Never had machinery been built in the United States to work on so large a scale with such a degree of accuracy. The Ordnance Department had to persuade manufacturers to undertake this difficult work, to assist them financially to build a thirteen-acre plant, to purchase and manufacture $6,000,000 worth of special tools, and develop an organization to do this. The contract was signed on Nov. 1, 1917, and today the plant is completed and is turning out the recoil mechanisms.
The Nitrate Division has under construction two plants for the manufacture of powder, costing $45,000,000 each.
The Ordnance Department itself has provided for the army 1,400,000 rifles, has brought the production of them up to 45,000 a week, or enough to equip three army divisions; has secured deliveries on 17,000 machine guns and brought the rate of production of them from 20,000 to 225,000 a year. It has increased the rate of production of field guns, heavy and light, from 1,500 to 15,000 a year, and is manufacturing 35,000 motor trucks and tractors to haul them and their ammunition. It has remodeled the British Enfield rifle so that it can be produced in quantities to take American ammunition and adopted two new types of machine guns, the Browning, heavy and light.
The United States entered the war resolved to win supremacy in the air. Congress adopted an appropriation of $640,000,000, in addition to $15,000,000 already granted, to provide the best airplane service possible. The best motor engineers in the country combined their talents to provide a motor, and the result of their efforts was the Liberty motor, asserted to be superior to anything used by any army air corps. Delivery of the new motors in quantity has been delayed by various causes. But the initial difficulties have been solved and quantity production of battle planes, as well as of training planes, is expected during the Summer of 1918. While there are more than seventy different types of airplane motors on the western allied front, the United States is relying on a single standardized type, greatly reducing the ratio of forty-seven men required on the ground by foreign service for every man in the air.
Colossal work has been done by the Quartermaster Corps, which supplies almost everything that a soldier needs, except ammunition; which transports those supplies as well as the soldier, feeds him, clothes him, and provides him with shelter. The war found the Quartermaster General's office without funds, Congress having adjourned without voting the Army Appropriation bill. But it tided over the interval until money was forthcoming. It has since spent $2,789,684,778, has clothed the draft armies and fed them, supplied the oversea forces with the million things they need, and there are at present few complaints of its work. The details are seen in columns of figures all running into millions.
In this first year the Quartermaster Corps has spent $60,000,000 for horse-drawn vehicles and harness, more than $50,000,000 for horses, mules, and harness, and now estimates it will need for fuel and forage alone more than half a billion dollars.
ARMY MEDICAL CORPS
In preparation for large numbers of wounded and invalided men, the Medical Corps of the army has enlisted doctors and nurses by the thousand. In addition to the work being done for the Red Cross, which is a separate institution, the Army Medical Corps has enlarged its personnel from 8,000 to 106,000, including orderlies, stretcher bearers, and ambulance drivers. Its 900 doctors before the war are now increased to 18,000. It had 375 army nurses a year ago; now it has 7,000. It had no ambulance service; now it has 6,000 drivers in training. Reconstruction institutions are being provided in the United States on a more comprehensive scale than any other nation at war has attempted. Already a few wounded soldiers are being reconstructed at Medical Corps hospitals so as to be able to support themselves now that they are blind or crippled. Professional men, nurses, and attendants from our most noted civil reconstruction hospitals have been added to the personnel of the Medical Corps for this work.
The hundreds of thousands of men taken from civil life into the army are now showing a death rate from disease below that of men of military age in civil life.
WORK OF THE NAVY