PRODUCTION Powder, Shot & Shell

One of the three big deficiencies shown up by the Louisiana maneuvers (TIME, Oct. 13) was the shortage of blank ammunition.* Who was to blame? Responsible for supplying the Army with shot & shell (real and blank) is the Ordnance Department. But in this case Ordnance was taking no blame for being behindhand.

Ordnance had set its sights high, year and a half ago asked for a staggering $11,000,000,000 to give the U.S. and allies a wartime supply of munitions—powder, explosives, ammunition, tanks, guns, etc. It got a lot less. Franklin Roosevelt cut four billion off the estimate and Congress further pared it down to $5,896,000,000.

Last week Ordnance men could congratulate themselves that the shot & shell business was looking up. Their munitions-buying fund was up to $7,750,000,000. With the help of private industry they had also been able to do a colossal job of building and of speeding production.

Near Independence, Mo., with appropriate red fire, the $80,000,000 Lake City Ordnance Plant (.30-and .50-caliber am munition) went into production. Begun last December, it opened four months ahead of Ordnance’s schedule. Across the State, the $35,000,000 Weldon Spring plant (near St. Louis), scheduled to go into production in November, had been turning out high explosives — TNT and DNT for shells, bombs, etc. — for two weeks. .

Since its munitions program got going, in June 1940, Ordnance has planned 63 munitions plants, to be owned by the Government, some managed by Government, some by private industry. Construction has been begun on all but ten, and 28 are in production. Estimated cost of the 63 plants: $1,750,000,000.

With few exceptions, like the $93,000,000 small-arms ammunition factory in St. Louis (delayed by labor trouble), the factories have boomed ahead. Built and operated by such oldtimer munitions-workers as Hercules, Du Pont and Atlas, by such newcomers as Procter & Gamble, Goodyear and Goodrich, most of them are ahead of Ordnance’s original time schedules.

But no Ordnanceman knows what he is really shooting at. When the U.S. built the world’s biggest munitions industry in World War I (86,663,000 Ib. of powder and explosives in three months), it had a definite object in view — the battlefields of France. For World War II the sights are set on an invisible target. No one has yet been able to figure how much powder, for instance, the U.S. will need; it may still have to supply Russia with ammunition, may have to supply Turkey and Britain in big operations, may have to do some shooting on its own account. Hence the program is not only huge but limitless.

At top production the Lake City plant (one of six small-arms factories) will turn out more ammunition in one month than the U.S. produced in World War I.

Ordnance’s hard-working Brigadier General Levin H. Campbell Jr., in charge of the powder, shot & shell program, gratefully admits that U.S. industry has given him yeoman help. But he is no man to spill such a military secret as the present status of munitions supply. Guesstimate: by the first of next year, the U.S. should have enough smokeless powder production to supply the world; enough high explosives to supply the U.S. in a tremendous war, with perhaps enough left over to spare for allies.

Production of small-arms ammunition is a more complicated problem and its solution less advanced. Only one of the six small-arms ammunition plants scattered by Ordnance between Salt Lake City and the Mississippi is yet producing; some are six months or more from production. Today the Army has not enough ammunition to give its soldiers adequate rifle and machine-gun practice. But by next March, perhaps before, there will be enough for any foreseeable contingency. Big question: What about unforeseeable contingencies?

* The others: spotty leadership, shortage of equipment.