 
When the American soldier went to war against Germany he took his appetite with him. The task of keeping that appetite satisfied with good food (and the soldier, therefore, contented and well) fell to the Quartermaster General. The average American soldier at the end of the fighting in 1918 is said to have weighed 12 pounds more than he did when the Selective-Service Act or his own enlistment brought him into the Army. This is the complete testimonial to the quality and quantity of the food served to the American troops in 1917 and 1918. Assuming 3,700,000 to have been the greatest number of Americans under arms, this average increase in weight means that the beans and bacon and fresh meat of the American Army ration were transmogrified into some 45,000,000 pounds of Yankee brawn to be the basis of untold resources of health and energy during the coming quarter of a century. Consider these millions of soldiers as one composite, gigantic man in khaki; compress the war period into a single hour, the dinner hour; and it will be seen that the American fighter consumed what might be called a sizeable meal. Let us say that he started off with the main course. The roast of beef weighed over 800,000,000 pounds. It was flanked by a rasher of bacon weighing 150,000,000 pounds. Over 1,000,000,000 pounds of flour went into the loaf of bread, while to spread the bread was there a lump of butter weighing 17,500,000 pounds and another lump of oleomargarine weighing 11,000,000 pounds. As a side dish this giant had over 150,000,000 pounds of baked beans, half of these coming in cans ready baked and flavored with tomato sauce. The potatoes weighed 487,000,000 pounds. To add gusto to his appetite there were 40,000,000 pounds of onions. Then scattered over the table were such items as 150,000,000 cans of corn, peas, and string beans; while the salad contained 50,000,000 cans of salmon and 750,000 tins of sardines. Then there was a huge bowl of canned tomatoes, nearly 190,000,000 tins supplying its contents. For dessert he had 67,000,000 pounds of prunes and 40,000,000 pounds of evaporated peaches and apples. The sugar for sweetening various dishes weighed 350,000,000 pounds. He washed it all down with a draft made of 75,000,000 pounds of coffee thinned with 200,000,000 cans of evaporated milk. The bill for the meal, paid by the American public, amounted to $727,092,430.44, this figure to December 1, 1918. In supplying such vast quantities of food, scientific attention was concentrated upon the details of the effort. At the time the armistice was signed the American troops in France were eating about 9,000,000 pounds of food every day. Never before in history had any nation been compelled to send subsistence so great a distance to so many men. It was not possible to ask France and England to divide their food supplies, as they were already rationing their civilian populations. We were required to purchase practically all food in America and transport it nearly 5,000 miles. Ships were relatively scarce. There was a strong bid for every inch of tonnage space. The tonnage allotted to subsistence must be filled with sufficient food not only to supply the immediate consumption, but to overcome losses due to the sinking of ships and the possible capture of base depots. These contingencies required two pounds of food to be shipped where one would ordinarily be sent; yet because of the shortage of ships the subsistence authorities were asked to pack these two pounds into almost the space of one. The result was foods in forms never before known by American soldiers and in some cases never before known at all—such forms as dehydrated vegetables, boneless beef, and the so-called shankless beef. Trench warfare made new demands for food. Calls came for such rare articles as soluble coffee or the wheat-and-meat cake of the emergency ration. These problems were solved only by the assistance of the American food industry. In numerous instances new factories, or even whole new types of food manufacture, were built up as rapidly as three shifts of men could work and money accomplish results. The cost of food rates high among the war costs of 1917 and 1918. Back in 1897 the average meal in the Army cost about 4 cents, and the daily three meals 13 cents. At the end of 1918 the cost of the ration was approximately 48 cents. The advance was not all due to the advance in living costs. Much of it was on account of the improved standards of the ration. In 1916 Congress appropriated $10,000,000 to feed the Army; the fiscal year beginning July 1, 1918, brought an appropriation of $830,000,000 for the same purpose. The American fighting man of 1917-18 was a good feeder. He ate nearly three-quarters of a ton of food each year, or over ten times his own weight. Without counting any transportation costs or the expense of handling at all, each man's yearly supply of food cost more than $165. In spite of the most rigid and painstaking economies in the purchase of this subsistence the American people were paying at the peak of Army expansion more than $2,500,000 per day to feed the troops. The distance of the American Expeditionary Forces from the source of their food supplies required that their food be largely purchased in nonperishable forms. That is, meats must be cured, meats and During the spring of 1918, when the demand for men in France resulted in reducing the available tonnage for supplies, the cry came from France to cut every nonessential. As a result most of the canned vegetables and fruits, including peas, corn, sweet potatoes, asparagus, pineapple, pears, and apples were stricken from the list of food supplies for the American Expeditionary Forces. From France came calls for tomatoes and men, men and tomatoes. This phrase did not mean that bread and bacon, beans and beef, should be eliminated; but it emphasized the importance of this one vegetable, the tomato. The total purchases of tomatoes exceeded those of all other vegetables combined. In addition to the many ways of serving tomatoes, they were used in the trenches to relieve thirst, being, perhaps, more effective than any other substitute for water. Because of its food value and slight acidity, a quart of tomato juice was worth several quarts of water to the thirsty men in the field. The Army took 45 per cent of the total 1918 American pack of tomatoes. These tomatoes were bought from 5,000 firms scattered throughout the rural districts of the United States. The demands of the overseas forces for meat during the summer of 1918 were so heavy that they created a shortage of beef in the United States. Beef is the mainstay of the soldier's diet. The Army allows 456 pounds of beef per year for each soldier. This does not mean that the soldier actually eats that much beef, beef being simply the Army's meat standard. Pork, usually in the form of bacon, is substituted for 30 per cent of this quantity of beef, 12 ounces of bacon being considered the equivalent of 20 ounces of beef. The major portion of the American Expeditionary Forces' beef was fresh beef shipped frozen all the way from the packing plants in the United States to the company kitchens at the front, through an elaborate system of cold-storage warehouses and refrigerator cars and ships. The Food Administration asked that the people substitute corn meal, rye flour, and other grain flour for 20 per cent of the wheat flour ordinarily used in making bread. The troops in the United States complied with this ruling and saved 1,000,000 barrels of flour. The use of substitutes in France was not insisted upon, as bread Food was purchased by the Quartermaster's Department and furnished to the individual companies at cost of the food. In charge of the mess was a sergeant, who had had special instruction in schools as to methods of feeding the Army. The mess sergeant checked over his stocks daily and made up a list of what he would require for the coming day. This list, in turn, was given to the camp supply officer, under whose direction the order was made up and delivered to the kitchen on Army trucks. This order was based on a ration allowance, as has been stated, a ration being the food required to subsist one man for one day. The general components of the overseas camp ration consisted of the following:
The ration at home was practically the same. The home ration, however, did not include candy and tobacco. The commanding officer had authority to modify or change all rations to meet special conditions. For instance, in times of great cold and when the men were subject to great exposure, or after long and tedious campaigns or marches, or when the work required of the troops was abnormal, the ration might be increased. The ration also included soap, candles, matches, towels, and a few other items considered necessary in the daily life of a soldier. The value of a ration fluctuated with the market from month to month. Each day's food weighed about 4.6 pounds per man. The men actually in the trenches sometimes made use of the emergency ration, the little flat can of compressed nourishment which every soldier carried in his pocket. This ration, however, was used only in severe straits, on the order of an officer, or on the enlisted man's own responsibility in the direst emergency, when the activity of the enemy made it impossible to get hot food to the men during daylight hours. Hot food was served in the trenches whenever possible. The hot food consisted principally of soups and soluble coffee. Specially constructed cans, made on the principle of thermos bottles, kept the food hot when it was being carried to the front. The chief quartermaster of the American Expeditionary Forces relates that on a tour of inspection made by him, during the Argonne-Meuse offensive, on November 1, 1918, he inspected the meals served at noon to the troops of the Fifth Corps actually engaged in battle on that day, and found in a number of cases that Artillery organizations were being served beefsteak, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, white bread and butter, rice pudding, and hot coffee, the men eating in reliefs in order that there might be no cessation of fire. The hot meals for the Infantry were prepared at their rolling kitchens a short distance in rear of the line, and sent forward to them in "marmite" cans. The company was the unit on which the feeding of the men was based. Each month the company was given credit at the quartermaster's store equal to the number of men in the company multi But this system was followed only in the United States. Savings were not allowed in France, all food there being issued on a straight ration basis. This was due to the fact that the shortage of tonnage made it imperative that no article not absolutely essential be shipped from the United States, while difficulties of transportation in France necessarily eliminated all except the most essential articles of food. Under the procedure in vogue previous to the recent war, subsistence was purchased by depot quartermasters located in 13 principal cities throughout the United States. The plan gave the Army a large number of purchasing officers for subsistence, working without coordination and even in active competition with each other. This condition resulted in a wide range of prices and a lack of uniform quality; while under war conditions, with the enormous quantities to be procured, it would cause at times a congestion of buying orders, with consequent disturbance of market prices. A plan of control was soon worked out whereby the Subsistence Division, with headquarters at Washington, received at regular intervals the estimates of the needs for subsistence for the Army, both at home and abroad. These estimates were compared and a budget made up. Bids were then asked through zone supply officers, who reported the bids to the control body in Washington. The lowest or most advantageous bid was accepted, and the purchase was completed by the zone supply officer in whose zone the seller was located. The plan eliminated one army zone bidding against another. At the same time it enabled every manufacturer or producer to bid on the needs of the Army. In this way active competition was secured and low prices obtained. A decided advantage of the plan was that purchases were made with a minimum of disturbance to prices paid by the civilian trade. Not only was it necessary to coordinate army organizations, but it was also found that the independent buying of the Army, the Navy, and the Allied Provision Export Commission was having the effect of increasing prices of a number of food products. These buying agencies were unconsciously bidding against each other. In December, 1917, at the suggestion of the Food Administrator, with the consent and approval of the Secretary of War and of the Secretary Practically all purchasing of meat was done by the Subsistence Division's packing-house branch, located in Chicago. Circular proposals were submitted by the various packers whose headquarters are located there. The Subsistence Division ordered the required purchases made, and the Chicago office at once allotted the amount needed among the packers. After the butchering and inspection of the meat, it was sent to the freezers and, after being frozen, was loaded in the cars and shipped to the embarkation points. The whole process from the time the animal was killed until it was loaded on the boat took about two weeks. The Middle West produced practically all the beef which nourished our fighting men. Some of the cattle were bought in California, inspected at the packing-house plants along the Pacific coast, and sent to France via the Panama Canal. The packers of Chicago and other cities found their plants, gigantic as they were, all too small to handle the demand of our troops for meat products packed in special forms; and extensive additions, both in buildings and machinery, were required by the Army's demands. It was only by careful vigilance on the part of its inspection branch that the millions of men dependent on the Subsistence Division for their food were protected from deterioration of supplies and abuses by certain dealers and manufacturers. Such firms were in the minority, for the food industry backed the Army with great loyalty, giving honest and patriotic support. In a certain week the inspection service found oatmeal flour moldy and unfit for use, having been stored too long before using; large amounts of potatoes, shipped to Camp Devens, undersize and frostbitten; 3,000 pounds of butter at Camp Greene too old for use; and 12 carloads of tomatoes of poor quality. The system in vogue of demanding reinspection was responsible for discovering many such cases, and traveling inspectors Samples of all shipments of food stuffs were required to be sent to the inspection branch. In this way many violations of the food laws were found. One packer was found to be using pork which contained large numbers of skippers. Another tried, consciously or unconsciously, to pass off wormy dried fruits. Milk has in some cases been found to be much below standard. All of these supplies were promptly rejected as improper for Army use. In many cases the fault has been found to be the result of improper manufacturing conditions, and in this event the manufacturer has been compelled to make good the loss to the Army. The general result of this inspection was that manufacturers gave the Army their very best products. One of the most important divisions of the inspection branch was the meat and meat-products section. Its function was the supervision of the reinspection, storage, and handling of meat and meat products, butter, and cheese. Special care was taken to see that there were no embalmed meats. Meat and meat products, butter, and cheese are all highly perishable articles; and, although they may be delivered in perfect condition, many imperfections may develop if diligent care is not exercised during shipment, handling, and storage. One of the first steps taken at the camps was the installing of complete cold-storage plants with adequate chill rooms, so that the proper preservation of fresh meats was assured after arrival at camps. From the first the most rigid inspection of meat and meat products was insisted on and no product allowed to pass which did not comply with Army specifications. The carcass might be from a perfectly healthy animal, yet be rejected, as lightweight carcasses were not approved for consumption in the Army. Instructions as to Army requirements were placed in the hands of every inspector, covering the inspection, storage, and handling of meat and dairy products. Supervisory traveling inspectors visited all stations at irregular intervals to insure these instructions being followed and to instruct quartermasters in posts which were too small to warrant a qualified meat inspector being stationed there. One object of the Subsistence Division was to educate the proper officers throughout the Army to be inspectors. To accomplish this the inspection branch compiled a manual covering practically all the principal items of Army subsistence, the exact methods of inspection, and how to detect imperfections in foods. Complete Army specifications for all supplies were included. Gen. Pershing cabled for 250 copies to be used in France, and the University of California adopted the manual to be used in zymology classes. It placed exact knowledge in the hands of the men who received the food and who had the responsibility that it be up to specifications. The overseas forces were the particular concern of the Subsistence Division. It was planned to have approximately three months' advance supply of food sent over each month for the number of troops actually sent to France during that month. This was called the initial supply. In addition to this, there was sent over a monthly automatic supply, equivalent to the amount of food the troops already in France would consume during that month. In this way a 90 days' reserve was usually maintained overseas. The problems of the overseas forces demanded quick solution. The new modes of warfare gave rise to many needs unknown in peace times. The result was that calls came in for commodities which were not at the time being produced in adequate quantities. Factories had to be built, labor secured, and machinery manufactured; in instances entirely new industries had to be created. The Service of Supply found it was impossible to secure sufficient fresh vegetables in Europe to take care of the requirements of our troops, and the Subsistence Division at home was called upon to supply dehydrated vegetables for overseas requirements. To send fresh vegetables from the United States was impossible, due to the great necessity for conserving ship tonnage, and a substitute was imperative. To supply dehydrated vegetables meant the development of an industry. Dehydration was practically unknown in the United States, there being but three small plants in existence. The Subsistence Division searched the country for advantageous locations where there were prospects of having such factories established. Within a few months the cooperation of companies was secured and factories were built whose combined output for the month of December, 1918, amounted to 6,000,000 pounds, there being 15 large plants in the United States at that time. Up to the date of the signing of the armistice 62,000,000 pounds of dehydrated vegetables had been ordered by Gen. Pershing. The difficulty of supply was increased by the delicate process which is required to make dehydrated vegetables. The moisture of the fresh product must be removed without extracting the nutritious juices or destroying the food value or flavor. After the vegetables have been peeled and sliced or cubed, they are blanched, in order that they may retain their starch components. They are then placed on trays in huge kilns, through which heated air is blown until only the small required amount of moisture is retained. The product is then packed in hermetically sealed cans. Dehydrated vegetables occupied a prominent place in the soldier's menu in France. Reports from overseas made by inspectors of the Subsistence Division indicate that dehydrated vegetables were quite satisfactory. The Surgeon General's Office has approved their use. However, when fresh vegetables could be purchased in The emergency ration and its production make another interesting story. Designed to be used only in dire extremity, primarily for No Man's Land fighting, the ration was packed in small cans to be carried in the soldier's pocket, usually the upper left-hand jacket pocket. This ration corresponded to the starvation ration of the allies. Its components were adopted after experiments at the battle front and after consultations with food experts. It represented the greatest amount of food that could be concentrated in the smallest compass. The complete ration consisted of three cakes of a mixture of beef and ground cooked wheat, each cake weighing 3 ounces; three 1-ounce cakes of chocolate; three-quarters of an ounce of fine salt; and 1 dram of black pepper. From the beef the preparation process removed all fat, sinew, and white fibrous tissue. The meat was then heated, and all of its moisture was evaporated so skillfully that no flavor was lost. The wheat or bread component of the cake was prepared by removing the chaff from cooked wheat which had been kiln-dried, parched, and then ground to a coarse powder. The meat and bread were compounded together, about two parts of bread to each part of meat, making a perfectly homogeneous cake. The chocolate of the ration was prepared by combining equal weights of fine chocolate, containing not less than 20 per cent of cocoa butter, and pure sugar, and molding the product into cakes weighing 1 ounce each. The several components were packed into oval tin cans, which were camouflaged to render them inconspicuous. These cans bore the legend: "U. S. Army Emergency Ration. Not to be opened except by order of an officer, or in extremity." Many ways of preparing the emergency ration for eating in the field were found by experiments. The bread and meat cake could be eaten dry; or, when boiled in 3 pints of water, it made a palatable soup; boiled in 1 pint of water, it produced a thick porridge which could be eaten hot or cold; the cold porridge could be sliced and fried when circumstances permitted. The chocolate could be eaten as candy or made into a drink by placing the chocolate in a tin cup with hot water. The gas attacks in the trenches made it necessary that the soldier's food be packed in containers impervious to mustard gas poison, mustard gas, when swallowed, attacking the intestines. The first call for such a ration came during October, 1917, and it called for the shipment of 100,000 sealed rations a month for 20 months. The food was to be packed in hermetically sealed galvanized iron containers, holding 25 rations each. The contents of each can consisted of 25 pounds of meat in 1-pound cans, 25 pounds of hard bread in 8-ounce cans, and 25 rations each of soluble coffee, sugar, and salt. Tobacco and cigarettes were added for the comfort of the men. The addition of tobacco and cigarettes was accidental. It was found necessary at first to fill the surplus space in the containers with excelsior. The office force of a large corporation learned of this fact and got permission to fill the empty space in some of the containers with tobacco. The Subsistence Division thought so well of the idea that orders were issued for the tobacco ration to be placed in all reserve ration containers. One of the most difficult elements in supplying the reserve ration was the securing of tin cans for hard bread. These, because of their unusual size and shape, could only be manufactured after new can-making machines had been designed. The demand for such cans exceeded 10,000,000 in number. Within a comparatively short time, however, hard bread in cans for special reserve rations was being produced on a large scale, and the overseas requirements were filled. Next the manufacture of the necessary galvanized containers and crates was contracted for. A packing plant was then designed to pack the components into the containers, which was an intricate operation in itself, the number of rations being so great. This plant was so contrived that the parts of the packing material came in at one end of the plant, and the hard bread, canned corned beef hash, canned roast beef, and canned corned beef, canned fish, coffee, sugar, salt, and can openers were packed into the galvanized containers as they traveled on a conveyor belt, until all the components were included. Only the best of Army purchases were put in the reserve ration. A study was made of the best packers of the various commodities, and their products were used exclusively. Everyone connected with the packing knew the purpose of the ration. It was to be used only when the trenches were under the heaviest fire—when hot food could not be carried forward, and when the men were most in need of good food. The reserve ration became the quality ration of the Army as a result. After the packing was complete, the cans were hermetically sealed by solder and camouflaged with olive drab paint. The container of the ration, when packed, was so buoyant it would support two men upon it when thrown into the sea, thus being a potential life raft. It was also necessary to feed our men in German prison camps. A ration for American prisoners was prepared by the Subsistence Division of the Quartermaster Corps, in conjunction with the Food and Nutrition Division of the Surgeon's General office. This ration was distributed by the American Red Cross from Denmark and Switzerland. Individual packages each containing sufficient food to supply one man were sent to the prison camps each week. The chief components of the package were corned beef and salmon (with an occasional substitution of corned beef hash and canned roast beef), hard dry bread, dry beans, rice, baked beans, and fresh potatoes (where possible). Prunes, jam, apples, peaches, coffee, sugar, evaporated milk, vinegar, salt, pepper, and pickles were also supplied. Potatoes and onions were procured when possible in Ireland, France, and Italy. Otherwise dehydrated potatoes and onions were used. Special food was sent for the invalid prisoners, this ration containing potted chicken, crackers, concentrated soup, dehydrated spinach, creamed oat meal, cornstarch pudding, sweet chocolate, extract of beef, soluble coffee, etc. There were several substitutes for all items mentioned, among the substitutes being dried eggs, potted veal, cheese, peanut butter, dried apricots, honey, corn meal, gelatine, malted milk powder, bouillon cubes, apples, oranges, lemons, cocoa, and tea. When the American troops entered the trenches it was found impracticable to use the ordinary roasted and ground coffee. Its preparation required too much fire, the smoke of which made a target for the enemy. Experiments were made with soluble coffee, looking toward guaranteeing a warm stimulant in the trenches. It was found necessary to give hot drinks to the men before they went over the top or after they had undergone periods of exposure. The British and French troops were supplied with brandy, wine, or rum on such occasions. But issues of intoxicants to soldiers were contrary to the American policy, and quantities of soluble coffee were substituted. Solidified alcohol was supplied so that the coffee could be served hot. The soluble-coffee industry was in its infancy in the United States. So great was the demand for soluble coffee from the overseas forces that the calls were for over thirty times the prewar production. A cablegram was received in October informing us that after January 1, 1919, the troops would require 25,000 pounds of coffee each day in addition to the amounts packed in the trench rations, these latter quantities alone amounting to 12,000 pounds daily. Allowance was also made for possible sinkings of 5,000 pounds daily, making a total of 42,000 pounds necessary to meet the daily requirements of the American Expeditionary Forces. MANUFACTURING BARRINGTON-HALL SOLUBLE COFFEE AT THE BAKER IMPORTING CO. PLANT, NEW YORK. THREE BATTERIES OF 21 PERCOLATORS. CAPACITY 5 CASES OF COFFEE EACH. MANUFACTURING SOLUBLE COFFEE FOR THE U. S. GOVERNMENT IN THE PLANT OF C. J. BLANKE TEA & COFFEE CO., ST. LOUIS, MO. The entire American output of soluble coffee was taken over for the Army, but this amounted to only 6,000 pounds daily. A number of manufacturers of other food products were induced to turn their entire plants into soluble-coffee factories. The greatest difficulty was incurred in the securing of the necessary equipment for these new plants. There was but one company in the entire United States which made the revolving bronze drums essential to the manufacturing process. This company ran its plant seven days a week, with three shifts daily, to produce the necessary materials. The metals which went into these drums were vital in the manufacture of other munitions, but it was even more important that men in the front lines be given hot drinks when tired and worn from long fighting and exposure. The signing of the armistice saw the difficulties of supplying soluble coffee about overcome. The Subsistence Division had won one of its hardest fights. The cooperation of American manufacturers had made the achievement possible. The problem of supplying good coffee to the troops was a difficult one. To make good coffee for a unit as large as a company is not easy for the average cook. To guarantee that good coffee would always be available, the Subsistence Division made one of its most radical changes in handling supplies. This change was so complete that whereas the Army formerly was served with coffee from three to six months out of the roasters, it came to be supplied with coffee freshly roasted every day. At the beginning of the war coffee was purchased, ready roasted and ground, from competitive dealers. It was then held in New York for about 30 days before being shipped overseas, the transportation requiring 30 days more. Received in France, the coffee often was kept for 90 days before it was distributed to the troops. In addition, a 30 days' supply must be kept on hand, making the coffee 6 months old by the time it was used. The result was that when the coffee finally reached the men it had lost half of its value as a stimulant and was greatly deteriorated in flavor, often being in a crumbly condition. "Muddy" coffee on the mess tables resulted. The only way for the troops to secure fresh coffee was for us to send over the green product for roasting as it was needed. Buildings were erected to house coffee-roasting machinery at home and abroad; men were trained as quickly as possible in the process of coffee-roasting, and sent out to take charge of the plants. In a relatively short length of time 16 plants were in full operation in France, and an increasing number at home. Eventually all the coffee used in France was shipped over green and roasted in the plants there. These plants were capable of roasting sufficient coffee to take care of 3,000,000 men at a considerably lower cost to the Government than under the old system. The Expeditionary Forces, as is noted elsewhere, organised a purchasing office in Paris. Its purpose was to save tonnage space by securing as many products as possible in Europe. Its scope covered all classes of supplies, but a large section was devoted to subsistence. Candy, hard bread, and macaroni factories under the direction of the Quartermaster Corps were built or secured from the French Government. Large quantities of beans, fresh potatoes, onions, coffee, rice, salt, and vinegar were secured from European markets. Many thousands of tons of foodstuffs were purchased and manufactured in Europe for our Army, every ton representing space on ships saved for additional men and munitions. Overseas purchases were generally discontinued after the signing of the armistice, as the Director of Purchase and Storage and the Expeditionary Forces were firm for the policy of favoring American manufacturers wherever possible. To reduce tonnage still further, extensive experiments were made in the packing of beef for overseas consumption. All bones, surplus fats, and waste portions were removed. The remainder, all edible, was pressed into 100-pound moulds and frozen. The initial shipment was composed of 16 carloads of boneless beef. The meat arrived in France in splendid condition, and was carefully watched from its arrival at the ports in France to its consumption in the front-line trenches. Officers, mess sergeants, and cooks were enthusiastic over the boneless beef, as it took much less time to prepare it and so conserved labor to a great extent. The men were gratified, as the inferior portions of the beef were not included, and much better meat resulted for the mess. After the success of this experimental shipment, as much boneless beef as possible was sent to France. Trouble was encountered in securing the skilled butchers to bone the great quantities needed, but this shortage was largely overcome. No means was discovered so effective for reducing tonnage as boning beef, dehydrating vegetables, and purchasing foods in France, but in many of the smaller items there were stories just as interesting. Efforts to save tonnage brought about the reduction of moisture in soap. While the Subsistence Division was securing toilet paper it found that the entire supply for the Expeditionary Forces could be stored in the waste space of Army rolling field kitchens. A special formula for vinegar was devised, and double-strength vinegar was shipped. This, when mixed with an equal quantity of water in France, was a good product. The saving of space in the transportation of subsistence stores makes a long story in itself. Just so much tonnage was allotted to food each month; and the ablest men in the food industry spent much time in working out how the maximum amount of essentials and luxuries in foodstuffs could be sent in the minimum amount of space. COFFEE-ROASTING PLANT AS OPERATED AT A NUMBER OF CAMPS. FURNISHING THE ARMY WITH TOBACCO. Packing machines in a Winston-Salem, N. C. plant. These machines automatically weigh the tobacco, wrap and seal tins in which this particular brand of tobacco is marketed. MAKING CIGARETTES FOR THE ARMY. Leaf tobacco being blended for cigarette-making purposes in a Richmond, Va., tobacco plant. The Subsistence Division not only looked after the working fighter but the playing fighter as well. The American soldier is fond of candy, tobacco, and chewing gum. The supply of these commodities brought much pleasure to the troops. Long lines of men waiting for free candy and tobacco in France, men who just came from the front, formed one of the interesting sights of the war. Tobacco has established its claim to a recognized place in the soldier's life. Probably 95 per cent of the soldiers of the American Expeditionary Forces used it in one form or another. In May of 1918 it was decided to adopt the practice of the allies, namely, to allow each soldier a certain amount of tobacco per day. This unusual innovation was the official recognition of tobacco as a necessity for men in active service. To men enduring physical hardships, obliged to live without the comforts and often even the necessities of life in times of battle, tobacco fills a need nothing else can satisfy. The daily ration of four-tenths of an ounce was given to every man overseas who desired it. The soldier had the choice of cigarettes, smoking tobacco, or chewing tobacco. If he chose smoking tobacco he received cigarette papers with it. In addition the men could buy at any Army or other canteen the most popular brands of cigars and cigarettes in unlimited quantities. The Subsistence Division purchased for overseas shipment a monthly average of 20,000,000 cigars and 425,000,000 cigarettes. Abundant supplies of tobacco were on hand in the commissaries overseas, and the soldier could buy it at actual cost. There was no profit or tax added on any tobacco shipped to France, and it was sold at retail to the troops at a cost lower than the price paid by the biggest wholesalers in the United States. The plan for the purchase of cigars and cigarettes was to divide the contracts among the most popular brands in the same proportions as the latter are sold in this country. Candy in the days of the old Army was considered a luxury. The war with Germany witnessed a change. The old popularity of chewing tobacco waned; that of candy increased. Approximately 300,000 pounds of candy represented the monthly purchases during the early period of the war. This amount included both the home and overseas consumption. Demands from overseas grew steadily. The soldier far from home and from his customary amusements could not be considered an ordinary individual living according to his own inclinations, and candy became more and more sought after. As the demand increased, the Quartermaster Department came to recognize the need of systematic selection and purchase. The first purchases were made from offerings of manufacturers without any particular standard, 40 per cent being assorted chocolates, 30 per cent assorted stick candy, and 30 per cent lemon drops. A standard was developed through the steady work of confectionery experts. This standard offered no opportunities for deception, and it Huge purchases of candy were made during the days when sugar was scarcest in the United States. The Food Administration was convinced that the Army should have all the candy it desired, and sufficient quantities of sugar were allotted for the purpose. From 300,000 pounds monthly the candy purchases increased till they equaled 1,373,300 pounds in November, 1918, the highest amount purchased up to that time. In December, 1918, an innovation was adopted, consisting of giving the troops a regular monthly ration of candy. The candy which had been shipped every month for sale in the various canteens had always been quickly disposed of. Many men did not get the opportunity to make purchases. The ration plan, however, assured each man a pound and a half a month, without exception. It required 3,495,000 pounds the first month of the ration system to provide each soldier overseas with his allotted portion. In December, 1918, the Subsistence Division took over the purchase of all candy for the various organizations conducting canteens for our troops. The purchase for that month totaled 10,137,000 pounds, all of which was shipped overseas. It was the largest exportation of candy on record. The candy purchased for the canteens, commissaries, and other agencies was manufactured by the best known candy firms in the country. A portion of the candy consumed overseas was manufactured in France. This French supply was discontinued January 15, 1919, and thereafter all requirements were shipped over from the United States. The candy was sold to the men at just half the price it would have cost individuals here. After December, 1918, 50,000 pounds were furnished each month for sales purposes for every 25,000 men in France. Up to February 1, 1919, 21,000,000 pounds of candy had been sent across. The demand for candy jumped skyward after the signing of the armistice, the men then having more time on their hands in which to enjoy luxuries. Tobacco demands likewise increased. The suffering sweet tooth of the Yank was not appeased by candy alone. The third of a billion pounds of sugar bought for the Army represents a tremendous number of cakes, tarts, pies, and custards. An old soldier recently stated that the ice cream eaten by the Army during the war would start a new ocean. The serious shortage of sugar which at one time threatened to reduce sweets to an irreducible minimum on the civilian bill of fare did not interfere with the Up to the signing of the armistice the total amount of granulated, cut, and powdered sugar purchased by the Subsistence Division equaled 342,745,862 pounds and cost $28,465,050. Of this amount the greater portion was shipped to the troops in France. A close companion in popularity to candy and tobacco was the typical American product, chewing gum. This confection was found of great value on the march as a substitute for water. Its importance is shown in the vast amount sent overseas. A total of 3,500,000 packages represents the overseas shipment in January, 1919. The shipment for February was 3,200,000 packages. The winter consumption of gum was heavier than that of summer, the average monthly supply being only 1,500,000 packages during the summer of 1918. Chewing gum came to be considered a necessity by the men in France and has been found to be an invaluable aid to keeping up their spirits in the midst of hardships. Every complaint against meals served in the Army reaching the attention of the Subsistence Division was investigated. These investigations were made in conjunction with the Inspector General's Department of the Army. Where complaints were justified, remedial action was taken. A study of the complaints revealed that most dissatisfaction was among new troops who, when first separated from the luxuries of home, wrote of their adventures at the mess table, enlarging any lack of home comforts into stories of privation. The more solid food, however, soon became popular, as the hard work in training gave an appetite for sustaining rather than for the more fancy foods. Subsistence to the value of $327,060,097 was shipped to our forces overseas from the United States from the start of the war to December 1, 1918. The following table gives the quantity, unit price, and total value of these subsistence items:
MEAT FOR THE U. S. ARMY RECEIVES THOROUGH INSPECTION. FEDERAL INSPECTORS ARE EXAMINING SHEEP AS THEY PASS ALONG THE ENDLESS TROLLEY IN THE PROCESS OF DRESSING. ARMOUR & CO. MANUFACTURING RAZORS FOR SOLDIERS: BLADE HONING DEPARTMENT. DURHAM DUPLEX RAZOR CO. MAKING UNIFORMS FOR THE ARMY. View of the cutting department of a plant at Red Bank, N. J. MANUFACTURING SPIRAL PUTTEES FOR THE ARMY. This photo shows yarn being wound in a Cleveland, Ohio, factory. The Army raised against Germany had to have stout shoes for its feet. It required warm uniforms and overcoats and good socks and underwear. It had to have heavy blankets for its beds. The men needed raincoats and rubber boots for wet and muddy weather. Tentage was required, pup tents for the front and large tents and flies at the camps. Belts and bandoleers of cotton webbing added to the soldier's efficiency as a rifleman or machine gunner. To procure these and other supplies for an American Army that eventually reached the strength of 3,750,000 men required the best brains in the textile, rubber fabric, and leather goods industries. From the counting rooms, from the laboratories, and from the American factories the needs of the Government called to Washington several hundred men, experts in a thousand lines, and put them into American officers' uniforms. Eventually the various agencies of the War Department purchasing these supplies were centralized in a single division known as the Clothing and Equipage Division of the Office of the Director of Purchase and Storage, which in turn was part of the Division of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic. The total cost of this necessary equipment of textiles and leather and rubber goods was approximately $2,100,000,000. Of the enormous sum of money appropriated for the so-called quartermaster activities, a full one-quarter went for clothing and equipage of this sort. The group who handled this enormous manufacturing effort not only conducted one of the biggest undertakings of the war but did it in a way to command the admiration of those who knew the story of what was going on. The division turned scientific attention, and that means the attention of real scientists, to the proper construction of all sorts of articles. It designed new styles of soldiers' clothing adapted in every curve and line to the service in France. It standardized dyes and made studies of protective coloring. It produced highly specialized shoes. It saved millions of dollars by the scientific study of specifications of various articles. It educated manufacturers in the production of articles strange to their experience, and in some cases developed entirely new industries. At one time it constituted the entire wool trade of the United States, since it had optioned every pound of wool in sight and had its agents out gathering up the excess wool of the earth. It was a shipmaster, an The organization was important not only for the size of its business but because it dealt more intimately with the individual soldier than perhaps any other production branch of the Government, with the possible exception of the branch which fed him. It might seem to be a fairly easy proposition to buy clothing for a soldier, his tent, and the bed clothing that kept him warm in active service or when he was a patient in a military hospital. But it was not a simple task. None of these articles was standard for civilian use, either in material, color, or pattern. Everything had to be made to order. The ordinary factory could not begin work on contracts for these supplies on a minute's notice, but usually only after special and sometimes costly preparation. And as the Army grew in size it had to have large quantities of special clothing. Cooks needed cotton aprons, and blacksmiths leather ones. Linemen had to have special gloves; hospital orderlies and waiters at messes required white duck suits; motorcyclists needed hoods; laborers, overalls; and firemen, helmets. There were special garments for aviators. We began capturing prisoners and they had to have special uniforms. Convalescents at hospitals needed special suits. The women nurses of the Army were supplied with uniforms, something entirely outside of previous Army experience. The Government was something more than the designer and manufacturer of these goods, drawing the specifications, placing the orders, and then teaching the processes of manufacture in the thousands of factories which had virtually become Government plants. The clothing and equipage organization had to go further back and become the actual procurer of the raw materials; and this phase of its work eventually became one of the largest and most spectacular and romantic elements of the whole undertaking. In addition to procuring the raw cotton and the raw wool and the hides, the Government had to go into the manufacture of cloth and the tanning of leather to supply these commodities to the manufacturers of the finished articles. The Government went into a raw materials market which was already glutted with orders from the allied governments and from domestic consumption. It went into this market at first without money, since funds on the scale demanded were not available between March 4, 1917, and June 15 of the same year; and it had to buy on credit and secure the commodities in the face of cash bidding for them. Nevertheless the whole enormous undertaking was successfully carried through. Except in rare instances, the American soldier never lacked for necessary supplies of this character. The organization which handled the work originally consisted of 6 officers and Wool was the most important of the raw materials to be procured, since wool entered into the composition of more items than any other material. Uniforms, overcoats, underwear, socks, breeches, shirts, and many other articles had to be made entirely or partially of wool. The purchases of woolen breeches alone during the war period amounted to 13,176,000 pairs. On September 10, 1918, the wool experts of the army estimated the Nation's total needs for wool up to June 30, 1919. The War Department, it was found, during this time would require 246,000,000 pounds of clean wool; the allotment to civilian needs was but 15,000,000 pounds. In other words, the war demands were to absorb practically the entire supply of wool; civilians were to be forced to do without it almost entirely. Soon after the declaration of war the Quartermaster Corps estimated that it would require about 100,000,000 pounds of scoured wool to meet the initial demands of the Army in 1917. A meeting was called of the principal wool dealers of the United States, most of them from Boston, and a quick inventory was taken of the available wool supplies, not only in the United States, but on order from foreign countries. It was found that there was in sight 78,000,000 pounds of greasy wool, which, after being scoured, would produce 35,000,000 pounds of wool of the quality needed. This was barely one-third of the Army's demand alone. It should be noted, however, that this inventory was taken just before the annual American clip, which would be finished by the end of July. To insure that the Government would secure every pound of wool in sight, options were promptly obtained on all wool in American warehouses or on the sea, and speculation in the prices of the domestic clip for 1917 was thus headed off by the entry of the Government itself in the raw wool business. The prices were fixed for the 1917 clip as of July 31. A year later the clothing and equipage division had become the entire wool trade of the United States. There was no wool market again and no public sale of wool until after the armistice was signed. To handle this enormous undertaking the division appointed a wool administrator to buy wool, a wool purchasing quartermaster to pay for it, and a wool distributor to sell it to the Government contractors. The Government's wool headquarters was in Boston, with branches at Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Seattle. This organization arranged to procure the whole 1917 clip, if needed, took over all wool destined for the United States under import licenses, and sent its agents to foreign markets. The largest of the foreign markets practically available from the standpoint of distance was the Argentine in South America. Aus The Government's wool administrator secured such Australian and New Zealand wool as he could; but he had to rely principally on sailing vessels, which could not, under the most favorable conditions, go to Australia and back again in less than seven months, while nine or ten months were more often required. A quick sailing voyage to Argentina and back required five months. Nevertheless, and this was particularly true in the early fall of 1918, when preparations were being made for the equipment of the Army in 1919, every effort was made to secure foreign wool. A South American wool-buying commission was formed and sent to Buenos Aires, arriving there October 30, 1918. By that time, however, the end of the war was in sight, and the commission never opened up its Argentine headquarters. The Government conducted its raw-wool business on the lines of a great department store. Headquarters were established in Boston, where the wool distributors kept samples of almost every kind of wool produced on earth, these samples representing stocks on hand in the various Government warehouses in Boston and elsewhere. Charles J. Nichols, a member of a large Boston wool firm, was the wool administrator and E. W. Brigham was wool distributor. Prices were fixed, and the manufacturers bought from the samples. Carpet wool was sold at an office in Philadelphia. The wool administrator did a business that averaged $2,500,000 per day during his incumbency, his total purchases amounting to about 722,000,000 pounds of wool. At first the supply of the better grades of wool seemed to be adequate to meet the Army's demands. Later, however, changes were made in the specifications for various cloths, uniform cloth being increased from 16 to 20 ounces in weight, overcoating from 30 to 32 ounces, shirting flannel from 8½ to 9½ ounces, and blankets from 3 to 4 pounds. These increases made it necessary for the Army to use grades of wool previously made only into coarse materials like carpet. The lower grades of wool were blended with the finer grades to provide the necessary weight and warmth, even at the expense of fineness of texture and appearance. This action explains why at the end of the period of hostilities some of the American soldiers' uni The Government saved every ounce of wool that it possibly could save. More economical patterns and layouts for the cutting of uniforms were designed in Washington and furnished to the manufacturers. The American soldier's uniform did not meet the approval of officers of the American Expeditionary Forces as to style, after the latter had become used to seeing the smartly dressed troops of Europe. Accordingly, after Gen. Pershing had recommended a better-appearing uniform, a new one was designed, incidentally with an eye to saving cloth. The coat of the uniform—formerly called the blouse, a designation which is now obsolete—was cut with new lines, making it slimmer without sacrifice of warmth or comfort. The patch pockets of the original blouse were usually unsightly bulges when the soldiers filled them with articles. On the new coat the patch pocket was retained only in appearance, the pocket actually being on the inside. It is not known to most Americans that the breeches, which have been typical of the American service uniform for many years, were abandoned late in the war in favor of long trousers. This change was also due to studies made by the army clothing experts. The soldiers themselves were not enamored of breeches, since they had to be either laced or buttoned below the knee, a process which took time always, but seemed to take more when a man was in a hurry. The laces sometimes chafed the leg under the leggins. Then, too, it was often impossible to remove the breeches from soldiers wounded in their legs without cutting the cloth. Long trousers did away with all these objections and had the added virtue of being warmer than the breeches. The overcoat, too, was redesigned, following Gen. Pershing's recommendations, the stock overcoat being too long to be worn in the trenches. A knee-length garment was provided which was much smarter than the older coat. The redesigning of the overcoat and the uniform (although the new uniform never appeared in the field) accomplished numerous economies. Merely by the elimination of lacings, eyelets, tape, and stays, the new trousers cost 95.25 cents less than a pair of army breeches. By July 1, 1919, this change in design would have saved the Government $16,988,440 in orders for trousers already placed or in sight. The change in overcoat styles saved 62 cents per garment, or a total saving to July 1, 1919, estimated at $897,140. The service coat, made by redesigning the blouse, saved the Government $1.598 on each garment, or an estimated saving of $4,977,770 to July 1, 1919. This was not only financial saving, but what was more important, it was saving the consumption of the raw material, wool. The A more economical cutting pattern saved twenty-three one-hundredths of a yard of cloth in the manufacture of every pair of trousers. This resulted in the total saving of 2,300,000 yards of woolen cloth. Part of the facings of the service coats and overcoats were eliminated without sacrificing warmth or serviceability, and cheaper cotton linings were substituted. Another important cloth economy came when the Army designers cut off the right-hand pocket of the O. D. shirt, on the ground that this pocket was seldom used. The designers also substituted an oblong elbow patch on the Army shirt for the circular patch formerly specified. This substitution was not economy in cloth, but the original circular patch, put on the sleeve to reinforce it at the point of greatest wear, actually resulted in reducing or shortening the life of the garment by tearing loose at the stitches, a fault which the oblong patch overcame. In the earlier contracts the garment makers were stimulated to save wool by being allowed a percentage of the cost of yardage saved. Each contractor, too, was permitted to sell his own clippings. But as the Government obtained a more scientific grasp of the clothing problem and produced pattern layouts which utilized the maximum percentages of the cloth, the issues of cloth to the garment makers were calculated more closely. Thereafter the contractors received no reimbursement for cloth savings, and the Government itself took all the clippings. These clippings were shipped to a base sorting plant at New York, where they were baled and shipped out to mills to be used as reworked wool in blankets and other articles. The clippings were sorted at a cost of 1.7 cents per pound and sold at an average price of 23 cents per pound, the total sales bringing in to the Government $5,500,000. The history of the Government's wool enterprise during the war illustrates how hard it was to check the momentum of the whole production undertaking against Germany once it had attained full speed. A week before the armistice was signed the wool stocks looked small, and shortages plainly existed to cause anxiety for the executives in Washington. That was because we were thinking in terms of consumption made familiar by the terrific destruction of war. A week later the same stocks looked overwhelming in size, and the shortages had become enormous surpluses. It had been a constant worry to procure a sufficient quantity of blankets, yet as soon as the armistice was signed, we had on hand a 47-months' supply of blankets for 1,000,000 men in the United States and 2,400,000 men overseas. As soon as the German plenipotentiaries affixed their signatures to the armistice agreement at Spa an apparently small stock of marching shoes turned into a 4-year supply for 3,400,000 soldiers at home The entire woolen industry, from the handlers of raw wool to the textile mills, worked splendidly with the Government. At all times there was plenty of available machinery to make all the cloth for which wool could be furnished. Mills which found no Government use for their regular business output went heartily to work to make something else that the Government would need. The Government's uses for carpet, for instance, were practically negligible; so that the carpet mills, many of them, swung their entire production to Army blankets and Army duck. Blankets, in fact, were one of the largest items. The total purchases brought to the Government warehouses about 22,000,000 blankets, at a total cost of over $145,000,000. Melton cloth for overcoats and uniforms consumed an enormous quantity of wool. The total purchases of melton amounted to more than 100,000,000 yards, or enough to stretch twice around the world at the Equator, with a strip left over long enough to reach from New York across Germany and Russia and into Siberia. The total quantity of raw wool bought by the Government up to December 14, 1918, cost over $504,000,000. After the Government had secured the wool and various types of cloth, there still remained the task of making this cloth into uniforms. The usual method was for the Government to furnish the materials and to pay the contractor his cost of manufacturing. All Army clothing was made up according to the so-called tariff sizes. The average coat for a man is a 38 or 40, and experience shows how many men in a given number will need this average. But there were always exceptions. One camp sent in a special order for 46 overcoats for "fats." Through a scientific study of the problem, notable reforms in the matter of fitting soldiers were brought about. When the men were coming in greatest numbers from civilian life to the training camps they were often put to great inconvenience in securing proper clothing. Each man would ask for such sizes as he thought were correct, but it often happened that the garments supplied to him did not fit him, and he thereafter spent some hours or even days swapping garments with other recruits until he eventually acquired an outfit somewhere near his size. Then, too, there was confusion in the way the articles were supplied to the men, who sometimes had to stand in line all day long, awaiting their turn at the issue windows. The matter of fitting was satisfactorily solved by adopting the so-called foolproof size labels. The labels originally used were merely paper tags pinned to the garments, and in the handling of garments by men unfamiliar with the fitting of ready-made clothing mistakes Before hostilities ceased a system providing a more scientific issue of clothing to recruits had been introduced. Under this system the recruit would enter the supply building at one end and there, in a special room, strip himself of his civilian clothing. He would thereupon enter the mill as naked as the Lord made him. He would stop first at the underwear counter, where he would procure garments that fitted him, would don them, and then pass on to the hosiery counter. Thus he would progress down the line, eventually emerging from the other end of the building a fully dressed American soldier, the process reminding one of the progress of an automobile through the Ford factory. It required the services of some 4,000 inspectors to supervise the garment-making in thousands of shops scattered throughout the country. This inspection also looked at the character of the shops taking contracts, and the Government was sometimes hard put to it to prevent child labor and sweat shop production in the work. At one time there came a rush order from France to supply several hundred thousand mackinaws. An officer who was familiar with, mackinaws was sent out from Washington to buy them from goods in stock. He accomplished his mission in 10 days, literally baring the shelves of the United States of these garments, his purchases including the extensive quantities of mackinaws held by mail-order houses in Chicago. It was always a problem in clothing the Army to find olive-drab dyes that were fast in color. The first dyes used were apt to fade quickly. A certain dye was of the proper color, yet it was found on test to have the peculiar characteristic of being visible at a distance. As the new American synthetic dye industry expanded and processes were perfected, the officers of the Clothing and Equipage Division were able to cooperate with the American dye makers to produce satisfactory dyes. Yet while the olive-drab dye used in dyeing coats and trousers seemed to withstand the sun and rain, that used in coloring the leggins proved to be fugitive to a remarkable degree. It seemed to be impossible to produce a dye that would hold its shade in leggins. The materials which went into the manufacture of clothing came from various sections of the country, since the several garment industries had grown up around centers. For instance, the melton cloth came generally from the Boston district. Linings were supplied from Atlanta, buttons from Philadelphia, and duck from Chicago. This geographic distribution of supplies simplified the Government's problem of supplying materials to the various contractors. It was possible to supply materials on short notice to any garment-making district. At one time Chicago wired that unless 500,000 yards of flannel shirting were supplied immediately hundreds of shirt factories in Chicago and the Chicago district would have to close down. Accordingly, a special freight train was loaded with shirting in the East and started for Chicago on a special movement in charge of a "live tracer"—that is, an officer who saw that the train was put through to its destination. The train arrived in Chicago on the second day after the order was received, so rapidly had the goods been procured and loaded. In addition to the regular uniforms for the men, almost half a million articles of clothing for officers were also bought by the Government. The Quartermaster Department went into an entirely new field when it bought uniforms for the women nurses of the Army. There was a Norfolk suit which cost about $30 and a cotton uniform that cost about $3, an overcoat costing nearly $28, and then there were waists made from navy blue silk and from white cotton, and hats. Before leaving the subject of clothing, it is interesting to refer again to the clothing furnished for interned prisoners. This was not manufactured for the purpose. Uniforms discarded by our own men were reclaimed and dyed a special shade of green. Over 50,000 of these garments were prepared at an average cost of less than 30 cents per garment. It had been the original intention to make a special prisoner's uniform striped in resemblance to the prison suits worn in American penitentiaries. Another interesting development in the manufacture of Army clothing was the production of a special uniform for expeditionary troops sent to Russia. The uniforms were so warm that they could well serve as the equipment for an Arctic exploration party. The The specifications called for 80 per cent wool underwear. Underwear with that percentage of wool could not be provided, but underwear of equal weight was substituted. Where fur-lined garments were unobtainable, fur-trimmed ones were procured. The specifications called for Buffalo coats. The division sent a man to the north woods country of Minnesota and Wisconsin, and there in the supply cities he bought sheep-lined coats with moleskin or duck shells as a substitute. These coats were the sort used by woodsmen and Alaskan miners and explorers. There was no time to procure mucklucks, moccasins, and felt shoes, so an agent of the division was sent into Canada to buy shoe pacs (or lumbermen's boots) and lumbermen's knee-length socks. The total cost of the whole outfit was more than $100 per man. It was impossible to find any substitute for the Alaskan parka. A parka is a sort of overshirt, wind proof and waterproof and hooded, to be worn over the overcoat and cap of the uniform. Consequently it was necessary to produce the parkas in this country, although our garment makers were entirely unfamiliar with such manufacture. The work was undertaken by the International Duplex Coat Co., at 114 Fifth Avenue, New York. It was necessary from the start in turning out this order for the employees of this plant to work overtime. In order to speed the production the principal member of this firm himself took his place at the bench and worked almost day and night in cutting out garments. CLOTHING WORN BY OUR SIBERIAN EXPEDITIONARY FORCES. MANUFACTURING WOOLEN UNDERWEAR FOR THE ARMY. The weaving department of a plant at Cohoes, N. Y. MANUFACTURING HOSIERY FOR THE ARMY. The knitting room of a hosiery mill at Durham, N. C. The day approached closer and closer when the shipment would have to start across the country if it were to catch the last boat from San Francisco. On the home stretch of the race the entire working force of the plant went 36 hours, stopping only for meals. The last stitch was taken at 1.30 o'clock in the morning. The garments were then piled upon auto trucks to be rushed to the baling plant in Brooklyn. One of the loaded trucks developed engine trouble and stopped in the middle of a bridge across the East River. The officer in charge thereupon commandeered every automobile that came along, piled them all full of parkas and sent them to the baling plant. The entire shipment was aboard the train less than one hour before its starting time. It was not only necessary for the Government to furnish cloth for the uniforms, shirts, and other articles, but it had to supply the fittings and findings as well, such needs as linings, tape, buttons, and hooks and eyes. In the calendar year 1918 the purchases amounted to over 46,000,000 yards of cotton lining and 2,500,000 yards of felt lining, worth over $18,000,000. The Government spent over $100,000 for hooks and eyes, $150,000 for tape, $1,250,000 for thread, and practically $3,000,000 for buttons. When it was found that the standard specifications for Army uniform buttons favored a certain class of manufacturers and excluded many others, new specifications were drawn so as to make it possible for every button manufacturer in the country to compete for contracts. An exclusive study was made of new materials for buttons. They had been made of brass or bronze, but due to other war necessities for metals an effort was made to provide a substitute. It was found, too, that metal buttons sometimes resulted in infection of wounds received on the battlefield. Substitution of vegetable ivory for metal in buttons was attempted. The Bureau of Standards in Washington tested the taqua, or ivory, nuts from which buttons are made and found them suitable. A vegetable ivory button with a shank was developed, although no such ivory button had been known before, and the Government's insignia was stamped on this button. Gen. Pershing approved the use of ivory buttons, and thereafter many manufacturers produced millions of gross of them. Every manufacturer who took button contracts agreed to turn over the ivory nut waste to the Chemical Warfare Service to be used in making charcoal for the gas-absorbing canisters of the gas masks. Most of the buttons were produced by firms in Rochester and Philadelphia. Many concerns made them who had never made buttons before. Manufacturers of electric goods, hardware, billiard balls, celluloid, pearl buttons, and phonograph records turned their plants into ivory-button factories. Enormous quantities of buttons were required. For the Army shirts alone the Government needed 216,000,000 buttons in 1918. Flags constituted another class of goods requiring wool. In all, the division produced 40,000 flags during the war period, most of these being made at the Government's own shop at Philadelphia. It is a The production of overseas caps for the American Expeditionary Forces was likewise an extensive undertaking. When the requisition for overseas caps came from France, it was not possible to design one here because of lack of knowledge of what was required. Later a courier bearing a sample cap came to the United States from Gen. Pershing. As soon as this sample was received a meeting of cap makers was called in New York, and 100 manufacturers attended. One and all agreed to turn over their factories to the exclusive production of overseas caps until the requirements were met. It took these cap makers only two weeks to turn out the first order. In all 4,972,000 caps were delivered. Our experts on this side of the water were not satisfied with the overseas cap. It shrank after being wet, it quickly lost shape, it absorbed much water and did not dry out quickly, and it was unattractive in appearance. Also it did not shade the eyes, and the experience in France showed that the soldiers usually improvised peaks to their caps by sticking their girls' letters between their caps and their foreheads. Then, moreover, the standard cap was made of 20-ounce melton, which was a fabric hard to get. But there was plenty of rabbit fur available to make felt caps for an army of 6,000,000 or 7,000,000 men. Accordingly a new cap was designed, made of felt and doing away with the bad features of the melton cap; but this cap improvement came at the end of the war and was never used. Wool was required not only for the outer clothing of the Army—for the uniforms, overcoats, and caps—but there was also a tremendous war demand for it for the manufacture of such knit goods as undershirts, drawers, stockings, gloves, and puttees. The matter of providing the Army with these necessary articles offered a problem of peculiar difficulty, since, in addition to the ever-threatening shortage of raw wool, there was an actual shortage of machinery in the knitting industry. When it was found that the regular mills could not turn out all the woolen knit goods the Army required, numerous mills which had been turning out specialties exclusively, such as women's underwear or men's union suits, were converted into factories to knit garments according to the Army specifications. Some idea of the extent of the Army's demand for this class of goods may be read in the fact that toward the close of hostilities every machine in the United States that could make hosiery at all was knitting socks for the Government. SEWING OVERSEAS CAPS IN A ST. PAUL. MINN., FACTORY. HEAPS OF OVERSEAS CAPS READY FOR SEWING IN A ST. PAUL FACTORY. UNDERWEAR FOR THE ARMY AT A MILL IN ST. JOHNSVILLE, N. Y. KNITTING ARMY UNDERWEAR IN A SYRACUSE, N. Y., MILL. At one time there was an acute shortage of needles. Germany had previously supplied America with knitting needles. When this source was cut off, we turned to Japan. The Japanese needles proved disappointing; they were not correctly tempered and frequent breakage caused great loss. At one time it was rumored that there were 10,000,000 knitting needles in Sweden, and the need here was so urgent that several buyers were sent to that country. Their effort was well worth while, for they actually secured a million needles to help relieve the situation here. Meanwhile, American needles were improved and American needle makers were pushed to the limit; but until the close of the war there was always an acute shortage of needles for the knitting industry. It was soon discovered that there was not enough machinery in America to knit one-tenth of the seamless woolen gloves that the soldiers required. Consequently it was necessary to adopt a substitute—a glove of knit fabric cut to pattern and sewed up with seams. In actual service this glove did not stand up to the hard usage required of it. Consequently there was designed an over-glove of canton flannel with the palm cased in leather, this to be worn outside the seamed woolen glove. In the effort to produce gloves which would give longer wear the so-called ambidextrous glove was designed so cut that it could be worn comfortably upon either hand. Puttees, the spirally wound leggins that had long been used by the British Army, were unknown articles to American manufacture when the American Expeditionary Forces adopted them as standard articles of equipment. A puttee of knitted wool was designed and 6,000,000 of them were ordered in the spring of 1918, these to be preliminary to future orders for 8,000,000. The work required the installation of much new machinery in the textile plants. On November 1, 1918, we had produced all the puttees required by the troops then in France and had a surplus of 1,500,000 of them. In the production of knit goods, economies in the use of material were constantly effected. An original article of equipment for the overseas troops had been a knitted woolen toque, which was a sort of stocking-cap. The toques had cost the Government $1 apiece, and some 1,500,000 of them had been piled up in the quartermaster warehouses before the toque was abandoned as a piece of standard equipment. Later a requisition was received for 400,000 woolen mufflers to be used by drivers of automobiles and motor trucks. According to the specifications these would cost about $3 apiece. Then it was discovered here that the abandoned toques might be sewed together to make mufflers. With this stock in hand it cost the Government only 20 cents each for the mufflers instead of $3, a clear saving of over $1,000,000. The Quartermaster Department was the Mecca of inventors during the war period, who came bringing real or fancied improvements in A woman of Iowa invented cootie-proof underclothing by impregnating underwear with vermin-destroying chemicals. The State of Iowa was so interested in her invention that there was a public movement to clothe all Iowa troops in this underwear, should the Government fail to adopt it. The underwear was submitted to the experts of the Bureau of Entomology (the Government agency that deals with bugs), whose experts tested the invention. They found that the underwear was indeed death to the cootie. However, if the chemicals were applied in weak strength they soon evaporated and left the underwear harmless to the insect; if applied in great strength, the poisonous chemicals irritated the skin of the wearer. During the first winter the men were in camp, the winter of 1917-18, there was no time to provide the troops with standard Army underwear. Consequently Government agents went into the underwear market and bought outright whatever was in sight. As a result, the soldiers that first winter wore underwear of almost every description and grade of merit. This gave the Army's underwear experts a fine opportunity to study the qualities of underwear of various types as proved by actual use. These studies contained hints of use to the civilian. For instance, the warning is plainly given to wear no fleece-lined underwear. A study was made of the causes of colds, and it was discovered that soldiers wearing fleece-lined underwear caught cold more easily than those wearing any other sort. The fleece of the lining absorbed perspiration and retained it, staying damp. Since many of the soldiers slept in their underclothing, they were thus encased in damp clothes 24 hours a day. Sick reports plainly showed the result of it. When it comes to the production of cotton cloth for the Army's uses, the figures are so large as to appear almost fantastic. In all we procured over 800,000,000 square yards of cotton textiles. This was enough to carpet an area nearly four times as large as the District of Columbia. In a strip 3 feet wide there was enough of it to wrap 18 In addition to the cotton khaki required for uniforms and other purposes, the principal other cotton items were duck, denim, webbing, gauze, venetian, sheets, pillowcases, and towels. The purchases made by the Army were beyond anything that had been known in the textile industry. In March, 1918, the supplies of cotton khaki on hand seemed to indicate a surplus of 21,000,000 yards beyond the needs of the immediate future. Then came the start of the German drive, and by the middle of April this great surplus of khaki cloth was not sufficient to the need. In other words, there was a shortage of khaki, since the Army needed at once 25,000,000 yards and thereafter would require a monthly supply of 10,000,000 yards. This was looking toward the great increase in the number of men soon to be called to the colors. It was planned to draft 300,000 in June alone, and subsequent drafts would be on a like scale. In order to supply summer uniforms for these men it was necessary for Army officers to get every yard of khaki goods in the country. All stocks of goods in the hands of dealers and manufacturers were inventoried, and the positive order went out of Washington forbidding the use of khaki in articles for civilians. In spite of the Government's tremendous demand upon a limited supply, these stocks of khaki were acquired at a price 20 per cent lower than the prevailing market. The requirements for cotton duck and cotton webbing also leaped upward as soon as the United States began to avalanche soldiers upon France. The demands were greater than could be supplied by the output of mills regularly producing these materials, and consequently the Clothing and Equipage Division called upon manufacturers of similar materials to adapt their plants to the production of duck and webbing. This they did, in many cases at considerable inconvenience and expense. Among the concerns which assisted in supplying these materials were manufacturers of carpets, automobile tire fabric, and even lace. Owing to the scarcity and the high cost of leather a great deal of cotton webbing was substituted in the manufacture of such equipment as cartridge belts, suspenders, gun slings, and horse bridles. Here was additional demand, and to meet it factories which had been making such things as asbestos brake linings, hose, lamp wicks, suspenders, garters, cotton belting, and other similar fabrics, became webbing mills. All these plants thus adapted to the emergency manufacture of webbing were dependent on purchased yarns, which they had to secure in the open market from yarn manufacturers. In the South particularly, where most of this yarn was purchased, the securing of power was a serious question. Many of the mills With regard to labor, employees in the cotton and webbing mills had to be educated in the manufacture of the new types of work to which these plants had been shifted. In the South, more especially, there was a question of child labor and of hours of labor for women and minors; for the Government inserted clauses in the later contracts requiring certain standards for the benefit and protection of labor. In some instances contracts were returned because of the child-labor clause. In such cases compulsory orders were often issued, practically compelling the mills to produce the goods called for. Considerable burlap used for packing, as well as burlap bags, silk for flags, hat bands, and badges were also purchased in quantity. The United States was never forced to turn to the use of paper in the manufacture of clothing, as the central powers were compelled to do; nevertheless preparation was made for the time when the cotton supply of the United States might become unequal to the demand. Garments made of paper cloth captured from the Germans were shipped to the United States and carefully studied by the Clothing and Equipage Division to learn the possibilities of paper fabrics should the need for them develop. Over 100,000,000 yards of denim were bought. Denim was used particularly in making working clothes for the soldiers. At one time the factories were consuming denim at the rate of 13,000,000 yards a month. Brown denim which was required by regulations was a material hard to get, blue denim being the standard fabric for American overalls, and consequently heavy gray goods and drills were dyed olive-drab and put into use. As to gauze, about 140,000,000 yards of it were purchased. Sheets and pillowcases were required in such quantities that at one time every mill in the country whose normal business was the production of sheeting was working for the Government. There were over 120,000,000 yards of webbing purchased, and nearly 300,000,000 yards of the various kinds of duck. The duck and webbing just mentioned went into the manufacture of a numerous class of articles, known as textile equipment, including such articles as belts, tool bags, tool kits, flasks, canteen covers, and But even after the webbing was secured there were practically no factories in the United States that had machinery heavy enough to make the Army's textile equipment. This work for the standing Army had been done exclusively by the Rock Island Arsenal. In order to increase the manufacturing capacity of the country it was necessary to get the Singer Sewing Machine Co. to build special machines adapted to this heavy work; and we also had to send experts from the Rock Island Arsenal to teach all new contractors how to make the articles. Many of the factory workers were women. In spite of all difficulties production was wonderfully increased. Along in January, 1918, about 100,000 pistol belts a month were being made; while at the time of the signing of the armistice 560,000 were being manufactured monthly. Of cartridge belts in the same period the production was increased from 85,000 to about 410,000 monthly, and of haversacks from 290,000 to about 850,000 monthly. No soldier could be sent overseas without a haversack, a cartridge belt, and a canteen cover; yet during the period of active hostilities no movement of troops was delayed one day on account of the lack of textile equipment. Up to December 1, 1918, the production of haversacks was over 2,500,000 in number, costing over $8,000,000; of canteen covers, about 3,750,000, costing $2,250,000; of cartridge belts, about 1,500,000, costing over $4,000,000. Another large item was bandoleers, which were procured to the number of over 31,000,000 at a cost of $5,500,000. These are only a few of the major items, but they serve to illustrate the extent of the purchases of textile equipment. At the end of hostilities the Government was buying textile equipment at the rate of $22,000,000 a month, and was working toward the goal of being able to supply 750,000 men a month with all articles of textile equipment. When the Army began to expand in size at an unexpected rate in the spring of 1918, it created a great shortage in cotton underwear. Government agents went out over the country and bought all cotton underwear stocks. In order to provide a sufficient manufacturing capacity for cotton underwear, women's underwear factories were enlisted for war work, and so were even corset factories. The Army experts in cotton textiles also effected many economies. A standard pattern layout was drawn for the overall makers with consequent large savings of cloth in the manufacture of brown denim fatigue clothing, or soldiers' working clothes. At one time practically every overall factory in the United States was making fatigue clothing for the Army, after Gen. Pershing had cabled an order for 3,000,000 garments to be delivered in 90 days. In making the soldiers' barrack bags, in which they pack their clothing and personal effects, the manufacturers in cutting out the pattern left a 3-inch strip of cloth. Army officers discovered these 3-inch strips and also noted the fact that every barrack bag must be provided with a draw-string. The specifications were thereupon changed so that these 3-inch strips could be used as draw-strings in the barrack bags, a trifling economy apparently, yet amounting to a saving of 6 cents in the cost of each one of millions of these bags. A vast amount of tentage was required, not only for tents themselves, but also for such articles as paulins, tent covers, bed rolls and clothing rolls, canvas basins and buckets, bags for stakes, tool bags, coal bags, and mail bags, cargo covers, wagon covers, horse covers, and many similar articles. Valuable work was done in substituting cotton thread for linen. Linen thread became so scarce that the Ordnance Department commandeered the whole supply. This worked havoc in the shoe industry, and as a result the Council of National Defense secured from the Ordnance Department enough linen thread to take care of the Army shoe contracts. Nevertheless it was discovered that cotton thread might be substituted for linen in many industries. In fact, it often proved to be better than linen. Valuable standard tests for waterproof cloth were also worked out. These tests were developed at the Bureau of Chemistry, a branch of the Department of Agriculture in Washington. In these tests cloth was required to withstand a deluge of water equivalent in intensity to a tropical rain, and also to undergo a dry temperature of 120° Fahrenheit. There were also tests to determine under what conditions the cloth would mildew. These tests are expected to have a use in the waterproof-goods industry in normal times. Another important contribution of the Army to peace-time industry was the design of the over-suit for the use of truck drivers. This was a waterproof garment, air-tight and cold-proof. It is expected that this new garment will continue in commercial use. The principal items of rubber goods bought by the Army were rubber boots and overshoes, raincoats, and slickers. The production of rubber boots for the Army took practically the entire capacity of all mills in the United States, the rubber boot manufacturers having pledged themselves to discontinue their civilian business until the Incidentally there was worked out an improvement in rubber boots to prevent them from blistering the heels of wearers. It was discovered that a rubber boot blisters the heel because it rubs slightly as the wearer walks, no matter how well fitted to the foot the boot may be. To the specifications for the Army's rubber boots was added the requirement that straps be incorporated in the article to be buckled both around the ankle and around the instep, thus holding the boot so that it can not slip. Raincoats caused a good deal of trouble, as there was not a sufficient manufacturing capacity in this country to meet the requirements. Practically all stocks of commercial raincoats were purchased, on the theory that even a poor cover was better than none. As these garments were made for civilian use, they were not built according to Army specifications, and considerable criticism was made as to their quality. When the manufacture of raincoats commenced on a large scale, many new concerns went into the business, and some of them, either through lack of experience or through carelessness or intent, made garments that were not properly cemented. This led to investigations and indictments. The total purchases of ponchos, raincoats, and slickers amounted to about 10,000,000 garments, costing over $46,000,000. In all 7,000,000 service hats of felt were manufactured on orders placed by the War Department. The felt for these hats was made of rabbit fur imported from Australia, New Zealand, and Russia and produced in the United States. Hats were made principally at Danbury, Conn., and Fall River, Mass., with smaller sources of supply at Yonkers and Peekskill, N. Y., and Reading, Pa. The numerous requirements of the Army for pillows created a shortage in feathers. In all there were manufactured on Government order 500,000 pillows weighing 2½ pounds each. It had been the original intention to fill these pillows with duck feathers; but when the American duck-feather supply was exhausted and thousands of the ducks of China had given up their plumage for the comfort of the American soldiers, and still there were not enough feathers for the pillows, adulterations with goose feathers and other light plumage were permitted. The procurement of leather for the Army, both the raw material and the finished products of leather, was one of the most important undertakings, the principal war uses for leather being in shoes for the soldiers and in harness for the horses and mules. When the Government entered the leather market it found a high level of prices, due to the large quantities of leather and leather equipment which America had been exporting to the European nations at war. The tanners were called together, and they came to an agreement with the Government as to the prices of all grades of equipment which the Army expected to buy. The packers next agreed on a maximum price for hides suitable for Army leathers. The Government took an option on 750,000 hides then in the hands of the packers. By consulting with the industry at all times the Government officers were able to stabilize prices of leather. The price of harness leather, which was originally fixed at 66 cents per pound, was advanced only 4 cents during the 18 months of the war period, while russet leather never advanced more than 4 cents per pound above the $1.03 fixed at the beginning of the war. As the stocks of leather on hand diminished it became necessary to stimulate the production of leather goods, and there was formed a hide and leather control board, with a representative on it from each branch of the trade, one for harness, one for sole leather, one for upper leather, and one for the sheepskin trade. This board also inspected leather at all the tanneries and the finished leather in the various factories, a course of action which resulted in great improvement in the quality of leather, particularly in leather used in shoemaking. At the outset the Quartermaster Corps, the Ordnance Department, the Signal Corps, the Engineering Department, the Medical Department, the Navy, and the Marine Corps were all buying leather or leather equipment, and the Y. M. C. A. and the Red Cross were also in the market for large amounts of leather materials. These activities, except those of the Navy and Marine Corps, were all eventually brought under the administration of the Clothing and Equipage Division, thus virtually eliminating competition in the leather market. At the signing of the armistice it is safe to say there was enough leather equipment, either in the United States or in France, or in process of manufacture here, to meet the needs of 5,000,000 men. Leather equipment was available at all times. The principal items of leather were harnesses, shoes, jerkins, gloves, and mittens. In all, $75,000,000 was spent for harness and leather equipment. The procurement of saddles in itself was a hard problem, since there were only three or four makers of saddletrees in the United States, and only one of these could get the ash or basswood required. The division induced various furniture factories to install the special lathes required for turning saddletrees, and in this way built up eight factories, which gave us sufficient capacity. Belting manufacturers and manufacturers of shoes were educated in the art of producing the leather for the saddles. The Army harness is of russet leather, a product for which there is no commercial demand. The result is that surpluses of Army harness can not be disposed of to advantage. Dieing Out Uppers with Clicking Machine. Pulling Upper Over Last. MANUFACTURING ARMY SHOES. Stitching Vamp to Quarter. Attaching Heels. MANUFACTURING ARMY SHOES. The former American Army shoe built on the Munson last and known as the russet marching shoe was machine sewed, had an upper of calfskin with the rough side turned in, and was lined with duck. This shoe proved to be short lived when subjected to the severe service in France. At the beginning of the war a new shoe was designed for trench service. This was a much heavier shoe and the calfskin of the upper was turned rough side out. There was no lining in the shoe. The shoe had two heavy soles, the outer one being hobnailed. Yet this shoe, too, proved to be unsatisfactory for the service. The uppers wore fairly well, but the soles could not stand the constant submerging in mud and water. The demands of trench service eventually led to the design of what was called the Pershing shoe. This was a shoe with three heavy soles, stitched, screwed, and nailed together. It had steel reinforcements on toe and heel. The outer sole was studded with hobnails. The original requisitions from France for this shoe called for leather tanned with bark. As bark tanning is practically obsolete in the United States to-day, it was necessary to go into the tanneries and build up what was virtually a new industry. It may be mentioned that the design for the Pershing shoe was completed in 30 days. The culmination of the shoe development was the model known as the Victory shoe. This model corrected certain defects in the Pershing shoe. The Pershing shoe was prone to rip along the back stays, and the upper did not fit snugly. In the Victory shoe the entire back of the upper was one piece. At one time 52 shoe factories in 13 States were working on Army shoe contracts. A scheme of packing shoes for overseas shipment in burlap bags instead of in boxes was worked out, and it resulted in saving a great deal of space on board ship. Machinery and tools for the shoe repair shops of the salvage division were purchased by the Clothing and Equipage Division. This was the first time that Uncle Sam had ever acted as cobbler for his soldiers. About 2,000 machines for repairing shoes were bought, besides some 28,000 repair kits, each one of which cost $135. Among the items of supplies for the Army shoe repair shops may be noted 20,000,000 pairs of half soles. A shoe waterproofing grease, or dubbin, as it is called, which had no odor and which would not turn rancid, was developed. The experts worked closely with officers in the field in training soldiers in the care of shoes to make them last as long as possible. Every man who received a new pair of shoes was required to break the pair Bad shoe fitting means foot troubles, leg troubles, and sometimes even spinal and mental troubles. E. J. Bliss, a Boston manufacturer of shoes, developed a shoe fitting system which was adopted as being unexcelled. The fitter was an implement about like a roller skate, with movable wings on the sides and a movable plunger in front of the toes. The soldier to be fitted equipped himself with rifle and loaded pack. With this weight on his shoulders he stepped both feet upon the skate-like devices and then raised on the balls of his feet, until the weight and movement pressed out the wings as far as they would go and advanced the front plungers. With the size thus automatically determined, the next step was to check the accuracy of it. This was done by inserting a pair of implements with knob-like ends in the toes of the shoes, the implements just filling the space in front of the soldier's toes. Wearing shoes and implements, the soldier then walked about the room, stepped upon a platform, climbed a cleated ramp, and otherwise simulated actual service demanded of shoes in the field. If the checking implements in the shoes did not hurt his toes the fit was regarded as correct.
Sergt. Irving Berlin, one of the fountain sources of American jazz music, found a special job cut out for him when he was drafted into the military service. The needs of the war machine called upon a wide range of individual talents, and this range did not exclude the artists. The painters engaged in camouflage work and made sketches and pictures of such things as unusual surgical operations for the permanent records of the Government, the poets fired the zeal of the country, and the musicians inspired the soldiers by providing them with music. The American Expeditionary Forces as they grew in size found themselves possessed of some 390 regimental bands. These bands organized themselves, gathered such music as they could get, practiced, and presently regaled the soldiers of units to which they were attached; and then the inevitable happened—they played and played the same old pieces until their audiences yearned for something new. One day a cry of distress trickled through the cables, and then the plight of the hapless lover of band music in France became the problem of the quartermaster organization in the United States, resulting in the largest purchase of band music ever made, 200,000 sheets of it, costing nearly $50,000. The music problem of the American Expeditionary Forces was put into the hands of a special committee of three well-known authorities in the musical world. Sergt. Berlin was the authority on popular numbers; Lieut. R. C. Deming, the bandmaster at Camp Meigs, Washington, D. C., was the member in charge of the ceremonial numbers; while Mr. Ward Stephens, the well-known composer, organist, and accompanist, was in charge of the concerted numbers. This committee picked out a repertoire of 333 selections, consisting of 172 concert pieces, 43 ceremonial numbers, and 118 popular numbers. Four hundred complete sets of these were bought, one for each of the 390 bands of the American Expeditionary Forces, with 10 sets as a reserve. The music was bought from some 27 music publishers, the largest suppliers being Carl Fischer, the Waterson, Berlin & Snyder Co., the Leo Feist Co., the Jerome H. Remick Co., and G. Schirmer (Inc.), all of New York, and the Oliver Ditson Co., of Boston. Each complete set was packed in a separate case so that each case upon arrival in France could be sent immediately to a band of the American Expeditionary Forces without being disturbed. The sort The supply of music was but one of hundreds of enterprises required to make the Army efficient, comfortable, and happy, quite aside from the more obvious ones of supplying guns and ammunition, artillery, aerial observation, and food and clothing. And these scattered undertakings in military supplies accounted for the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars. Nearly all of them were quartermaster enterprises. But before we lift the curtain on this, one of the most interesting branches of our military preparation, involving, as it did, the scientific solution of problems ranging from the production of super-gasoline for the fighting airplanes to the proper and most economical method of cutting up the carcass of a steer, let us continue the musical overture by observing how the Army secured its band instruments. There was a special branch of the Quartermaster Corps which concerned itself exclusively with the musical requirements of the Army. This branch bought in all approximately 143,000 musical instruments. These were secured at a saving of about $500,000 under the prices which the Government had been paying for such instruments prior to the war. Without going into the details of how this economy was effected, one typical instance may be cited. For years it had been the custom of manufacturers of musical instruments to embellish the trumpets and brass horns of bandsmen with engraving, chasings, and other markings. These were decorative only and had nothing to do with the quality of tone produced. By eliminating all such markings from the specifications, a substantial saving in cost was attained. The principal suppliers of musical instruments were the Wm. Frank Co., of Chicago; J. M. York & Son, of Grand Rapids, Mich.; and the H. M. White Co., of Cleveland, Ohio. C. S. Conn & Co., of Elkhart, Ind.; the Eugene Geisler Co., of Chicago; and the Rudolph Wurlitzer Co., of Cincinnati, also supplied several thousand musical instruments. FUEL, OIL, AND PAINTS.During the months of hostilities the American public was constantly informed in advertising literature that fuel would win the war, and indeed fuel would win it, and did win it, in the sense that without fuel or with any grave shortage of fuel we could not have won. In this sense there was no commodity contributing to success in the great drama more important than coal. Coal not only furnished the power that transported the khaki-clad millions to France, but it furnished the manufacturing power in the United States and supplied the coke, which is essential to the manufacture of steel, thus entering into every rifle and piece of artillery. MINING COAL FOR THE GOVERNMENT'S NEEDS WITH ELECTRICALLY OPERATED MACHINES. 6-TON ELECTRIC LOCOMOTIVE PULLING A STRING OF COAL CARS. PICKING TABLES AND LOADING BOOMS IN A WEST VIRGINIA COAL MINE. TWENTY-TON ELECTRIC LOCOMOTIVE BRINGING COAL OUT OF MINE. America began keeping the records of coal mining in the year 1807. Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated President of the United States in 1913. In the 106 years between 1807 and 1913, and including those years, American mines produced a total of 9,844,159,937 tons of coal. In the succeeding five years of President Wilson's administration American mines turned out 2,960,938,597 tons of coal, almost one-third as much as was mined in the entire 1807-1913 period, and almost one-fourth of all the coal mined in the United States since records have been kept. The American coal miners in 1918 met the war emergency by producing 150,000,000 tons of coal more than they had dug in 1914. The shortage of coal in the winter of 1917-18 was due not to the inability of the mines to produce the required tonnage but to inadequate railroad transportation facilities and severe weather conditions. The war-coal project was in the hands of the United States Fuel Administration, but the office of the Quartermaster General assisted in the effort. Army officers were stationed at the offices of the various district representatives of the Fuel Administration throughout the country. These officers kept in constant touch with the factories making war supplies and saw to it that coal was diverted from less essential enterprises to the munitions factories. This service operated with such excellent effect that few manufacturers working on Government contracts were compelled to suspend operations because of the lack of fuel, and those who did have to suspend were able to resume again within a few days. During the summer of 1918 the usual seasonal slack in the demand for fuel was taken up by the action of the fuel branch in absorbing practically all of the excess coal in the United States and storing it at Army posts, camps, and stations. This action kept the mines working at maximum capacity during a period when there is normally a curtailment in output. Of course, at the time there was no realization that the fighting was to end so soon, and this policy was adopted in preparation for unchecked industrial activity during the winter of 1918-19. The Army itself was a heavy user of fuel, requiring it not only at its various manufacturing establishments but also at the great camps for heating purposes. The following table shows the Army purchases of fuel for the calendar year 1918.
The Army was an enormous consumer of oil, the total oil purchases, both in the United States and in France, in the nine-month period from April 1 to December 31, 1918, amounting to $30,522,837. There were 49 items in the oil-purchasing schedule for the troops in the United States alone, including lubricating oils, fuel oils, oils for paints and varnishes, gasoline for motor trucks and airplanes, axle grease, floor oil, tempering oil, oil for the preservation and waterproofing of shoes, harness, and other leather equipment, and numerous other varieties of oils. The gasoline purchases were heaviest of all, Army motor trucks and cars in the United States requiring 484,282 barrels of it, worth $5,448,570, in the nine months between April 1 and December 31, 1918. The American Army motor trucks and cars with the American Expeditionary Forces were supplied with 703,104 barrels, worth $10,104,437, in the same period. For Army airplanes in the United States during the same months there were purchased 306,082 barrels of special aviation gasoline, at a cost of $3,906,650, and for the planes in France 146,780 barrels, worth $2,748,839. To give the American aviator the hottest, most instantaneously explosive, and surest-fire gasoline ever produced, the American refiners turned out a naphtha along specifications drawn by the Government that was the highest refinement of gasoline ever produced in large quantities. This was done by taking the best gasoline that had ever been produced in commercial quantities and giving it another run through the distilling retorts. Thus it was literally the cream of the cream, containing only the most combustible elements of liquid fuel and nothing else. This refinement became known as "257° fighting naphtha," and the Army confined its use to the service planes actually at the front. It was not supplied to the aviation training camps, either in this country or in France. In order to distinguish this naphtha as the finest engine fuel available and to mark it so that it would not be wasted by accident in any use other than that of service at the front, it was colored red with aniline dyes. The Army did not even trust 257° fighting naphtha to bulk transportation on tank ships, but stored it in steel drums and freighted it across the ocean in this form in cargo boats. America has always been the largest producer of gasoline, and the experience and development in this country has resulted in many grades of the fuel. The ordinary commercial gasoline comes in five grades, the best grade being known as "straight-run" gasoline and the other grades, in the order of their cost and purity, as "casing-head," "blended," "pressure-still," and "cracked." For motor fuel for the Army the quartermaster specifications would accept nothing but "straight-run" gasoline, unblended and without dangerous Above that were the three grades of gasoline, or rather, naphtha, produced specially for the American Army airplanes. The lowest grade of these was called domestic aviation gasoline, and it was the best commercial gasoline refined until its boiling point had been brought down to 347° F. This fuel was used by our aviators in this country and was known as "347° domestic aviation naphtha." A still greater refinement was the splendid "302° export aviation naphtha," which was used by planes in France, other than those at the front. The fighting naphtha was obtained by taking the cream of export aviation naphtha. Although purchased in enormous quantities, it cost the Government more than 41 cents a gallon. The Government paid slightly less than 22 cents a gallon for its motor gasoline. Another new development in the oil industry brought about by the Government's war needs was known as "Liberty aero oil." This was an airplane lubricating oil of pure mineral origin, a refined lubricant of excellent viscosity and a low cold test, an oil which proved itself to be capable and reliable under the ever-changing atmospheric and pressure conditions of mechanical flight at the front. Liberty aero oil was a success. Most of it which was shipped overseas was made from paraffin base oils, although in this country we used successfully many aero oils of asphaltum base. The Ordnance Department submitted a requisition for a three-months' supply of pure neat's-foot oil, which was in quantity almost twice the total American production of neat's-foot oil in the preceding year. The Government oil experts worked out a satisfactory substitute by combining animal and mineral oils. This was not only equal to neat's-foot oil under tests, but it was considerably cheaper. The American Expeditionary Forces submitted a rush order for 6,000,000 pounds of dark axle grease. The specifications called for containers made of tin. But it was almost impossible to secure the tin for such a shipment. Experiments were conducted with all possible haste, and the result was a container made of black iron sheets treated with a special varnish to prevent the moisture in the grease from rusting the iron. This container proved to be satisfactory. BRUSHES.Offhand, one would scarcely say that brushes play any part of vast importance in the life of an individual; yet to buy the brushes for the Army required a special organization, competent to spend money by the millions of dollars and get value received for it. Indeed it was quite surprising how many brushes in variety the Army required. The tooth brush, the shaving brush, the hair brush, the clothes brush, the shoe brush, and the paint brush might occur to anybody as necessities; but the Army used all these and in addition, artists' brushes, bottle brushes, chimney brushes, whitewashing brushes, gun-cleaning brushes, floor brushes, roofing brushes, stove brushes, horse brushes, and dozens of other kinds. In all, the Government bought 9,224,210 brushes, at a cost of $3,039,000. It required 59 factories in the United States to manufacture these brushes. The most numerous class of all were the tooth brushes, more than 1,500,000 of these being ordered from one company alone. Brushes are made from many different materials, such as bristle, horsehair, fiber of various kinds, imitation bristle, split quills, and the like, but the most important is bristle. Only a little bristle is produced in the United States in comparison to the demand for it, the bulk of the supply coming from China, India, Siberia, and Russia. The procurement of bristle was no small part of the problem of supplying brushes for the Army. Not one in every 10 tooth brushes used in the United States was of American manufacture before the war, the rest coming from Japan, France, England, Germany, and Austria. When the European supply was cut off, Japan became the principal source of supply. The problem of tooth brushes was further complicated by an embargo on bristles coming into this country and another on the exporting of bone to Japan. The Army bought no shaving brushes made of horsehair, even in part, since horsehair is known to be the carrier of the much dreaded anthrax germ. The Government specified a shaving brush with an abbreviated handle, making it more convenient to carry. A handle-less hairbrush was also specified. Paint brushes were largely standardized, but it was impossible to standardize toilet brushes because there were not enough facilities in the country to turn out sufficient quantities, if machinery had to be remodeled to meet Government specifications. ROLLING KITCHENS.Those in charge of general quartermaster purchases designed and produced the liberty rolling field kitchen, an equipment which could cook for 200 men. Rolling field kitchens were not new to our Army or the trade, there being about six types of commercial kitchens manufactured at the time we entered the war. Most of these were being produced on foreign war orders. In order, however, to secure a standardized kitchen with interchangeable parts, thus insuring a constant supply of spare parts, the division designed the liberty kitchen. There were two types of it—the horse-drawn type and the motor-drawn or trailmobile type. Each kitchen consisted of a stove and a limber. The stove unit contained a bake oven and three kettles. The limber contained four bread boxes, which were also used as water containers, one cook's chest, four fireless cookers, and four kettles. In July, 1918, contracts were awarded for 15,000 complete kitchens, including the necessary cooking and camp utensils. Deliveries of these kitchens eventually reached a rate of over 200 per day. Two factories adopted and installed track conveyor equipment on which the assembling process was carried forward from operation to operation until the finished kitchen, painted and boxed, was delivered to the car for shipment to the port of embarkation. The kitchens were packed each in a single crate, ready to be delivered to the front after arriving in France. Before this kitchen was designed the Army had been paying from $700 to $1,050 apiece for rolling kitchens. The average price of the liberty kitchen was $502. Subsequent orders brought the total projected purchases of mobile kitchens to 25,000, of which 10,000 were of the animal-drawn type. Substantial shipments of these kitchens had been received overseas before hostilities ceased, and in November deliveries were expanding at a rate which would have exceeded several times the 3,000 liberty kitchens required by the American Expeditionary Forces by January 1, 1919. About 7,000 rolling kitchens of all types were shipped to France. TOOLS AND TOOL CHESTS.Another important result accomplished in the purchase of general supplies was the standardization of tool chests. At one time the Army was buying and using approximately 100 different kinds of quartermaster tool chests. A committee to standardize tools and tool chests was appointed, and this committee reduced the number of types of tool chests to seven standardized ones—the carpenter's chest, the blacksmith's, the farrier's, the saddler's, the electrician's, the plumber's, and the horseshoer's emergency chest. The committee also standardized the tools. Many varieties of such things as drawknives and handsaws had been purchased previously. This committee adopted a standard type of draw knife and a standard handsaw, and also standardized many other tools. Standardization of tool chests effected a large saving in transportation space by keeping the dimensions to a minimum. The standardized carpenter's chest occupied 3½ cubic feet less space than the older type wooden chest. Since at the time the armistice was signed the Army was in the market for approximately 135,000 tool chests of the seven standardized types, the saving in shipping space would have been no slight HARDWARE.The general supplies division of the quartermaster organization operated much of the Army's hardware store. In this work the division not only standardized Army tools, but also standardized the proportions in which the various tools were bought. This was not only an intensely interesting development, but it was of utmost importance to the American people, since it saved large sums of money and great quantities of shipping space. The supply officers of the American Expeditionary Forces early began making up their estimates of the materials that must be produced in the United States and shipped to France, to maintain the efficiency of an indefinitely growing Army over a protracted period of time. In the matter of hardware these estimates came originally from the company units. Each repair unit, for instance, would look over the future, and its officers would estimate kinds and quantities of tools required for such and such a period. These little estimates came together in larger groups, and so on, the consolidation of figures continuing until eventually in the case of a certain tool there would be one figure on file at headquarters. Then one day one of those long daily cablegrams from France, signed "Pershing," came to Washington, bringing the future requirements for tools and other hardware. Theoretically it might be assumed that the proportioning of items in these requisitions would be correct and that the American Expeditionary Forces might be expected to need tools in the proportions named. Of course, Sergt. A, in a repair unit with the artillery, might estimate too many hammers and too few wrenches, but Machinist X, miles away in some base shop, might call for too many wrenches and too few hammers. These two estimates would thus balance correctly; and, following out this line of reasoning, it would seem that the entire American Expeditionary Forces' hardware requisitions, compiled as they were, would be properly proportioned. Yet when these requisitions came to Washington and were found to call for the manufacture of such things as files and bolts by the tens of millions, the supply officers here would not accept the theory that the proportions of various sizes called for were correct, but turned the searchlight of science upon these estimates. The method selected of checking these estimates was simplicity itself, yet unique in the history of American industry and almost majestic in the scope of its comprehensive vision. The officer in charge of the procurement of hardware, in the case of files, for instance, simply called together the entire file-manufacturing industry— This procedure was followed with respect to many common articles in hardware. The Hardware Manufacturers' Organization for War Service was formed to give just such assistance, cooperating up to 100 per cent of the hardware industry. The consolidation of the experience figures in American hardware consumption resulted in a schedule of supplies known as the Army's hardware tariff, a schedule showing the proportions in which hardware might be expected to be consumed. The hardware tariff disclosed some surprising errors in the estimates from the American Expeditionary Forces. The American Expeditionary Forces' requisitions, for instance, had called for a total of 127,180,387 bolts of various kinds. The experience of bolt consumption in the American industry was able to correct this to a total of 125,285,000 bolts, or a saving of nearly 2,000,000 in number of pieces. The requisitions had called for 39,945,458 large carriage bolts. The experience of American consumption showed that only 9,700,000 large carriage bolts would be required. The original specifications had called for 31,839,741 small carriage bolts. The experience in American consumption showed that 60,300,000 would be necessary. In other words, the off-hand estimates of the American Expeditionary Forces had called for 30,000,000 too many large carriage bolts and nearly 30,000,000 too few small carriage bolts. The specifications from France called for 5,000,000 stove bolts of the five-eighths-inch dimension. Since this size was not used or was not made at all by stove-bolt manufacturers, the item was canceled, and 2,000,000 smaller-dimension bolts substituted. All bolts were supplied in quantities and proportions determined by following the proportions of the scientific tariff. They were shipped to France in these proportions, whence reports from the American Expeditionary Forces showed that the quantities sent completely covered the needs of the troops in the field. The saving in the manufacture of bolts alone came to nearly $4,000,000, and this says nothing of the saving in railroad and ocean freight charges, or The same procedure was followed in the supplying of files. The hardware manufacturers consulted their records and on the basis of actual consumption in American industry discovered that a repair unit consisting of a machine shop, a horseshoeing shop, a blacksmith shop, and a woodworking shop, with 11 mechanics working in the unit, would consume 305 dozen files per year, the experience tables showing precisely the proportions of the various sizes of files in this consumption. Consequently, when the American Expeditionary Forces requested 439,200 dozen files, the quantities of each size, kind, and style as specified in the requisition from France were disregarded, and the so-called tariff proportions substituted. The files as supplied not only proved adequate in number in every style, but they cost $250,000 less than it would have cost to fill the original order. Moreover, by using tariff sizes the industry was able to make immediate shipments and to run at full production from the start, since it needed only to produce files in the proportions known in the regular trade. What was done with bolts and files was done in many other lines of hardware. When the American Expeditionary Forces saw that its hardware was coming in correct quantities, its officers notified the hardware supply organization to ship all tools and hardware materials in accordance with the so-called tariffs. The executive committee of the Hardware Manufacturers' Association for War Service, which made possible this achievement in commercial science, consisted of Messrs. Murray Sargent, Alexander Stanley, Charles W. Asbury, Fayette R. Plumb, and Isaac Black. The standardization of proportions in the hardware supply succeeded in cutting an original requisition of the American Expeditionary Forces for 8,750 tinners' machines to 860, and an original requisition for 21,600 tinners' assorted groovers to 240, and still met every need of the Army's tin shops in France. The Army hardware office was also called upon to supply such small hardware as fasteners for gas-mask knapsacks and pistol holsters, and some metallic parts for cartridge belts and similar goods. Less than two months before the armistice was signed orders were in sight for the manufacture of some 500,000,000 pieces of these small metallic devices. Most of them were to be made of brass. The uses of the Army in October, 1918, were calling for these articles in such quantities that it required approximately 250,000 pounds of brass per working day to meet the demand. AMBULANCE BODY BOXED FOR SHIPMENT OVERSEAS. PHOTO SHOWING METHOD OF CRATING CHASSIS FOR OVERSEAS SHIPMENT. INTERIOR VIEW OF COAT FACTORY OPERATED BY THE PHILADELPHIA QUARTERMASTER DEPOT. INTERIOR VIEW OF FLAG AND CHEVRON FACTORY OPERATED BY THE PHILADELPHIA QUARTERMASTER DEPOT. At one time there came an order to procure 135,000,000 stud fasteners within approximately 90 days. The result was that one manufacturer, who had been producing 400,000 such fasteners in a day succeeded in raising his production to 1,000,000 per day, and this was only typical of the expansion elsewhere in the industry. The demands of the Army overtaxed the brass rolling-mill capacity of the land. As a result the hardware specialists investigated the possibility of substituting iron and steel for brass, and these substitutes were under consideration when the war came to an end. Vast quantities of large sizes of rope were requested for overseas to replace steel hoisting cables, which could not be secured in sufficient quantities. Standard specifications drawn by the Government in cooperation with rope manufacturers insured the supply to the Army of rope only of the highest grades. Approximately 14,000,000 pounds of manila rope, 2,500,000 pounds of halter rope, and 2,000,000 pounds of cotton and jute twine were purchased at a cost of approximately $9,000,000. Army hardware men bought 1,534,679 axes, at a cost of $1,838,979. They bought 1,256,994 shovels at a cost of $1,140,412, and 425,522 wrenches costing $395,776. They purchased 380,752 fire extinguishers at a cost of $1,761,711. They purchased 2,621,521 safety razors and 45,300,000 safety razor blades, the razors costing $3,171,806 and the blades $1,318,750. These items selected at random give some idea of the extent of the Army's hardware business. QUARTERMASTER FACTORY ENTERPRISES.It may not be generally known that the Quartermaster organization was an extensive manufacturer of war goods in Government shops. In another chapter has been described the method by which the Army was supplied with clothing. While many of the clothing contractors were private manufacturers, the Government itself manufactured more uniforms than it secured from any single outside source. There were two Government uniform factories—one at the plant of the Philadelphia Quartermaster Depot and the other at the Jeffersonville (Ind.) Quartermaster Depot. The Philadelphia factory also manufactured chevrons, flags, and tents. The Jeffersonville depot produced army shirts in addition to outer clothing. The Jeffersonville depot expanded in size during the war until it became the largest shirt manufacturing establishment in the world. When the armistice was signed the Philadelphia uniform factory was rapidly gaining the eminence of being the largest clothing manufacturing plant in the United States. The total value of the articles manufactured by the Philadelphia Quartermaster Depot during the war was $26,230,000. The gar The Philadelphia factory attained an output of 5,000 pairs of chevrons per day, most of them embroidered by hand or by machinery. Before the war the Philadelphia factory had a maximum capacity of 68 pyramidal tents per day. This output was raised to 300 per day. The Jeffersonville uniform factory was established in February, 1918. Jeffersonville is just a few minutes' ride from Louisville, Ky., which is a clothing center, and therefore there was little trouble in securing experienced workers. The factory was operated day and night with two shifts, each working eight hours. The plant reached a capacity of 750 woolen coats and 1,500 pairs of woolen trousers per day. The salaries of the women employees ranged from $50 to $80 per month. The Government established at Jeffersonville one of the most modern woolen cloth shrinking plants in the United States, costing approximately $50,000 and providing a capacity for sponging 10,000 yards of cloth per day. The Army supply officers pronounced the uniforms turned out at Jeffersonville to be the best and most honestly made clothing delivered to the Army during the war, yet the cost of manufacturing uniforms in this plant was at least 25 per cent under the average price paid to private contractors. The average cost of making a woolen service coat at Jeffersonville was $1.02, and the average cost of making a pair of woolen trousers was 54 cents. The shirt factory at Jeffersonville was that depot's largest manufacturing enterprise. The Jeffersonville depot had been making army shirts since 1872. The shirt factory greatly expanded during the Spanish-American War, until it was employing nearly 2,000 operatives, mostly home workers. Thereafter the depot continued to make shirts at the rate of about 200,000 per year until the United States declared war against Germany, and in that time it had accumulated a roll of 2,000 sewing operatives who had worked for the factory at one time or other. A PAIR OF ARMY SHOES BEFORE AND AFTER BEING SALVAGED AT JEFFERSONVILLE QUARTERMASTER DEPOT. TWO VIEWS OF THE RESCO SHOE-FITTING MACHINE. SHOE-FITTING MACHINE WITH PLUNGER AND WINGS OPEN. SHOE-FITTING SCHOOL, CAMP MEIGS, D. C. When the great demand for shirts came in the spring of 1917, the most expert of these seamstresses were hired outright by the month to act as instructors in the homes of new sewing women who had volunteered for the work. Advertisements were then sent out through the newspapers of that entire section for women workers, and presently the factory had a sewing force of 20,000 operatives from practically every town and village throughout southern Indiana and northwestern Kentucky. The output of shirts was increased from 600,000 per year to 8,500,000. Each home worker was supplied with one complete shirt to be used as a guide, and she secured from the factory as often as she needed it shirt material cut from the pattern and tied up in bundles of 10 sets. A large corps of sanitary inspectors was employed to visit the thousands of homes and see to it that the shirts were made under proper conditions. All shirts accepted from the home workers were thoroughly fumigated before being issued from the depot. SHOE FITTING.The Quartermaster Department, along with its other activities, was a school-teacher on a large scale. Without going into a general description of the quartermaster schools and the branches they taught, we will here consider some of the most interesting educational enterprises such as the shoe-fitting schools, the schools for butchers, and the school of goods packing. Elsewhere in this volume the mechanical system of shoe measuring, perfected and adopted by the War Department, was described. Studies made at the camps at various times during 1917 and 1918, studies which examined nearly 59,000 men, showed that a little more than 70 per cent were wearing shoes too short, more than 9 per cent were wearing shoes too long, while less than 19 per cent were correctly fitted. It is probable that these proportions ran clear through the Army before shoe fitting was scientifically taken up, and there is no reason to believe that in civil life the averages of correct shoe fitting are any better. After the so-called Resco system of shoe fitting was adopted, schools for shoe measuring were held at Camp Meigs, D. C., and at Jefferson Barracks, Mo. Each camp and cantonment in the country sent two officers to one or the other of these schools. The course of instruction lasted five days and consisted of lectures by experts and demonstrations of the various appliances. In this way the science of correct shoe fitting was scattered throughout the Army. MEAT CUTTING.It is no easy trick to teach a man to cut meat properly; butchering is a skilled trade. As soon as it was apparent that the American Expeditionary Forces in France were to be greatly expanded in size, our officers overseas sent requests that several trained and experienced butchery companies be sent over to cut meats properly for the organizations abroad. In order to comply with this request there was added to the curriculum of the quartermaster training camp in Florida a butchery course in the cutting, boning, rolling, and tying of fresh and frozen beef. In this course there was developed an entirely new method of cutting beef known as the "natural guide" method; and by it men who had never cut meat before were developed into practical meat cutters in less than eight weeks of instruction and practice. The natural guide method, which was found to be far superior for Army use to any other meat-cutting system which had been known, was exactly what it was named, as it was essentially a separating rather than a cutting process. The beef quarters were boned and divided into their major parts by following the natural separations between muscles, tissues, and bones. This method, which is not at all like that in commercial use, proved to be more economical than any meat-cutting system known, because it utilized every ounce of meat and produced a greater proportion of choice cuts suitable for pot roasts and other roasts than the older Army Cooks' Manual method of meat cutting. The Cooks' Manual method was similar to the method used by the retail butcher, in that it cut meat along artificial indetermined lines. The natural guide method actually produced 3 per cent more edible meat than the other method, since even the most expert meat cutters can not remove all meat from the bones by the Cooks' Manual method. Moreover, by the natural guide method all cuts are uniform, and the fats, suets, and bones are separated as clean, sweet, edible products. Butchery companies were trained by the natural guide method and sent overseas in numbers sufficient for the requirements of the American Expeditionary Forces. After the discovery of this method and the fact that it produced at least 3 per cent more meat than even the expert cutters could secure by the artificial cutting system, it was evident that further research work along this line would be profitable. Even expert butchers, in spite of all their skill and care, wasted meat. What must be the conditions in the mess kitchens of the Army where the cooks, with no expert knowledge of butchery, cut the meats? It was evident that numerous edible by-products of meat, such as fats and marrow, were going into the kitchen garbage pails and thence to the rendering plants. The result of the investigation was a project to establish central meat-cutting and rendering plants for all large concentrations of troops, where all meats would be cut, boned, rolled, and tied, by experts, and delivered direct to the company kitchens ready for roasting or cooking in any manner. The fat and suet at such plants would not be soiled or made unsound by handling, and so it could be rendered and its food value retained. The oil could be cooked from the bones as a valuable by-product, the bones could be dried and sold commercially, and the plant could also have machinery for making sausage and hamburg steak. A plant of this character was put in The meat experts also effected notable economies in ship space by developing what was known as shankless beef. Shank-less beef was beef quarters with the four shanks removed. Quarters thus prepared occupied 14 per cent less freezer, cargo, and shipping space than quarters with their shanks. A still further economy in shipping space was projected in the plan to bone all beef at the packing plants and ship it boxed or frozen in molds and wrapped in burlap. This method saved about 50 per cent of cargo space, and it began to be extensively used during the winter of 1918-19. One set of packages included tenderloins, sirloins, butts, loin steaks, top rounds, and shoulder steaks. Another set of packages contained roasts, including prime ribs, rumps, bottom rounds, and bottom chucks. A third set was for stews, including flanks, plates, blades, necks, shanks, and trimmings. PACKING.American exporters generally for many years have had the reputation of packing goods improperly for overseas shipment. Time and again travelers and investigators in foreign lands have pointed out that if America expected to compete successfully with other manufacturing nations in foreign trade, she must learn to pack goods so that the packages will not break en route and damage the contents. When we sent an Army of over 2,000,000 men to France, it was evident that unless we learned quickly how to put up our supplies properly for overseas shipment, our lack of knowledge would be costly to us. Accordingly the packing service branch of the Quartermaster Department was established. One of its first acts was to set up a school of baling, packing, and crating, this school being located at the Forest Products Laboratory at Madison, Wis., where studies of packing were being made by scientists. The school started in July, 1918, and before the armistice came it had graduated 400 students from its six-weeks' course. Now, while it was important that Army supplies reached the other side in good condition, it was soon seen that of even greater importance would be the economy that might be effected in shipping space by the scientific packing of goods. This obscure and little known packing service branch was really one of the most important agencies in the whole war organization, since the results which it accomplished in the saving of ship space were nothing short of astonishing. These economies came at a time when the German submarines were still These space economies resulted usually from specifications drawn by the packing experts reducing the sizes of packing cases that were too large for the goods contained, and also by packing articles more compactly. For instance, these experts studied the rolling kitchen and determined the most compact assembly of its parts in a crate. The crate was then carefully designed to occupy a minimum amount of space. Some 18,000 rolling kitchens were packed ready for shipment to France. Had all of these been floated, a total of 22,500 cubic tons of ship space would have been saved, or the equivalent of five or six whole shiploads. As it was, room aboard ship could be found for only 6,940 rolling kitchens, which by being scientifically packed occupied 8,700 cubic tons less cargo space, or about two whole shiploads, than they would have occupied otherwise. Wherever possible, entire units of such heavy articles as escort wagons and ambulances were packed in single crates. Wherever open spaces were inevitable in the crating, these vacancies were filled with various subsistence stores, such as dried peas or beans. Galvanized-iron cans, for instance, were packed with two sacks of flour inside each one. The experts studied boxing to determine the best thickness of wood required by various commodities and the proper method of strapping or otherwise fastening the boxes. As a result there was a great improvement in the condition of goods arriving in France. In no respect did the packing service effect greater space economy than in the packing of clothes for the American Expeditionary Forces. Formerly clothing had gone forward to troops packed loosely in wooden boxes. The packing service devised the system of baling all clothing, and a baling plant was set up at the Army supply base in Brooklyn. The service gave scientific attention to the proper folding of garments and eventually, after exhaustive experiments, developed a system of folding that allowed the maximum number of pieces which could go into a bale. It was found that these new methods saved two-thirds of the space that had been used formerly for the shipment of the same quantity of goods in boxes, to say nothing of the great saving both in labor and in boxing materials. A FIELD OF ROLLING KITCHENS AT NEVERS, FRANCE. FIELD KITCHEN EQUIPMENT. MULES AFTER MALLEINING. Malleining is a serum test to determine if the animal is suffering from glanders. The baling plant at New York in the calendar year 1918 shipped to France approximately 1,000,000 bales of clothing and textile and other equipment that could be baled. The saving in money to the United States Government by this method of packing at this one plant in a single year amounted to approximately $55,000,000. The largest item in this economy was the matter of cargo space, which is estimated at $49,080,000 saved to the Government. The complete statement of the financial saving in the shipment of these 1,000,000 bales is as follows:
In addition to the financial saving there was a large saving in raw materials, which count for more than money to a nation engaged in a desperate war. This million bales of clothing saved 58,000,000 board feet of lumber, which would have been used in boxing had the old system of packing been followed. The lumber which might have gone into these boxes requires 30 years for its growth, but the burlap covering the bales was made of jute, which is raised in semiannual crops. The size of the bale adopted was 30 by 15 by 14 inches and up to 19 inches. It is interesting to note that this size was determined upon because it was found that the burlap covering such bales of this size would cut into sandbags with a minimum amount of waste material. The Army abroad used great quantities of sandbags. Thus, by wrapping bales in burlap pieces of proper size, there was saved a considerable amount of cargo space previously occupied by baled burlap being shipped to France to be made into sandbags. It is also notable that baled clothing arrived in France in much better condition than clothing which had been packed in cases. HORSES AND MULES.The Quartermaster Corps was charged with the duty of providing horses and mules for the Army. This function is known technically as remount, and the buying of horses was in the hands of the remount division. There were three permanent remount depots in the United States when the war began in April, 1917—one at Front Royal, Va., one at Fort Reno, Okla., and one at Keogh, Mont.,—an auxiliary remount depot at Fort Bliss, Tex., and a purchasing headquarters at Kansas City, Mo. When it became apparent that the Army would need a large number of horses, some of the most celebrated horsemen and In addition to the existing three remount depots there were established 33 additional auxiliary remount depots and two animal embarkation depots. The horses purchased were shipped to the various remount depots and there trained and conditioned for Army use. It required a large number of officers and men to care for the remount establishment. Shortly before the armistice was signed there were approximately 400 officers and 19,000 enlisted men in the American remount service. The following statement shows the total numbers of horses and mules purchased for the American Army in the calendar years 1917-18, including those acquired by the remount service in France:
Thousands of American animals were shipped to the American Expeditionary Forces in France. Because of the lack of tonnage there were no animal shipments between March 26, 1918, and August The total expenditures of the Army both abroad and at home for horses and mules during the war period was $115,957,000, divided about half and half between the United States on the one hand and France, England, and Spain on the other. The largest remount depot developed during the war is located at Camp Jackson, Columbia, S. C. This depot has a capacity of about 10,000 animals and its construction cost was about $300,000. Soon after the armistice was signed, when it became apparent that animals would no longer be needed, thousands of horses and mules at the different remount depots were sold at auction, these auction sales drawing large crowds of buyers. STORAGE.The problem of storing Army supplies became great only after hostilities had ceased. Before that time supplies were going through the warehouses and to the ships at the deep-water ports so rapidly that there was no backing up of the tide of them in the vast warehouse facilities that had been provided as a war measure. But as soon as the armistice was signed and the Army no longer grew in size but rapidly diminished as men were discharged, the manufacturing operations under way, necessarily continued for a time on a scale which had been developed in preparation for an Army nearly double the size of the one that existed on November 11, 1918, soon began filling up the warehouses. The total storage capacity which the Army had on hand at the time of the fighting, exclusive of that at ports and that for the Department of Military Aeronautics, was as follows:
The operation of one of the Quartermaster depot warehouses might be described at this point, and the general supply depot at Jeffersonville, Ind., is typical. During the war this depot procured for the Quartermaster Corps of the entire Army all horse-drawn vehicles and harness, and such items as barrack ranges, field ranges, and ovens, pack-train equipment, and other supplies. The war deliveries began at Jeffersonville in the late summer of 1917. Receipts soon outgrew storage space. Adjoining lands were leased, and supplies, covered by paulins, were stored in the open. This early period of the war, prior to the spring of 1918, was a back-up period at all the warehouses, as supplies were produced faster than men were trained and transported to France. In the late spring of 1918 Jeffersonville began making heavy shipments of supplies overseas and from then on shipments exceeded receipts. For three months before the armistice was signed the Jeffersonville depot's shipments averaged 60 carloads a day and its receipts about 25 carloads. After the armistice was signed, Jeffersonville was designated as the depot for the storage of all surplus horse-drawn vehicles and black harnesses therefor. Extensive temporary storage sheds were erected. Inbound shipments increased to about 80 cars a day. The depot has stored 4,000 rolling kitchens of the trailmobile type, these kitchens being packed in boxes, each package weighing about 4,300 pounds. The work of storing these kitchens is still in progress, and the pile of boxes will ultimately be 45 feet wide, 30 feet high, and 1,000 feet long. As the pile is made, corrugated-iron roofing is placed on the sides and top, thus forming a waterproof building. Crated automobile trailers, weighing about 9,000 pounds per crate, are being handled in the same manner. Wagons are stored in galvanized-iron warehouses, each one capable of receiving 2,500 wagons, without wheels. Wagon wheels are stored in specially adapted sheds. About 2,000 automobile trucks have already been received for storage in specially constructed sheds. These trucks are mainly Nash Quads, four-wheel-drive trucks, and G. M. C. ambulance chassis. These chassis are stored on end, resting on the bumpers. The engines of all trucks are well oiled and the magnetos are covered with waterproof material. STORAGE OF AUTOMOBILE CHASSIS, JEFFERSONVILLE, IND. STORING ROLLING KITCHENS. METHOD OF STORING WAGON WHEELS AT JEFFERSONVILLE QUARTERMASTER STORAGE DEPOT. METHOD OF STORING HORSE COLLARS AT JEFFERSONVILLE DEPOT. As the supplies backed up into the warehouses, it became necessary for the Army to know where it stood in the matter of property; and a complete inventory was ordered, since there had been no time during the hurry and bustle of the war period to take stock. This inventory in itself was an enormous undertaking. To prepare for it the quartermaster training school at Camp Meigs, D. C., was completely transformed into a school for training experts for taking inventories. A standard scheme was worked out. The experts, after being trained in the standard method, were sent out into every zone in the country as instructors. In each zone they convened the so-called "town meetings." The town meeting was made up of Army storekeepers from each depot, post, camp, and station in the zone—any place where Army supplies were stored. These representatives were schooled in the inventory method and then sent back to their stations with instructions to start the inventory on December 31, 1918. The next operation was to organize an inventory factory in Washington as the consolidating point for all the inventories in the United States. Some idea of the number of articles which Uncle Sam accumulated as a result of the war may be gained from the fact that the inventories received in Washington filled 40,600 sheets of paper, the size of an ordinary large letterhead, with typewriting single spaced. To take the inventory required a force in Washington of approximately 100 officers and 400 civilians, while there were probably over 10,000 officers and men engaged in the entire operation over the country. The inventory was undoubtedly the largest ever taken in the world. Before the war the standard items of Army supplies had been 20,000. The inventory in the consolidation of its figures in Washington disclosed the fact that at the beginning of the year 1919 there were 120,000 standard items, and many of these stood for large quantities of individual pieces. As this report is written, a catalogue, or standard nomenclature list of supplies, comprising 120,000 items, is being prepared, to establish throughout the United States one language of supply for all items stored, distributed, and issued under the direction of the Director of Storage. The punitive expedition into Mexico in pursuit of Francisco Villa marked the real beginning of the use of motor transportation for the Army, although for many years the motor truck had received some attention for military purposes. In 1904 a few progressive officers at West Point made preliminary tests of 1½-ton trucks, but these tests, while demonstrating that the truck would doubtless be of value to the Army in the future, were not sufficiently successful to create any particular interest. A few trucks were in use in the Army in 1907, but no systematic tests were made until 1912. At that time officers were seriously studying the motor transportation needs and problems of the Army. In 1914 the Society of Automobile Engineers, having learned from the experience of European nations then at war that motor transportation is one of the most vital factors in the success of any army, offered its services to our War Department for the purpose of making a complete survey of the automotive industry, in the hope that the interests of the industry and of the Army could be coordinated so that in an extreme emergency the industry might be able to provide the necessary motor equipment for the Army, and that the Army might be able to use such equipment in the most efficient manner. Pursuant to this offer, on April 28, 1916, the War Department asked the society's cooperation in issuing revised specifications for the purchase of 1½-ton and 3-ton Army trucks. In May of the same year, a committee consisting of the engineers from five companies manufacturing trucks, from five companies assembling trucks, and an engineer from a truck company not making the types of trucks under consideration, was appointed to cooperate with Army officers in making plans to provide our troops with motor vehicles suitable to their needs. On this committee were representatives of the Locomobile Co. of America, the Packard Motor Car Co., the Peerless Motor Car Co., the Pierce-Arrow Motor Car Co., the Kelly-Springfield Motor Truck Co., the Selden Motor Vehicle Co., the Commercial Truck Co. of America, the White Co., and the General Motors Co. This committee went over the Government specifications for the 1½-ton and 3-ton trucks, which had been proposed by the Army, and after a few changes had been made, the specifications were drawn up for what then seemed to be the ideal trucks for Army use in these two sizes. Trucks at this time were urgently needed for our forces along the Mexican border and for the punitive expedition entering Mexico. Consequently rush orders for the first large quantities of trucks ever purchased or used by our Army were placed with the White Co., the Packard Motor Car Co., The Garford Motor Truck Co., the Kelly-Springfield Motor Truck Co., the Four Wheel Drive Co., and the Jeffery (Nash) Quad. It was with the trucks of these concerns that our Army officers obtained their first real experience on a big scale with motor transportation. The trucks themselves also received the most severe tests while in service on the border and in Mexico. Not only did the Army officers secure valuable experience in operating this motor equipment but the manufacturer also took this exceptional opportunity to study motor vehicles in actual operation under Army conditions, and early in 1917 revised specifications for Army trucks were issued as a result of the numerous conferences that had been held between representatives of the War Department and the automobile industry. In May standard specifications for the so-called class A (1½-ton to 2-ton) and the class B (3-ton to 5-ton) motor trucks were established, showing that the fundamental requirements of motor trucks for the Army were as follows: low-gear reduction, larger engines, 4-speed transmission (with very low first speed), maximum ground clearance, demountable tires of standardized size and specifications, large gasoline tank, electric lighting system, 3-point engine suspension, locking differential, extra quality alloy steel springs, and larger radiators. After deciding on the requisites of an Army truck, the matter of standardization began to receive definite attention, it being the belief of many of the Army officers that it would be entirely possible and practicable so to standardize Army vehicles that but one type of truck would be sufficient for each size, and it became quite evident if this ideal could be worked out, the maintenance of Army vehicles would be a simple matter. Without some standardization, the providing of the proper stock of spare parts became a problem of extreme difficulty. In the early summer of 1917 an appropriation of $175,000 was set aside by the Quartermaster Department for the purpose of financing the cost of designing and drawing up specifications for a complete new vehicle, which would become a standardized truck for our military forces. On August 1, 1917, there were assembled in Washington 50 automotive engineers who had been in touch with the truck needs of the Army; and these men, with the help of Army officers, began the task of designing a sample standardized truck, first centering their efforts on the 3-ton size, as this was at that time most urgently needed by the Army. On October 10 of this same year Orders for 10,000 of these class B trucks were placed within the next few weeks. Five additional trucks were rushed through the plants as a check on tools and were completed January 10, 1918. In April, actual production having begun on the first 10,000, the purchase of an additional 8,000 was authorized, and orders for them were placed in May. In September, 1918, additional orders were placed for 25,000, but on account of the signing of the armistice no trucks were delivered under this last order. Production of these standardized class B trucks was directed by the following men, who were called to Washington: Christian Girl, head of the Standard Parts Co., of Cleveland; James F. Bourquin, Continental Motor Co., Louisville, Ky.; Percy W. Tracy, of the Premier Motor Co., Indianapolis; Walter S. Quinlan, of the Maynard H. Murch Co., Cleveland; Guy Morgan, of the Mitchell Motors Corporation, Racine, Wis.; J. G. Utz, of the Standard Parts Co., Cleveland; G. W. Randels, of the Foote-Burt Co., Cleveland; and A. G. Drefs, of the Miller-Franklin Co. All materials for the building of a standardized truck were mobilized through officials at Washington. In general, it was the idea to have at least three or four sources of supply for each part that went into the standardized truck, and as a result 150 parts manufacturers were given contracts. During the time in which the Quartermaster Department was attempting to standardize all Army cargo-carrying vehicles, and up to May 15, 1918, the other branches of the Army were buying commercial trucks of different makes for their special uses. The Ordnance Department had concentrated on the Nash and F. W. D. trucks for ammunition and other ordnance work, and had ordered approximately 30,000 of these two types. The Signal Corps had specialized in the light and heavy aviation trucks, these being assembled from known and tried units, such as motors, axles, transmission, etc., and equipped with special apparatus for the Signal Corps. Approximately 4,000 of the light aviation and 4,600 of the heavy aviation trucks were ordered. The Engineer Corps had adopted the Mack 5½-ton truck and had ordered approximately 3,600. The Medical Corps had gone in for the G. M. C. model 16 for ambulances, of which approximately 5,800 had been ordered, and they had also purchased approximately 2,600 Ford ambulances. These five branches of the Army had purchased trucks of other makes as well, and during the winter of 1917 and 1918 it became During the first year of operations in France the American Expeditionary Forces had purchased various types of vehicles abroad in order to fill their immediate requirements, and the result was that over 200 different makes of motor vehicles were actually in use by the American Expeditionary Forces. This diversity in types was to some extent caused by lack of shipping space in which to transport motor equipment abroad. Not being able to secure sufficient trucks from the United States, due to shortage of ocean tonnage, the American Expeditionary Forces were compelled to purchase a miscellaneous assortment of foreign-made vehicles, thus complicating the maintenance problem beyond the possibility of a satisfactory solution. The buying of motor equipment by so many different agencies of the Government was not only confusing to the manufacturer, who was selling to five different corps, but it also precluded any possibility of real standardization; and with a view of eliminating these two evils, Special Order 91, W. D. 1918, and General Order 38, W. D. 1918, were issued. The first created a standardization board and the second consolidated the procurement of all motor vehicles in the Motor Transport Service, which service operated under the direction of the Quartermaster General. Under the special orders the standardization board was charged with selecting and approving the proper types for the use of the Army, the board being composed of representatives from each of the various corps. In this manner the various ideas of the different corps were coordinated through the discussion of the board, and the final result was that the following chassis were standardized for use: Passenger cars: light, Ford and Dodge; heavy, Cadillac. Ambulances: G. M. C. and Ford (with longer wheel base). Trucks: one-half-ton to ¾-ton, Ford and Dodge (same chassis as in passenger cars); ¾-ton to 1-ton, G. M. C. Model 16; 1½-ton to 2-ton, White; 3-ton to 5-ton, Quartermaster standardized "B." The 4-wheel-drive TT type, called the "Militor," was also standardized, this being a special truck tractor designed by the Ordnance Department. These latter vehicles were never furnished to the Army, as production had not progressed far enough at the time of the signing of the armistice. On this limited number of chassis could be mounted any bodies required by the Army. For instance the White ¾-ton to 1-ton chassis While the board was standardizing on the types of vehicles to be purchased in the future for the Army, the Motor Transport Service was being formed, and by June 1, 1918, the consolidation of procurement, inspection, production, maintenance, etc., was well underway. The needs of the American Expeditionary Forces for motor equipment were increasing by leaps and bounds, and the Motor Transport Service found that it was impossible to purchase the trucks standardized by the motorization board in sufficient quantities to meet the overseas requirements. It was therefore decided, after the consent of the board had been received, that certain other types of vehicles should be procured to fill the requirements of the Army until such time as production of the standardized truck could be increased. Therefore, the makes of trucks which were already in use in large quantities with the American Expeditionary Forces were temporarily made standard to meet the immediate needs of the Army. It being extremely difficult to purchase sufficient trucks, even of these additional makes, to meet the needs overseas, it was decided that still other makes of trucks would be procured for use in the United States, thus allowing all the makes standardized for overseas use to be shipped to France. The Motor Transport Service operated from May 15 until August 15, 1918, when the Motor Transport Corps was organized under General Order No. 75. This order created a separate corps under the operations division of the General Staff for the operation as well as the procurement of all passenger and cargo carrying motor equipment for the Army. A few weeks later, however, Supply Circular 87, P., S. & T., was issued, placing the procurement of the above under the Director of Purchase, Storage and Traffic (Motors and Vehicles Division), but the operation and maintenance of vehicles was left with the Motor Transport Corps. From September on these organizations remained unchanged up to and after the signing of the armistice. The table appended shows the status of the procurement and production of motor-vehicle orders as of November 1, 1918, 11 days The Army in April, 1917, possessed 3,039 trucks, 437 automobiles, 670 motor cycles, and 12 tractors. One and one-half years later it owned approximately 85,000 trucks, and had the war continued until July 1, 1919, there would have been approximately 185,000 trucks provided for its use by American industry. In addition, this same industry would have provided 30,000 ambulances, 40,000 passenger cars, 70,000 motor cycles, 70,000 bicycles, making a grand total approaching 400,000 vehicles, costing (with spare parts) over $700,000,000. From the very beginning the Government received the hearty cooperation of the entire industry. The need was urgent, the demand tremendous, and many manufacturers were called upon to sacrifice their own product in order to meet the needs of the Army, and many were on a 100-per-cent war-work basis.
MOTORCYCLES, SIDE CARS, AND BICYCLES.The need of the Army for motorcycles, side cars, and bicycles was so tremendous that for many months during the war practically the entire output of these vehicles of the kinds selected as being most suitable for Army use was taken by the Government. It was found that the Indian and Harley-Davidson motorcycles were best adapted to meet the necessities of the Expeditionary Forces in France, and these types were standardized for overseas shipment. Orders for a total of 39,070 Indian motorcycles were placed with the manufacturers at Springfield, Mass., and before the end of 1918, 18,081 of these had been delivered. From the Harley-Davidson manufacturers at Milwaukee, Wis., the Government received 14,666 machines of the total of 26,487 ordered before the end of 1918. In addition to the Harley-Davidson and Indian machines, 1,526 Cleveland motorcycles, made in Cleveland, Ohio, were contracted for, and 1,476 delivered previous to 1919. Side-car equipment for the Indian and Harley-Davidson machines was bought in almost as great quantities as the motorcycles themselves. In fact, the demand for motorcycles and side cars from these two concerns was so great that they were working at 100-per-cent capacity for the Government before the summer of 1918. The needs of the Army for machines increased so steadily and the requirements were so vast that both the Indian and Harley-Davidson concerns had made large additions to their plants for meeting the Government needs at the time the armistice was signed. A standard military type of bicycle was turned out for the Army by the Westfield Manufacturing Co., at Westfield, Mass., and other bicycles were ordered from the Great Western Manufacturing Co., at Laporte, Ind., and the Davis Sewing Machine Co., at Dayton, Ohio.
HORSE AND HAND DRAWN VEHICLES.It was early realized by Army officers upon our entry in the war that procurement of horse-drawn vehicles for the Army would require mobilization of practically the entire wagon-making industry of the Nation. Consequently one of the first steps taken to provide the Army with the necessary vehicles of this type was to call into conference representatives of the four largest manufacturing companies in the industry. R. V. Board, of the Kentucky Wagon Co.; A. B. Thielens, of the Studebaker Corporation of America; E. E. Parsonage, of the John Deere Wagon Co.; and R. W. Lea, of the Moline Plow Co., were named members of an advisory committee to assist the Army in the procurement of vehicles. Our first requisition called for the manufacture of 34,000 escort wagons. This order, with the necessary spare parts for these vehicles meant the building of the equivalent of about 50,000 wagons. At the beginning of the war the manufacture of vehicles from kiln-dried lumber was almost unknown, as there had always been a sufficient amount of air-dried lumber on hand to meet every demand for farm-wagon construction. Our first order, however, practically used up all of the air-dried lumber then in existence in the country. In order that dry lumber could be obtained in sufficient quantities to keep up with the demands for Army vehicles, the War Department entered into an arrangement by which dry-kilns were built by contractors with the Government defraying half of the cost, the wagon manufacturer being reimbursed at the rate of $10 for each wagon produced, or on a basis of $10 for each $185 worth of spare parts fabricated. Despite the fact that ordinarily six months were required even with kiln-drying before a log was ready for fabrication into a vehicle, all orders for the War Department were filled on time and in accordance with the plans outlined. To make this possible every manufacturer of the industry capable of turning out the class of vehicles desired did his part and did it so well that up to the signing of the armistice approximately 110,000 horse-drawn or hand-drawn vehicles had been delivered, of the total of 185,727 for which contracts had been placed. Escort wagons formed the large bulk of the requirements at the start, but as the war progressed, the necessity was created for different designs of vehicles. So from time to time there were de In the early spring of 1918 it was found that the wagon industry had about reached its limit so far as output was concerned, and that, if the war continued another year, new sources of supply would have to be developed. Then it was that the furniture industry was called upon to produce spare parts for vehicles. Under the presidency of P. B. Schravesande, president of the Grand Rapids School Equipment Co., the Furniture and Fixture and Light-wood Industry War Service Committee was organized to cooperate in arranging to have furniture makers enter the field of manufacture of spare parts. It was arranged that the furniture manufacturers were to produce 75 per cent of the spare parts then requisitioned, totaling in value about $8,000,000. While the furniture industry was preparing its plants for the manufacture of these parts, the wagon industry continued to manufacture 25 per cent of the required parts in order to keep up a satisfactory flow. When the armistice was signed practically all the furniture manufacturers had prepared to fill the spare-parts orders, but none of them had reached quantity production. Automobile-wheel manufacturers were induced to turn out the immense quantity of wheels needed for escort wagons. There were in all about 250 manufacturers of wagons, wagon parts, and wheels. Among the prominent wagon companies engaged in this work were: Bain Wagon Co., Oshkosh, Wis.; Columbia Wagon Co., Columbia, Pa.; Deere & Co., Moline, Ill.; Emerson-Brantingham Co., Rockford, Ill.; Florence Wagon Co., Florence, Ala.; Hackney Wagon Co., Wilson, N. C.; International Harvester Co., Memphis, Tenn.; Moline Plow Co., Moline, Ill; Mogul Wagon Co., Hoskinsville, Ky.; Owensboro Wagon Co., Owensboro, Ky.; Pekin Wagon Co., Pekin, Ill.; Peter Schuttler Co., Chicago, Ill.; Springfield Wagon Co., Springfield, Mo.; Stoughton Wagon Co., Stoughton, Wis.; A. Streich & Bros. Co., Oshkosh, Wis.; Thornhill Wagon Co., Lynchburg, Va.; Tiffin Wagon Co., Tiffin, Ohio; Eagle Wagon Works, Auburn, N. Y.; A. A. Cooper Wagon & Buggy Co., Dubuque, Iowa; Winona Wagon Co., Winona, Minn.; White Hickory Wagon Co., Atlanta, Ga.; Kentucky Wagon Co., Louisville, Ky.; Studebaker Corporation, South Bend, Ind.; American Car & Foundry Co., Jeffersonville, Ind. Among the leading automobile-wheel manufacturers who were given contracts for escort-wagon wheels were the following: Mutual Wheel Co., Moline, Ill.; Roger Wheel Co., Aurora, Ind.; Crane & McMahon (Inc.), St. Marys, Ohio; Hayes Wheel Co., Jackson, Mich.; Imperial Wheel Co., Flint, Mich.; Kelsey Wheel Co., Detroit, Mich.; Binnel Spoke & Auto Wheel Co., Portland, Ind.; Archibald Wheel Furniture factories that assumed contracts for making spare parts for horse-drawn vehicles included about 30 furniture manufacturers of Rockford, Ill., as well as the following: Grand Rapids School Equipment Co., Grand Rapids, Mich.; Sherman Bros. Co., Jamestown, N. Y.; Ramsey-Alton Manufacturing Co., Portland, Mich.; Connersville Furniture Co., Connersville, Ind.; P. Derby & Co., Gardner, Mass.; Ebert Furniture Co., Red Lion, Pa.; S. Karpen & Bros., Chicago, Ill.; Chas. T. Lambert & Co., Holland, Mich.; The Macey Co., Grand Rapids, Mich.; Thos. Madden Son & Co., Indianapolis, Ind.; Sidney Manufacturing Co., Sidney, Ohio; Basic Furniture Co., Waynesboro, Va.; Brecht Co., St. Louis, Mo.
The following table shows the principal items listed under commercial vehicles, with the total number ordered, value of the order, and the total number delivered up to November 11, 1918:
This table shows the total number of horse-drawn vehicles sent overseas during the war; also the value of these shipments and the unit prices.
Lest it be thought that the American Army was dependent in any way for its hospital facilities and surgical supplies upon private contributions, it may be said that the Government during the period between April 6, 1917, and November 11, 1918, placed contracts for medical supplies amounting to $424,761,031. Contract cancellations after the armistice was signed amounted to $56,000,000. The remaining $370,000,000 approximately represents the cost to the United States of medicine, surgical instruments and dressings, ambulances, hospital furniture, equipment and supplies, and dental and veterinary supplies for the war. This was considerably more money than was contributed by the American people to the American Red Cross, a great part of whose funds went to the relief of civilian populations in Europe, or to any other war charity. Thus it will be seen that the Government with billions of dollars to spend could well afford the few hundreds of millions necessary to give the American soldiers who needed it the best possible hospital attention. It accepted the gifts of this sort, ranging from gauze bandages to fully equipped motor ambulances, as the offerings of the people whose hearts overflowed with love and gratitude to the American soldiers and took this means of showing their concern; but the Government in no sense was dependent upon these donations. Before 1914 four-fifths of all surgical instruments used in the United States were imported from Germany. This country, too, was practically dependent upon Germany for many of its most important medicines, including the potassium salts and such drugs as digitalin, salvarsan, atropin, etc. While in a way we had been developing substitute sources of supply in the United States for these indispensable commodities in the months between the outbreak of the great war and the date of our participation in it, the raising of a vast army and the project to send this army to the bloody battle fields of France created an American demand for medicines and surgical instruments beyond anything ever known in the United States. Yet, through the cooperation of manufacturers and the officers of the Medical Department's general purchasing office, which was on November 15, 1918, incorporated in the office of the Director of Purchase and Storage, sufficient supplies were developed, not only of medicine but of surgical instruments. The development of the production of medicines for the use of troops in the field was particularly notable. The important drug, salvarsan, used in the treatment of syphilis, was a patented formula and had been furnished formerly by a single German manufacturer. In this country we produced arsphenamine as a substitute, gradually increasing the supply and constantly improving the drug until at length its toxicity had been so reduced that it equaled or even excelled the German product. The facilities of the American drug and tablet manufacturers were taxed to the utmost to supply the Army. For example, during the year 1918 a total of 46,000,000 quinine tablets was produced, while 172,000,000 aspirin tablets were manufactured during the same period, and 835,000 pounds of calomel ointment, 45,000,000 iodine swabs, 10,250,000 tins of foot powder, and 300,000,000 tubes of iodine-potassium. All other items of medicines, antiseptics, and disinfectants, required by the Medical Department, were increased in proportion. This production not only strained the facilities of the manufacturers of chemicals and drugs but also called upon the glassware manufacturers for the necessary bottles and tubes in which to pack these medicines satisfactorily. Here again was an effort that required close cooperation between the trade and the Medical Department in order to meet the demand. When it became evident that a declaration of war against Germany was imminent, the Medical Department proceeded to analyze the country's resources of medical supplies. These resources were to a large extent limited. The Allied nations had been making heavy and constant demands for these materials, so much so that even the mobilization of such a relatively small number of troops as were centered along the Mexican Border put a severe burden upon the medical supply facilities of the country. The Council of National Defense took up the medical supplies problem at the outset. The various manufacturers sent their representatives to consult with the Surgeon General, and committees on surgical instruments, surgical dressings, medicines, and other important supplies were formed. These committees allocated among the various manufacturers the first emergency orders for these materials. The result was that the base hospitals at the 32 mobilization camps in 1917 were equipped in an amazingly short time. The New York Medical Supply Depot, which was then the largest purchasing agent, was called upon to supply 500 hospital beds each to 22 of the camps. This work was handled so rapidly that in some cases the shipments had to be held back to wait for the completion of the hospital buildings. Perhaps the most difficult task was to determine what quantities of medical supplies would be needed for a given period. It is a com Eventually there was worked out a system of supply based on the initial requirements of the unit of 25,000 men in the Expeditionary Forces and the automatic supply of replenishment of this equipment. In this system use was made of the knowledge and experience obtained by the British and French medical forces during their nearly three years of warfare before America went in. The following statement of estimated expenditures for the fiscal year 1920 illustrates the difference in the medical requirements of an army of 500,000 men under peace conditions and an army of 5,000,000 men in a war such as the recent one:
Civilian experts in various lines of medical supplies were brought into the organization to supply the wide range of specialized knowledge required in such a universal buying program as the Medical Department was about to conduct. Before the war the Army's purchases of instruments for oral and brain surgery, orthopedic supplies, Dakin outfits, and other special apparatus were practically negligible. During the war period these purchases amounted to millions of dollars. It may be seen readily that the purchasing office had to possess more than a superficial understanding of the materials to be bought. Orders customarily went to the lowest bidders, with a careful review in Washington of all prices named in contracts. The inspection of material was an important phase of the work. This inspection was handled through the New York Medical Supply Depot, which The medical supplies were divided under the following classifications:
The New York depot was intrusted with the purchase of miscellaneous hospital equipment and dental and X-ray supplies. The St. Louis depot purchased the veterinary supplies, and the field medical supply depot at Washington purchased the laboratory and field supplies. The motor ambulance supply depot, established at Louisville, Ky., purchased ambulances and ambulance spare parts. Appreciating the necessity for a certain amount of cooperation where the purchase of conflicting articles by the various depots was concerned, the general purchasing office of the Medical Department was organized at Washington. This purchasing office bought all surgical dressings, surgical instruments, and medicines and such items as were used in the field, post, veterinary, and dental stations. In connection with the production of surgical instruments in this country it was necessary for the Medical Department to educate in the manufacture of these instruments certain concerns which had been engaged in the production of similar devices. Men skilled in the manufacture of instruments, with long years of experience, were sent to these factories to work out with the forces there satisfactory processes. It was necessary to recruit toolmakers, jewelers, and cutlery manufacturers in order to build up a sufficient supply of forged and finished instruments. Surgical needles, for instance, had never been made in this country, but had all been obtained in England. As a war measure the British In one month we shipped 65 tons of surgical instruments to France. A few of the principal instruments, quantities purchased, and the prices paid were as follows:
Each general operating case contains more than 50 instruments and the small operating case more than 30 instruments, and in these two items alone are more than 207,000 forgings, practically all handwork. The quantity of surgical dressings used in peace times was relatively small, so that the sources for supplying this material had to be increased enormously. To do this the Government went out into the cotton goods industry and induced such concerns as curtain makers and manufacturers of waists and white goods to make bandages for surgical uses. The Government obtained the raw material, gray gauze, and turned it over to the various manufacturers for bleaching, cutting, sterilizing, and packing in the necessary cartons. Among other items during the last year of the war a total of 12,000,000 individual dressing packets were purchased and 795,000 boxes of gauze bandages, 574,400,000 yards of bandage, 10,000,000 first-aid packets, and 108,000,000 yards of gauze. During the same period a total quantity of 3,814,000 pounds of absorbent cotton was also bought. Among the miscellaneous items obtained were approximately 1,600,000 blankets, 258,000 litters, and over 1,000,000 clinical thermometers. The rate of output of clinical thermometers was not all that the Medical Department thought it should be, and as a result a large quantity of thermometers was obtained on mandatory orders. The heaviest buying period during the war was between July 1 and November 30, 1918. The supplies purchased or ordered in that period were the following, with their costs:
It is interesting to note that the purchases made in France for the Medical Department consisted mostly of large and bulky items, mainly hospital furniture and equipment, which, if transported from the United States, would necessitate the use of considerable valuable cargo space. Foreign purchases were made primarily to save ship space and not because of any shortage or failure to function in this country. Although America is famous throughout the world for her dentists and dentistry, yet the participation of this country in the war created a demand for dental supplies that the American manufacturing facilities in existence in 1917 were unable to fill. For that reason it was necessary to extend the production capacity. The manufacturers in the trade rose to the occasion, and as a result the Government was able to supply to the A. E. F. from the United States all dental materials required, the only purchases made in France being of exceedingly bulky apparatus. The total amount allotted for dental supplies for an army of 5,000,000 men in 1919 was $6,256,482. During the five months between July 1 and November 30, 1918, the dental purchases amounted to approximately $5,000,000. The six leading dental items purchased by the Medical Department and the quantity and cost of each were as follows:
Tables of statistics are apt to be tiresome affairs; but in the annals of the War Department, as part of the record of the American Army in the great war, there is a table of statistics that is replete with human interest. This is the table which depicts the activities of the salvage operations of the Army, both at home and abroad. Until the war came to America and brought to us the necessity of being provident, thrift and economy could not be called characteristic American qualities. As virtues in the individual we were apt to despise them. Paris can live on what New York throws away, runs the old saying. For the prudent man we invented opprobrious names. Such names and phrases were but the surface outcroppings of a national tendency to be wasteful. But the war came along to put a stop to waste and to raise thrift high in the esteem of America. Partly because of the mounting prices of food and clothing and partly because of well-organized and well-conducted propaganda on the part of various agencies of the Government, chief among them being the United States Food Administration and the Liberty Bond and War Saving Stamp organizations of the Treasury Department, America began to practice economy in the use of materials. How much of the credit for the change can be claimed by the Government itself we may never know; but this may be said—in urging the people to save materials in their own homes, the Government did not, as it had done in previous wars, allow the traditional wastes of military campaigns. The Government practiced what it preached. It cleaned up its own back yard and utilized every scrap of useful material. It mended the shoes and clothing of the Army; it darned the socks; it tinkered the tin cans; it starved the garbage pails by economy in the mess kitchens and recovered the valuable components of garbage at rendering plants; it collected the junk; it swept the stables and put the manure on the land, and then produced crops from the increased fertility. All of these adventures in conservation and reclamation were known to the Army simply as Salvage; which after all was but the scientific attention which the Army paid to the "p's" and "q's" of military housekeeping—it was household economy on the scale of a family of 3,500,000 members. The figures of the Army's thrift are most impressive. The figures of our war salvage are as follows:
A consolidation of these figures shows that the total amount returned to the Government in money value by the savings of the salvage service of the Army for the single calendar year of 1918 was $101,180,151. With this figure some interesting comparisons may be made. In 1912, to meet every expense of the American standing Army, Congress appropriated $99,676,767.43; in 1913 the appropriations were $100,292,855.04. Salvage, reclaiming the materials once wasted and using them over again, saved enough in 1918 to have maintained the entire Military Establishment in 1912 or 1913. But there is even a more striking comparison. During the fiscal year of 1898—the Spanish-American War year—the entire appropriations for the support of the Army amounted to $70,394,739.96. Salvage in 1918 saved $30,000,000 more than was appropriated to fight the Spanish-American War up to July 1, 1898, at which date the fighting was nearly over. Take the cost of clothing the Army raised to fight against Spain, and add to it the appropriations for clothing the Army and equipping it with shoes, leather and rubber goods, and textile equipment for the years 1913, 1914, 1915, 1916, and 1917, and you have a total Government expenditure of $100,050,271.65. The savings of salvage in 1918 could pay this entire cost with $1,129,880 to spare. It cost $20,280,000 for the clothing and equipage of the Army for the year ending June 30, 1917, at which date the war with Germany had begun. Salvage in the United States alone in 1918 saved to the Government $17,967,416 more than this appropriation. Salvage undertakings touched intimately every soldier in the Army. This service which taught economy in the use of materials could with equal facility operate a laundry or dry-cleaning plant, or run a farm, or drive a good bargain in the sale of junk, or return goods that did not meet specifications and be reimbursed for them. Wherever the experts of the service saw a leak through which the Government's money might flow out, they plugged it. An innovation in warfare as we knew it, it had to fight its way against prejudice at the start, but it developed what formerly was waste and a liability into a tremendous asset. Yet when the armistice came salvage had only commenced to show its possibilities. It had merely scratched the surface, but it had opened up unlimited fields for utilizing worn-out or unserviceable products or by-products of war. It had saved thousands of tons of shipping space in the transportation of supplies to the American Expeditionary Forces by using over again in France the things that otherwise would have had to be replaced by new; it saved this tonnage at the time when every ton saved counted heavily. In this and in the saving of materials at a time when all the raw materials of the earth would scarcely meet the insatiable demands of Moloch, the value of salvage can scarcely be measured by the money figures of its record. SALVAGE IN THE UNITED STATES.War salvage in the United States started on October 5, 1917, when the conservation branch was created in the Quartermaster Department. It started with an executive force of two commissioned officers and one stenographer. When the armistice was signed about 13 months later, the salvage service in the United States alone had a force of approximately 500 commissioned officers, 20,000 enlisted men, and 2,000 civilian employees. In this period the method of clothing and feeding the American soldier had been revolutionized. The old way was to issue a uniform to a soldier and hold him responsible for the repair and cleaning of it. He owned his uniform and had to keep it in good condition at his own expense out of the $15 per month the Government paid him. The new way was for the Government itself to retain ownership of the uniform and to repair and clean it at public expense. The soldier was required to pay only for his laundry work at a uniform charge of $1 per month, much under what he would have had to pay at commercial rates. Formerly the soldier had to repair his own shoes. The soldier prefers repaired shoes to new ones for campaign service because the former are broken in and are comfortable. After the salvage service was established the Government retained ownership of Army shoes and repaired them at Government expense. Once the Army seldom conducted sales of the boxes and crates in which supplies were packed. Salvage undertook such sales, thereby bringing considerable revenue to the Army. But in these and similar economies, it was not so much the saving of money that was important as it was the saving of materials at a time when the supply of all materials was scarcely adequate to the war demands. When our troops first reached France the officers were surprised at the emphasis placed upon salvage operations by the British and French armies. They were soon to learn that salvage was stressed because it supplied materials which were scarce. Glycerine, a component of high explosives, had become so short in supply that the British Ministry of Munitions paid as much as $1,250 a ton for it. The British army distilled its garbage and procured from the operation glycerine at a cost of $250 per ton. This was a financial saving of $1,000 a ton; but, more important, it supplied glycerine at the time when money did not count. The British Ministry of Munitions got the glycerine, which meant explosives for use against the Germans, which was the main thing. The British appreciated the importance of salvage so much that one of the officers sent with the British mission to the United States early in the war was a salvage expert, included in the mission so Although the salvage service of America was authorized in the autumn of 1917, it was not until winter was declining into the spring of 1918 that the service became a working organization fully clothed with authority. Consequently its record was accomplished within a period of 9 or 10 months. The purpose and ideals of the service were embodied in its code, known as special regulations No. 77, promulgating rules and regulations for the conservation and reclamation of Army supplies and materials. The principal provisions of these regulations were as follows:
These regulations likewise—
Thus it may be seen that special regulations No. 77 were not only a charter for the salvage service but a code of conduct in economy and thrift for the soldier of the American Army. Although the regulations did not become official until midsummer of 1918, they had a profound effect in the few months before the fighting in Europe came to an end. Prior to July 1, 1918, all reports of garbage collection, etc., in the military camps in this country indicated that the American soldier in training wasted on the average of 2 pounds of food per day. This was not excessive, judged by civilian standards, since our large cities, a great part of whose population are fed not nearly so well as soldiers were fed in the camps, show a food waste nearly as great. These regulations also set up a salvage equipment for the use of the Army. As a rule each camp had a shoe-repair shop large enough to fix 400 to 500 pairs of shoes per day; a clothing-repair shop large enough to take care of the everyday mending of 30,000 troops; a hat-repair shop sufficient in size to restore the headgear of 30,000 men; and other miscellaneous shops. But at the change of seasons there could be expected an exceptionally large turn in of worn-out clothing, and to handle these periodical floods of garments large base salvage plants were established at Fort Sam Houston, Tex.; Washington, D. C.; Atlanta, Ga.; New York City; Philadelphia; El Paso; and Newport News, Va.; with a base salvage plant for rejuvenating shoes at Jeffersonville, Ind. Smaller base plants were established at Chicago, New Orleans, San Francisco, and at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kans., and at Alcatraz Island, Calif. Other base plants to receive and classify and dispose of waste materials were established at New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, St. Louis, Fort Sam Houston, and Atlanta. The shoe-salvage base plant at Jeffersonville Depot was more than a repair shop in the accepted sense of the term, for it became one of the most complete shoe factories to be found anywhere in the country. When this shop was being projected as a plant to take care of the overflow of worn shoes from the camps and depots, the United Shoe Machinery Co. agreed to furnish machinery sufficient to repair 2,000 pairs of shoes a day, supplying this equipment for a period of six months without any expense to the Government, except upkeep and the cost of supplies. At the Jeffersonville shop shoes went through the mill from department to department much as machines are assembled in the familiar quantity-production manner. Shoes arriving were first counted, and then sorted and graded as follows:
The shoes arriving at this plant were in a condition that would have resulted in their being discarded altogether in the old days. The experience at Jeffersonville showed that 65 of each 100 pairs arriving at the factory could be repaired, and repaired cheaply. In January, 1919, of 132,112 pairs of shoes sorted, 45,000 were in irreparable condition and had to be thrown away. There were 11,475 pairs of class 2 shoes, 74,362 pairs of class 3, and 1,175 pairs of class 4. From the sorting room the shoes went to the wash room, where they were disinfected and cleaned in a bath containing a solution of 40 ounces of formaldehyde and 1 pound of castile soap to each 10 gallons of water. After being washed the shoes were placed on rolling racks, each rack holding 24 pairs of the same size and width. The loaded racks were wheeled to the lasting section where lasts were inserted according to sizes. Next, machines cut off the worn portions of the old heels, after which the shoes went to the stripping bench, where the old soles were removed and the shank pieces skived to prepare a smooth joint for the new half sole. The next process was welting. The welts were prepared, and tarred felt was glued to the old inner sole to fill out uneven parts and prevent squeaking. The next operation was to lay on the half sole in a setting of rubber cement. Another machine rough rounded the soles to conform with the shape of the shoes. Then the shoes reached the stitching machines, where the soles were sewed on, and then the leveling machines, which smoothed out the wrinkles of the inner soles. The next step brought them to the heeling machines, where the complete heels were attached in one motion. Next, machinery for nailing soles and heels, and then the trimming machinery for smoothing off the work. The final mechanical operation was on the scouring and finishing machines. Meanwhile, if the shoes needed patching on the uppers, this work was done by women operating sewing machines. The final process was to give the field shoe a thorough coat of waterproof dubbin. A good polish was put on the russet shoes. A split leather insole was inserted in each shoe to insure perfect smoothness of the bottom. A pair of laces was tied to each pair of shoes, and then the shoes were packed in boxes of 24 pairs each and turned in to the Army stores. The Jeffersonville shop repaired 222,135 pairs of shoes in seven months of operation. Thousands of pairs of shoes were discovered to have been fitted too short. This was shown by the fact that many of the shoes were worn out entirely in the toes. A shoe that is too long will turn up at the toes, while one that is too short will stub with nearly every step taken. On August 8, 1918, the Secretary of War authorized the expenditure of $5,287,852 for the construction of laundries to serve from Each shoe-repair shop at the training camps had equipment sufficient to repair 500 pairs of shoes per day, utilizing the services of 40 to 50 men. When the shops were officially authorized, an inventory of the Army's old shoes showed there were approximately 1,500,000 pairs on hand in need of rehabilitation. In order to assist the camp shops in the work, the salvage service brought between 50 and 55 shoe factories into the reclamation effort, these private factories repairing about 500,000 pairs until the camp shops were able to catch up. Because of the shortage of linen thread it was decided to use nails for attaching half soles, particularly in the repair shops in France. More than 2,500 nailing machines were bought and shipped to the American Expeditionary Forces. The American Expeditionary Forces adopted the English system of company cobblers and regimental repair shops. Upward of 11,000 cobblers' kits were shipped to France. In July, 1918, the American Expeditionary Forces requested machinery for a base shoe-repair plant in France. This machinery was shipped considerably before hostilities ceased. The service maintained a corps of civilian instructors, who traveled from camp to camp and improved the efficiency of the Army cobbling. The accumulation of worn shoes at the embarkation camps was sent to various contractors for repairs. By November, 1918, the shoe-repair facilities of the Army had reached full operation, 500,000 pairs of shoes being repaired that month, a figure representing all the repairing required by 1,500,000 men. All shoe-repairing activities were under the direction of Philip H. Fraher, who was assisted by Joseph Caunt, of Pasadena, Calif., a retired shoe manufacturer with a wide experience both in this country and in England. In its clothing-repair activities the salvage service dry-cleaned uniforms and woolen equipment, repaired and renovated hats, and reclaimed outer clothing and underclothing. For the first time in dry-cleaning history, a method was worked out to destroy all living organisms and a considerable amount of bacteria, a process which is likely to have a lasting effect in the dry-cleaning industry. The specifications of this process were the In the repair of clothing the service received much assistance from the Red Cross. Local Red Cross units in the vicinity of camps worked in conjunction with the officers of the salvage service in the reclamation of such garments as woolen shirts, underclothing, sweaters, helmets, socks, and gloves. The base salvage plants at Atlanta and Fort Sam Houston reached a high state of efficiency in the repair of clothing. Shipment after shipment was made from such congested centers as Newport News and Hoboken to these plants, and within a comparatively short time the property was ready for reshipment and reissue. Capt. Harvey A. Rosenthal, a graduate of the first officers' training school, and in civil life in the clothing business, was in charge of clothing repairs. All of the camps had shops for renovating and repairing hats. The average cost for repairing a hat was 35 cents, whereas the lowest contract price was 65 cents, and the quality of work at the Government shops was far better than that obtained from private contractors. The following table gives an idea of the approximate saving to the Government in hat-repair operations:
Mr. E. Leroy Cummings, of the John B. Stetson Co., of Philadelphia, was in charge of hat-repair activities. Extensive repairs to canvas materials were confined to the base plants at Philadelphia, El Paso, Fort Sam Houston, and Atlanta, and, on a smaller scale, at Jeffersonville. Minor repairs were conducted at camp shops, some of which were only in the course of construction Laundering was not a new activity for the War Department, since when the war was declared the Government already owned 14 small steam laundries. Later the Government went into the laundry business on the scale demanded by the great chain of training camps, building cantonment laundries at a cost of approximately $300,000 each. Experienced laundrymen were placed in charge of camp laundries. Through the cooperation with the Government's insect experts of the Bureau of Entomology, laundering processes were worked out successfully to disinfect all clothing while washing it and to free it from vermin without shrinking fabrics or causing other damage. Government laundries during the war operated 24 hours per day with three labor shifts and cleaned an average of 10,909,850 pieces of clothing monthly, with gross receipts of over $500,000 per month, approximately half of which was profit. One of the most interesting features of laundry activity was the development of mobile laundry units for overseas use near the front. The men to operate these units were trained in a special school at Camp Meigs, D. C. Each mobile unit required a crew of 37 men. The men of the Army nicknamed these special troops the "Fighting Chinamen." The need of the American Expeditionary Forces for wash-up and delousing stations at the front, so that even troops engaged in battle might have clean clothes, called the mobile laundry units into being. The first experimental equipment was designed and constructed early in 1918. After that the salvage service produced 50 others, 32 of which were shipped to France. Each unit consisted of a large steam tractor and four trailers, an outfit which on the road made up a train over 100 feet long. The trailers could be placed together in the field to form a building 30 feet long and 28 feet wide, the tractor acting as the power plant. On the trailers were washing machines, wringers, drying machines, tanks for water and soap, a pump, and a dynamo to supply electric lights. One of these plants working 24 hours per day could do the washing of 10,000 men. This unit was designed by officers of the salvage division. ONE OF THE ARMY'S MOBILE LAUNDRIES. INTERIOR VIEW OF MOBILE LAUNDRY. SALVAGING ARMY HATS IN FRANCE. This photo was taken at Tours, France, 1 February, 1918. SALVAGING ARMY SHOES IN FRANCE. Picture taken at Tours in March, 1918, showing a few shoes worn out by the soldiers overseas. Army laundry activity was in charge of three New York laundrymen: J. E. Dann, president of the Pilgrim Laundry, of Brooklyn, and his assistants, William Longfelder, of H. Kohnstamn & Co., and E. D. Tribbett, of the American Laundry Machinery Co. Wherever possible waste materials were reclaimed for use by the Army instead of being sold as junk. This was particularly true of bags and burlap. Hundreds of thousands of bags and great quantities of burlap furnished by the salvage division were utilized for army purposes. Without salvage, all of this would have been thrown away or sold at junk prices. When the fighting ended the base salvage plant at Chicago was being equipped to repair about 15,000 bags daily. The purpose of garbage separation was threefold—the reduction of mess waste, the increase in revenue to the Government, and the recovery of glycerine contents for military purposes. Before the war with Germany the Army regulations required the burning of garbage at camps. When the great training camps were established, the Government adopted generally the policy of selling garbage to contractors, except at Camps Fremont, Hancock, McClellan, Sevier, and Shelby, where it was incinerated. Originally contracts had been let on a per-man basis, the contracts extending for several months, comparable to municipal contracts for the disposal of garbage. Later on, however, the policy was adopted of letting contracts for periods of one month only, since the number of men at the camps was continually increasing, and the garbage grew correspondingly bulkier. It is estimated that this change in contracting saved the Government considerably over $400,000. Contract sale prices ranged from 1 cent to 9 cents per man per month, the latter price in most cases including the manure from the stables. With a view to obtaining glycerine, the War Department authorized the construction of 16 garbage-rendering plants at the larger concentration centers, but only one, that at Camp Lee, was actually constructed, since it was determined later by an investigation of our national resources that the amount of glycerine to be obtained in this manner did not justify the expenditure of the money. Also the project of establishing piggeries at camps was abandoned, after investigation by the salvage service, since it would have required 18 months to clear the investment, and in the meantime the Government would have been deprived of revenue from the sale of garbage. The disposition of waste materials was under the direction of Louis Birkenstein, of Chicago, assisted by R. D. Cunningham, of Troy, N. Y. In response to an insistent demand that farms be operated at various camps, the salvage division, on May 15, 1918, secured $60,000 from the vocational fund for the training of soldiers and allotted sums to 15 camps. On November 4, 1918, Congress appropriated $250,000 for the same purpose, but little of this money was expended. The total acreage under cultivation in 1918 was 3,483, and the equivalent revenue derived from the camp farms amounted to $108,000. The farm work was under the direction of Capt. Henry G. Parsons, a practical and scientific farmer. Salvage activities, in general, in the United States were under the direction of Philip W. Wrenn, who was chief of the salvage division during the most active period of its existence. SALVAGE IN FRANCE.Salvage in France was under the direction of the chief quartermaster with the American Expeditionary Forces. At first, it was undertaken in a smattering way, but as the American Army grew in size, salvage increased, until the salvage service became one of the features in the field, with thousands of men and women working in salvage activities, with salvage plants, branches, and depots, large and small, saving, repairing, conserving, and putting into shape, ready for reissue, materials of all sorts and descriptions. The word "salvage" became the watchword and pride of many an organization at the front. Each field army had its chief salvage officer. Each division of troops had its salvage organization under a salvage officer. Each organization had its salvage dump, in which it took a just pride, and there was a spirit of friendly rivalry between different organizations as to which could save the most for the Government. In the flood times of battle, when waste materials piled up on the fields, the regular salvage specialists were assisted in various ways. In some divisions the regimental bands were designated to act as emergency salvage companies. Sometimes after an engagement whole battalions and regiments were enlisted to clean up an area, and there is one instance on record where a wise general of the American Expeditionary Forces turned out his entire field army to clean up for salvage the area which it had just won from the enemy. The salvage service in France handled not only the recovery of quartermaster supplies, but it also collected and disposed of all materials captured from the enemy, including ordnance materials, and also all materials abandoned by our own troops and found on the battle fields. When troops moved into combat they took with them only such equipment as they could carry on their backs or on the meager transportation facilities allowed. Thus they frequently left behind them an enormous quantity of their possessions; including personal baggage. The salvage units went through such areas, visited every billet, and collected all Government and personal property and cared for it. As an indication of the magnitude The salvage operations in France were conducted over an area of 4,000 square miles, and there were approximately 4,000 men in the salvage service field force. The various salvage depots and shops in France occupied a floor space of 736,000 square feet and had a personnel of 11,632 on December 31, 1918. Even before the war, the Quartermaster Corps of the Army was a good-sized organization, yet there were more French women and girls mending clothing for the American Army in France at one time than there were commissioned officers and enlisted men in the whole Quartermaster Service before the war. Clothing generally for the American troops in France was repaired at special shops and at the homes of seamstresses in the small towns and communes. Each town had a forewoman who distributed the damaged clothing, after it had been disinfected and laundered, and kept all counts. There were 880 of these home workers, nearly all of them from needy families. The best record for darning socks was made by an old French grandmÉre, aged more than 80. Numerous soldiers were discovered in the American Expeditionary Forces who were unfit physically for the hard service on the front line. These were permitted to go into the various salvage depots and shops, where they learned to be shoemakers, harness makers, saddle makers, wood workers, painters, metal workers, tailors, laundrymen, electricians, mechanics, checkers, warehousemen, etc., occupations in which many of them expected to engage after their separation from the military service. The salvage troops in France were in five classes—the salvage headquarter detachments, depot battalions, field salvage battalions, laundry units, and the clothing and bathing units. One of the last named was attached to each division to handle field bathhouses and delousing and disinfecting plants, to receive old clothes, and to issue new or reclaimed serviceable garments. The ordnance property salvaged in the field in the period between January 1, to October 31, 1918, included 5,000,000 rounds of small-arms ammunition, 71,909 shell of the 75-millimeter size, and 16,195 of the 155-millimeter size, more than 32,000 rifles, and 21,000 machine guns and automatic rifles. The unexploded or "dud" shell is a menace to life, and the duty of destroying these in immense quantities fell to the salvage service. Some of the salvage squads in the field were composed of men who through lack of education or lack of knowledge of the English language were unable to do front-line service. They were largely composed of American troops of alien birth. The divisional salvage squads sorted the materials at the railhead dumps for shipment to the various depots. When trucks brought up supplies to the front and unloaded, the salvage detachments there filled them up again with all sorts of materials which had been picked up, and the trucks carried their loads back to the railheads, the railroad stations of the division. This queer conglomeration of trash consisted of everything from a hairbrush to a 77-millimeter enemy gun. To show the sorts of articles that are picked up in an area over which an army has fought, there is given here the following list of items selected at random from the check of a salvage shipment from the railhead of the Twenty-sixth Division on August 12, 1918:
The kitchen economics branch of the salvage branch of the American Expeditionary Forces in the recovery of fats and glycerine and other kitchen by-products during the month of September, 1918, saved $57,404.19 to the Government. The value was increased in October to $109,013.84, and in November to $120,158.63. In addition to this saving, kitchen salvage in October produced over 25,000 pounds of grease and over 14,000 pounds of dubbin for waterproofing shoes. This branch of the service also had the disposition of unserviceable food supplies, entailing the salvage of large quantities of flour, sugar, rice, and beans damaged in transportation or injured by exposure to weather so as to become unfitted for troops. Such vegetables as peas and canned corn, unsatisfactory for use, were dried and ground and sold for chicken feed or hog feed, bringing in a considerable revenue. The question of laundering for the field hospitals, particularly after hard fighting, was a vital one. During the month of December, 1918, a total of 7,811,566 pieces of laundry was handled by the laundry branch of the salvage service. This included 3,700,000 pieces for the hospitals alone. The American Expeditionary Forces were required to establish three large shops for mending clothing sent to the laundries. OUTPOST AND FIELD WIRE SALVAGED FROM BATTLE AREA, GIEVRES, FRANCE. PORTION OF OPEN STORAGE YARD. SAPPINETS FOR TEMPORARY LINES IN FOREGROUND, CABLE REELS IN BACKGROUND. GERMAN PRISONERS WORKING FARM LAND. 100 SOLDIERS HARVESTING SNAP BEANS AT CAMP GORDON FARM NEAR ATLANTA, GA. The salvage service in France rendered a peculiar service in being the repository for lost articles. The baggage branch of the salvage service worked in close cooperation with the Army transportation service, railroad transportation service, the central records office, the graves registration service, the effects depot, the French railroad officials, and other agencies which might assist them to recover and handle all lost baggage for the members of the American Expeditionary Forces or for their heirs in the United States. The garden service of the American Expeditionary Forces was operated as a separate branch of the Quartermaster Corps, but a word about its work may not be amiss here. In addition to gardens at the camps and hospitals in France, there was a large central farm at Versailles, near Paris, where American officers and men were assembled to learn intensive farming before being sent to the various stations to assume charge of garden work. This service was composed entirely of men who had been wounded or gassed, or were otherwise physically unfit for service at the front. The garden operations provided welcome additions of fresh vegetables to the American Expeditionary Forces' diet and also gave many Americans an insight of the French methods of intensive farming. The 85,000 German helmets used in advertising the American Government's fifth war loan—the Victory loan of April, 1919—were all collected and shipped to the United States by the salvage service of the American Expeditionary Forces. In fact the immense quantities of dunnage and junk collected by the service are expected to be of untold historic value as time goes on. Various historical societies and museums are taking steps to secure collections of this war material. Civilians in Europe are now wearing shoes built originally for American troops, later worn out by them, and still later reconditioned by the salvage service in France. A large number of these shoes recently sold for approximately $4.30 a pair. Since the average total cost to repair shoes was $1.05 a pair, the Government realized a net gain of $3.25 from every pair of these shoes. In connection with the conservation of waste materials the salvage service conducted a considerable manufacturing enterprise in France. It turned waste into a large number of small articles, such as metal markers for graves or effects of deceased soldiers, sheet tin (this from discarded tin containers) for lining the stables at the remount depots, large shipping bags, cement sacks, collar ornaments, divisional insignia, brassards, overseas caps, guidons, curtains for engine cabs, and many other things. The service took discarded campaign hats Such things as waste cotton scrap, waste paper, shredded rope, tin cans, and woolen rags collected in France were saved and sold, but nothing was sold that could be utilized for repairing or manufacturing purposes. Leather scrap was used to make leather straps or shoe laces, and the worst of the leather scrap was burned at the power plants of the salvage depots as a fair substitute for coal. Old harness, books, small scraps, leather washers, and the like, canvas and burlap scrap, went to the camouflage screen makers. Woolen rags were shredded and used over again for making cloth. Cotton rags too poor for other purposes went to the paper mills. Rubber scrap became new rubber material. Nothing which had a value was allowed to go to waste. The salvage depot at Tours, France, alone in the period from March to November, 1918, inclusive, produced goods to the value of $19,383,353.58, at a total expense of $268,955.37, giving the Government a net profit of $19,114,398.21. The value of all this work went far beyond the value of the figures in dollars and cents, which is the only concrete way in which it can be expressed. The saving in raw material alone which it effected was an important factor in the war; yet of even greater service was the salvage production of materials, particularly ordnance materials, which took much time to manufacture at home and after that required a long haul to get them to the American Expeditionary Forces. Some of the materials recovered on the battle field were scarce and hard to get, and every pound of them recovered added that much to the power of the American Army in France. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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