America's Munitions 1917-1918

by Benedict Crowell; United States. War Department

The officer in charge of the Construction and Repair Division of the Quartermaster General's Office was relieved of his former duties and placed by the Secretary of War in charge of a new and almost entirely independent division, reporting directly to the Secretary, called the Cantonment Division, and charged with providing the necessary construction and camp facilities for the National Army and the National Guard. This was in May, 1917, at which time the commissioned personnel of the division consisted of only three officers. This step was recommended by the General Staff, acting in accordance with the advice of civilian construction experts on the Council of National Defense.

One year later the personnel of this division had grown to 263 officers and 1,100 civilians in Washington, the best constructors, engineers, draftsmen, managers, purchasing agents, and other specialists obtainable by the Government; there were hundreds of other officers and civilian experts in the field for this organization; it had an enlisted personnel of some 16,000 men and employed over 200,000 laborers and craftsmen; it had jobs on hand, complete and incomplete, aggregating $600,000,000, or nearly twice the cost of the canal at Panama, while future works then being planned and later actually undertaken came to another $600,000,000; it had now become the Construction Division of the Army, attached directly to the office of the Secretary of War, charged with all the army construction within the United States. Such was the expansion of one branch of the Army to meet the emergency. Construction operations for the Army overseas, conducted principally with troop labor, was in charge of the Corps of Engineers.

Congress passed the selective service bill on May 18, 1917. Before the end of May the military authorities had decided to call the first levies of the National Army on September 1. The little Cantonment Division, which had in the week after its birth grown to a personnel of 30 officers and numerous civilian experts, received orders to have the camps—16 complete cities to accommodate 40,000 inhabitants each and 16 tent camps, with many incidental buildings and public utilities—ready in 90 days.

Actually the time allowed for construction was much shorter than that, for the last site was not approved until July 6. About 60 days later, on September 4, the National Army cantonments were ready for 430,000 men, two-thirds of the first draft. Although some construction, subsequently authorized, was not entirely complete until later, the cantonments nevertheless were at all times prepared to receive the conscripted soldiers faster than the Army could assimilate them.

However irksome to the impatient construction officers the interval between the time when the cantonments were ordered and the day when the last sites were approved, it was not time wasted by any means. There was much preliminary work to be done. The magnitude of the task ahead was appalling. Yet the Cantonment Division, with scarcely anything to start with, with not even the ground selected for a single camp site, must design and adopt types for buildings, mobilize materials, standardize everything possible, adopt an emergency contract that should protect the Government from the grafter and the profiteer, locate stores of materials, commandeering them if necessary, and also discover manufacturing plants capable of turning out supplies as rapidly as they were needed, build up an organization to handle the work in every detail, and be ready to start hammering in the nails on the day the materials arrived on the jobs. Actually these officers had something less than 20 days in which to accomplish this feat.

There had been, however, a measure of pioneering in several of these directions. The Council of National Defense had an organization of civilian experts in many lines gathered together in Washington to give advice to the military authorities. Through its committees the council prepared a form of contract upon what came to be known as the "cost-plus with sliding scale and fixed maximum fee" plan, which limited the cantonment contractor in each case to a maximum fee of not more than $250,000, the Army itself retaining control of the cost of materials and the wages paid to labor.

Since the cantonments cost anywhere from $8,000,000 to more than $12,000,000 each, the average fee to the contractor was slightly less than 2½ per cent, out of which the contractor had to pay overhead expenses, such as his main office expenses and the like; so it will be seen that the United States drove a close bargain with its cantonment builders in spite of the breathless haste to get the work done.

It was not until the 1st of June that the war authorities decided upon wood construction for the 16 National Army cantonments and canvas tentage for the 16 camps of the National Guard. According to the original plan, so far as could be foreseen, the cantonments were to be permanent camps to receive fresh contingents of selectives as long as the war should last, whereas after receiving its training the National Guard would go to France and leave its American camps deserted. The wood construction was much more expensive than tentage—amounting to $215 per man of the first draft, as it proved—but it was permanent; once installed it made no further demands for materials, and in convenience and comfort, especially in winter, it was far superior to tentage.

Meanwhile the Cantonment Division had designed a model barrack building, 43 feet wide and 140 long, to house 150 men, or one company, as the company was in the spring of 1917. Here, in the adoption of this model and general camp plans, there might easily have occurred in Washington a fatal indecision. Both the British and the French armies had found by experience that a company of 250 men was a more convenient size for trench warfare than a smaller one. There was some question whether the American Army would be guided by this experience. Gen. Pershing was to decide this matter, but he did not reach Europe until June 15. A weak executive control in Washington might have justified itself in waiting for this decision before starting in at full speed to build the cantonments. Those in charge of the program took upon themselves the responsibility of building the 150-man barrack, trusting to their own ability to adjust the buildings later to changed conditions. As a matter of fact, when the company unit was enlarged to 250 men, it was readily possible to house two companies in three barracks, leaving space in two of them for the kitchen and mess room. Still later the Construction Division built smaller barracks for 66 men each, providing four such barracks to the company.

Before a single site was selected the experts in Washington had designed the buildings and mapped out the future cities. America, leaving behind her the decorative atrocities of the old Victorian days, had been seeking beauty; and this yearning had produced a new profession, that of town planning. Town planners in the Construction Division grouped the 1,500 buildings required by each cantonment into two typical arrangements, known as the straight-line and the U-shape layouts. Later at each cantonment there was a town planner who adapted one or the other of these plans to his local camp topography.