America entered the war when this development of ordnance novelties had reached an advanced state. It became necessary for us, then, to make a rapid study of what had been done and then go ahead with our own production either from foreign designs or with inventions of our own.
To this end in April, 1917, a few days after we declared war with Germany, the Trench Warfare Section was organized within the Ordnance Department and given charge of the production of these novelties. The section did not entirely confine itself to trench-warfare materials, since one of its chief production activities was concerned with the manufacture of the various sorts of bombs to be dropped from airplanes. Also, at the start of its existence it had charge of the production of implements for fighting with poison gas and flame. Although in large part this phase of its work was taken away from it in the summer of 1917 and was later placed under the jurisdiction of the newly organized Chemical Warfare Service, the Trench Warfare Section continued to conduct certain branches of gas-warfare manufacture, in particular the production of the famous Livens projectors of gas and also the manufacture of the portable toxic-gas sets for producing gas clouds from cylinders.
All in all, the Trench Warfare Section was charged with the responsibility of producing some 47 devices, every one of them new to American manufacture and some extremely difficult to make. The backbone of the program consisted of the production of grenades, both of the hand-thrown and the rifle-fired variety, trench mortars, trench-mortar ammunition, pyrotechnics of various sorts, and bombs for the airplanes, with their sighting and release mechanisms.
In the production of these new devices there arose a new form of cooperation between Government and private manufacturers under the tutelage of the Trench Warfare Section. The manufacturers engaged in the production of various classes of these munition novelties joined in formal associations. There was a Hand Grenade Manufacturers' Association, under the capable leadership of William Sparks, president of the Sparks-Withington Co., of Jackson, Mich.; the Drop Bomb Manufacturers' Association, headed by J. L. Sinyard, president of A. O. Smith Corporation, Milwaukee; the Six-inch Trench-mortar Shell Manufacturers' Association, R. W. Millard, president of Foster-Merriam Co., Meriden, Conn.; the Rifle Grenade Manufacturers' Association, under the leadership of F. S. Briggs, president of the Briggs & Stratton Co., Milwaukee, Wis.; and the Livens Projector Manufacturers' Association. A similar association of manufacturers engaged in army contracts existed in the production of small-arms ammunition; but in no other branch of the Ordnance Department was the development of such cooperation carried on to the extent of that fathered by the Trench Warfare Section.