U. S. Army Ordnance Department

J. vonNeumann, First Draft of a Report on the Edvac , Contract No. W-670-ORD-4926 between the U. S. Army Ordnance Department and the University of Pennsylvania Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pensylvania, 1945. 

The very concept of a stored program computer had its roots in the work done during World War II on a computing machine called the ENIAC. At the start of World War II, the military felt a need for more and better trajectory tables for artillery. To prepare the tables, the Ballistic Research Laboratory of the U.S. Army Ordnance Department utilized a pair of mechanical differential analyzers. But by 1943 the produaion of ballistic tables was so far behind schedule that the Ordnance Department began to look for another means of preparing the tables. The answer came in April 1943, when a delegation from... 

Department of Chemistry, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. The work was supported by the Office of Ordnance Research, U. S. Army. 

About 1900 the Navy Department built the Naval Powder Factory at Indian Head, Maryland. The plant was capable of producing several thousand pounds of smokeless powder per day, and was enlarged during the course of a few years to a capacity of about 10,000 pounds daily. About 1907 the Ordnance Department, U. S. Army, built at Picatinny Arsenal, Dover, New Jersey, a powder plant with a capacity of several thousand pounds per day. 

Another American stored program computer project was initiated by Eckert and Mauchly after they left the Moore School and formed their own company in 1946. Eckert and Mauchly approached the U.S. Bureau of the Census with the idea of building a computer, but while the bureau was interested, it was forbidden by law from entering into research and development contracts. A scheme was thus developed by which the Census Bureau would obtain 300,000 from the Army Ordnance Department (making it the Army s third stored program computer project) and then transfer the funds to the National Bureau of Standards. The NBS would fund the development of a computer, to be called the UNIVAC (UNIVersal Automatic Computer), for use by the three concerned agencies. ... 

The War Department used many of these perchlorate compounds in W.W.I., contrary to the claim of the U.S. Army Center for Ordnance Expertise that perchlorate was first used in W.W.n. The Germans also had a 17 cm shell which used ammonium perchlorate as the explosive filler. In W.W.I., the United States used perchlorate compounds for signaling rockets and flares, and as a burster charge in gas grenades. Perchlorate is and has been used in over 250 munitions often in powder train time fuses and propellants in rockets and in other time fuse applications. Since perchlorate is so water soluble, it is a secondary contaminant in water dumped or buried munitions. Perchlorate has an exothermic reaction (heats up) as it ages, capable of spontaneous combustion. 

The Ordnance Department was in the Department of War, which was the official name and cabinet-level department of the U.S. Army. The separate Department of the Navy had its own ordnance unit, but it was smaller and less influential in shaping the production of synthetic organic explosives and, especially, gases in World War I. Over the years, historians have developed a sizable literature on explosives and U.S. mobilization in World War I. Particularly central to understanding mobilization are Koistinen, Mobilizing for Modern War, from which I have drawn extensively Cuff, The... 

The United States Army was slow to respond to gas warfare because it assumed that masks would adequately protect U.S. troops. The civilian Department of the Interior, which had experience dealing with poison gases in mines, therefore took the lead in chemical warfare studies. The Army quickly changed its mind when the Germans introduced mustard gas in July 1917. Research contracts for poison-gas development went out to Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Yale and other universities. With what a British observer could now call the great importance attached in America to this branch of warfare, Army Ordnance began construction in November 1917 of a vast war-gas arsenal at Edgewood, Maryland, on waste and marshy land. 

The U.S. Biological Warfare Committee, with Mr. Merck as chairman, came into being in October 1944, as a supervisory body to make recommendations to the Secretary of War and Chief of Staff on policy and to establish liaison with its British counterpart, the London Inter-Service Sub-Committee on Biological Warfare (ISSCBW). Members of the new committee included the Chief, Chemical Warfare Service the director of the New Developments Division, WDSS the director of the Office of Strategic Services the chief of the Navy Bureau of Ordnance the Surgeon Generals of the Army and Navy the chief of the Military Intelligence Service the Chief of Staff, ASF the chief of the Requirements Section, AGF the assistant chief of Air Staff Plans the British Army Staff representatives the director of Canada s Department of Chemical Warfare and Smoke and the CWS representative on the ISSCBW. Research and de-... 

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