BROOMSTICK APOLOGISTS
October 14, 1917
The chief of the Ordnance Bureau of the army, in commenting on the shortage of rifles, has said that it is of no consequence, because “every soldier will be supplied a rifle when he starts for France.”
Of course he will, otherwise he cannot start. One of the leading papers of New York backs up the statement by saying that the “drilling in the camps without rifles is ended now” and that “General Crozier delayed the work so as to get rifles with the same ammunition our allies are using.”
Neither statement is correct. The last is the reverse of truth. On October 2 in one camp there were still only one hundred rifles for twenty thousand men and other camps were scarcely better off, and the delay in getting rifles during the last eight months has been due primarily to the refusal of the Ordnance Department to get rifles using the ammunition of our allies.
If during the two years preceding our entry into the war the Government factories had been run full speed, we would have had over two million of Springfield rifles instead of under one million. Our shortage was due solely to our policy of dawdle. Our factories produced a mere dribble of rifles and no big field guns until the inevitable happened.
War came. Having no rifles of our own for the new army, the War Department decided to adoptthe English rifle, the Enfield, which was being built in this country at the rate of nearly nine thousand a day in private plants, and by speeding them up the number could have been immediately increased to fourteen thousand a day. But the authorities insisted that the Enfields should be changed to take our ammunition, and that certain parts should be standardized and made interchangeable. As regards this excuse, it is sufficient to point out that in the first place it was a very grave error, while making the parts of our Enfields interchangeable, at the same time to make their ammunition not interchangeable with that of the British Enfields, for the number of Springfields on hand was negligible compared to the millions of rifles we would ultimately need, and in the second place the delay even for this purpose was wholly inexcusable. The German submarine note came on January 31. An alert War Department would have had its rifle programme minutely mapped out within two weeks. The delay in furnishing final specifications to the factories was such that they could not begin on the complete rifle until the latter part of August. Six months is a “perfectly endurable delay” only if we are content to accept the speed standards in war of Tiglath-Pileser and Pharaoh Necho. The United States must learn to adopt the war speed standards of the Twentieth Century,A.D., instead of those of the Seventh Century,B.C.
If in April we had been ready to proceed with the Enfield rifle, we would now have about two millionof the new rifles instead of about one-fiftieth of that number. General Crozier says that we have only had to wait “two or three months—a perfectly endurable delay.” Surely if there is anything this war teaches it is the vital importance of time. Two or three months’ waiting in order to get a rifle which does not carry the ammunition of our allies represents not merely an undesirable delay but grave unwisdom.
General Crowder handled the draft to perfection because he appreciated that the difference between sending a telegram at 5 or at 4:45 might be of momentous consequence. General Crozier has bungled the rifle situation because of the attitude which makes him regard two or three months as “a perfectly endurable delay.”
For two years and a half before entering the war we relied upon broomstick preparedness. For the first eight months of the war we have followed the same policy as regards the vital matter of rifles for our troops.