Freedom From Lines By Lines


   Astin had surprised everyone when he returned from the US and almost immediately applied to the CS Naval Academy in Mobile. He would graduate from there at the near top of his class, and seems to have found several patrons that singled him out for his talent as an engineer. That was something the Confederate Navy was always sorely short of and eagerly seeking. This also might go a great deal towards explaining why Astin joined the Navy. In the late 19th century, if you lived in the CSA and wished to work on machines, there was no better place than the CSN. If this was truly the explanation for Astin then he had made the correct choice of career paths.
A light examination of Astin’s impact on the war would seem to indicate it was marginal at best. This is particularly true when you consider it in light of future accomplishments, most of which can be traced directly back to his days in the Navy and the Montgomery workshops. All of this is an illusion for two reasons. The first of which is that Astin’s innovations were not the kind that are usually written about because they are not very glorious. They don’t make headlines because they don’t make a story that people usually want to read. The second is because his effect was very subtle. He changed a lot of little things and, it would seem, even he did not understand the implications. This is only natural when you consider that, at his heart, Astin was not a military man.
It would be a report from the Confederate War depart that would lead him to Mexico. Several members of the Confederate General staff had been impressed by the Mexican use of the armored cars employed by their cavalry. This was despite the fact that the Mexican Lancers were so disappointed in them that they no longer used them and, in fact, had never wanted them in the first place. There were many who believed that where the Mexicans had failed, the Confederacy could not only make it work but, improve it. Strangely enough, Astin was not one of these.
When he was first handed the plans for what was being called a “Land Battleship” he quickly let it be known that the entire design was impractical. The internal combustion engine had been around for nearly a half century at this point. The personal automobile had been around for about twenty years with the invention of a practical carburetor. In 1899, all of these were still the toys of the very rich and few had seen military service. Astin had seen the Mexican designs and he fully understood that Mexico was way ahead of everyone else in the engineering required to make this work. What the Confederate War Department wanted was as Greene wrote, “silly humbug.”
Someone in Richmond, most obviously not an engineer, had dreamed up the idea of not only armoring a car to be proof against small arms but, against artillery as well. They wanted to put more than a Maxim gun on it, they wanted to do as the ANV had around Washington. They wanted to mount artillery on the thing. Greene quickly understood that the design was so heavy that no engine could possibly move it. Even if there were, he had already read about the Mexican experience and it proved what he had suspected.
There were no tires capable of traversing adverse terrain and the military commonly encountered this. The only possible solution was to make solid wheels with metal flanges. This approach had been tried on farm machinery and it had met with mixed success. Military considerations would also, probably, be far more adverse than a farmers field. It would also make the design even heavier and it was already too much so. For these reasons, Greene scoffed at the project right from the start. He also agreed to take it on.
This is probably where the project benefited from the fact that Greene was no military man. While the Generals in Richmond only thought in terms of things that blew other things up, Astin saw the world quite differently. He had showed himself quite adept at understanding mechanical systems and he obviously saw the military supply system in this light. He knew that what they did have the resources to accomplish, that would do the most good, was not to put armor on cars but, needed supplies instead. He saw the war department grant as a license to research and build a bigger and stronger engine. He did just that.
When he was finished with an actual vehicle, that went with his new engine, he did not armor the thing. Instead he turned the horseless carriage into a horseless wagon. The truck was not exactly a new design but, Greene’s truck was significant in the fact that it was made specifically to survive battlefield conditions. It would not survive a direct attack by enemy weapons but, it was never meant too. What it would survive is the rugged conditions that armies traverse. Many field tests had proven this and, by late 1899, Greene only had one last logistical problem left. It was how to make enough of them, fast enough, to make a difference on the battlefield.
While the automobile might seem to lack any serious advantage over pack animals this is most certainly not the case. Too the modern reader, who is used to having to fill up their tank with gasoline and shell out money they otherwise might not, the advantages might not seem clear. To the mind of a late 19th century general it was even less clear. There were no advantages in speed since a horse, even a burdened one, could easily outpace a vehicle of that day and age. Fuel for vehicles was both expensive and not so common. At the same time, forage for pack animals, was both common and cheap. Most important, no matter how rugged you made a vehicle it could not traverse the terrain that a mule could.
These were all illusions for reasons that were yet to be discovered. You could look at the fact that both pack animals and vehicles both consume fuel. The key difference is that if you do not use your pack animal he still consumes fuel and this only serves to increase the amount of fuel required. That fuel takes up precious space and reduces the amount of  cargo that can be carried. You also get infinitely more power per any given volume of petrol than you ever could from fodder. This also reduces the space required for fuel.
The speed factor was also highly illusionary. The attitude of the day was greatly shaped by the fact that many had seen a galloping horse outrun the fasted automated buggy. What was not generally recognized was the fact that a horse can’t gallop while burdened with supplies nor can he keep it up all day. Animals, like people, get tired and have to be constantly rested. Machinery keeps going until it breaks down and that led to the other most widely accepted attitude of the time. People had seen machines break down almost constantly. Still, when a horse or a mule breaks down, the common practice was to shoot them. Most armies quite often ate the animal after that. If a machine breaks down, more times than not, it can usually be fixed. All of these factors were not so readily evident but, eventually, they would prove themselves crucial.
Greene did not seem inclined to debate any of this with his own war department. He had considerable resistance from Richmond once his plans became apparent. This even prompted a phone call from President Wheeler but, it seems to have had little effect on Greene. He proceeded anyway and the only thing Mechanics Hall could do about it was deny him resources. They tried and even that did not work since Greene was the man sitting at the heart of those very resources. Greene had already produced too much for them, he had a few supporters in Mobile, and it was enough to allow him to continue but, it did force what would prove to be a most crucial change in his approach.
The problem of producing enough trucks, to be of use, had been a problem from the start, Astin’s estimates of the Confederate production capacity had been coming up short almost from the start. Now that he had less cooperation and material, he would have to budget his pet project even more than originally planned. His solution was typical Astin Greene. A man that saw mechanical systems, in everything that he looked at, suddenly got the idea to apply that view to the production system. He quickly realized that it was grossly inefficient and if it were a design for an engine, he’d throw it off his board almost at once. That was why Greene set about the task of restructuring how things got built.
It was easy enough for him to do it in his own shops where he pretty much had unlimited authority. The production in those shops quickly increased along with the complaints from his civilian work force. Many quit over the reforms and Greene was often accused of treating his workers as if they were slaves. In the Confederacy this was no small insult between white men. It did not stop Astin since the war had already disrupted the economy and for every man that quit, there were ten more who would take their place.
The problem that Astin encountered was with his civilian contractors. His shops could not produce most of what he needed and his reliance on them was high. Many outright refused to implement his innovations. Their complaints were not unrealistic by their way of thinking. At the time, many of even the most menial of tasks were considered skilled labor. In essence, building anything out of steel, even making the metal itself, required an artisan and these people could not be as arbitrarily replaced as Astin was doing in his workshops. The social stigma, that was quickly being attached to Greene’s labor force, threatened to run off the very men that Confederate industry required to survive. It would put them out of business and bring Confederate industry to a screeching halt.
This is what first sent Astin to Mexico. Emperor Maximillian had already laid the favorable political landscape. Astin’s ideas were better received by any number of Mexican industrialists. They began setting up lines of workers and runners who each did one task. The various parts and supplies were organized right down to where they were stored. It eliminated many time consuming actions and, more important, it suddenly turned a host of jobs, that once required skilled labor, into something that could be efficiently done by almost anybody and with very little training required.
By early 1900, Astin was getting the finished products required to begin the assembly process for his fleet of trucks. He shocked many of his detractors by how quickly he had managed to produce over a hundred of the vehicles. It gave him enough clout to allow his vehicles to be field tested but, the real question was where?
That was right about the time that the New Mexico campaign began to be planned in earnest and, in Richmond and Mexico City, it was quickly realized that one of the single largest impediments to the campaign was the regions lack of water and a need to supply this to the armies. It greatly hampered operations for two reasons. The first of which was the lack of railroads in the region which meant that the armies would have to stay even closer to the tracks than was normal. This factor narrowed down the front and eliminated the advantages of surprise.
The second problem was that supply caravans, consisting of pack animals, required water too. Carrying fodder was easy enough, if not bulky, but carrying water was an entirely different matter. Water was both heavier than hay and no descent water containers, that could be strapped on an animals back, existed. There were water sacks and wagons but, sacks leaked profusely and the water wagons could no better traverse rough terrain than an automobile. This all looked to be a logistical factor that could kill the offensive before it even started. Astin’s fleet of trucks offered a solution.