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.