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fore a year hud elupsed, the ordnance department hud grown Into un organisation of 5,000 oUlcers, 30,000 enlisted men und 20,000 clvllluu employees. It has undergone a thorough reshaping to adapt Itself to the extraordinary new conditions. The orduance bu-reuu In the first purt of the war did a total business of $4,700,000,000. In peace times its average unnuul expenditures were $14,000,000.Large us these figures seem, astounding us this rate of expansion must ap-peur, they give only a scant idea of the difficulties faced by the ordnance department in its year of preparatory work. Ordnunce is a highly technical ubject. The few who knew it thor- ( oughly have had the double task of furnishiiig ideas and perfecting designs und of Imparting their knowledge to others. They had to be workers and teachers in the same day. The old ordnance department of less than 100 officers was split up into a gun-carriage division, a cannon division, a small-arms division, and so on, euch division being charged with tho design und production of some part of ordnance material. Manufacture of ordnance material was curried on almost entirely in government arsenals. The problem of production was not difficult. A few officers could follow a gun through from the day that it was first sketched out on paper until it was turned over to a field artillery regiment. Hut when the ordnance department was called upon to put through a program Involving expenditures andracture the modified infield because our American factories, which bud accepted large contracts from Great Britain. could turn this weapon out In larger quantities than the Springfield, which had been made only at government arsenuls.Our rate of rifle production is today 50,000 per week. Every threa months we are now making as many rifles ns we had altogether at the beginning of the war. Vet that original supply (000,000 Sprlngflelds and 100,-000 rifles of other sorts) was, from the start, sufficient to equip the rifle-carrying men of an army of a_jnillion. We can congratulate ourselves about rifles. Knottiest Problem of All.But artillery manufacture was the knottiest problem of all. It is almost Impossible to make the layman understand how difficult it is to manufacture a piece of modern artillery. Perhaps that was the reason, or one of the reasons, why public opinion In this country failed to listen to the warnings of ordnance experts and provide adequate appropriations for artillery manufacture years ago. For tin* last 12 years the war department has been telling congress tha,t artillery could not be made quickly after the outbreak of war. A year would be required to begin deliveries on any guns in quantity, these experts told congress. To provide for artillery manufacture on a vast scale would take even longer, be; cause In that event literally scores of new plants would have to be built, millions of dollars’ worth of machine tools
Newspaper Details
Crested Butte Elk Mountain Pilot
Crested Butte, Colorado, US
Thu, Oct 10, 1918
Page 7
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TX, USA 01 Jul 2020
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Crested Butte Elk Mountain Pilot
