Tanks from A. C. F.

Into Fort Knox, Ky., and Fort Benning, Ga., last week poured a stream of new faces. They were crack officers, detailed in a great batch of Army orders to join the new Armored Force. In officers' conferences the new force's commander, Brigadier General Adna Romanza Chaffee, leather-faced son of the late onetime Chief of Staff, Lieut. General Adna R. Chaffee, looked around at a wide assortment of Army insignia. Some, like himself, wore on their collars the crossed sabres of the Cavalry. Present also were the rifles of the Infantry, the cannons of the Artillery, the retorts of the Chemical Warfare Service, the flags of the Signal Corps.

So fast had the Army's newest branch been born that no one had had time to devise an insignia for it. But it was not conceived without planning. Last week, in the midst of organizing two armored divisions and other outfits to make up the First Armored Corps, Adna Chaffee could see and hear the good results of Army foresight. Part of it came in the kind of officers he was getting--the best the service has. More of it came from the sprawling plant of American Car & Foundry Co. at Berwick, Pa.

Fortnight ago to A. C. F. went the Army's biggest tank order in its peacetime history--627 caterpillared twelve-ton rolling fortresses to cost around $11,500,000 (about $18,000 apiece). Cheering thing to Army men about the order was that they were sure of pretty fast delivery. For under a previous educational order (for 329 tanks at about $6,000,000) A. C. F.'s Berwick plant was already turning out twelve-tonners at the rate of two a day, expected by September to have upped the rate to five a day.

Half-starved, like most other great railroad equipment companies, on the trickle of orders from the U. S.'s No. i transportation medium, A. C. F. turned to tanks with gusto. To handle the Army order, plus $12,000,000 in contracts from the Allies for shells, A. C. F.'s Berwick plant boss, spectacled, trap-mouthed Guy C. Beishline built three new plant additions, started an ordnance department, filled it with annealing hearths, lathes, other machine tools. A. C. F.'s flint-shelled armor plate for tanks is made by a secret process, involving endless steel treating and hardening, and Guy Beishline's workmen work around the clock, seven days a week.

An oldtimer in the tank business, but not on a big production scale, A. C. F. turned out its first twelve-ton machine on May 8--a snub-snouted monster armed with four .30-calibre machine guns, a .50-calibre machine gun for use against aircraft and a wicked-looking 37-rnm. (about 1 1/2-inch) cannon. Since then the assembly line has turned them out with increasing regularity. A. C. F. drivers take the tanks for 40-m.p.h. trial runs, see that their Continental airplane-type engines function, bring them back to the shop for final adjustment down to close tolerances (1/10,000 of an inch) before marking them ready for delivery. To the officers of the new Armored Corps, anxious to start training their men in new equipment, new Panzer tactics, A. C. F.'s tank-production line was just what the doctor ordered.

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