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Show WHAT THIS COUNTRY DID. I One of the stories which came out soon after the close of Lhe war I was that of the achievements of the war department in the making of deadly gases. There was so much that was out of the ordinary a little lit-tle skepticism was expressed, but E. A. Powell, in his book, "The ! Army Behind the Army," assures us there was no exaggeration and i that the real accomplishment was beyond even the earlier reports. We all have heard of the gas that was to have ended the war. Mr. !! Powell says it was manufactured at Willoughby, near Cleveland, nad was 72 times more deadly than the mustard gas of the Germans. It is estimated that ten tons of this death-dealing poison could have dc-' dc-' stroyed all life in New York City. I American army officers had planned to make their big offensive in March, 1919, if the war was not ended before the winter of 19! 8-19 8-19 caused operations to slow down, and one of the weapons to have I been employed was 3000 tons of this gas. ten pounds to a shell and jj 350 pounds to a drum to be dropped from airplanes. H j Powell in his book presents a number of extraordinary perform- i ances by those who were preparing America for the great offensive, H as follows: I I So successfully was the gas problem met that by October, hJ .' - . 1918, the Edgewood arsenal alone was producing nearly twice I . I as mucn 8as Per day as Germany, France, and England together. I I I Typical of Colonel Walker's methods was the immediate scraps p j ping of the slow and dangerous water-cooling method of produc- ing phosgene used in Europe and the invention of a system that turned out forty tons of this gas a day. He thereby cut the cost of this gas to the government from $1.50 a pound to 10 cents a pound. The systems devised for filling, painting and marking shells were marvels of mechanical ingenuity. One of the most remarkable discoveries of the war due to ihf experiments of General Squier, chief of the Signal corps, that trees can be used as instruments in their receipt and transmission transmis-sion of electrical messages, both telegraph and telephone, both by wire and wireless. "From the moment an acorn is planted in fertile soil," to quote the words of General Squier himself, "it becomes a 'detector' and a 'receiver' of electromagnetic waves, and the marvellous properties of this receiver, through agencies at present entirely unknown to us, are such as to vitalize the acorn and to produce in time the giant oak. In the power of multiplying plant-cells it may, indeed, be called an incompara- ble 'amplifier.' When the war ended orders had actually been placed by the United States government for 23,390 tanks, representing an outlay out-lay of approximately $175,000,000. Tins vast fleet of Lanks was to be manned by some 58,000 men as many as there were in the entire American army prior to the war with Spain. Had these tanks been placed side to side they would have formed a moving wall of steel forty miles long. Special motor trucks, equipped with pumping, filtering, sterilizing ster-ilizing and testing apparatus, time after time demonstrated that they were able to get into action and deliver pure water from a polluted supply within thirty minutes after their arrival. Sixty miles of pipe and 300 as-driven pumps were used during the St. Mihiel and Argonnc-Mcuse operations alone An interesting and little known feature of the remarkable work of the chemical warfare service was the elaborate series of experiments on living specimens. It was necessary on one occasion to send an officer to Mexico to purchase 1 ,500 Angora An-gora goats, experiments having shown that the goat possesses powers of resistance to gas which more nearly approximate those of a human than does any other common animal. Thanks to the work of Bradley Dewey of the American Can company, chief of the gas defense division, and those associated associat-ed with him, the A. E. F. wore gas masks that gave twenty times the protection afforded by those worn by the Germans. The United States government now possesses a system of code transmission which can defy all the experts of the world. This device, developed in 1918 to meet war needs is so perfect thai a message sent by its means is absolutely indecipherable to the inventor himself; it is the only cipher in existence that is absolutely abso-lutely indecipherable and at the same time practicable. No single person contributed more to the fine art of perfecting perfect-ing devices for killing Germans at long range during the war than a certain college professor of astronomy. So well did he Professor Forest Ray Moulton of the University of Chicago adapt his theoretical knowledge of the mathematics of the paths of celestial bodies to the problems of artillery ballistic. that he became a major in the engineering division of ordnance. Here is a sample of his achievements: As the result of a series of abtruse calculations he made a change in the chape of the copper cop-per driving-band on the 6-inch shell, whereby, without adding to the powder chaige and with no modification whatever in the gun, he increased its range two and a half miles. What is even more remarkable and important, he so reduced the variation between be-tween successive shots that a given number or shells will fall into one-eighth the area formerly covered by their dispersion. During the Meuse-Argonne offensive our aviators took 100,-000 100,-000 photographs in four days. To meet the rA-mand for maps, plenty of them and at short notice, the engineers erected and operated in Fiance a larger map-producing plant than was possessed pos-sessed by France herself or any of the allies. In order to provide a more rapid means of obtaining topographical information. Major James W. Bagley, of the engineers, invented an aerial cartograph or mapping camera which takes three pictures at a time from an airnlane. manning t slrin nf fprrlnrv iKr and . , . r I -o r --------j w.. v. lu 11 half miles wide at 5,000 feet elevation. When the armistice was signed. 60.000 members of the A. E. F. were engaged on railroad work of various kinds in France: more than a thousand miles of standard-gau.oe railway (equal to the distance b the Pennsylvania from New York to Chicago) had been laid; upward of 1,300 locomotives (300 more than are owned by the Atchison system) had been shipped overseas, and, had the war continued, we would have had in France by-July, by-July, 1919, enough American cars to make up a train the caboose ca-boose of which would have been leaving Pans when the engine was entering Berlin. Tire transportation department had in operation between Tours, which was the headquarters of the service of supply, and Chaumont, which was the great headquarters, an all-American train, drawn by an American locomotive, driven by an .American .Ameri-can engineer, and, as a final touch, with its sleeping-cars in charge of former Pullman porters. Thirteen billion dollars was to have been spent on ordnance for the first 5.000,000 mer The quartermaster corps caused the death of 500,000 Nuchwang dogs over in North China because their skins are the best material in the world for aviator's uniforms. It operated the largest shirt factory in the world. It met a shortage in needles by dispatching an agent to Sweden who returned with a million needles. It conducted two schools of coffee roasting, and as a result the American soldier received re-ceived a fresher cup of coffee than most of the folks back home and the government saved two or three cents a pound. The quartermaster corps spent $8,500,000,000 during the war more than half of the total expenditures for the entire army. It dc veloped the most highly specialized shoe ever made, purchased 33, 000,000 pairs of them, carried them in 120 sizes including such hitherto unheard of sizes as 1 7EEE. At the time of the armistice approximately 10,000,000 pounds of food a day were being shipped overseas. All Americans should be proud of the great things their countiy did during the war. |
