Shot & Shell

At the end of World War I, even stay-at-home U. S. citizens could see for themselves that war is wasteful business. The evidences were all around them: great stocks of airplanes, deserted cantonments, warehouses full of equipment that only the cut-rate dealer or the junkman wanted. Of all these white war elephants, none looked bigger than the 53 new powder and shell-loading plants built between April 1917 and Armistice Day, at a cost of $360,000,000. On Nov. 11, 1918. the U. S. was the world's No. 1 producer of explosives (86,663,000 lb. in three months). Thereafter the U. S., deciding it would see no more wars, junked most of its powder plants.

Last week in Washington the War Department grabbed time by the forelock, signed a $16,075,000 order for smokeless powder to be turned out by Hercules Powder Co. (operators of the famed Charleston, W. Va. nitro plant of 1918) from a mill still to be built near Radford, Va. Only the week before the Army had signed a $25,000,000 contract with Hercules to put up the plant and operate it on a cost-plus basis. It was the second construction contract to be let in 1940's defense emergency for a powder mill to be operated by private industry, owned by the Government. Du Pont had signed one like it last month (for a plant at Charlestown, Ind.). These contracts were the first moves made by the U. S. Government to increase its pip-squeak peacetime powder supply. All Government powder now comes from three plants -- Du Pont and Hercules and the Army's Picatinny Arsenal near Dover, N. J. -- and Picatinny is on little more than a laboratory basis.

The Hercules and Du Pont contracts were only a start. Before this empty breech of U. S. defense is properly loaded, Major General Charles Macon Wesson, Army Chief of Ordnance, has many an other contract to allot. Congress has already appropriated and authorized $244,000,000, is now ready to lay out $700,000,000 more for powder plants, for great factories where smokeless and high explosive will be loaded into small-arms ammunition (pistol, rifle, machine gun), aerial bombs, artillery shells. The Army has laid out plans for building 33 plants in five U. S. areas, has specified that no plant shall be within 200 miles of any U. S. border.

Standard capacity of each of the 18 plants making explosives will be 200,000 lb. in an eight-hour day. Not until all are built, not until the 15 supplementary loading and fuse plants are completed, can General Wesson and his staff of technicians breathe easily. They will not breathe easily for a long time. Best estimate is that Du Pont and Hercules, starting their building almost together and putting on full steam, will not be in production for twelve or 13 months. How soon other contractors would volunteer to take on the building and operation of other similar plants, no one in Washington would venture to say.

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