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 Government could always raise more money; but if the wool supply were exhausted, all the money on earth could not buy any more of it.
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 and abroad. On November 1, 1918, the Clothing and Equipage Division had on hand a reserve stock of goods valued at $811,000,000.
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."