Patrick J. Owens - Picatinny: The First Century

T he perennial curse of New Jersey sites is to have their locations regularly fixed in relation to either New York or Philadelphia. For the subject of this world, the reference point is New York City, specifically the Borough of the Bronx. A person who takes the Cross-Bronx Expressway west over the George Washington Bridge and follows Interstate 80 to exit 32 can turn on to New Jersey Route 15 North and almost immediately be at Picatinny Arsenal, a 6,500-acre reservation which is the leader in researching, developing, and engineering United States Army weapons and munitions. A name occasionally heard in the documentaries which flood the History, Discovery, Military, and similarly programmed cable channels, Picatinny has played a significant role in arming Unites States troops for over a century and a quarter.

Events at an obscure support facility do not make for the most exciting reading, but these events influenced the dashing happenings which are the stuff of war movies. In its first incarnation as a powder depot, the installation sent gunpowder to troops serving in the Spanish-American War, the Philippine Insurrection, and the China Relief and Mexican expeditions. Production experiments early in the 20th century determined explosive D would fill armor-piercing rounds for over half-a-century. The powder factory established in 1907 supplied troops through two world wars while development work during the 1920s and 1930s influenced the artillery and tank rounds, fuzes, grenades, and mines of World War II and beyond. In the first years of the 1950s, Picatinny gave ground troops the 3.5-inch bazooka rocket, the C-4 explosive, and the Atomic Annie artillery shell. Soldiers in Vietnam fired Picatinny developed light antitank weapons and 40mm grenade launcher rounds. Today, if it goes boom and the Army uses it, it is probably a Picatinny product.

This book is a hodgepodge. Given its multiplicity of purposes, it could not be otherwise. On one hand, it attempts to tell readers unfamiliar with the installation what Picatinny did and how it came to do it. On the other, it offers itself as a reference work for Picatinnyans interested in the origins and development of their missions, buildings, and landscape and in the work their predecessors did and the environment in which they did it. The outsider may find discussions of where certain activities took place or when road layouts changed confusing and boring while Picatinnyans will have an easier time placing pictures with these words.

Critics are free to harp on how the chapters jump around internally, combining discussions of construction, technical developments, and social trends. This is a reflection of life at a place where people do work. Where there is work, there are buildings and technical processes. Where there are people, there is sociology. The intention is to limn interactions and show how one Army installation functioned at different periods of its career and how the people on the installation interacted with it. In short, this work tries to offer something for everyone in the firm expectation of satisfying no one.

The hodgepodge characterization applies both to the topics discussed and to the space and emphasis given to the same topics at different points in the narrative. The first chapter is heavy on details of land acquisition and construction because it was necessary to build the installation before it could do anything. Later chapters give little attention to land acquisitions because these became smaller and less complicated. Construction work varied in intensity. Chapter Three spends much space on the reconstruction following the 1926 explosion and chapter eight goes into detail on the construction of the Naval Air Rocket Test Station. Others are content to single out individual structures whose peculiarities excite interest.

After World War I, Picatinny put more emphasis on research work. Chapters three and after reflect this. The projects discussed are only a sampling of Picatinnys work and, sometimes, not the most important. For contrast, this work occasionally focuses on dead ends. It is about Picatinny as a place supporting varied efforts, a service organization for many missions. Selectivity becomes more extreme as chapters progress because the later the time frame, the more variety to Picatinny projects and the greater the number of organizations it housed. Often, the criterion for selection is not a projects technological worth or its value to national defense, but its ability to illustrate a larger point about the workings of the installation.

The start of research and development work created a bifocal arsenal, one part concentrating on production and the other on research and engineering. Chapter three is fairly comprehensive, touching on most of the efforts on-going in the early 1920s, but later chapters treat progressively smaller samples of the total Picatinny effort. Even where a project receives more than minimal space, its story may be incomplete as discussion focuses on Picatinnys role in the effort and the efforts influence on Picatinny. A running theme is the nations receipt of real value from a place ready and able to do sundry duties while learning to perform new ones quickly.

Chapter Four tells the story of the havoc wreaked at Picatinny by the explosion at the neighboring Lake Denmark Naval Ammunition Depot while Chapter Five tells of the rebuilding, stressing the role of New Deal agencies in preparing the arsenal to meet the challenges of another world war.