Preface
This volume treats of the problems of a great Army agency and its prewar and wartime research and development programs. It is directed primarily to the men and women whose responsibility it is to make the US Army the most effective possible tool of national defense. Technical history rarely makes light reading and this book is not intended to supply diversion for the casual reader. Yet inasmuch as many more Americans than ever before are today concerned with military affairs, others than Army staff planners may find this analysis of the Ordnance Corps’ past of interest and use.
The scheme of treatment of the three projected volumes of Ordnance history is basically chronological. This first volume undertakes to discuss the steps that precede manufacture of munitions. The second volume will cover the problems of computing quantities to be ordered, the processes of production and procurement by purchase, and the tasks of distribution and maintenance of equipment in the zone of the interior. A third volume will be dedicated to the operations of Ordnance overseas.
To provide essential background this book includes a rather lengthy analysis of pre-1940 difficulties and a rapid sketch of the confused interim when the United States hovered between peace and war. Discussion of the vital preliminaries to efficient wartime functioning follows in chapters describing the evolution of a workable organization and the recruiting and training of soldiers and civilians to carry out the Ordnance mission. The last section of the book deals with research and development of weapons, the process that in a scientific age necessarily also precedes production of matériel.
Special recognition must be accorded Lida Mayo who, though a latecomer to the staff and hence not listed as an author on the title page, assembled the data and wrote the sections on self-propelled artillery, mines and mine exploders, terminal ballistics, and bombs. Dr. Albert E. Van Dusen, now Assistant Professor of American History at the University of Connecticut, made a valuable contribution in collecting and sifting the materials upon which much of Chapters II and VII are based. Several chapters are the work of more than one individual. Peter C. Roots wrote the story of German rearming contained in Chapter IX, the first half of Chapters X and XI, and the section on armor plate in Chapter XIII. Dr. Harry C. Thomson, the sole author of the chapters on over-all organization, military training, civilian personnel, and conservation of materials, also wrote most of the second part of Chapters X and XI. Mrs. Mayo, as noted, prepared the section on self-propelled artillery in Chapter X, the
second half of Chapter XII, the bulk of Chapter XIII, and the entire chapter on bombs. The rest of the volume is the work of the Chief Ordnance Historian, upon whom rests also responsibility for the plan of the whole.
Throughout this book the authors have been obliged to omit discussion of numerous interesting, frequently significant, elements of the whole story of planning weapons. Selection has been chiefly dictated by consideration of controversial data, where the Ordnance Corps believes misapprehensions prevail. Thus the tank has received first attention, at the cost of nearly total exclusion of motor transport and of merely sketchy description of the evolution of self-propelled artillery. Even much of the tank story is untold, partly because space forbade, and partly because treatment of some features would have had to be so highly technical as to make it meaningless to anyone save the automotive engineering expert. The development of cross-drive tank transmissions, for example, has been dismissed with a word, not because this innovation was unimportant, but because explanation of its distinctive features would require many pages of complex engineering data.
Some readers, observing the nature of the documentation, may be disturbed by the degree of reliance the authors have placed upon Ordnance records. Could this volume be regarded as an attempt to produce a definitive history, the failure to exhaust the sources revealing the reverse of the coin would constitute a serious charge against the Ordnance historians. At no point have we aspired to so big an undertaking. Justifications for deliberately narrowing the task are several. First is the obvious impossibility of exhaustive research when staff was small and time relatively short. Ordnance records of World War II located in the Federal Records Center in Alexandria and in the Pentagon run to some 22,000 linear feet. Extracting the most pertinent data from that mass generally precluded more than sampling the voluminous records of other branches of the Army. Only where historians of other services and arms have screened these collateral materials have the Ordnance historians been able to examine thoroughly the counterarguments on controversial issues. Furthermore, the Ordnance Corps has expected its historians to present its side of the story as fully as possible. And, finally, the events under review are too recent to permit of any final appraisal, any fully rounded, wholly objective narrative. We can but hope that this first historical draft will have distilled a concentrate of some value from which the historian in time to come, by refining and by adding distillates from other studies, can prepare the authoritative history of a complicated but stirring era.
The authors are heavily indebted to Mrs. Irene House, research assistant in the Ordnance Historical Branch, whose ingenuity in locating elusive sources and whose patience in assembling a multiplicity of irksome detail have insured the volume an accuracy it would otherwise have lacked. The index is wholly the work of Mrs. House. Miss Feril M. Cowden of the Historical Branch has in turn contributed greatly to the format of the manuscript. Acknowledgments for assistance are also due to a host of men and women in the Office of the Chief of Ordnance, to the custodians of the records in Alexandria, to the staff of the National Archives where the materials of pre-1941 years are housed, and to the
authors of preliminary studies of particular Ordnance items or particular tasks. And the work of historians of other segments of the Army has been a constant boon, correcting, at least in part, an otherwise one-sided view of Ordnance problems. Finally, thanks go to the editor, Miss Mary Ann Bacon of the Office of Military History, whose sound sense of literary style improved much of the text, and to Mrs. Loretto Stevens, who did the copy editing.
In writing this narrative the authors have sedulously endeavored to interpret the evidence by criteria of sound scholarship. Testimony to some measure of success may well lie in the mutually contradictory opinions of reviewers of the manuscript. Ordnance officers found many passages overcritical of Ordnance performance; officers of other branches thought that presentation frequently smacks of the Ordnance “party line.” In the Ordnance view, the inadequacies of matériel on the battlefields of World War II were the result of the “dead hand” of the using arms, which blocked development of weapons badly needed before the war was over. Combat officers, on the other hand, point to the failure of the Ordnance Department to produce many items for some of which requirements date back to 1919. If the proponents of neither extreme be satisfied, we dare believe we have struck a judicious golden mean.