In the War Department were the following: Office of the Chief of Ordnance, Depot Quartermaster, Chief Signal Officer, Chief of Engineers, the Army Transport Service, the Quartermaster General’s Office, the Signal Corps, the Aircraft Production Bureau, United States Engineer’s Office, General Engineer Depot, Bureau of Insular Affairs, Procurement Division, the Balloon Department of the Aircraft Production Board, and the Director General of Military Railways.
Always there were the United States Shipping Board, the Emergency Fleet Corporation, and the demands for these alone were a business. In addition to all this the Committee made allocation of orders for the Argentine Naval Commission, the British War Commission, the Imperial Munitions Board, the Italian Commission and the Belgian Government.
It doesn’t seem such a large roster, but it took a world of wire to go around it. A few figures out of the total allocations will suggest what the total demand was and the task that it involved.
SOME OF THE BIG DEMANDS
The first big call on the wire rope producers was for submarine nets to protect the fleet bases and harbors. There were supplied to the Navy, for this purpose, 2,820,520 feet of rope, and it was regular rope that was required in this service, for the German submarines had developed a way of slashing through the earlier and lighter nets. For the new type the rope ranged from an inch and a half to three-quarters of an inch; but it wasn’t merely a matter of shipping reels of rope. Almost all of it had to be cut into lengths and attachments made, for these barriers were designed in sections. This necessitated, for the Navy order, 153,000 fittings. The Army Ordnance Bureau used nearly a million feet of rope for nettings, which was shipped to various coast forts. The whole volume of wire rope for nettings was furnished within four months.
CUP CHALLENGERS, DEFENDERS AND SAILING VESSELS OF ALL TYPES SECURE THEIR RIGGING WITH WIRE ROPE
Another interesting order was from the Quartermaster’s Department, which called for 6,852,500 feet of rope and the manufacture of 300,000 pairs of traces, requiring 3,000,000 splices. These are what are called thimble splices, and, while fitting one of them is ordinarily half an hour’s work, the Roebling plant, with a force chiefly of men who were utterly unskilled, was turning off ten thousand pairs of traces a day at the peak of production on this order. This harness, for artillery purposes, was on English designs, adopted after considerable delay, but by means of which a horse, when shot down, could be eliminated from the gun team in half a minute.
The Spruce Production Bureau took over 8,000,000 feet of rope, the Emergency Fleet more than 12,000,000 and the Fuel Administration drew on at the rate of 2,500 tons a month. And all the time the mines and mills and ordnance plants, locomotives, cranes and all other manufactures kept getting largely increased supplies of rope to carry on their own war-driven work. Altogether the orders come to a figure that is hard to visualize.
84,000,000 FEET OF ROPE AND A HALF MILLION FITTINGS