National Affairs: Ordnance Show

Secretaries Dwight Filley Davis of War and Curtis Dwight Wilbur of the Navy, and most of their assistants; Attorney General Sargent; Commandant Hanson E. Ely of the Army War College, and 100 officers; Quartermaster-General B. Frank Cheatham; Commandant John A. Lejeune of the Marines, and many another military bigwig, stepped out of motors and trains at the head of Chesapeake Bay one fine morning last week and stuffed cotton or fingers in their ears. They and some 7,000 more or less distinguished civilians were promptly greeted by the cataclysmic detonation, the boiling smoke blast and the vanishing heaven-bound whine of a 16-inch shell from one of the country’s 32 biggest coast guns.

It was the Army Ordnance Association’s* ninth display at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Md., the biggest U. S. demonstration of destructive devices since the War. Bombs dropped and banged. Tanks lurched and rumbled. Field artillery galloped and crackled. Machine guns chattered. Smoke screens fumed. The courteous Signal Corps advised through loudspeakers: “We advise our guests to place their fingers in their ears,” but only a few heard, having rammed in ear wadding before the 16-inch chaos was followed by two more convulsions, one from an 8-inch Navy rifle, one from a 12-inch howitzer.

Most spectacular of the smashing, thundering, rumbling, banging, whizzing, screeching demonstrations was the night sniping by a battery of automatically-aimed 3-inch “archies” at 27-foot sock-shaped targets towed 1,200 yards behind bombing planes more than two miles aloft. Giant searchlights picked out the “socks”. Machine gun tracer bullets streaked aloft. White flowers with angry red centres blossomed abruptly and faded where shrapnel burst in the sky. A direct hit of the last target’s towline ended the show. Experts pronounced the anti-aircraft marksmanship the best yet achieved by the U. S.

*The procurement branches of the Army —Ordnance, Quartermaster Corps, Chemical Warfare Service, Engineers, Medical Corps, Signal Corps, Air Corps—have been linked, since the War, with civilian industries organized under reserve officers, as a measure of national defense. Army experts estimate that ten industrial workers are necessary to supply the needs of each and every uniformed soldier in wartime. Army arsenals would be capable of turning out only 1% of the artillery ammunition required by forces as large as the U.S. had in the field at the 1918 Armistice. The Army Ordnance Association perfects plans for the rapid conversion of private metal sheet & tube factories, for example, into shell factories ; keeps such factories’ knowledge of shell-making up-to-date; plans for emergency purchases of raw materials; for orderly output and delivery of the finished product.