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.