Chapter 23: Conclusion
Appraising the Record
In the months and years that followed the defeat of Germany and Japan, the wartime leaders of the Ordnance Department looked back upon their achievements with a keen sense of satisfaction. They felt they had made a significant, if not always fully appreciated, contribution to victory. General Harris was outspoken in his praise of the Ordnance record on procurement; General Crain and General Hatcher were equally emphatic about the Ordnance Department’s success with storage, issue, and maintenance. General Campbell wrote a book to eulogize the “Industry-Ordnance Team” and to portray its war record as “an epic of industrial accomplishment which had never been equaled in the history of the world.” No less laudatory was the volume on research and development that appeared in 1947 over General Barnes’ signature, Weapons of World War II. In reviewing the advances in weapons made during the war General Barnes gave a special salute to science, allotting credit for “results far beyond our expectations” to “the Science-Industry-Ordnance team,” thus introducing a term that was to gain wide currency in Ordnance circles after the war.
The farther one moved from the immediate staff of the Chief of Ordnance the more frequently one heard notes of criticism in the postwar years. General Burns, who viewed the Ordnance Department during the defense and war periods from the offices of the Assistant Secretary of War and the Lend-Lease Administrator, spoke highly of Ordnance procurement plans and operations, but in postwar interviews he expressed disappointment that Ordnance leaders had not been sufficiently “international-minded” to appreciate the needs of allied nations. Officers who had served in ASF headquarters went much further in their criticism. They conceded that in many areas Ordnance had done an excellent job, but they complained that most influential Ordnance officers resented staff supervision and did not make good team players. Combat commanders overseas usually spoke well of the Ordnance equipment and support they received, but they sometimes voiced criticisms. Some complained that American tanks were no match for the enemy’s: others denounced the Ordnance failure to provide combat troops with the ammunition they needed: still others castigated Ordnance for failing to provide enough spare parts for maintenance. General Niblo, an Ordnance officer with long experience overseas, found many points at which Ordnance service in the field needed improvement.1
In any attempt to review and evaluate the Ordnance record on the procurement and supply fronts, one fact stands out clearly and serves as a point of departure: much of what the Ordnance Department did in World War II was an outgrowth of its experience in World War I. Most of the senior officers of the Department in World War II were men who still remembered their own successes and failures in World War I. Major elements of the Ordnance organization had been created during or immediately after World War I. The Field Service Division, for example, was a direct outgrowth of World War I, and its chief in the 1940-42 period, General Crain, brought to his office valuable experience gained as a young officer with the AEF. The Ordnance district offices had first been established in 1918 to relieve the congestion that hampered procurement officials in Washington. Though closed for a time after the Armistice, they were soon reopened on a skeleton basis in the early 1920s and became perm anent elements of the Ordnance Department. Within the limits of their meager budgets, the district offices—with their unusual combination of military and civilian leadership—kept in touch with industries capable of conversion to munitions manufacture. They were not strong in 1940–41 when the need again arose for placing huge contracts with industry, but they were in existence and were rapidly expanded.
Outside the official hierarchy, but of great importance to it, was the Army Ordnance Association, also an outgrowth of World War I. Founded in 1919 as a voluntary association of American citizens (headed by Benedict Crowell, wartime Director of Munitions) to promote “industrial preparedness for war as being one of the Nation’s strongest guarantees of peace,” it provided influential civilian backing for Ordnance interests. Through the meetings of its many local posts and special committees, and through its magazine, Army Ordnance, it helped foster an interest in industrial preparedness and in the training of Ordnance reserve officers.
The manufacturing arsenals of the Ordnance Department antedated World War I by many years, Springfield Armory tracing its history back to the days when George Washington was President. Though starved for funds during the 1920s and 1930s, they managed to preserve some munitions manufacturing capacity for a nation that vainly hoped it would never again have to resort to war. Because the Ordnance budget was so low during the interwar years the arsenals were unable to replace equipment that wore out or became obsolete; they soon fell behind the rapidly advancing American technology. When the nation began to rearm in 1940–41, the arsenals were far from modern and their staffs were depleted. They nevertheless proved their value as the “Regular Army of production,- carrying the load almost single-handedly while civilian industry was tooling up to make guns, ammunition, and tanks. For many months during the so-called defense period before Pearl Harbor, Frankford Arsenal was the sole source of small arms ammunition for the U.S. Army, and Springfield Armory was the only producer of the new M rifle. Meanwhile, the arsenals helped in another way: they opened their doors to engineers from industry and made available to them Ordnance drawings, specifications, and descriptions of manufacture. It is impossible to calculate to what extent the process of rearmament would have been delayed had there been no arsenals, but there certainly would have been some
delay. During an assessment of the value of the arsenals the question may well arise as to how the war might have turned out if the June 1944 invasion of the continent had been held up even for six months and Germany had meanwhile pushed forward with its atomic research and its development of V-2 weapons.
Along with developments based on the past came new factors that sprang from the experience of World War II itself. Most notable, perhaps, was the emergence of the Technical Division (later named Research and Development Division) as a major organizational element on a par with the Industrial Division and Field Service Division. Under the energetic leadership of General Barnes, it gave recognition to the increasing importance of science and technology in the development of modern weapons. At the other end of the development-procurement-supply chain were the greatly expanded activities of Field Service with scores of new storage depots, a vast bookkeeping operation, and complex problems of organization and management. Other new developments on the organizational side were the steady trend toward decentralization, the delegation of more and more responsibility to the arsenals and district offices, and the creation of new field agencies such as OCO Detroit and the St. Louis office of the Field Director of Ammunition Plants. There were two factors working toward decentralization: one was the vast size of the Ordnance task, demanding that it be broken up into small pieces; the other was the congestion and lack of office space in Washington. Even after completion of the Pentagon in 1942, office space in the Washington area remained at a premium, and the need to check the trend toward concentrating authority at the seat of government became daily more urgent.
Impetus for the one most important decentralizing move came with the transfer from the Quartermaster Corps to Ordnance of responsibility for motor transport vehicles in 1942. No other organizational change during the war had such great impact on Ordnance. The transfer affected some four thousand contracts valued at $3 billion. It brought into the Ordnance supply system a great variety of civilian-type vehicles, enormously complicated the task of supplying spare parts for maintenance, and made Ordnance procurement equal in dollar value to the procurement of all the other technical services combined. The acquisition of new storage space made the Ordnance Department the largest warehouse operator in the world.
To keep the decentralization picture in perspective it should be noted that Ordnance had adopted a policy of decentralized operations long before 1942. The storage depots and the six “old line” manufacturing arsenals—Springfield, Watertown, Watervliet, Frankford, Picatinny, and Rock Island—were historic examples of decentralized operations under centralized supervision. After the procurement district offices built up their staffs in 1940–41 and assumed authority to make contracts, they, too, represented a major delegation of authority by the Chief of Ordnance. They placed a large measure of procurement authority in the major industrial areas of the nation, close to the industrial firms that were to sign Ordnance contracts.
The other side of the organizational coin was represented by the new Army Service Forces, created early in 1942 to provide for all the technical services more supervision and control than that to which they had formerly been accustomed. In
both procurement and supply ASF and its commanding general, Brehon Somervell, exerted a good deal of influence on the Ordnance Department. The decision, for example, to transfer trucks from the Quartermaster Corps to Ordnance was essentially a Somervell decision. On the supply side, it was ASF that directed the redistribution of depot space in 1943 and in 1944 established new and lower stock levels. In fact, of the many Ordnance activities, there was scarcely any major aspect that was not touched by ASF in one way or another. It was almost inevitable that friction should result from the sudden imposition of unwonted controls. Ordnance leaders were, to some extent, set in their ways and reluctant to change; they were also able, strong-minded men with long years of experience. They resented supervision by management experts who, in their opinion, had little or no technical knowledge of the procurement and supply of munitions. Yet one of the worst mistakes made by Ordnance itself early in the war period was placing too much faith in civilian supply experts unfamiliar with military procedures.
Ordnance procurement officers took special pride in their prewar planning; they felt that it had contributed greatly to the success of the Nation’s rearmament, especially in the 1940-41 period. General Wesson, General Harris, and their associates were convinced that maintenance of the arsenals and district offices in time of peace paid big dividends in 1940 and 1941. Ordnance leaders steadfastly maintained that surveys of industry, accepted schedules of production, educational orders, and production studies proved their value at the start of the rearmament drive by saving the all-important commodity, time. In spite of objections raised by sonic observers that the prewar plans were valueless because not followed to the letter, the evidence suggests that the planning was well conceived and proved more helpful in Ordnance than in the other technical services. Had the planners been given more public support and more funds to work with, the results of their efforts would have been even more apparent.
One of the hardest things for General Wesson and his staff to accept in the 1940-41 period was the low priority assigned to Ordnance procurement. In an economy where priority ratings were more important than money, the Ordnance Department found that it had to take third place, ranking below both the Navy and the Army Air Forces. “We were so far ahead of the rest of them in our advance planning,” some Ordnance officers commented, half in jest, “they had to hold us back to let the others catch up.” Because the nation’s strategic position in the 1940–42 period led to emphasis on air power and sea power, the Ordnance procurement effort, being geared mainly to supply of the ground army, had to take a back seat. Its rate of progress was thus inescapably slowed.
A notable Ordnance procurement innovation in World War II was the widespread use of government-owned, contractor-operated (GOCO) facilities. Plants and works of this type were needed chiefly to make powder and explosives and to load ammunition. As there were no civilian plants that could readily be converted to these purposes, nor any appreciable opportunity for commercial profit in the peacetime manufacture of military ammunition, such plants had to be built by the government if they were to be built at all. Broadly speaking, the experiment with GOCO facilities was highly
successful. Ordnance managed to recruit competent firms to operate the plants; it strictly enforced safety regulations with excellent results; it achieved quantity production, a high level of quality, and steadily decreasing costs. The main criticism of the GOCO contracts was that they were sometimes too liberal in permitting contractors to make profits that were out of proportion to services rendered.
The chief blot on the artillery ammunition record was the failure to provide enough heavy artillery ammunition for the invasion of Europe. It was not a failure on the production front but a mistake in planning. During the early months of the war, top Army planning agencies decided to put their faith in light and medium artillery, and aerial bombing. To a large extent their faith was justified. But heavy artillery was needed, too, and, when an urgent demand for big guns and ammunition came in 1944, Ordnance was unable to produce them overnight. Ordnance officers who had for many years been heavy artillery advocates were keenly disappointed that the demand for it came late in the war and had to be handled on a “blitz” basis. With heavy tanks and heavy-heavy trucks the story was much the same.
These examples illustrate the importance of sound strategic planning and accurate forecasting of future requirements. On this point, all Ordnance leaders were in agreement at the end of World War II. Some considered requirements as the Number One problem of the Ordnance Department; others rated it somewhat lower; but all recognized its great importance. They also recognized that it was an extremely difficult problem to deal with. No matter how imaginative and farsighted the planners might be, there were always unforeseen twists and turns in the course of events. The Army high command, Ordnance leaders said in effect, with help and advice from Ordnance, must plan ahead, determine long-range production goals, and then stick with them. Given time and money, they said, there was nothing they could not produce—but the manufacture of fighting equipment would take both time and money and must be planned for long in advance. Changes in the plan could and must be made to keep production in step with battlefield needs, but changes must be held to a minimum and approved only after careful study of all factors in the situation.
Among the mistaken overestimates of requirements, the Ordnance Department objected most strongly to those for small arms ammunition and tanks. The goals set for both early in 1942, while the shock of Pearl Harbor was still fresh and British needs were being dramatically revealed by Churchill and his advisers at White House conferences, soon proved to be completely unrealistic. As Ordnance leaders warned at the time, some of the productive capacity built at great expense during 1942 proved to be unnecessary even before the year was out.
The same was true of storage depots, but here it was Ordnance rather than the Army staff that set its sights too high. Given a relatively free hand in 1940-42, Ordnance built more depots than it needed. ASF then stepped in, redistributed the excess capacity, and allocated storage space on an Army-wide basis.
In striving for efficient operation of its vast supply and distribution system, Ordnance found that many factors had to be considered. Nearness of depots to manufacturing plants had to be weighed against nearness to ports of embarkation; the
desirability of vast desert tracts for safe, dry storage had to be balanced against the problem of labor shortage in such areas. The integration of the storage space acquired from the Motor Transport Service in 1942 called for a good deal of reshuffling, as did the ASF-directed redistribution of excess capacity in 1943. On top of all this, Ordnance was justly criticized for making too frequent changes in depot missions, with resultant expense and loss of efficiency during the periods of changeover. The Master Depot System of 1943 was an ambitious plan to put Ordnance storage operations on a sound basis, but it worked no miracles.
Of all the many categories of Ordnance items, spare parts for vehicles caused the most trouble, in both procurement and distribution. The trouble originated with the Quartermaster Corps’ losing battle during the 1930s to standardize Army trucks. The transfer of transport vehicles to the Ordnance Department in the latter half of 1942 made it necessary for Ordnance suddenly to assimilate a vast number of unfamiliar items. Before that time nearly everything procured by Ordnance had been a military item designed under Ordnance supervision exclusively for military use. With the exception of tanks and a few special articles such as new fire control devices, Ordnance had many years of experience on which to base its estimates for replacement parts. As a result, the wartime supply of spare parts for weapons—”shooting ordnance”—was usually adequate. But with military trucks the situation was much different. In the first place, trucks were basically civilian vehicles converted to military service; they were manufactured in many different makes and models with a bewildering variety of parts and parts numbers. Second, the Army had only limited experience in the field maintenance of a truck fleet.
To one not familiar with the complexities of automotive spare parts, the assigning of a name and number to each part as a means of identification would seem to be a fairly simple task. But in World War II it was far from simple, partly because of the vast number of parts made by many different manufacturers—some interchangeable, some not—and partly because Ordnance was in the throes of adapting its parts numbering system to electrical accounting machines at the time the truck transfer brought in some hundred thousand additional parts. The “Numbers Racket,” as Ordnancemen dubbed this problem, caused endless trouble and was still not solved at the end of the war. Some vehicle parts masqueraded under many “aliases” as well as under their basic names and numbers. As a result, vitally needed spare parts could sometimes not be found because, for lack of a good numbering system, they were “lost.” The one most effective step toward solving the problem was the compilation of many volumes of interchangeability data known collectively as ORD 15, supplemented by ORD 14 for combat vehicles and ORD 5 for tools.
On the procurement side, Ordnance recognized early in the defense period that production of spare parts had to be given just as high a priority as production of complete items. The principle was sound enough but it was not easy to apply, particularly as the procurement people did not see eye-to-eye with the supply people. Requirements for spare parts were based at the start on educated guesses and had to be adjusted later as field experience data became available for more accurate forecasting. How far to go in the direction
of supplying all types of parts for all types of equipment was another unresolved problem at the end of the war.
When it received responsibility for transport vehicles in September 1942, Ordnance was fortunate in one respect: the worst of the procurement crisis was over. The Quartermaster Corps had gone through a trying period since the summer of 1940, laying the groundwork for a large-scale truck procurement program; soon after Pearl Harbor steps had been taken to harness the automotive industry to the war effort. By the fall of 1942 three remarkably successful vehicles were either in production or ready for production—the ¼-ton jeep, the 2½-ton truck, and the 2½-ton amphibious Dukw. The one serious lack was in heavy-heavy trucks, for which the using arms then foresaw no great need. Though total truck production was high all during the war, it nevertheless lagged behind schedule year after year, especially in the heavier types.
Among the most successful devices Ordnance developed to break bottlenecks, specd production, and promote cooperation among contractors in the automotive industry, and all other industries, were the many integration committees formed during the war. Fully protected from prosecution under the antitrust laws, these committees formed meeting grounds where representatives of all the firms making a certain product could discuss their manufacturing problems, exchange ideas, and arrange for temporary loans of materials, machinery, or production experts. Countless production problems were settled in committee meetings by the men best qualified to deal with them. Closely related to the integration committees were the machine-tool panels formed in the Ordnance districts to help remedy the lack of new machine tools by bringing to light the existence of used tools or recommending alternative types.
Stock control appeared as a new term in the military vocabulary during World War II. It described an activity that was, in essence, as old as war itself—the maintenance of an orderly flow of supplies to troops. But the magnitude of the supply task in World War II introduced the need for elaborate procedures to keep records on hundreds of thousands of separate items destined for shipment to troops in all parts of the world. Had Ordnance given more attention during the 1930s to adapting the Ordnance Provision System to sudden wartime expansion, or had it set up a training program for new Field Service employees in 1940, some of the delays and difficulties experienced in this area in World War II might have been avoided. The influence of ASF on Ordnance stock control methods came too late in the war to be of great value, but the experience pointed up lessons for the future.
The Ordnance Department, and the Army as a whole, learned much about maintenance during the war, particularly maintenance of trucks and tanks. Long before World War II a tradition of good maintenance practice had been well established in the Army, reaching from the soldier’s daily care of his rifle to the proper upkeep of buildings and grounds. But the rapid expansion and mechanization of the Army during the 1940s, and the influx of millions of raw recruits led by inexperienced officers, brought neglect of equipment maintenance. A profligate and irresponsible spirit pervaded many units. Regardless of the administrative problems relating to echelons of maintenance and the control of repair shops, the one lesson
of the war that stood out above all others, from the maintenance point of view, was that troops must learn maintenance discipline as well as combat discipline. Illness and death caused by disease can cripple an army as effectively as wounds inflicted by shot and shell; vehicles with broken springs or burned out bearings caused by neglect or rough handling can halt an advance just as surely as damage from enemy action.
On the procurement front, the Ordnance Department, acting almost entirely on its own initiative, did some significant pioneering work in applying the techniques of statistical quality control to acceptance inspection. Here, as with so many other Ordnance activities, the seeds were sown during the 1920s and 1930-5. Progress was slow during the prewar years, partly because the need for new inspection methods was not urgent and partly because few Ordnance officers were enthusiastic about statistical sampling techniques. But, with the coming of war production on a tremendous scale, the theories of Col. Leslie E. Simon and others were put to the test, in a few limited areas at first, and then with gradually widening usefulness. They helped make Ordnance inspection more efficient and rational, and shifted to the contractor more of the responsibility for quality production.
In its speedy termination of contracts Ordnance set a record of which it could well be proud. With the approval of the War Department, and in consonance with acts of Congress, it worked out—long before the war ended—enlightened plans for terminating and settling contracts without elaborate and time-consuming audits. Speedy contract termination not only promoted good will in the business community but also helped the nation make the difficult transition from war to peace without suffering a postwar depression.
Though Ordnance officers seldom mentioned it as anything remarkable, the Ordnance Department’s record of honesty was certainly noteworthy. Ordnance procurement officers placed contracts for billions of dollars’ worth of war matériel with thousands of industrial firms, both large and small, without any taint of graft or corruption. In all the Congressional investigations of irregularities in wartime procurement, no evidence was uncovered to show that any Ordnance officer or civilian employee profited from double dealing. Ordnance procurement was sometimes criticized on the ground that it was too slow, too cumbersome, or too favorable to big business; but it could not be criticized for lack of integrity. The mistakes made appear to have been honest mistakes, not fraud. Most Ordnance leaders apparently saw nothing remarkable in this fact; they simply took it for granted as being the least that was expected of them.
Looking to the Future
Long before the war was over, General Campbell gave serious thought to the form the postwar organization of the Ordnance Department should take. As early as January 1944 he appointed a board of officers headed by General Harris to study the matter and prepare recommendations. General Campbell described his thinking on the matter as follows:
As the outcome of the war became apparent I considered that it might well be of great value to the future of the Department and of value to the Army and the country if a Board composed of men who had been through the Ordnance job from the declaration of war, and who were to continue as an active part of the Department until the
War’s end and possibly beyond that period, were to study and report upon the future organization of the Department and its personnel. I thought that the recommendations of these men, many of them of long experience, all of whom were engaged in the successful operation of the Department, would be of more value and would be better founded in fact than observations to be made after the war by officers returning from overseas who had not been connected in any way with the Industrial and Field Service front.2
During February the board’s preliminary report was distributed for comment to six general officers, most of whom gave it their approval, and on 1 2 May the final Harris Board Report was placed on General Campbell’s desk.3
This report recommended that the Ordnance headquarters consist of five major services closely comparable to the existing services and staff branches. The Military Service was to combine the Military Plans and Training Service with the Military Personnel Branch; the Administrative Service was to be made up of five existing staff branches—Legal, Fiscal, Plans and Requirements, Civilian Personnel, and Control. Both of these services were to report directly to the Chief of Ordnance, but the other three services, to be known as Research and Development, Procurement (formerly Industrial), and Supply and Maintenance (formerly Field Service), were to be responsible to a Deputy Chief of Ordnance for Matériel Services. The Board recommended creation of this position of Deputy Chief to relieve the Chief of Ordnance of the responsibility for supervising all the activities of the Department, and thus allow him more time to confer with chiefs of the using arms, with representatives of higher headquarters, and with committees of Congress, to study ways and means of strengthening the 473
Department, and to consider the assignment and promotion of key personnel. It was also felt that the position of Deputy Chief would “tend to break down some of the present dividing lines” between the major operating divisions.4
The most important recommendation of the Harris Board was for the establishment of six decentralized Product Centers, each with full responsibility for design, procurement, storage, and maintenance of a certain class of matériel, and with jurisdiction over all arsenals, plants, and depots dealing with such matériel. “The finally accepted organization,” the Board reported, “must be based upon product lines, with strong centralized control, and complete integration by product, from design to obsolescence.” The six Ordnance establishments proposed by the Board as Product Centers were the following:
| Springfield Armory | Small Arms and Small Arms Ammunition |
| Rock Island Arsenal | Artillery |
| Frankford Arsenal | Fire Control |
| Indiana Ordnance Works | Ammunition |
| Augusta Arsenal | Troop Equipment and |
| Miscellaneous Supplies Detroit Tank Arsenal | Tanks and Transport Vehicles |
The recommendations of the Harris Board thus combined the functional and
the product types of organization, but with far greater emphasis than had ever before been given to decentralization along product lines. The five services proposed for the Office of the Chief of Ordnance were functional in nature, but they were to be strictly limited to staff work and were not to engage in actual operations. The six Product Centers were to be the main operating divisions. Just as the Tank-Automotive Center had become a decentralized and semiautonomous organization specializing in the development, production, and distribution of one broad class of matériel, so each proposed Product Center was to become a decentralized headquarters specializing in one class of ordnance.
The broad principles of the Product Center idea were accepted by many Ordnance officers during the 1944–45 period, but there were differences of opinion as to how the six proposed Centers should be administered. In March 1944, for example, when General Hayes was asked to comment on the Harris Board’s preliminary report, he declared: “I think that the Product Centers are a very fine idea, and they are probably essential to the further healthful development of the Ordnance Department. As shown on the chart, however, I am not sure exactly how they will work because they seem to have too many bosses, i.e., Chiefs of all Services except the Military Service. ...”5 General Barnes and Safford expressed similar views.
There was also disagreement as to the most desirable locations for the six proposed Product Centers. In September 1945 six committees were appointed to stud) this matter and make recommendations as to which Ordnance installations were best suited for use as Product Centers. These committees agreed with the recommendations of the Harris Board on. only two Centers—Rock Island for artillery and the Detroit Tank Arsenal for tanks and other vehicles. For small arms they chose Frankford rather than Springfield, Pica-tinny rather than Indiana Ordnance Works for ammunition, Pottstown Depot rather than Frankford for fire control, and Raritan instead of Augusta Arsenal for troop equipment.6
In addition to its specific recommendations for organizational changes, the Harris Board laid down certain fundamental principles of organization to guide the future development of the Department. First and most fundamental was the principle that the technical services should continue to exist. “The successful prosecution of any war effort,” the report stated, “can be obtained only by retaining the Technical Services as entities in the postwar organization of the War Department.” The second principle was that the peacetime organization of the Department should be capable of handling the wartime mission simply by expansion, without a major organizational change. The third principle was that the Department should be organized along product lines, with decentralization of operations to Product Centers. The Harris Board also recommended that the Ordnance Districts be continued as the procurement agencies of the Department, that the existing Industry-Ordnance Team be maintained, and that the manufacturing arsenals “return to their pre-war role of keeping alive those phases of munitions art that do not have a commercial counterpart.”
The recommendations of the Harris Board take on added significance when they are compared with the trend of thinking within the Army Service Forces. The proposal that the Ordnance Department be organized along product lines ran directly counter to the prevailing opinion in the ASF that the technical services should be organized on a functional basis. During the preceding summer, General Somervell’s staff had drafted a plan for the complete reorganization of the ASF, abolishing all of the technical services and merging their functions in various divisions within the ASF headquarters.7 All research, development, and procurement activities of the technical services would have been centralized in one ASF division, all transportation in another, all supply in another, and so on. At the same time, the field establishments of all the technical services, including the Ordnance Districts, arsenals, and depots, would have been absorbed by the headquarters of the Service Commands in which they were geographically situated.
General Somervell and his staff vigorously pushed this reorganization proposal during the summer of 1943, but when it was finally referred to the Secretary of War in September he refused to approve it. As explained in his published memoirs, Stimson “was prepared in general to accept Somervell’s judgment that his proposed changes would in the end increase the efficiency of the Service Forces, but it was a grave question whether the improvement would outweigh its concomitant disadvantages in the creation of bad feeling.”8 Stimson knew from experience “how deeply imbedded in sentiment the services of the Engineers, Ordnance, and Quartermaster are in the memories of all the people that belonged to them, and the tremendous uproar that would be created if we tried to destroy all that sentiment by wiping out the distinction of the services with their insignia, etc.” Stimson also knew that the technical services had done outstanding work in organizing production for war and specifically noted the high quality of General Campbell’s performance. He therefore opposed “stirring up a hornet’s nest right in the middle of the war when things are going well.”
The Harris Board was appointed just three months after this rejection of the ASF reorganization plan by the Secretary of War. The Board’s conclusions were diametrically opposed to the ASF proposals, and represented the point of view held by most high-ranking Ordnance officers. As a result of wartime operational experience, leaders in the Ordnance Department had become convinced not only that the traditional product basis of the technical services should be preserved but also that the internal organization of each service should be along product lines.
General Campbell was in full agreement with the recommendations of the Harris Board, and in May 1945 directed a memorandum to the chiefs of his staff divisions announcing that the Harris Board report was to be the basis of all planning of postwar organization within the
Department.9 But he decided against any attempt to revamp the organization of the Department along such lines while the war was in progress. As a result, no major changes occurred before the surrender of Japan in August 1945. Even then there was no sudden reorganization, but only a reduction of staff, a gradual consolidation of administrative groups, and the elimination of specialized branches that were no longer needed.
After the war the Ordnance Department did not settle down immediately to a quiet life of peacetime. routine. Too many startling new developments were in the air. In the closing months of 1945 it was widely felt that the atomic bombs that had blasted Hiroshima and Nagasaki had ushered in a new era in the history of war, or indeed in the history of mankind. The new forces miraculously unleashed from the nucleus of the atom made the power of TNT suddenly appear puny and outmoded. At the same time, the future possibilities of long-range rockets and guided missiles were taking definite shape. Even without the atomic bomb these new devices were in themselves sufficient to mark a major turning point in the long history of weapons. Some Ordnance men were momentarily stunned by the thought that rockets might some day render all existing artillery obsolete. Was the era of guns and howitzers that had opened about the time of the battle of Crecy in 1346 now about to end after six long and turbulent centuries? Were small arms and tanks to be of any military value in the future? In the face of the onrushing weapons revolution, would any of the arsenals save Redstone be able to hold their positions? If future wars were waged with long-range missiles carrying atomic warheads and lasted only thirty days, as some predicted, where was the value of procurement planning? Of what use were production plans or factories designed to swing into war production after from three to six months of conversion time? Would it ever again be possible to concentrate great quantities of supplies in huge depots of the World War II type, either at home or overseas? Would all the experience of that war have any relevance at all to the atomic war of the future?
These and many other questions went through the minds of the Ordnance officers and key civilians who remained in service after the war. There were no sure answers immediately forthcoming. It seemed to many Ordnance men that they had successfully concluded one war, with prodigious effort, only to find themselves confronted with a host of new, baffling, and yet challenging problems.
The situation was in some respects not unlike that following the Armistice of 1918 when the armored tank and the airplane appeared as dread new devices that threatened to change altogether the nature of war. People had said then, as they were saying in the fall of 1945, that war had become too terrible to contemplate and ought to be outlawed by international agreement. The older Ordnance leaders could remember the earlier years; their experience during the 1930s had left. them with little faith in leagues of nations; they found it hard to comprehend the magnitude of the new weapons. The younger men paid little heed to philosophical principles; they turned their attention to the immediate problems at hand, began to pick up the scattered pieces left by the departing armies, and worked to master the techniques of the new science of war.