RM Vivas
US Veteran
Many of us are familiar with the Defense Supplies Corp. (DSC) as it relates to the Smith & Wesson Victory revolver.
This post is meant to describe an ongoing project I'm working on to find and organize documents regarding the sale and distribution of S&W Victory revolvers by the DSC during World War Two.
The common understanding is that the U.S. government formed the DSC to handle the provisioning of small arms to various non-military users. Guards, police, etc. who needed a revolver and could not procure one on the open market (which was pretty much limited to second-hand guns) could petition the DSC to sell them a revolver, either a S&W Victory or a Colt Commando.
That is about as far as most peoples' understanding of S&W and the DSC goes, including mine.
Recently, while reviewing documents about the DSC providing Victory revolvers to the NYPD, I noticed several little interesting tidbits about the DSC, S&W and wartime revolver sales and service. So much so, that I decided to take a deeper look at S&W and the DSC as represented in some of the documents at the S&WHF. My findings thus far have been quite interesting.
There is a search function within the S&WHF database that allows one to search by various fields. I had the database pull up all the ORDERS from 01JAN42 through 31DEC46. As you can imagine, this produced many thousands of records. I then winnowed those records down by caliber, seeking out -only- those orders that were revolvers of .38 caliber. Not surprisingly this pulled up .38 Special and .38/200 revolvers as well as a smattering of .38 S&W and the like.
Once I had assembled a folder of these orders, I started going through them. The first thing I noticed was that the orders for DSC guns were processed on standard S&W shipping invoices. The only thing that set them apart from the conventional commercial invoices was that across the top of the invoice it read "Defense Supplies Corp." Each invoice had multiple fields of data that, when properly organized, could reveal some very interesting things.
The biggest issue was serial numbers. Unfortunately, most of the invoices (and I have by no means gone through all of them) lack serial number data. They are still quite useful, but for what we do and where our interests lie, serial number data is gold. Still, there were quite a number of invoices that –did—have serial number data and I have thus far been able to pick out about 1,200 serial numbers.
The various fields that I used to organize the data are:
Serial number – Although by no means common, there were over one thousand serial numbers jotted down thus far. In instances where a serial number was on an invoice, I added it to the spreadsheet (duh!)
Customer's Date – Presumably this is the date the customer ordered his gun through DSC. This data occupies a specific line on the invoice.
Date – I believe this to be the date that S&W received the order from DSC and started processing it. This date also occupies a specific date on the invoice.
Shipping Date? – This is a date rubber stamped on the bottom of the invoice, usually twice, and I believe that it reflects the date of the actual shipment. I'm in the process of using some exploratory techniques to verify this thesis.
Order – This is a specific line item on the invoice and will contain the letters DSC followed by a space and then a three or four digit number (DSC 1234). Despite being labelled ORDER, this is –not—the DSC order number. Research suggests this is actually the DSC shipping or shipment number.
Order No. – This is a notation usually typed on the invoice with what is described as a "Contract No.". From what I have seen thus far, the contract numbers were arbitrary and didn't seem to follow any pattern. Often the incorporated the intials of the ordering party as part of the number, so when Gruman Aircraft ordered revolvers, their contract number may have been GAC1234 or some such.
Name, title, street address, city, state - Self explanatory
Number and type of guns in shipment – Again, pretty self-explanatory. The guns were almost always described as "38 M&P 4" sq." and then either a letter "B" to indicate blue or "sand blast" to indicate a parkerized-type finish. Sometimes "sand blast" would be typed in as part of the arm description and other times just the initials "SB" would be penned in.
Record location – If you can't locate the record, then you can't prove anything. This is the record identifier so I can find the record again in the database.
This would be a sample of a DSC Shipping Invoice for a single gun shipment where the s/n was recorded. I wish there were a lot more of these!!!!!
Some of the interesting things I've noticed:
I still have a couple thousand invoices to go through. The earliest one I've seen thus far is DSC 660 and the latest DSC thus far has been around DSC 6300. The entire sequence of shipping invoices, organized by DSC shipping number, seems to be largely intact based upon what I have seen thus far. To be sure, there are gaps, but I think a rather detailed view can be constructed of how many guns shipped when and to whom. (Note: after the war the DSC continued in function, re-branded as the Reconstruction Finance Corp.)
Throughout the early war years (1942 and 1943) S&W was still taking and processing orders for civilian gun sales. There were many invoices with commercial order numbers on them for various guns to the usual distributors and dealers. What was really interesting about these invoices was the Customer's Date would be something like 3/4/42 and the (shipping) Date would be 3/28/46. S&W would take orders during the war and hold them against their anticipated return to civilian production, following their publicized "First Come First Served" policy for post-war production.
The people and agencies that received DSC guns are quite varied. There are many one-gun shipments to Constable Smith or Patrolman Jones and there are scores of multi gun shipments to Big City Police Department and Small County Sheriffs Office. There are also many, many shipments to business concerns. It's not unexpected or unusual to see 50 or 100 guns going to a Ford plant or to an Ordnance Works. Where it becomes interesting is when you see the three-gun shipment to the Joe Blow Gear & Shaft Co., Inc. and wonder why they are getting guns. A little research then shows that this little gear and shaft outfit had a contract to produce parts for the Norden bombsight or some similarly high value project that merited an armed presence. A shipment of twelve guns to the A.B. Smith & Sons company may seem rather innocuous until one digs around and finds that A.B. Smith produced bicycles before the war but then turned the machinery over to making M1 carbine bolts or radio parts or some similar wartime product they would not normally have made but had the machinery capable of making.
While the number of police agencies requesting guns is astonishing, there was a surprising number of other agencies that one would not normally think of when thinking of armed organizations. The Florida Highway Department for example got quite a number of Victory revolvers, as did various Alcoholic Beverage Control agencies, a large number of private railway police, banks, drug makers, etc.
Apparently, revolvers that went out through DSC did sometimes come back and go to other organizations. I found a few invoices where it was mentioned that the revolvers were being returned from one user who, having completed a government contract, would return the guns to DSC (via S&W) and the guns would go back into the 'pool'.
If someone wanted a 2-inch Victory they could order a 4-inch gun through DSC, pay $1.50 to the S&W Repair Department, and the gun would be re-fitted with a 2-inch barrel and then shipped to the user. This raises some interesting questions about when one runs across a 2-inch Victory in the wild. Until it gets lettered, is it a rare 2-inch CID/OSS/FBI gun with a correspondingly high price tag or is it an undercover gun for some deputy sheriff from East Jesus, Kentucky?
One of the great things about these invoices is that they are very often accompanied by correspondence between the factory and the user and all manner of things are discussed and many different sorts of letters are found. A mother writes to S&W asking for a replacement cylinder to send to her boy in the Pacific so that he can shoot more Japs (S&W sent the cylinder to her COD but threw in a fitted extractor for the cause). A deputy sheriff writes about how much he loves his Victory model, as the finish is so "business-like" and then describes his experiences finding Japanese balloon bombs in the Pacific Northwest. A Navy Beachmaster writes about wanting to replace a .38/44 HD he lost on the beach during an amphibious landing.
Equally as interesting as what the customers would write was the various responses from S&W. Many people wrote about wanting their Victory revolvers re-blued to commercial finish and S&W had a rather detailed response about why this could not be done. A great many people also asked about getting guns and S&W had various form letters explaining the procedure for contacting the DSC for a gun and copies of the form used. Possibly the biggest question was when someone could get a commercial gun again and S&W would explain that their entire production was for the government and after the war they would fill new commercial orders on a "First Come, First Served" basis although they could not say exactly which models would continue in their line after the war and which ones would be discontinued.
The fact is that much of the factory responses to correspondence they received gave a very good picture of how the company dealt with both wartime production and the anticipated post-war re-tooling to commercial sales. Whats really great about this is that all the primary sources really help to create a fairly accurate picture of how S&W dealt with the wartime government contracts while still keeping an eye on future commercial sales.
Anyway, I'm going to use this line of posts to drop the occasional historical bon mot that I find that might strike a responsive collectors chord.
None of this would be possible, by the way, without the work of the S&WHF. If you haven't joined, join!
This post is meant to describe an ongoing project I'm working on to find and organize documents regarding the sale and distribution of S&W Victory revolvers by the DSC during World War Two.
The common understanding is that the U.S. government formed the DSC to handle the provisioning of small arms to various non-military users. Guards, police, etc. who needed a revolver and could not procure one on the open market (which was pretty much limited to second-hand guns) could petition the DSC to sell them a revolver, either a S&W Victory or a Colt Commando.
That is about as far as most peoples' understanding of S&W and the DSC goes, including mine.
Recently, while reviewing documents about the DSC providing Victory revolvers to the NYPD, I noticed several little interesting tidbits about the DSC, S&W and wartime revolver sales and service. So much so, that I decided to take a deeper look at S&W and the DSC as represented in some of the documents at the S&WHF. My findings thus far have been quite interesting.
There is a search function within the S&WHF database that allows one to search by various fields. I had the database pull up all the ORDERS from 01JAN42 through 31DEC46. As you can imagine, this produced many thousands of records. I then winnowed those records down by caliber, seeking out -only- those orders that were revolvers of .38 caliber. Not surprisingly this pulled up .38 Special and .38/200 revolvers as well as a smattering of .38 S&W and the like.
Once I had assembled a folder of these orders, I started going through them. The first thing I noticed was that the orders for DSC guns were processed on standard S&W shipping invoices. The only thing that set them apart from the conventional commercial invoices was that across the top of the invoice it read "Defense Supplies Corp." Each invoice had multiple fields of data that, when properly organized, could reveal some very interesting things.
The biggest issue was serial numbers. Unfortunately, most of the invoices (and I have by no means gone through all of them) lack serial number data. They are still quite useful, but for what we do and where our interests lie, serial number data is gold. Still, there were quite a number of invoices that –did—have serial number data and I have thus far been able to pick out about 1,200 serial numbers.
The various fields that I used to organize the data are:
Serial number – Although by no means common, there were over one thousand serial numbers jotted down thus far. In instances where a serial number was on an invoice, I added it to the spreadsheet (duh!)
Customer's Date – Presumably this is the date the customer ordered his gun through DSC. This data occupies a specific line on the invoice.
Date – I believe this to be the date that S&W received the order from DSC and started processing it. This date also occupies a specific date on the invoice.
Shipping Date? – This is a date rubber stamped on the bottom of the invoice, usually twice, and I believe that it reflects the date of the actual shipment. I'm in the process of using some exploratory techniques to verify this thesis.
Order – This is a specific line item on the invoice and will contain the letters DSC followed by a space and then a three or four digit number (DSC 1234). Despite being labelled ORDER, this is –not—the DSC order number. Research suggests this is actually the DSC shipping or shipment number.
Order No. – This is a notation usually typed on the invoice with what is described as a "Contract No.". From what I have seen thus far, the contract numbers were arbitrary and didn't seem to follow any pattern. Often the incorporated the intials of the ordering party as part of the number, so when Gruman Aircraft ordered revolvers, their contract number may have been GAC1234 or some such.
Name, title, street address, city, state - Self explanatory
Number and type of guns in shipment – Again, pretty self-explanatory. The guns were almost always described as "38 M&P 4" sq." and then either a letter "B" to indicate blue or "sand blast" to indicate a parkerized-type finish. Sometimes "sand blast" would be typed in as part of the arm description and other times just the initials "SB" would be penned in.
Record location – If you can't locate the record, then you can't prove anything. This is the record identifier so I can find the record again in the database.
This would be a sample of a DSC Shipping Invoice for a single gun shipment where the s/n was recorded. I wish there were a lot more of these!!!!!
Some of the interesting things I've noticed:
I still have a couple thousand invoices to go through. The earliest one I've seen thus far is DSC 660 and the latest DSC thus far has been around DSC 6300. The entire sequence of shipping invoices, organized by DSC shipping number, seems to be largely intact based upon what I have seen thus far. To be sure, there are gaps, but I think a rather detailed view can be constructed of how many guns shipped when and to whom. (Note: after the war the DSC continued in function, re-branded as the Reconstruction Finance Corp.)
Throughout the early war years (1942 and 1943) S&W was still taking and processing orders for civilian gun sales. There were many invoices with commercial order numbers on them for various guns to the usual distributors and dealers. What was really interesting about these invoices was the Customer's Date would be something like 3/4/42 and the (shipping) Date would be 3/28/46. S&W would take orders during the war and hold them against their anticipated return to civilian production, following their publicized "First Come First Served" policy for post-war production.
The people and agencies that received DSC guns are quite varied. There are many one-gun shipments to Constable Smith or Patrolman Jones and there are scores of multi gun shipments to Big City Police Department and Small County Sheriffs Office. There are also many, many shipments to business concerns. It's not unexpected or unusual to see 50 or 100 guns going to a Ford plant or to an Ordnance Works. Where it becomes interesting is when you see the three-gun shipment to the Joe Blow Gear & Shaft Co., Inc. and wonder why they are getting guns. A little research then shows that this little gear and shaft outfit had a contract to produce parts for the Norden bombsight or some similarly high value project that merited an armed presence. A shipment of twelve guns to the A.B. Smith & Sons company may seem rather innocuous until one digs around and finds that A.B. Smith produced bicycles before the war but then turned the machinery over to making M1 carbine bolts or radio parts or some similar wartime product they would not normally have made but had the machinery capable of making.
While the number of police agencies requesting guns is astonishing, there was a surprising number of other agencies that one would not normally think of when thinking of armed organizations. The Florida Highway Department for example got quite a number of Victory revolvers, as did various Alcoholic Beverage Control agencies, a large number of private railway police, banks, drug makers, etc.
Apparently, revolvers that went out through DSC did sometimes come back and go to other organizations. I found a few invoices where it was mentioned that the revolvers were being returned from one user who, having completed a government contract, would return the guns to DSC (via S&W) and the guns would go back into the 'pool'.
If someone wanted a 2-inch Victory they could order a 4-inch gun through DSC, pay $1.50 to the S&W Repair Department, and the gun would be re-fitted with a 2-inch barrel and then shipped to the user. This raises some interesting questions about when one runs across a 2-inch Victory in the wild. Until it gets lettered, is it a rare 2-inch CID/OSS/FBI gun with a correspondingly high price tag or is it an undercover gun for some deputy sheriff from East Jesus, Kentucky?
One of the great things about these invoices is that they are very often accompanied by correspondence between the factory and the user and all manner of things are discussed and many different sorts of letters are found. A mother writes to S&W asking for a replacement cylinder to send to her boy in the Pacific so that he can shoot more Japs (S&W sent the cylinder to her COD but threw in a fitted extractor for the cause). A deputy sheriff writes about how much he loves his Victory model, as the finish is so "business-like" and then describes his experiences finding Japanese balloon bombs in the Pacific Northwest. A Navy Beachmaster writes about wanting to replace a .38/44 HD he lost on the beach during an amphibious landing.
Equally as interesting as what the customers would write was the various responses from S&W. Many people wrote about wanting their Victory revolvers re-blued to commercial finish and S&W had a rather detailed response about why this could not be done. A great many people also asked about getting guns and S&W had various form letters explaining the procedure for contacting the DSC for a gun and copies of the form used. Possibly the biggest question was when someone could get a commercial gun again and S&W would explain that their entire production was for the government and after the war they would fill new commercial orders on a "First Come, First Served" basis although they could not say exactly which models would continue in their line after the war and which ones would be discontinued.
The fact is that much of the factory responses to correspondence they received gave a very good picture of how the company dealt with both wartime production and the anticipated post-war re-tooling to commercial sales. Whats really great about this is that all the primary sources really help to create a fairly accurate picture of how S&W dealt with the wartime government contracts while still keeping an eye on future commercial sales.
Anyway, I'm going to use this line of posts to drop the occasional historical bon mot that I find that might strike a responsive collectors chord.
None of this would be possible, by the way, without the work of the S&WHF. If you haven't joined, join!
Last edited:
...Ben
