New Jersey Artillery Explosives Production in World War I

Written by Andrea Dragon, Ph.D. Andrea investigates and writes about New Jersey's industrial history. Professor Dragon will be teaching a continuing education course on "New Jersey's Explosives History" at Rutgers - New Brunswick in the fall, 2024. For details, see the fall catalog at olliru.rutgers.edu. The course is described on page 31.

 

1914:  World War I Breaks Out

 

Russia started to modernize its army in 1913, with substantial French financial and weapons support. The beginning of a five-year plan, one of the main goals was to expand artillery to catch up with Germany. But war broke out. 

 

After the first four months of the war, all combatants realized they were in for a long war with deadly modern weapons. Every country’s strategy of a quick victory through offensive warfare failed. Germany did not defeat France and England in the west, and the Russian offensive against Germany in the east ended in disaster. The result was four years of trench warfare in the west and three years of large-scale but inconclusive warfare in the east. Russia stayed in the war only because of imports of weapons, especially through large orders in the U.S.

 

Russia, like all combatants in World War I, was not prepared for a long war. Russia’s stockpile of shells was inadequate for the high rates of fire. The Russian army used up most of its inventory of shells in the first four months of the war. Russia did not have the production capacity to resupply shells for its large army.

 

Financing Russia’s Need for Artillery Shells and Explosives: First England and then J. P. Morgan and American Loans

 

      Russia needed foreign loans because it couldn't produce the quantity of war materiel needed to engage in modern warfare. When the war began in the late summer of 1914, Russia had a large standing army of over one million soldiers and through conscription and reserves Czar Nicholas II had the ability to draft and call up millions more for the army. What Czar Nicholas didn't have was the industrial capability to manufacture artillery, artillery shells and ammunitions in the quantities necessary to turn his large army into a modern fighting force. 

 

      The Czar's cousin, King George V of England, and his parliament, were willing to spend whatever it took to keep the Czar's army fighting on Germany's eastern borders because every German soldier sent east to fight the Russians meant one less soldier to fight British soldiers in the trenches of France and Belgium.

 

      In the early months of the war, Britain loaned Russia money to buy armaments on the world market, but Britain attached conditions to the loans (buying in England?). Although the munitions themselves would be made to Russian specifications, the contracting for their manufacture would be handled by the British.

 

      Russia chafed under these conditions and wanted a free hand to choose the manufacturers, delivery times, and most important of all, how and when the contracts would be paid.  Russia tried to go around Britain and seek loans directly from bankers in the neutral United States believing those conditions would be less onerous than the British ones.  

 

Obtaining U.S. Financing

       

J.P. Morgan was an investment bank. It did not have the financial assets of a large commercial bank. Morgan syndicated loans through wealthy corporate and individual clients and other banks. It made its money from commissions.

 

      A compromise of sorts was reached in the fall of 1914 when Chancellor of the Exchequer and later Minister of Munitions David Lloyd George asked J. P. Morgan, Jr. who was heading up his father's banking house, to loan Russia $12,000,000 (about $300 million in today's dollars) to buy weapons and ordnance. A few months later, Morgan responded to additional requests by beginning a long process of bundling a staggering $500,000,000 worth of loans from his bank and from other American banks.

 

Only a few people in the United States outside of the government knew that seventy-five percent of the Morgan-brokered money was designated to be funneled through obscure channels to Russia to buy munitions from American ordnance companies. Although these direct loans from privately owned banks to governments at war with Germany were not illegal because they did not violate America's official policy of neutrality, they were the subject of fierce debate among members of President Wilson's cabinet.  The new loans granted Russian officials the ability to act without British oversight enabling them to add layers of regulations to manufacturing contracts by inserting a boggling array of parties, terms, penalties and conditions. The U.S. government refused to make or guarantee loans because of Wilson’s policy of neutrality. America was still strongly isolationist, so any government loans would probably be politically unpopular. And Wilson was facing reelection in 1916.

 

      On September 22, 1915, representatives of the Russian and British government, with J.P. Morgan, Jr. acting as purchasing agent, signed a contract with New Jersey's Union Powder Company for the manufacture of several million rounds of both high explosive and shrapnel shells for the Russian version of the French 75mm (76.2mm due to Russia's unique system of measurement) field artillery gun. These were the first Allied shells made in America.

 

New Jersey Artillery Explosives Production and Shipping for Russia

 

Russia contracted with American companies, mostly in New Jersey, to produce shells and explosives as early as 1915. 

 

     "Soon to be erected on the north side of the Raritan River between the towns of Fords and Metuchen will be the world's largest munitions factory."

      Daily Home News, New Brunswick, New Jersey, July 17, 1915.     

 

      The newspaper didn't name the Raritan River factory, but it was the Nixon Nitration Works and its sole customer was the Russian Imperial Army.  It was owned by New Jersey explosives pioneer Lewis Nixon.

 

Lewis Nixon was the top graduate of his 1882 U.S. Naval Academy class.  After graduating, he pursued graduate work in naval architecture at the Royal Naval College in England where the future King George V was his classmate.  After finishing his studies in England, Nixon moved to Russia where he spent a few years building torpedo boats for the Czar's navy before returning to the U.S. and managing shipyards in Philadelphia and Elizabeth, New Jersey. In 1897, he supervised the building of the U.S. Navy's first commissioned submarine.  

 

      Despite his success in ship building, Nixon lost interest in naval architecture and decided to switch to manufacturing the explosive propellant nitrocellulose, commonly known as smokeless powder.  Even though he knew the basics of smokeless powder manufacture (soaking cotton in nitric and sulfuric acid with the aid of a solvent) Nixon couldn't just start manufacturing because unlike gunpowder, smokeless powder was proprietary and he risked being sued for patent infringement if he proceeded without a obtaining a license from a patent holder.  He contacted a Naval Academy classmate, John Baptiste Bernadou, who was conducting research on smokeless powder at the Naval Torpedo Station in Newport, Rhode Island.  Like Nixon, Bernadou had traveled to Russia and spoke the language which came in handy because he was also the naval station's official translator of international research articles including those written by the Russian chemist Mendeleev, the same Mendeleev who devised the periodic table.  In 1897, Bernadou and a colleague, George Converse, received an American patent for smokeless powder that was very similar to the one Mendeleev had patented years earlier. (For the story of the development of smokeless powder, see my post The Maxim’s Machine Gun and Smokeless Powder.)

 

      After buying a license from Bernadou, Nixon began manufacturing smokeless powder in the Raritan River town of Sayerville.  Unsurprisingly, right away Nixon received orders from the U.S. Navy and from several European armies and by 1902 his factory was producing 6,000 pounds of power a day.

 

       In 1904 Nixon sold his business to the explosives giant DuPont and returned to naval architecture. But the advent of war revived his interest in smokeless power and utilizing his knowledge of Russian, and his royal contacts in Britain, he obtained a contract to supply Russia with 1,000,000 pounds of smokeless powder in 1915. In his new company (the world's largest munitions factory referred to in the above quote) which was spread out over twelve square miles along the Raritan River, hundreds of powder men and women and their Russian supervisors produced 75,000 pounds of smokeless powder a day, producing over 200,000,000 pounds by the end of the war.

 

      Nixon wasn't the only New Jersey powder man who made explosives for the Russians in WWI, but he was among the largest.  One thing all manufacturers had in common was all received payment for the powder and shells they produced from the money Russia had borrowed via a bewilderingly complex system of loans.

 

Union Powder company was owned by another New Jersey explosives pioneer, T.A. Gillespie, who had no experience making munitions but as owner of an important New York civil engineering firm he had experience getting government contracts.   His company was one of several New Jersey shell-loading subcontractors doing business with the lead contractor, Canadian Car and Foundry, a Montreal-based manufacturer of heavy railroad equipment.  In October, 1914, just few weeks after the war began, Canadian Car had received a contract from the British government to manufacture 5,000,000 shells for Russia even though the company had no experience making munitions.  Early in 1915, Canadian Car purchased fifty acres of New Jersey swamp land near the town of Lyndhurst and began building what was billed as the world's largest shell-loading facility, "Kingsland," where hundreds of employees working under Russian supervision would load smokeless powder propellant that had been made by Nixon and other powder men plus shrapnel and high explosives into shell bodies shipped to Kingsland via railroad.

 

      Only about half of the shells specified in the contract had been delivered in January of 1917 when a devastating explosion nearly destroyed the facility, but Canadian Car partially rebuilt and loading operations limped along at a reduced pace until August of that year when the political situation in Russia began to change following Lenin's return from exile.   Because the Russian Imperial Army was Kingsland's only customer, the facility's future depended on whether the new government in Petrograd was going to continue to fight on, or get out of the war altogether.  Sensing which way the wind was blowing, Canadian Car closed down their Russian shell-loading operation in Kingsland a few weeks later.

 

The three largest shell-loading plants in the United States were in New Jersey.

 

The United States Enters the War

 

      Russia left the war late in late 1917 because of the Russian Revolution. The new Bolshevik (Communist) government defaulted on Imperial Russia's obligations to pay for the munitions it had received from American suppliers and subcontractors. Fortunately for New Jersey explosives manufacturers, the United States entered the war in April, 1917.

 

After the U.S. declared war, the New Jersey explosives industry shifted into a much higher gear. For example, an all-female crew working at DuPont's explosives plant in Carney Point, New Jersey, produced 1,000,000 pounds of powder a day. 

 

The United States army had little artillery. The French "rented" artillery to the U.S. Army who paid the rent in picric acid (TNP) filled shells. The French supplied the hardware and the U.S. supplied the manpower and the explosive shells. This was General Pershing's deal. New Jersey workers made the picric acid, loaded it into shells, then shipped the shells to Europe via South Amboy and Jersey City.

 

For security reasons, shell production figures were never published and exact numbers remain elusive. A reasonable guess is that between four and five million high-explosive shells were manufactured at all the shell-loading plants in the U.S. between April 1917 and November 1918.

 

In the summer of 1918, the U.S. government contracted with Gillespie to build a giant shell-loading facility, one of the largest in the world. 

 

      How many of that number Gillespie's Morgan plant produced may never be known because on October 4, 1918, the Gillespie plant was destroyed by an explosion that killed over 100 workers, many of them women and teenage girls.  The explosion destroyed twelve million pounds of high explosives. 

 

      No evidence of sabotage was ever found.

 

Conclusions

 

This is a good example of two key aspects of World War I.

 

First, the United States as the world’s largest and most diverse industrial power could provide Russia and later France with war materiel they could not produce themselves in sufficient quantity.

 

Second, England, France and Russia had resources beyond what they could domestically produce or provide. In this example, access to artillery shells from Canada and the United States. In addition, England and France could call upon substantial numbers of troops from colonies and Dominion countries (Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa).

 

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For a related post, see

The Maxim’s Machine Gun and Smokeless Powder