On November 11, 1918, the Construction Division was conducting 535 building operations in 442 localities in the United States. These involved an aggregate expenditure of more than $1,000,000,000. Including the various camps and cantonments, these activities were being conducted or had been conducted in every State of the Union but one. An average of more than 200,000 workmen, principally of the building trades, had been engaged continuously for months.
In the executive administration of the work the organization required 1,487 officers and 12,355 civilian Government employees, of whom 2,555 were located at the offices of the division in Washington. Merely for the maintenance and the operation of the various completed projects a force of 16,359 enlisted men was required. In a little more than a year the organization had grown from a handful of clerks and executives to one of this size. The brigadier general who headed the Construction Division had been a Captain when war was declared.
In this period the organization had housed a population equal to that of the city of Philadelphia in 40 large camps, each in number of inhabitants comparing in size to such cities as Racine, Wis., Cedar Rapids, Iowa, or Wheeling, W. Va. It had constructed storage depots and warehouses that would cover 890 acres. It had built hospitals with beds for 128,378 patients. It had purchased and nailed up 2,647,605,426 board feet of lumber, enough to stretch around the Equator twenty times in boards 12 inches wide and 1 inch thick. Loaded on freight cars to their capacity this lumber would require a train reaching from Washington, D. C., to Kansas City. It had used enough brick to build an 18-foot road from Kansas City to Chicago. It had constructed 645 miles of railroads and made 1,081 miles of wagon roads, mostly of concrete. These are only a few of the high points in this building record.
There are few undertakings of mankind in all history which can be compared with this enterprise. The price paid for the Panama Canal and the Canal of Suez, the cost of damming the Nile and tunneling the Alps, and the money spent on building the Government railway into the heart of Alaska might be lumped together and still the aggregate would not equal the cost of providing the buildings, exclusive of those of the training camps, which the American Army had to have in the United States after it went to war.
We can gain a picture of the size of this construction by considering the building records of the United States. In this country there are about 150 cities large enough and ambitious enough to keep annual building statistics as the indices of their prosperity. In these cities, whose populations range in size from that of New York down to those of communities of 20,000 or 25,000 inhabitants, dwell nearly a quarter of all the Americans. They are metropolitans, the people who demand most of the builder for their comfort and luxury. Yet in no one year had the building construction in these 150 largest American cities combined approached in amount within $250,000,000 of the cost of our military construction undertaken during the war.
The Government became not only the greatest of customers for the building industry but almost the sole customer. This whole great industry, one of the largest in the country, which had been busy in its interminable task of providing the mansions of peace, was suddenly converted under military direction into a machine for building a titantic war plant. Before the Nation could mobilize its material resources or train its human ones for war it must have buildings—headquarters for its executives, barracks for its men, structures for its various arsenals for the manufacture of explosives and chemicals, warehouses for the storage of reserves of material, terminals for the transfer of overseas shipments, schools, laboratories, proving grounds for testing its weapons, hospitals, embarkation depots, and a vast number of structures for less conspicuous activities.
It was the work of the Construction Division to provide these facilities. Exclusive of the cantonments themselves, this work fell into projects ranging in size from small building groups costing a few thousand dollars to enormous powder plants, huge terminal docks, vast warehouses and other great undertakings costing $10,000,000, $16,000,000, $25,000,000, $40,000,000, and as high as $70,000,000 for a single project.
ORDNANCE CONSTRUCTION.
Perhaps the most striking of these undertakings were the various construction jobs called for by the ordnance program. There were more than 60 of these, and they ranged in cost from $100,000 up to $70,000,000.
One of the larger of these projects was that of the Aberdeen proving grounds on Chesapeake Bay, not far distant from Baltimore. This reservation, with its area of 35,000 acres and its magnificent testing and observation ranges, 75 miles in length, over the waters of the bay, will undoubtedly be retained permanently by the Government. As the plant exists to-day it has a capacity of testing 5,000 shell between daylight and dark.