Chapter 19: Unresolved Problems of Research and Development
The end of fighting in World War II found the Ordnance Research and Development Service with several hundred projects under way and scores of problems still unsolved. The long list of specific questions that had arisen but remained unanswered showed no lack of energy or of imagination on the part of Ordnance engineers, but rather the complex interrelatedness of factors to be considered in any major development and the vastness of the realm of applicable science still scarcely explored. That neither Ordnance specialists nor scientists of the National Defense Research Committee had, for example, learned what made predictable the behavior of a shaped charge must be recognized as the consequence of the limited knowledge of aerodynamics, explosives, chemistry, and physics generally. In time, such phenomena could either be analyzed and sorted out into categories in which comprehended natural laws applied or be relegated to the area of natural forces usable but not understood. In view of the tremendous facilities for scientific investigation in the United States, Americans could safely cherish the belief that problems solvable by scientific research would be dealt with as quickly, perhaps more rapidly, in the United States than in any other country in the world. That such a program might take years could cause no profound dismay since, in the competition with other nations that underlies war, the scientific progress in other countries might outstrip the United States in some particular applications but could surely not keep pace in others. So German science had preceded Allied in developing guided missiles but, providentially for the armies fighting the Axis, had lagged far behind in making possible the employment of proximity fuzes.
Comforting though these reflections might be in the long view, for the Ordnance Department the series of problems that were unresolved on V-J Day constituted an abiding challenge. They were of two kinds, those requiring patient investigation of means of improving any given weapon, and those involving matters of tactical usage, logistics, and the basic theories of how a citizens’ army should be equipped. To cite a single example of the first kind, research into ways of producing a longer-ranged, accurate, and more powerful rocket to be fired from a shoulder launcher was a project calling for extensive postwar work. Far more fundamental were the controversial questions arising from conflicting views of what types of weapons modern warfare demanded. The Ordnance Department, as has been repeatedly stated, had no final voice in those decisions.
Yet its opinion carried weight, at the end of the war perhaps more than in 1941 when experience had not yet lent force to the Ordnance line of reasoning.1
Global war had, to be sure, manifested the undesirability of having a single type of weapon for universal use. Thus, the Ordnance Department learned that to limit design of tanks, whether light or medium, to one standard pattern was to court disaster. Wide tracks to give flotation in mud and swamps were needed in some actions; narrower tracks and less powerful engines were adequate in others. Rubber tracks gave better service over paved roads and smooth surfaces; steel were all but essential for rocky terrain and coral reefs. But acceptance of the thesis of variations of design did not settle the argument of whether many relatively thinly armored, rather lightly gunned combat vehicles were more valuable than fewer very heavy tanks that were harder to ship and much more expensive to build and operate. Six years after V-J Day the proponents of the lumbering, powerful, heavy tank were to encounter occasionally the criticism that the US Army had let itself be over-mechanized; repeating the argument heard about the Italian campaigns of 1943–45, the contention was that a few units of horse cavalry in Korea could have cleaned out pockets of resistance where a vehicle was unable to go.
Still, granting the wisdom of adaptations of some features of a weapon to give the versatility required for effective use under various conditions of combat, climate, and terrain, the question remained as to whether multiplicity of design created more problems than it solved. Quite apart from any difficulties in production, supplying special spare parts for, and training troops in the use of, a variety of weapons might make the drawbacks more considerable than the advantages. The Ordnance Department’s largely successful effort to make all ammunition of a given caliber usable in any model of any type of gun of that size paid off again and again. The much less successful endeavor to have parts for vehicles interchangeable between one make and another convinced Ordnance automotive engineers that uniformity of mechanisms was vitally important. Yet within the Ordnance Department, as in the Army at large, differences of opinion endured over whether to place emphasis upon multipurpose weapons or on special equipment for special purposes. The visible effectiveness of the German 88-mm. gun at once as a field artillery piece, an antitank weapon, and an antiaircraft gun inspired design features of the American 90-mm. that warranted General Barnes’ calling the 90-mm. a “triple-threat” gun. But the result was a series of compromises that made the gun less well suited to any one of the three uses than would otherwise have been possible.
Even what constituted the most essential features of infantry weapons was a matter of some argument throughout the war. The fast cyclic rate and thirty-round magazine of the 8.5-pound M3 submachine gun provided the infantryman and paratrooper with a spray of fire, but precluded aiming shots carefully. Conversely, the Browning automatic rifle, though capable of short bursts at an even higher cyclic rate, had only a 20-round magazine and, with its bipod, weighed over 19 pounds. But it could achieve an accuracy unobtainable
with the more portable submachine gun and had double the range. So the question arose whether, when choice was necessary, the scatter fire of the lighter, short-range weapon was more useful than the accurately aimed longer-range fire of the heavier. Attempts to copy a very lightweight German machine gun and a machine pistol seemed waste effort to men who believed the .30-caliber Browning machine gun and the BAR the best weapons foot soldiers on the move could have. Troops advancing through the villages and wooded stretches of Lorraine and the Ardennes found reassurance in the sound of their submachine guns rattling away at scattered enemy, but the fact that “nearly every unit carried more BAR’s than called for in the Tables of Equipment” testifies to the faith American soldiers placed in the heavier weapon.2 True, an infantry company might be given a diversity of small arms so that the BAR’s of some squads would supplement the submachine guns and rifles of others. But the new emphasis put upon the individual soldier’s combat capacity and his indoctrination in fighting not only as a member of a team but, when necessary, as a one-man army carried implicitly the assumption that every individual must be armed as adequately as possible. One man could not pack both a “Tommy” gun and a BAR.
How much the factor of weight should be considered in infantry equipment was a question as controversial as that of aimed versus area fire. The M1 rifle gave the infantryman a weapon of greater power than the short-ranged carbine but saddled him with over four pounds more weight. Which was more important for the individual soldier, the utmost mobility and least possible fatigue or more, longer-range killing power, and hence greater self-confidence? Ordnance Research and Development Service, neither able nor invited to give a categorical answer, could only strive to develop infantry weapons combining light weight and fire power more satisfactorily than those of the enemy.
The importance of achieving light weight and sturdiness in equipment was heightened, moreover, by the growing role of air warfare and the introduction of the parachute technique to drop men and supplies behind enemy lines. Obviously matériel that would survive parachuting or delivery by glider must still possess lethal characteristics if it were to be of any use. A serviceable airborne tank had not been developed by V-J Day, and even the 105-mm. airborne howitzer, because of its reduced range, proved less valuable than its designers had hoped.
Whether extensive recourse to night fighting demanded special equipment not only for bombers but for ground troops was another moot question. Whether infra-red rays, for example, could be effectively used to facilitate driving vehicles at night was a matter for further study. Though the Corps of Engineers had primary responsibility for infra-red applications. Ordnance assistance was enlisted on the problem. On V-J Day its future was uncertain. Battlefield flood lighting had scarcely been tried at all. In late 1942 interest in a secret British development had run high. Five hundred Canal Defense Light vehicles were built in the United States under high priority, in anticipation of need of powerful searchlight illumination for night tank battles. Mounted on General Grant medium tanks, some sixty of these were employed in the Rhine river crossings in February 1945, but no other use occurred. The
“illuminated front” that was to be widely advocated in Korea was after all not part of the tactics of the 1944–45 campaigns in either Europe or the Pacific.
The logistical and tactical considerations to be borne in mind in determining what length of life American weapons should have were never fully evaluated during World War II. Shortages of tungsten, chromium, molybdenum, rubber, and a dozen other materials obliged the Ordnance Department to find substitutes even at the expense of producing less long-wearing items, but it was usually necessity rather than reasoned choice that changed the specifications. Nevertheless, as the war progressed, the observant could see the logic of frequently using stamped metal parts in place of forgings or a wide variety of cheap, readily worked materials in lieu of more durable but more expensive kinds. German and Russian infantry weapons proved that inexpensive short-lived articles, produceable at fractional cost and therefore cheaply replaceable, in many cases served every purpose adequately. The American submachine gun M3, with most of its parts stamped out of sheet metal, was one application of the new realization that great durability was not necessarily a vital requirement for any small weapon.
But while tacitly admitting the validity of the thesis in the case of small arms, the General Staff and the Ordnance Department were far less persuaded of the soundness of the principle applied to more complex items. Where replacements must be shipped halfway around the world, the cost of having equipment wear out needlessly fast was naturally too high to contemplate. On the other hand, enemy fire could demolish in a moment matériel with years of life left in it when struck. Unlike machines designed to run until deliberately scrapped, weapons of war were constantly subject to destruction long before they wore out. The Germans put the Panther tank into action with an engine requiring replacement after, at most, 625 miles of travel, whereas Sherman engines were known sometimes to have a life of over 3,000 miles. Advantageous though the greater endurance must be if achieved without sacrifice of essential features and without large additional expense or slowing of quantity production, the reasonable chance that enemy fire would destroy the tank before the engine had lived out its life made its durability a doubtful asset. The Soviet Army, like the German, accepted matériel with a service life span far below what the US Army demanded. In the Russian view, usable, albeit makeshift, equipment was good enough to be blown up. But in the United States the century-old concept of building military equipment with a solidity to last at least through an entire war was too deeply ingrained to be cast off readily. The question of what items were best made as cheaply as possible with scant regard to service life was one that the Ordnance Department was only beginning to study at the end of the war.
Equally fundamental was the question of overelaboration versus oversimplification of military equipment. Improvisations in the field often did a job as well as a device carefully worked out on drawing board and production line. When the research and development staff in Washington learned that American soldiers in the jungles of the Pacific had been sticking razor blades into tree trunks to prevent Japanese snipers who had infiltrated through, the lines at night from taking position in the trees, draftsmen immediately began making drawings of a device by which a bristle of knife blades could be clamped to a tree
trunk. A commercial company under contract produced several experimental versions of this gadget before the scheme was vetoed as quite needless.3 More bizarre and amusing than significant, this episode nevertheless exemplified a growing tendency to gild the lily of simplicity on the one hand and to develop and nurture the extremely elaborate on the other.
When armies had been supplied only with rifles, bayonets, revolvers, and sabres, with cannon and howitzers, mortars, and hand grenades, or even with machine guns, designing, manufacturing, and keeping satisfactory weapons in usable condition was relatively easy. Training soldiers to use them properly was correspondingly routine. When World War I inaugurated both air and tank warfare, the task became far more complex, and by the end of World War II the advances of science made the possible applications to military usage so infinitely various as to tempt the general staffs of all countries to junk most earlier types of killing devices. Just as the single-shot rifle was largely superseded by the semiautomatic, and the revolver by the semiautomatic carbine or the submachine gun, so artillery fire control instruments directed by eye, hand, and prefigured firing tables were replaced by highly intricate electrical computers, frequently fed data by radar. To train soldiers in the use of such equipment and to teach crews to maintain it meant lengthy courses of instruction meticulously planned and executed.
Any Russian peasant trooper could see in a moment how to use the “Molotov Cocktail,” a bottle filled with gasoline and stoppered with a rag set alight and hurled into a tank to set it on fire. Had he needed to be taught how to use a proximity fuze on a rocket, preliminary schooling would have been necessary. Nor was the better-educated soldier of the US Army always ready to make use of new equipment, advance instruction in its employment notwithstanding. Thus the patience, ingenuity, and money spent in the United States on developing gyrostabilizers for tank guns proved largely wasted until the very end of the war, inasmuch as hastily trained tank crews, finding them too difficult to manage, usually disconnected them. When they were used, specially schooled maintenance teams stationed far to the rear had to adjust and repair them at frequent intervals, with the consequence that gunners of most armored units through much of the war preferred tanks minus this refinement. If the US Army must count on having little more than a year in which to prepare draftees for military service, dare it rely on equipping its forces with weapons so complicated that the high school graduates composing the citizens’ army could comprehend the principles of employment and care of only a very few items? Might the dangers inherent in this kind of specialization not exceed any benefits? Though these were not questions for the Ordnance Department to answer alone, they were problems the nation’s Military Establishment had to face before it could arrive at an intelligently planned development program.
Hand-in-hand with these questions ran the matter of over-all costs in both money and materials for complex new weapons. Bred in the belief that its natural resources, if not inexhaustible, were at least ample for immediate national needs, the American people at the opening of World War II had been unprepared to accept the idea that some matériel might be too expensive to use, and that less than perfection must do. The Russians put into action tanks the
exterior finish of which was so rough that American engineers deemed them unsuitable because somewhat less likely to cause a projectile to glance off than would the rounded contours of the American. Again the provision for crew comfort within American combat vehicles had no counterpart in Russian-built tanks. Here, to be sure, the argument lay in the relative value of unfatigued crews versus cheaper tanks. Yet World War II experience forced recognition of the possibility that American design and fabrication was refined to the point of extravagance. A German general, comparing Russian and American tanks, remarked: “In my opinion, your Western tank is much too complicated, much too expensive.4
After the war, so one story runs, military tacticians were startled by the dollars and cents aspect of wider use of proximity fuzes in place of impact or time fuzes; when inquiry revealed that the cost differential was close to ten to one, the plea for issue of a larger proportion of influence fuzes was withdrawn. In the heat of combat, soldiers naturally forgot that they were taxpayers as well as fighting men, but the Ordnance research and development staff was coming to realize that it must keep costs constantly in mind. National policy had of course to determine the balance to be maintained between the armament program and the national economy as a whole. For the Ordnance Research and Development Division the problem remained of how to carry out any policy when settled.
The swiftness with which combat conditions and doctrine of tactical employment of weapons shifted in World War II naturally made carefully thought-out tables of equipment extremely difficult to compile and revise. Piecemeal standardization of items from 1940 onward multiplied models from which to choose matériel for any particular type of engagement, but the War Department had made no thorough overall study of what a modern army would need since the Westervelt Board report, completed in 1919. By early 1943 the Ordnance Department believed a careful reappraisal overdue. In March Brig. Gen. Roland P. Shugg, then attached to the Office, Chief of Ordnance, pointed out to General Somervell and Lt. Gen. Joseph T. McNarney the desirability of “a comprehensive survey of the necessary modern gun power and armor to win the European campaign. We need immediately another Westervelt Report.”5 Though in late 1943 and during 1944 several special missions, such as the Eddy mission to Europe and the Borden “Jungle Warfare” mission to the Pacific, brought back a series of recommendations, the “comprehensive survey” wanted by the Ordnance Department had to wait till a year after the war.
The upshot was inevitably not only considerable waste effort spent during the war on specific developments requested by the using arms and then canceled before results could be tried but, after the war, a tangle of conflicting views about what projects should be pursued and fitted into an all-embracing armament plan. The new weapons employed in the last year of fighting, the Axis’ dreaded V-2 rocket, the proximity fuzes, and above all, the atom bomb, unavoidably introduced elements of confusion. Why expend time and money on improving conventional weapons likely to be outmoded at the drop of a hat or an
A-bomb? Hints thrown out in the press that warfare would soon be revolutionized by the use of very-long-range artillery firing an atomic warhead tended to raise questions of the utility of such a weapon as the 914-mm. mortar. Admittedly only guesses, these rumors affected public opinion and made Ordnance research and development planning more difficult. Until the first report of the Army Equipment Review Board appeared in the summer of 1946, uncertainty left the Ordnance Department with no logically constructed long-range program of development to follow.
Achievements during the war had exceeded the most optimistic hopes of men familiar with the obstacles to overcome in designing military equipment. Science, allied as never before with military research and development, had sent weapons into action that rivaled Buck Rogers’ extravagancies. But if much of the development program had been haphazard, Ordnance Committee attempts at coordination notwithstanding, the fundamental difficulty was more subtle. Clearer differentiation of the respective roles of the pure scientist, the design engineer, and the technician engaged in testing and modifying the products of the first two was needed. “The world,” said Brig. Gen. Leslie E. Simon, in speaking of the applications of science, “muddled through by random processes rather than through the application of purposive procedure.6 Perhaps John Dewey’s pronouncement on adjusting to life could be applied to devising ways to kill: “If ever we are to be governed by intelligence, not by things and by words, science must have something to say about what we do, and not merely about how we may do it most easily and economically.”7
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