each case work was halted by lack of money, lack of interest on the part of the Field Artillery, or both. As late as 1938, between 40 and 60 percent of the Army’s artillery was still horse drawn. A good many artillerymen contended that horse draft was more satisfactory than machine; horses neither ran out of gasoline nor required repairs and spare parts. If the Field Artillery did not want self-propelled guns, the Ordnance Department could not foist them upon the user, even had the Ordnance Department had funds to develop them. Only the insistence of the mechanized Cavalry enabled the Ordnance Department in 1938 to resume work on gun motor carriages. Yet when, after war broke out in Europe and Army appropriations increased, the Ordnance Department again recommended development of a motor carriage for the 105-mm. howitzer, the Chief of Field Artillery remained adamant in his refusal. Towing, Brig. Gen. Charles H. Danforth decreed, was better. Thus one very important feature of the Westervelt program lapsed.115
Towing by tractor was relatively acceptable to the Field Artillery. Horses could always be substituted. So the
development of a series of tractors and half-tracks had to be the Ordnance Department’s answer to mobility for artillery. Though the Ordnance Department before 1933 had procured and tested trucks for towing artillery, thereafter, by War Department order, procurement of trucks, as part of motor transport, was turned over to the Quartermaster Corps. The Ordnance Department was left in charge of all tracked and half-tracked vehicles, with very few exceptions, for all branches of the Army.116 This division of responsibility for vehicles was maintained till 1942. Tracked vehicles were preponderantly of commercial design; the Ordnance Department tested various models and devised the modifications that military use required. The Air Corps used some tractors and the Corps of Engineers a number for construction work, but otherwise most tractors were for use as prime movers of artillery. Between 1932 and 1940 the Ordnance Department tested some twenty-three different commercial tractors requested by the Field Artillery.117
Half-tracks similarly were developed by the collaborating efforts of Ordnance engineers and automotive engineers in private industry. This type of hybrid vehicle, originating in France, was a small truck or passenger car on which a half-track assembly was substituted for the conventional rear axle and wheel assembly. The design aimed at combining the cross-country mobility of the tracked vehicle with the highway speed of the wheeled. It was considered especially adapted to use as a personnel carrier or as a prime mover for divisional artillery. Some fourteen half-track truck models, a half-track car, and a half-track personnel carrier were tested before 1940, though it was not until 1939 that the armed services took any pronounced interest in half-tracks. In that year their possibilities for various combat operations apparently emerged. Accordingly, the Artillery Division of Industrial Service prepared drawings for a half-track scout car, later labeled the T14, and a pilot model was built in 1941. From engineering studies of this derived the three basic models from which stemmed the whole family of half-tracks used in World War II.118
Influence of Budgetary Restrictions
Ordnance research and development problems between world wars may be further clarified by an analysis of what the Department planned and what it accomplished in a given year. The fiscal year 1937 is fairly typical of the period immediately preceding the formal launching of the National Defense program. Appropriations for research and development for 1937 were set at $1,350,000, $90,000 more than for 1936 and $10,000 less than for 1938 and 1939.119 While the War Department as a whole sought $9,000,000 for 1937, the Bureau of the Budget cut the figure to $7,160,400. Approved Ordnance projects numbered 224 and were classified into 21 groups. Seventeen projects, most of them in the artillery ammunition group, still were based on Westervelt Board
recommendations. With cost of material estimated at about $300,000, 70 percent of the money was marked for salaries. Distribution of money among the twenty-one groups was as follows: $249,900 for artillery ammunition, including antimechanization weapons; $111,810 for procurement of artillery ammunition for service test; $101,300 for development of mobile artillery; $76,620 for ballistics research; $67,774 for small arms; $65,000 for railway artillery; $64,000 for artillery fire control; $60,120 for tanks; and smaller amounts for the remaining thirteen groups. Even for individual projects of major importance, the sums allotted had to be small: $2,500 for the light mortar, $800 for the 81-mm. mortar. The $60,000 for tanks was spent largely on the medium tank T5. Most of the 224 projects had been on the books for several years before 1937, some for over a decade. On twenty-one there had been no progress at all; on thirty-four work was only 1 to 10 percent completed.120
The question naturally arises as to why the research funds were spread so thin to cover so many items when the urgency of some undertakings would appear wholly to obliterate the importance of others. The answer lies in the fact that the Ordnance Department had to serve all branches of the Army. The Infantry would not acquiesce in devoting all appropriations to artillery development, nor would the Cavalry agree to a program disregarding its needs for armored cars to permit improvement of small arms. Each service had to get a share. The Ordnance Technical Committee mapped out the tentative distribution of research monies, the General Staff decided. In 1937 the apportionment of projects showed Field Artillery holding first place with 68 of the 224. Forty projects were for the Infantry, 35 each for the Coast Artillery and the Air Corps, 21 for the Cavalry, a scattered few for the Engineers and Chemical Warfare, and the rest for “all Arms and Services.”121
The War Department as a whole appreciated the wisdom of devoting a large slice of its available funds in peace years to research and development. For Ordnance development work alone, the War Department survey of 1929 had recommended an annual budget of not less than $3,000,000. But when total appropriations were small, the operating needs of the standing army and the cost of maintaining equipment already in existence tended year after year to eat up the lion’s share of appropriations. Thus for preservation of ammunition larger sums were allotted in the early thirties than for research projects,122 Tabulation of the relatively stable appropriations for research and development shows how the percentage of the total Ordnance appropriation shrank after 1934, though after 1937, by transfer of funds, more than the original allotment was actually spent.
As 1939 approached, the General Staff deliberately chose to reduce the research budget in the interests of having more money for actual rearmament.123 But the Chief of Ordnance believed that a large increase for ordnance research and development was of vital importance. His contention was strongly supported by the Chief of Field Artillery, the Chief of Coast Artillery, the Chief of Cavalry, and the Chief of Infantry, who all concurred that
Table 11: Ordnance Department total appropriations and appropriations for research and development: fiscal years 1921–40
| Appropriations | ||||
| Fiscal Year | Total | Research & Development | Percent R&D of Total | Actual expenditures Research & Development |
| 1921 | 22,880,186 | $1,120,500 | 4.9 | * |
| 1922 | 13,425,960 | 2,058,225 | 15.3 | * |
| 1923 | 6,859,030 | 1,400,197 | 20.4 | * |
| 1924 | 5,812,180 | 1,223,900 | 21.1 | * |
| 1925 | 7,751,272 | 1,867,600 | 24,1 | * |
| 1926 | 7,543,802 | 1,013,500 | 13.4 | * |
| 1927 | 9,549,827 | 989,500 | 10.4 | * |
| 1928 | 12,179,856 | 1,405,000 | 11,5 | * |
| 1929 | 12,549,877 | 1,369,500 | 10.9 | * |
| 1930 | 11,858,981 | 2,711,500 | 22.9 | * |
| 1931 | 12,422,466 | 1,137,148 | 9.2 | * |
| 1932 | 11,121,567 | 1,311,352 | 11.8 | * |
| 1933 | 11,588,737 | 1,291,764 | 11.1 | * |
| 1934 | 7,048,455 | 1,255,837 | 17.8 | * |
| 1935 | 11,049,829 | 1,266,500 | 11.5 | $1,268,546 |
| 1936 | 17,110,301 | 1,260,000 | 7.4 | 1,237,745 |
| 1937 | 18,376,606 | 1,350,000 | 7.3 | 1,350,018 |
| 1938 | 24,949,075 | 1,360,000 | 5. 5 | 1,661,444 |
| 1939 | 112,226,412 | 1,360,000 | 1.2 | 1,735,023 |
| 1940 | 176,546,788 | 1,650,000 | 0.9 | 1,941,338 |
a Data not available.
Source: Stat Br, OUSW, Weekly Stat Rpt Summary 3, 19 Jul 41, p. 9, DRB AGO; and interview with James A. Brown, R&D Serv, 31 Mar 53.
the insufficient funds allotted Ordnance for its development program over the preceding five years had resulted in disastrous delays. For example, the $276,400 marked for all 1940 mobile artillery development, the Chief of Coast Artillery asserted, would not even meet the cost of work on one item, the intermediate-caliber antiaircraft gun.124
General Tschappat’s summary of the situation in January 1938 was grimly factual: the Ordnance backlog of untouched artillery and automotive development projects totalled $10,000,000, of small arms projects $1,000,000. For ammunition alone, a budget of $1,500,000 a year for several years was imperative inasmuch as new methods and new matériel being developed in a rearming world would add to costs. Research, as distinguished from
development work, had been equally crippled for want of money. The Department had been unable either consistently to apply engineering principles worked out by industry in the decade past or to utilize techniques perfected in Ordnance laboratories. A doubling of research activity was essential for the future. In the absence of qualified ordnance experts in private industry, the Department had to recruit and train its own designers and engineers, a costly business. Purchase of designs from abroad, even if desirable, had been prohibitively expensive: the price recently quoted for rights to a foreign 37-mm. antiaircraft gun had approximately equaled the Ordnance Department’s total annual research and development budget. General Tschappat considered $2,500,000 for research and development in 1940 an absolute minimum.125 Congress appropriated $1,650,000 for this purpose.
Perhaps the refusal of the Bureau of the Budget to allot larger sums to Ordnance research and development and the reluctance of the Congress to vote as much as the budget called for can be partly explained by the tenor of the annual reports of the Ordnance Department in the years preceding 1940. Neither in hearings before Congressional committees nor in annual reports to the Secretary of War did Chiefs of Ordnance betray anxiety. Instead of telling the Congressional committees on military affairs that American ordnance, thanks to lack of money, consisted largely of the obsolete equipment of World War I, Chiefs of Ordnance year after year either avoided making any appraisal or else announced that in quality particular items of American ordnance were as good as or better than those of any army in the world. All officers appearing before Congressional committees were expected to confine themselves to answering specific questions. and not to volunteer information or opinion. The result was that year after year congressmen, trusting to the testimony their questions elicited from the experts, could believe that the United States Army, though small, was equipped with the very best. Similarly, the formal reports from the Chief of Ordnance to the Secretary of War sounded confident; they presented summaries of what had been done but rarely mentioned what was left undone. Because the published annual report of the Secretary of War, which included the summary statements of chiefs of arms and services, circulated widely, discretion apparently seemed the better part of valor. This explanation gains weight from evidence in the correspondence between the Ordnance Department and the General Staff. There, occasionally, the Chief of Ordnance warned of the true situation. It was General Tschappat’s letter to The Adjutant General that bluntly described the lag in Ordnance development work up to 1938. Some months later General Wesson reported to the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-4, that the Ordnance Department had not been able to keep abreast of recent developments abroad. Yet in the spring of 1941 General Wesson told a House committee that American weapons were as good as “and in many instances superior to those of any other army in the world.”126 In the face of statements in like vein repeated at intervals during the preceding years, Congress could scarcely be expected to vote large
sums of money to meet an exigency that members had little reason to think existed. Here was a situation not limited to the Ordnance Department in dealing with Congress, but representing the twenty-year-long struggle of the whole War Department versus the holders of the purse strings and lagging public opinion.
The Role of Technical Intelligence
As war is competitive and military equipment satisfactory only if it is as good as or better than that of potential enemies, knowledge of what ordnance other nations were developing was at all times of great importance to the United States Army. In appraising the value of technical intelligence reports three questions arise. Was adequate information available? If so, was it studied? How fully and how promptly was it applied? These questions have immediate bearing on the status of Ordnance research and development before 1940.
The formal channel for technical intelligence was through the Military Intelligence Division of the General Staff. Observers abroad dispatched their reports to the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, who then relayed the reports to the arm or service concerned. Though occasionally, particularly during the 1920s, the Ordnance Department sent an officer to Europe on a special mission, and during the Spanish Civil War the War Department stationed men on the scene, the usual procedure was to rely upon information forwarded by officers, specifically detailed as observers. Ordnance officers with engineering background were ideally the men to serve in this capacity and to prepare the technical reports on foreign ordnance.127 But the number of Ordnance officers qualified by experience who also had the necessary command of a foreign language and who had private incomes large enough to meet the expenses of a tour of duty abroad was small;128 in fact, between 1920 and 1940 there were only nine, and between November 1930 and May 1940 only two—Maj. Philip R. Faymonville in Moscow, and Capt. René R. Studler assigned to London. Thus General Williams’ original plan of frequently replacing Ordnance officers abroad fell down and with it the opportunity for them to report upon their findings in person, rather than in writing. In countries to which the Ordnance Department could not supply a liaison officer and during the early thirties when no Ordnance officer was assigned to foreign service anywhere, officers of other branches of the Army transmitted information. Particularly important were Maj. Truman Smith’s reports from Berlin.
Over the years a very considerable body of written data on foreign matériel accumulated in Washington. The long tours of duty of both Major Faymonville and Captain Studler, the former from July 1934 to February 1939, the latter from July 1936 to October 1940, gave the Ordnance Department the benefit of uninterrupted series of letters during a specially critical period. The reports from the Soviet Union were general in character, but those from western Europe were of a character to command close attention, for the great munitions makers were located in Germany, France, England, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, and Sweden. Though Captain Studler was formally assigned to London, his mission was a roving one and
included observation of developments in much of western Europe. The number, the details, and the timing of his studies made them peculiarly significant.129 A list of the subjects he covered in his 300-odd reports reveals the scope of his work.130
Sometimes the information in reports was perforce sketchy, consisting of photographs, rather general descriptions, or even merely guesses based on inference. Sometimes, particularly before the war began, the data were detailed, though in the absence of precisely dimensioned drawings Ordnance designers could consider the information suggestive rather than explicit. Technical intelligence reports could supply facts on the observed performance of a piece of equipment and could list general characteristics; more exact details were very difficult to obtain. Ordinarily, the War Department could get engineering details only by purchase from a European munitions maker or by an exchange of information with a foreign government. In any attempted exchange, American officers again and again deplored the weakness of their positions. American military journals, technical magazines, and newspapers so frequently spread across their pages the essential information of a new American development that liaison officers found themselves with nothing to offer and came away empty handed. Yet occasionally they apparently believed it possible to locate supplemental data, for Ordnance officers serving as military observers complained of being kept in ignorance of what further information the Ordnance Department might want. Their reports elicited no response, unless personal correspondents supplied it, and the officers abroad were left unguided. If, as an Ordnance general later averred, the Department followed their work closely and was balked of action only by the indifference of the using arms and by want of money,131 the observers assembling the information never knew how it was received at home. Real or seeming lack of interest in the Ordnance office in Washington tended to discourage the search for additional data. Reports were primarily valuable for the clues they gave. They indicated the lines of development to pursue rather than how to pursue them.
How carefully men in the War Department studied technical intelligence reports naturally depended in some measure on who saw them. Within the Ordnance Department distribution was orderly. When a report landed in the Office, Chief of Ordnance, from G-2—where it might have been kept for as long as four or five months—it went first to such members of the Technical Staff as were concerned with the subject and then passed on to the Manufacturing Division engineer in charge of the particular item discussed in the report. If the report dealt with tanks, it went to the chief of the Artillery and Automotive Division of the Technical Staff and on to the engineer in charge of automotive design; if with antiaircraft, from the Technical Staff to the engineers responsible for that type of artillery and to the man in
charge of artillery ammunition. Thence the original report or a copy would usually go to an arsenal or to Aberdeen Proving Ground, or to both. The routing was designed to give the persons best able to use the information full opportunity to study it. The names of the men who received various reports are often still attached to the original folders. Engineers and designers for each category of ordnance saw the reports that touched their special fields. Presumably each man in turn could truthfully say “Contents noted.” Furthermore, from 1920 on an accession list, compiled monthly, was distributed to division heads, so that anyone with a legitimate interest in the information could readily know of any new material that had come in. Many reports were circulated and recirculated several times. They all ended in the files of the Ordnance library.
What use the information derived from military reports was put to is harder to perceive. Reading, even studying, a document is not synonymous with grasping its full import, and understanding its significance is still different from acting upon it. Hints of European experiments or news of achievements abroad may frequently have caused uneasiness or curiosity among Ordnance engineers, but as long as the Department had no money to exploit a discovery, they could reason that further investigation was futile. The optimism, the intellectual vigor, the whole temperament of the individual in charge of developing each field of ordnance might determine whether the Department pursued or ignored a line of research. An underling’s ideas could be quashed by the indifference of his superior. How deep an impression particular technical intelligence reports may have made must be largely a matter of speculation. The paternity of ideas is nearly always difficult to fix. Though few ordnance development projects before 1940 can be traced directly to military observers’ reports from abroad, some reports may have exerted pronounced influence. A few specific examples may illustrate the workings of the technical intelligence system. In August 1937 Captain Studler reported at some length on the new German 47-mm. and 50-mm. antitank guns he had seen:–
The 47-mm anti-tank gun is considered of interest as representing a tendency to which reference has been made in earlier reports. ... The undersigned [has] expressed the opinion that replacement of the German Army 37-mm anti-tank gun by one of a larger caliber, probably 47-mm or 50-mm could be expected.
It will be noted that the initial striking energy of the 47-mm is approximately 36% greater than the corresponding energy of the 37-mm, with an increase of approximately 15% of total weight of gun and carriage. It is recognized that conclusions of value cannot be drawn without complete data as to comparable external ballistics and actual impact results.
It is of supplemental interest to note that a barrel of a caliber of approximately 50-mm and not less than 50 calibers long was seen by the undersigned in a Krupp gun shop at Essen, Germany, on June 23, 1937. Krupp engineers at first denied that such a barrel was in existence and later stated that it was prepared for an experimental model of antitank gun. The same engineers indicated that the 37-mm gun was considered inadequate by German military personnel.
On the following page of this report there appears a tabulated statement of comparative characteristics of the various anti-tank cannon seen by the undersigned in the course of the past 12 months. Weapons of a caliber less than 25-mm have been excluded from the tabulation. The smaller caliber anti-tank guns include Rheinmetall, Solothurn, Oerlikon and Madsen.
The energy and weight figures given in the last two lines of the tabulation are believed to
be of interest although they should not be made the basis of evaluation without full consideration of the specific characteristics and of descriptive data contained in manufacturers’ catalogues or in individual reports to which reference has been made. For example, the Schneider 47-mm, the Bofors 47-mm and the Madsen 37-mm guns, all with relatively high energy indices, are provided with steel tired carriages and are therefore not suitable for high road speeds.
It will be noted that, of the guns listed, only the British has true all around traverse.132
The significance of this information, as Captain Studler stated, lay in its indication of a trend. The exact data were missing. The routing slip attached shows that eventually the report reached the chief Ordnance engineers in charge of artillery design and in due course went on to men at Aberdeen Proving Ground and at Pica-tinny Arsenal. The men who did the actual work at drafting boards apparently did not see the letter. No one requested more information.
Years later, when US soldiers discovered that German tank and antitank guns outranged theirs, angry American officers charged the Ordnance Department with ineptitude for not knowing what high-powered armament German units possessed.133 The Ordnance Department had known. G-2 of the General Staff and Ordnance men alike had received warning in 1937. But they had not acted upon the information. Several facts entered in. In the first place, Major Smith, in 1937 the military observer in Berlin through whom the report quoted above was sent, disagreed with Captain Studler’s prophecy that German antitank units would in the near future be equipped with guns larger than 37-mm, Major Smith’s comment, appended as an endorsement, presumably weakened the impact of Captain Studler’s report. In the second place, because the evolution of concepts of defense against tanks had not yet gone far, a light-weight gun to accompany the infantry was still the goal sought. Much later, doctrine would dictate use of tanks versus tanks, and bazookas or recoilless rifles for powerful defense in infantrymen’s hands against attacking armored vehicles. Until doctrine changed, the requirement of an antitank gun little or no heavier than the 37-mm. was bound to endure. For what it was, the 37-mm. was a good weapon; it met the requirements as set up. In the third place, be it repeated, in 1937 and 1938 the data available on the German 47-mm. was not enough to permit Ordnance engineers at Rock Island and Picatinny Arsenals to build a 47-mm. gun and make ammunition for it without starting nearly at the beginning of the long development process. A Rheinmetall 37-mm, gun, on the other hand, was at that moment in the possession of the Ordnance Department; it could complete adaptation of that design for the US Army relatively rapidly. And the General Staff wanted something quickly.134
On foreign tank developments technical intelligence was copious. Because combat experience with tanks after World War I was limited to the Italian campaign in Ethiopia and the Spanish Civil War, designers of every nation were especially eager to profit from the experiments of others. Though the cost of building a pilot model precluded the possibility of testing every innovation, Ordnance Department automotive engineers scrutinized such data
as came into their hands. Some features of foreign design were nearly impossible to learn; in the fall of 1936, in response to an Ordnance Department overture to the British proposing freer exchange of information, the military observer in London replied that the British War Office had never permitted any foreigner to see the inside of a British tank.135 When in 1933 a young German, ostensibly as a personal hobby, published a book on combat vehicles, Taschenbuch der Tanks, a copy sent to Washington soon found its way into the Ordnance technical library and saw constant use. Its photographs, text, and tabular comparisons of the chief characteristics of successive models developed by every nation were so informing that the book was literally thumbed to pieces in the course of the next years.136 Comments appended to a report of the spring of 1939 covering recent German tank designs indicate that automotive engineers of the Ordnance Department continued to watch the work of other nations. Between 1936 and the end of 1939 more than a score of reports on German, French, and British tanks and tank accessories came in. Apart from the ever-present handicap of too little money to test new devices, American tank design was chiefly obstructed by the failure to modify doctrine of tactical use. Neither designers’ ignorance of foreign developments nor bland assumption of the superiority of American automotive engineering was responsible for shortcomings in American tanks of the 1930s.
Many considerations might affect the treatment accorded any piece of technical intelligence and its ultimate value. The reports on the Mohaupt “explosive” may serve as an example. In January 1939 a military liaison officer chanced upon a trail that led him to a young Swiss, Henri Mohaupt, who described in general terms a new type of explosive which he claimed to have developed. A British commission was then secretly investigating Mohaupt’s device and upon payment of a fee later witnessed test firings. Correspondence between the American military observer assigned to Bern, Switzerland, and the Mohaupt Company followed, and in July the War Department cabled Captain Studler to pursue inquiries. Captain Studler’s report, sent in August, contained a photostat copy of the results of the tests conducted for the British commission and a summary of the most significant features of the explosive as Mohaupt himself set them forth: its effect, “in certain cases” forty times that of TNT for equal weights, its stability, its low cost of manufacture, and the variety of uses to which it could be adapted. Mohaupt claimed also to have developed a fuze that doubled the effect of the explosive. The British officers who had been present at the tests surmised that Mohaupt was using the Neumann principle but, as they assured Captain Studler, although Mohaupt had indeed demonstrated the results he claimed for his explosive, the price he was demanding had led the British to drop negotiations.137
While this report aroused some immediate interest in the Ordnance Department, the refusal of Mohaupt and his associates
to divulge any particulars of the construction of his device unless the United States Government paid $25,000 in advance soon halted negotiations: “... further interest of the War Department,” the Ordnance Department stated, “is contingent upon evidence that either England or some other major European power has acquired rights for use of the device.”138 Thus, caution about spending money delayed matters for a year. Late in 1940 Mohaupt in person came to Washington under the aegis of the American agent of Edgar Brandt, the French munitions maker. Doubtless the fact that Mohaupt had in hand an actual model of a rifle grenade built to his design clinched his argument and won him opportunity to make 200 grenades to test fire at Aberdeen Proving Ground. The demonstration at Aberdeen convinced the Army and Navy men who witnessed it that here indeed was an important “new form of munition.” They at once recommended purchasing rights to employ the Mohaupt principle in any form to which it might prove adaptable.139
The curious fact then came to light that the essential features of this “new form of munition” had already been offered to the Ordnance Department by Nevil Monroe Hopkins, an American inventor. The Ordnance Technical Staff had rejected Hopkins’ design of a bomb built with a shaped charge and rejected it without testing because, the letter to the inventor had stated, his was not a new idea.140 Several months later the Technical Staff learned from Mohaupt what the British had already guessed, that the Mohaupt projectile achieved its effect not by a new explosive but by similar use of the Monroe principle of the hollow charge. By citing the British patent of 1911 that had caused the United States Patent Office to deny Hopkins a patent, the Ordnance Patent Section thereupon showed Mohaupt’s “secret” to be no secret. The upshot was that the Ordnance Department was able to conclude a contract with Mohaupt’s company at a much lower price than the Swiss had first demanded.141 An adaptation of Mohaupt’s design later formed the basis of the bazooka rocket.142
Estimate of the value of technical intelligence reports on this new type of projectile must be weighed today by recognition of Hopkins’ contribution. The reports on the Mohaupt projectile would have served an all-important purpose had they directed the attention of American ammunition experts to the importance of Hopkins’ proposal. But the Ordnance technicians who studied the confidential papers from Europe and Hopkins’ hollow charge bomb obviously saw no connection between Mohaupt’s development and Hopkins’, in
spite of the lead given them by British research chemists’ conclusions cited in one report from abroad. The British, in fact, supplied only with the photographic records of the Zurich tests and the British officers’ oral descriptions, which the military report made equally available to the United States, proceeded to develop hollow charge projectiles of their own.143 In the United States the investigation was dropped until the Brandt agent in Washington intervened to get Mohaupt a chance to demonstrate his grenade. Technical intelligence was not involved in that transaction; the 1939 reports from Europe had no influence whatsoever upon the Ordnance Department’s decision many months later to test Mohaupt’s grenade.
These examples indicate that utilization of technical intelligence was at times both prompt and intelligent, at other times laggardly and unimaginative. For the lapses explanations of a sort can be found: the small staff of officers and trained civilians in the Office, Chief of Ordnance, before 1940, with the consequent multiplicity of assignments for each person which automatically reduced his time for thinking through a problem; the limitations on Ordnance research and development imposed by higher authority both through control of the purse strings and through specifying the characteristics that any new item should embody; and finally the fact that the temper of the American people up to 1939 made American involvement in war so unthinkable that vigorous pursuit of new munitions developments could hardly seem urgent, Ordnance officers and employees carried on their work in a milieu where everyone was more concerned with butter than with guns. Nevertheless, the testimony to a deep-seated complacency, inimical to ideas not originating within the upper echelons of the Ordnance Department, cannot be brushed aside.144 Nevil Monroe Hopkins, though naturally a somewhat prejudiced judge, voiced the charge: “To the ‘expert’ smug in his ‘superior’ convictions, the writer often would like to say—‘Better not know so much that much of it is untrue.’”145
Still, the Ordnance Department was by no means alone in its too frequent do-nothing attitude. Every branch and service of the US Army, including the Air Corps, displayed it.146 Indeed many weaknesses of Army Technical Intelligence before 1940 may be fairly attributed less to imperceptiveness or easygoingness of individuals on the General Staff or in the Ordnance Department than to the lack of any systematic routine for following up information. In the first place, military liaison officers had only very general instructions. Neither G-2 nor the Ordnance Department through G-2 had mapped out charts or lists of items upon which data were desired. Military observers were obliged to exercise their own judgment on what would be useful. Correct estimates of what to look for became increasingly difficult as in the course of time the officer serving abroad lost touch with the work of the Ordnance men at home. No regular two-way exchange of information between the Office, Chief of Ordnance, and the observers was provided for. In the second place, when thought-provoking information reached
the Ordnance Department, no recognized procedure existed whereby it could quickly affect policy decisions. An Ordnance draftsman working on the American 37-mm. antitank gun might question whether the 37-mm. would be powerful enough in view of the German development of a 47-mm., but his job was confined to designing a weapon incorporating features determined by higher authority, in this case a 37-mm. He might discuss the question with the engineer in charge of the section, the chief engineer, in turn, with the head of the Technical Staff Artillery Division, the latter with the chief of the Technical Staff and with Ordnance Technical Committee representatives of the using arm and of the General Staff. Not only would this take time, but the chances were at least even that somewhere along the line the discussion would get sidetracked. Both imagination and persistence would be needed to drive home the point that a new European development was rendering obsolete an American design. The users had to be convinced and then the Bureau of the Budget and Congress had to be persuaded to supply the money. It was no one person’s job to see that knowledge was translated promptly into appropriate action.
The General Staff looked to the Ordnance Department for expert advice on munitions; the Ordnance Department expected the using arms and G-2 to stipulate their requirements, based on over-all plans of tactical use and evaluation of competitors’ equipment. Between these groups important decisions could easily be delayed or altogether lost in the shuffle. The processing of information was at times inordinately slow. If the dates on route slips be a safe index, a military report in the 1930s might take nearly a year to circulate. Some reports remained with G-2 several months and took another six or seven to go the rounds of Ordnance Department offices.147 Routing technical intelligence within the Ordnance Department was left to a clerk who lacked authority to push matters. By the time decision to act upon a report was reached, the information might well be out of date. Not until the summer of 1940 did the General Staff awaken to the faultiness of its intelligence system and set up the machinery for more effective operations).148