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The Ordnance Department: Planning Munitions for War

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Introduction: The Ordnance Task In World War II

Ordnance is fighting equipment. It is the weapons, the ammunition, the armored and transport vehicles that give an armed force its striking power in battle. The Ordnance Department, in 1950 renamed Ordnance Corps, is that segment of the US Army responsible for design, procurement, distribution, and maintenance of ordnance for the Army Ground Forces. During World War II it also supplied the Air Forces and. in some categories, the Navy as well.

Unlike England, France, and Germany, the United States has never sponsored private manufacturing establishments that specialized in the design and production of heavy munitions. Instead of relying upon a Vickers-Armstrong, a Schneider-Creusot, or a Krupp, this country from its beginning followed the policy of assigning responsibility for Army munitions supply to a special government agency, the Ordnance Department of the Army. A few commercial concerns, to be sure, acquired over the years technical skills in making small arms and ammunition, explosives and propellants, skills that in wartime simplified the problems of conversion from civilian to war production. But the Ordnance Department itself undertook development and manufacture of ordnance or directly supervised the work placed with private contractors.

Design to meet the weapon specifications of the infantry, the artillery, the armored forces, and the air forces; manufacture or purchase of items produced exactly to those design specifications; storage, inspection, and issue of all this matériel; maintenance by replacement of parts and by complete overhaul and reconditioning; and, finally, salvage—these constituted the mission of the Ordnance Department in World War II.1

Small arms included rifles, pistols, carbines, submachine guns, machine guns up to and including .50-caliber, recoilless rifles, grenade launchers, and bazookas. Artillery ranged from 20-mm. aircraft cannon and 76-mm. tank guns through the experimental 914-mm. mortar. Supplying ammunition for these weapons was complicated by the development of special purpose ammunition, such as incendiary, illuminating, armor-piercing, and smoke. Besides aircraft bombs, there were new guided missiles, special fuzes, demolition charges, land mines, submarine coastal defense mines, and flares and other pyrotechnics. Assigned responsibility for

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combat vehicles from World War I onward and, after mid-1942, for transport vehicles also, the Ordnance Department had to supply tanks, gun motor carriages, armored cars, ¼-ton “jeeps,” trucks, heavy tractors for tank salvage, amphibious troop and cargo carriers, and all the many variations of these. Nor did the list end there. In the course of World War II the Department issued some 1,860 different models of major pieces of fighting equipment; of these about 1,200 were models of new or improved design. And into these went over 350,000 parts.2

The chain of command under which the Department performed these various duties was altered somewhat when the reorganization of the War Department took effect in March 1942. During the preceding twenty-odd years the Under Secretary of War, by authority delegated from the President of the United States through the Secretary of War, was charged with supervising procurement of Army supplies. He served as the civilian chief for Ordnance, as for all other supply services.3 After the reorganization of the War Department in March 1942, which divided the Army in the continental United States into the Army Ground Forces, the Army Air Forces, and the Services of Supply, the Under Secretary of War acted as civilian supervisor to the Commanding General, Services of Supply, or, as it was relabeled in 1943, the Army Service Forces. That general now represented all of the supply services in their relations with the Under Secretary. The latter maintained contact with the heads of the civilian economy and chiefs of other war agencies, thereby guiding production for the Army in order to keep a balance among the groups competing for supplies.

Before March 1942 the traditional line of military command of the Ordnance Department had been from the Chief of Staff through the General Staff Supply Division, usually known as G-4. Creation of the Army Service Forces interjected another administrative unit between all the operating or technical services and the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-4. Thus, after March 1942 and throughout the war, the Ordnance Department performed its mission under the immediate direction of the Commanding General, Army Service Forces, and no longer enjoyed direct access to the Chief of Staff or to the Under Secretary of War. The “higher authority” to which the Chief of Ordnance was subordinate consisted of his immediate superior, Lt. Gen. Brehon B. Somervell, commanding the Army Service Forces, and his assistant chiefs of staff; the Supply Division, G-4, of the General Staff; the Chief of Staff himself; the Under Secretary of War; the Secretary of War; and the President in his capacity of Commander in Chief of the Army.4

Military equipment for many years past has differed markedly from articles for ordinary nonmilitary use. Even where items are of the same general category, differences exist between what is necessary for the Army and what suffices for the civilian. The military requirements of ruggedness and power far exceed what the civilian usually demands. Army rifles and Army trucks must first and foremost be capable of operating under the most adverse circumstances, regardless of the dollar cost of achieving that dependability. The .22 rifles, produced in the United States by

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thousands for farm boys who hunt rabbits and woodchucks, and the trucks manufactured for commercial use can be of relatively cheap construction, both because durability is rarely a matter of life and death to the purchasers and because initial price tends to be a big consideration in determining the purchase. Furthermore, many items of military equipment have no civilian counterpart at all. Large-caliber guns, artillery ammunition and fuzes, machine guns and their ammunition, tanks and other armored vehicles are produced solely for use by the armed forces. For these the toughest steels, the most powerful explosives, the most highly powered engines are needed. Hence, the first task in ordnance design is to test all materials meeting these requirements in order to specify the best. Establishment of exacting specifications for steels, oils, chemical agents, and other materials must be followed by detailed instructions for processing and gaging. As research and experience indicated feasible improvements, the Ordnance Department revised its designs and specifications.

Design of ordnance was not arrived at by theory alone. The basic idea for a new weapon might stem from any one of various sources, from a private citizen, from a commercial company, from combat troops, or, of course, from the Ordnance Department itself. The value of any proposal had to be thoroughly explored. Information assembled in the course of wars past was the first obvious check; forecast of future needs was a second. The using arms, the Infantry, the Coast and Field Artillery, the Air Forces, and the Cavalry, later called the Armored Force, collaborated closely with Ordnance Department designers in determining the characteristics needed in any given weapon or accessory to fulfill a definite military purpose. After March 1942 the Army Ground Forces and the Army Air Forces spoke for the combat arms. But the user had the final say about what would be acceptable to him. Sometimes one desired feature ruled out another; maneuverability and high road speed in a tank might preclude use of heavy armor plate or powerful guns. What was essential for the Infantry might be unimportant for the Cavalry and vice versa. Hence decisions as to what was of primary importance, what of secondary, were often hard to reach.5 These questions were resolved by the Ordnance Committee, composed of members of the Ordnance Department and the using services. When the principal “military characteristics” were agreed upon in the Ordnance Committee, the Ordnance Department worked out a design, built a pilot model, and subjected it to tests. The using arms studied its performance, suggested, if need be, modifications, and later scrutinized the resulting modified weapon. If that appeared to be acceptable, the Ordnance Department made a limited number for test under service conditions. The using arm conducted the final service test. Only when both using arm and Ordnance designers concurred that the item was satisfactory in all essentials did the General Staff authorize the Ordnance Department to officially accept, or “standardize” it, and issue orders for quantity fabrication. In peacetime

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this procedure of design, test, refinement, service test, acceptance, and, then, order for production might stretch over years. In wartime the process was necessarily hastened. But perfection of design cannot be greatly speeded. The US Army fought most of World War II, like earlier wars, largely with the types of equipment standardized or ready for standardization when the conflict began. During World War II the Ordnance Department completed few significant innovations in weapons that reached the front lines in sufficient quantity and in time materially to affect the outcome on the battlefield.

Large-scale procurement of matériel declared satisfactory in design was the next function of the Ordnance Department. Procurement might be by manufacture in government arsenals or other government plants, or by purchase from commercial sources. Quantities and dates of delivery had to be worked out with utmost care. The General Staff of the Army determined the size of the Army, within statutory and budgetary limitations, and provided the implementing directives so that the technical services might then calculate the quantities of initial items of equipment needed and the volume of replacements. Under the aegis of the Army Service Forces in World War II, the Ordnance Department evolved its procurement schedules to meet the requirements calculated as the result of General Staff directives. Computation of requirements in order to have available the proper quantities at the exact time and place they were needed was an enormously difficult job. Controversy with the War Production Board and other agencies directing the civilian economy was occasionally inevitable. “Too much and too late” was the criticism tendered by men usually not themselves faced with responsibility for making the critical decisions of how much, when.

Desired requirements schedules mapped out, the Industrial Service of the Ordnance Department took over the job of meeting them. Since the six permanent government arsenals could produce only a small fraction of the volume needed, contracts with private industry had to be the mainstay. Government-owned government-operated plants were far outnumbered by government-owned contractor-operated plants and privately owned establishments. The Ordnance districts, the geographically decentralized offices first created in World War I, were in charge of making formal contracts, placing orders, and supervising production in plants other than the government arsenals. The staff of each of the thirteen district offices controlled the allocations of machine tools and raw materials and was accountable for government property within its district. The staffs trained inspectors, directed the inspection preliminary to acceptance of the contractors’ output, supervised packaging and shipment of the finished product, made payments for satisfactorily completed orders, renegotiated and terminated contracts. These operations varied in particulars but in general were everywhere the same. The district offices furnished the administrative machinery for ordnance procurement.6

The six permanent Ordnance arsenals in peacetime sufficed to supply the Army. Each one specialized in particular types of ordnance: Springfield Armory in small arms; Watervliet Arsenal in cannon; Watertown in gun carriages and forgings; Rock Island in artillery recoil mechanisms,

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gun carriages, and combat vehicles; Frankford in small arms ammunition, artillery projectiles, cartridge cases, optical and fire control instruments, gages, and pyrotechnics; and Picatinny in artillery ammunition, explosives, and propellants. In these establishments year after year research and development work went forward along with manufacturing and maintenance of equipment. While their peak productive capacity was never enough to meet the needs of a wartime army, the arsenals provided the technical assistance that enabled privately owned companies to manufacture specialized ordnance when expansion was necessary. Here the art of munitions manufacture was preserved. Not only blueprints of components of weapons, ammunition, and vehicles, but carefully planned shop layouts and details of processing were available for distribution to new contractors. The long-term civilian employees of the arsenals, men whose experience often could be counted in decades rather than years, constituted the schoolmasters of firms unfamiliar with the peculiar problems of ordnance manufacture. Consultations over particular difficulties helped the commercial contractor produce exactly to specification; occasionally during the war, arsenal employees were lent to contractors to assist in solving some processing problem. Interchangeability tests to guarantee that parts of one producer’s output were interchangeable with those of another were also conducted at the arsenals, “Technical responsibility” for all Army Ordnance items was divided among the six arsenals, so that nothing from a cleaning rod to a “blockbuster” was fabricated without having experts from one or another of the government establishments qualified to accept or reject every piece. In fact, training men in inspection procedures was one of the arsenals’ important functions during the war.

While the arsenals made a very small part of the matériel required and privately owned establishments produced most of some types of ordnance, neither possessed capacity to manufacture all items in sufficient quantity. Existing plants could be readily converted to turn out small arms, artillery shell and other metal components, fuzes, and transport vehicles. In these fields either prewar procurement planning had been thorough, or the military item was closely enough allied to a civilian article to eliminate novel production problems. In other fields the reverse was true. No existing facility, for example, was adapted to mass production of tanks; the original plan of fabricating all combat vehicles in shops making heavy railway equipment proved impractical. For procuring a great deal of ordnance, consequently, the best answer was found to be newly built government-owned contractor-operated plants—GOCO facilities.7 Thus the vast, rapid expansion was achieved, and government establishments, private facilities, and combinations of the two met demand. By the end of 1942 the Ordnance Department was conducting the financially largest manufacturing program in the world.8 Expenditures between 1940 and V-J Day totaled about $46,000,000,000.

Another duty of the Ordnance Department was to manage the distribution and upkeep of matériel. Field Service of the

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Ordnance Department was responsible for storing and issuing both initial equipment and spare parts and replacement parts. Some twenty-six storage depots in 1940 housed ordnance supplies, while the depot units had the task of keeping accurate records of stocks, receipt, and issue. As output of manufacturing plants mounted, the number of depots and warehouses had also to be multiplied. Storage space by 1942 was ten times that of 1940. In addition to ammunition depots, largely built inland out of range of carrier-based enemy planes, and storage space for weapons and accessories both for the US Army and for lend-lease, the Ordnance Department after September 1942 acquired depots from the Quartermaster Corps for storage of transport vehicles and parts.

When U. S. troops began to move overseas, problems of distribution and record-keeping became more complex. Confusion might easily have become chaos, for matériel in transit was at all times difficult to keep track of and supply lines were long. In time, the Army Service Forces evolved a supply control system under which Ordnance and all other technical services operated, but a foolproof scheme of accounting and method of maintaining a balanced supply of the thousands of components, component assemblies, and complete items was never wholly achieved. Experience, as the war progressed, dictated establishment of four types of depot—bulk storage depots, master depots to handle selected types of ordnance, distribution depots to serve as retail distributors, and filler depots for ports of embarkation.

Packaging ordnance matériel had never been recognized as a major problem before World War II. Neither private industry nor government agencies had anticipated its importance. But when arms and ammunition, sensitive electronic devices, and expensive engine parts were found to be unusable on the combat fronts because of improper packing for shipment or outdoor storage, Field Service and Industrial Service jointly undertook a careful study of packaging. Design of sturdy, compact containers, use of desiccants and protective surface coatings, exact labeling of boxes, and application of engineering principles to loading freight cars and trucks had to be worked out in detailed procedures for shipping.

A still more exacting assignment for Field Service was maintenance of ordnance matériel. In peacetime, periodic inspection of items in storage, cleaning, overhaul, and reconditioning at depot or arsenal were more or less routine tasks. In wartime, maintenance of equipment being used by an army was a job of major proportions. For cleaning and minor repairs, the combat soldier was usually responsible. But spare parts had to be available so that he could replace a broken firing pin in his rifle or put new spark plugs in his tank engine. Having the right number of replacement parts at the spots where they were needed and at the time when they were needed was a constant logistical problem. Mobile ordnance supply and maintenance units, serving immediately in the rear of combat operations, repaired equipment that could be restored to serviceable condition promptly. Jobs more time consuming, or beyond the capabilities of mobile shops, were sent to Ordnance units in the communications zone. Ordnance troops salvaged matériel both to rebuild and to ship back as scrap to the zone of interior. Maintenance, a trying job in this country, was an even more difficult task overseas.

To make proper maintenance possible, Field Service, in the office of the Chief of

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Ordnance, prepared a long series of technical manuals and bulletins for use in training both Ordnance units and using troops in the care of equipment. On special maintenance problems technical assistance was also furnished to commands responsible for matériel used by their troops. Of utmost importance were the Ordnance catalogs, popularly called SNLs, which provided complete information on spare parts stockage and identification data—name, number, and photograph of each part or assembly.9 In all, Ordnance required about 1,700 different technical publications and 2,000 different supply catalogues. Preparing and distributing these and then keeping this huge publication system up to date, in order to cover improvements and new information, was a never-ending job.

Ordnance Department responsibility for supply did not end with the issue of mate-rid to troops or with consignment at depots to the Transportation Corps for overseas shipment; it endured until items received the “death certificate” and salvage began. Yet the Chief of Ordnance had no command responsibility outside this country. Overseas commanders had full authority over men and equipment in theatres of operations. Thus Ordnance units assigned to divisions outside the zone of interior were not under the control of the Chief of Ordnance, and Ordnance officers attached to the staffs of commanders in the field could not officially communicate directly with the Ordnance Department in Washington save on strictly technical matters. Technical missions to observe functioning of American munitions, to further the development and use of new items, and to note particular problems to be met served to keep some contact, while publications and confidential reports abetted translation of field experience into action in this country. Moreover, personal letters from Ordnance officers in the theatres to the Chief of Ordnance in Washington kept the headquarters informed of ordnance problems overseas.

Ordnance equipment is specialized. Its construction and maintenance require technical skills. Training Ordnance personnel, therefore, is a final, or perhaps more logically a first, duty of the Department. Civil Service employees to man the arsenals and depots, to administer the Ordnance districts, to inspect contractors’ output, and to carry on much of the paper work in the Office, Chief of Ordnance, fall into one category, and Army officers and enlisted men into another. War Department ceilings on officers forced the Ordnance Department in World War II to use civilians on some jobs that officers might otherwise have filled, though, like other services, the Department commissioned a number of men straight from civilian life in order to avoid losing them to the draft. At the peak, in February 1943, 262,772 civilian employees, 6,500 officers, and 13,750 enlisted men were employed by the Department’s operating missions in the continental United States. Over 14,000 Ordnance officers were assigned by the end of March 1945 to overseas commands.10

During World War II most of the key men in the arsenals, depots, and administrative offices brought to their war jobs their skills from civilian life. The Ordnance Department carried on a large training program for inspectors and also trained a

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good many men for depot work. But the bulk of operators on production lines in war plants were schooled not by the Ordnance Department itself but by Ordnance contractors and by the War Manpower Commission’s Training Within Industry Service.

Ordnance training for officers and enlisted men, though necessarily brief, was fairly intensive. To a degree never before considered necessary, the Ordnance Department had to teach raw recruits to be soldiers as well as technicians, for in World War II Ordnance troops had to function close to the front lines and be prepared to fight in case of an enemy break-through. Technical training itself embraced many specialties. Instruction in maintenance and repair of automotive and fire control equipment, of small arms, and of artillery constituted one kind of training. To prepare men to handle distribution of ordnance there were courses in ammunition supply, vehicle assembly, spare parts handling, and general depot work with its infinite detail of receipt, issue, and record-keeping. Units were trained in such diverse tasks as methods of disposing of unexploded enemy bombs and waterproofing vehicles for amphibious operations. All told, between 1942 and V-J Day some forty basic types of Ordnance military units, ranging from squads to battalions, were activated and trained—units for ammunition supply, for light, medium, and heavy maintenance, for automotive repair, and for armament and automotive repair in base shops. Because enlistment of men already possessed of experience in maintaining heavy machinery and automotive transport promised to ease the problems of training specialists, the Ordnance Department early in 1942 persuaded the National Automobile Dealers Association to organize a large-scale recruiting drive for Ordnance “Affiliated Units.” The association, later assisted by other business organizations, supplied some 1,200 officers and 30,000 enlisted men in a few months’ time. These men needed relatively little technical schooling and rather brief indoctrination in Ordnance procedures. As new trainees poured into the training centers, courses were repeated again and again. Several additional training centers had to be opened in 1942 as well as “continuation” schools at some of the depots. The 334 Ordnance officers and 3,950 enlisted men of mid-1940 grew by D Day in June 1944 to nearly 24,000 officers and nearly 325,000 men.11

The task of the Ordnance Department, difficult in any war, was far harder in World War II than ever before. Since the fighting of the US Army in World War I was concentrated on the battlefields of northern France and Flanders, in 1917 and 1918 supplies had to be sent only to the Continent and distributed within a relatively small area. In World War II American forces were scattered almost literally “from Greenland’s icy mountains to India’s coral strand,” and Allied nations, in part equipped by the United States, were fighting in every quarter of the globe. Supply lines had to extend in all directions. Weapons, ammunition, and vehicles had to be designed with the factors of weight and bulk constantly in mind so that equipment could be transported easily. The distance from factory to depot in the United States, to overseas ammunition dump, or to repair shop spelled a costly lapse of time for delivery of any replacement item not

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shipped with the troops in the first place. And time might determine the success or failure of any tactical operation. Global warfare created a nearly overwhelming logistical problem for Ordnance, as for all the supply services.

The sheer quantity of ordnance matériel required constituted another problem. In the Civil War the Ordnance Department had furnished arms for somewhat over 1,500,000 Union soldiers, and in World War I for perhaps 4,000,000 men.12 In April 1945 the United States Army totaled over 8,290,000 men.13 Add to the individual equipment for these men the machine guns, mortars, artillery, ammunition of all types, mines, tanks, transport and combat vehicles, and the magnitude of the Ordnance task begins to emerge. Some items were also made for the Navy and the Marine Corps. Furthermore, the United States as the “Arsenal of Democracy” had to supply much matériel to the British, Russians, Free French, Chinese, and other allies. Plans to meet these demands were nursed by Assistant Secretary of War Louis Johnson before 1940 and by his successor, Robert Patterson, but most of the responsibility for carrying out this gargantuan undertaking fell upon the Ordnance Department. “From Pearl Harbor to V-J Day the Industry-Ordnance team furnished to the Army and 43 foreign nations 47 billion rounds of small arms ammunition, approximately 11 million tons of artillery ammunition, more than 12 million rifles and carbines, approximately 750,000 artillery pieces, and 3½ million military vehicles.”14

The job would have been enormous even had American industry been prepared in 1940 to produce munitions on a large scale. Many Americans, and particularly isolationists, were opposed. A considerable public still branded munitions makers as merchants of death. Neither the will to participate in an armament program nor the machine tools and shops with which to carry it out existed. The “Industry-Ordnance Team” had to be built up from a skeleton organization. Enlisting the interest of American manufacturers in making munitions was easy in 1942, but in 1940 and 1941 was difficult. Only recently out from the shadow of a business depression, industrialists before Pearl Harbor were reluctant to forego opportunities to enlarge their civilian markets. Moreover, even if and when companies were willing to accept Ordnance orders, they faced a technological problem. To

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manufacture intricate weapons and ammunition, tanks and cargo carriers markedly different from vehicles for civilian use, requires time—time to assemble machines, tools, and gages, time to teach workmen how to turn out parts made to exacting tolerances. Precision work as it was known in many American factories of 1940 was inexact when measured by the ten-thousandth-inch limits permitted for gun mechanisms and delicate fuze assemblies. It was the mission of the Ordnance Department to help industry learn how to produce ordnance and produce it quickly enough to turn out quantities in time to serve. The so-called technological time lag in manufacturing matériel was a problem shared in some measure by all the technical services of the armed forces, but was particularly acute for the Ordnance Department.

World War II was as different from World War I as a future war will be from World War II if the predictions of the Cassandras of the atomic age be fulfilled. The trench warfare of 1915–18 had few counterparts in the 1940s. Planes, combat vehicles, and cargo carriers made a war of movement. Mobility and maneuverability were prime requisites for an efficient army. Equipment that could not readily be shifted about even in the thick of combat was of limited use. The batteries of field artillery, in World War I solidly emplaced behind the front lines, had either to be mounted on self-propelled gun carriages or supplied with motorized tractors to tow them. Towed artillery, though extensively used, tended to slow the advance. Enemy planes and fast-moving tanks in turn necessitated more rapid and accurate sighting and fire. Motorization, while militating against the miseries of trench warfare, created its own supply problems, and maintenance of vehicles became a never-ending job. Furthermore, use of tanks called for countermeasures—fields of land mines. To meet this hazard Army Ordnance had to develop mine exploders, as well as mines to sow against an enemy advance.

Still more far reaching were the changes brought about by aerial warfare. Planes flying at unheard of altitudes and at speeds unobtainable in the 1930s created new puzzles for Ordnance. Fire control instruments, new types of ammunition, higher velocity guns for both aircraft and antiaircraft became essential to survival. Employment of airborne troops was another innovation calling for redesign of equipment. Men must be supplied with weapons light in weight, sturdy enough to withstand parachuting, and powerful and reliable enough to protect the parachutists in encounters with the enemy behind his own lines. Later in the war German guided missiles, particularly the celebrated V-2 rocket, challenged American and British brains to find countermeasures. During the war no effective answer to the powerful German V-2 was found.

Indeed the complexities of munitions increased steadily. Trained soldiers and experts in ballistics no longer alone sufficed for the jobs of designing weapons to anticipate enemy developments. Scientists in a dozen fields were needed to evolve intricate devices which a generation before would have seemed fantastically remote from any application to arms for fighting men. Not all physicists were engaged on the MANHATTAN Project. Men trained in research laboratories, authorities in electronics, chemistry, metallurgy, meteorology, mathematics, and physics were called upon to contribute to ordnance. When workable applications of involved scientific formulae were completed, men of the Ordnance Department had still to locate

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facilities to produce the items and had still to train men properly in handling and maintaining them. Though the fruits of scientific research undoubtedly shortened the war by many months, the problems imposed by scientific developments in fighting equipment added to the immediate task of Army Ordnance.

Finally, supplying weapons and the means of keeping them in usable condition was complicated by unforeseen circumstances of combat. Extremes of climate, unexpected difficulties of terrain, and the demands of amphibious warfare presented new problems. From 1941 on, the Ordnance Department tested equipment under the arctic conditions of Alaska, the tropical of the Canal Zone, in the California desert, the swamps of Louisiana, and the mountains of Colorado. Yet neither these experiments nor imagination served to anticipate many situations that American soldiers later met. Fungus and corrosion from even short exposure to the humidity of jungle islands in the Pacific, wear on piston rings resulting from driving combat vehicles over 800 miles of Australian desert from ports in the south to camps on the northern coast, brittleness of steel armor plate and congealing of lubricants in the subzero temperatures of winter in Alaska might theoretically have been foreseen. But the most farsighted still could not realize how greatly these factors on the scale on which they were encountered around the globe would complicate the Ordnance task.

Despite the late start, American ordnance had overtaken and outdistanced enemy ordnance by 1945. Unflattering comparisons of some American weapons with those of the enemy. Ordnance officers were convinced, grew out of American soldiers’ tendency to regard only the deadly effectiveness of an enemy arm without taking into consideration its weaknesses. Unquestionably, particular items of German design and make were superior in at least some particulars to the corresponding American pieces—simpler to operate, easier to repair, lighter to carry, cheaper to manufacture, or better killers. The dreaded German “Panthers” were more heavily armored and had more fire power than any American tanks that saw action. We now know that ever since 1933 Nazi Germany had been applying most of her science and productive capacity to preparing for war. Her head start put the United States at a nearly insuperable disadvantage. Nevertheless, by the last year of the war American fighting equipment in general was sturdier and better functioning than that of the enemy. And the US Army had far more of it. The British, the Canadians, and the Russians held the lines while the United States got its vast armament production under way. But it is abundantly clear that in any future crisis better preparedness would be essential.