Great as was the job of building the army camps and cantonments, it was nevertheless only a part of the work which fell to the Construction Division, and much the smaller part at that.
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 stillthe 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.
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.
At Aberdeen the Construction Division built barracks to house 8,000 men, quarters for 230 officers, and all the accessories of convenience and amusement which a community of that size should have.
Guns came to the proving grounds unassembled, so that it was necessary to build an assembly plant. This building is 165 feet wide and 500 feet long and cost $1,000,000. As an adjunct to the assembly plant there is a machine shop which is one of the largest in the United States.
Mention should be made of the 25 miles of standard railway trackage which the Construction Division put down at Aberdeen. This was exclusive of the spur tracks for the heavy guns mounted on railway carriages. These tracks approached the firing range on apparently outlandish curves and at every variety of angle. The guns were fired at these various angles to determine if the recoil would push the carriages from the track or would spread the rails.
The development of aerial bombing and the necessity for testing our own aerial bombs required the construction at Aberdeen of hangars and quarters for an aviation squadron.
In addition to these facilities, the project involved the construction of powder magazines, shell-loading plants, and warehouses. There were built 15 miles of concrete roads and 30 miles of roads of other types. Garage accommodations were provided for 100 trucks and automobiles. The firing ranges required observation towers of various sorts. The observation dugouts had to be of special strength, because certain of the tests at Aberdeen involved the actual bursting of gun barrels, making necessary specially heavy protection for the observers.
Aberdeen is equipped with a complete waterworks system and with a hospital for 250 patients. An interesting laboratory constructed on the grounds is that in which the so-called "dud" shell, or those which fail to explode, are analyzed for their defects. The Aberdeen project was started in December, 1917, and first tests were made within a month. The entire project cost over $30,000,000.
One section of the Aberdeen reservation, about 4,000 acres of it, was set apart for the uses of the gas-warfare organization of the Army and was later known as the Edgewood Arsenal. The progress at Edgewood is indicative of the manner in which chemical warfare increased in importance during our period of belligerency. It was originally estimated that $250,000 would provide a plant at Edgewood sufficient for our chemical-warfare needs. The actual cost of the Edgewood Arsenal at the date of the armistice, so great had been the expansion of chemical warfare, was about $43,000,000. At that time there had been constructed or were in process of constructionfilling plants that could turn out 120,000 loaded gas shell per day. The equipment at Edgewood includes a cantonment for 10,000 men, some of it of permanent construction. There were built 10 miles of macadam road at Edgewood and 15 miles of railway, in addition to large warehouses and a dock where loaded shell could be freighted upon lighters to deep water.
Another project made necessary by the expansion of chemical warfare was the gas proving grounds at Lakehurst, N. J., the entire project costing $1,500,000. The site of 5,000 acres provided space for two target ranges, each 4 miles long. Extensive laboratories were built at Lakehurst, and the proving ground was operated by a force of 1,500 men. In addition to this there was located at Lakehurst a camp for 3,400 troops in training. All buildings for these facilities were provided by the Construction Division.
In addition to Aberdeen and Lakehurst the Construction Division built a proving ground at Clear Springs, Md., used for testing out 37-millimeter guns; another such institution at Port Clinton, Ohio, for testing 155-millimeter and 240-millimeter howitzers; and others at Scituate, Mass., and Savanna, Ill. The combined cost of these last four projects was $6,507,520.
One important undertaking of the Construction Division was that of providing warehouse depots for ordnance materials. These supplies differ from ordinary Army supplies in the important particular that they must be treated gently and handled with care. A quartermaster storehouse can be of emergency construction type, that is, more or less built of wood, but an ordnance storehouse, since it usually contains high explosives, must be strictly fireproof. In undertaking the creation in record time of a number of ordnance depots the Construction Division faced not only the problem of the type of building required but also the location of these buildings. It was necessary to locate them at deep water in order to avoid frequent handling of the high explosives, yet no depot could be situated in any thickly settled center because of the danger to the civilian population. At most deep-water points on the Atlantic coast which had railway connections the available sites were already occupied. The result was that the ordnance depots had to be built on marshes and meadows, on land which for construction purposes had always been regarded as impossible. Yet they had to be completed in as much of a rush as any buildings which the Army demanded.
There are now five of these great ordnance depots on the Atlantic coast built by the Construction Division: at Metuchen, N. J.; Curtis Bay, Md.; Pig Point, Va.; Charleston, S. C.; and Pedricktown, Del. The largest of these is the one at Metuchen, known as the Raritan Arsenal. The Raritan site contains about 2,200 acres of salt marsh. High tides used to submerge the whole area almostcompletely. Before any building could be started the Construction Division had to build a dike 9 miles long around the whole reservation. The entire project was perched on piles, and these piles, by the tens of thousands, were driven into the frozen ground during the severe winter of 1917-18. Labor was hard to get and hard to keep. After the laborers' quarters had been built and a few powder magazines had been erected, it became almost impossible to keep men on the job because of the danger of working in a powder arsenal.
Most of the Raritan buildings are of terra-cotta construction. There are 85 completed magazines, each 51 feet wide and 218 feet long, for the storage of shell, black powder, and miscellaneous items, this number not including 12 magazines of sheet-metal construction, each 26 by 42 feet, for the storage of high explosives. When the armistice was signed the Construction Division was building 60 similar magazines intended for the storage of smokeless powder.
At Raritan was also located a school of instruction for ordnance troops, with a cantonment to accommodate 10,000 men. A 150-bed hospital was part of the equipment, as was also an assembly shop and a motor-instruction school.
Along the river a dock was built 2,000 feet long. On the dock were constructed several huge warehouses for the storage of material. Fifty miles of railway were constructed. The project on the armistice date was probably the best equipped ordnance depot in the world. It cost about $14,000,000.
The next largest ordnance depot is that at Curtis Bay near Baltimore. It is half the size of the Raritan project and cost about $7,000,000.
The Pig Point ordnance depot is located at Hampton Roads, about 12 miles from Portsmouth, Va. In order to obtain berthing facilities for trans-Atlantic ships it was necessary to build a dock more than a mile long out to deep water. The dock is said to be the longest wharf in the United States south of Philadelphia. The Pig Point job cost about $3,500,000.
The Charleston Arsenal cost $5,000,000; while $7,000,000 was the amount provided for the arsenal at Pedricktown. The Pedricktown job, however, was started late, and not over $2,000,000 had been spent when the armistice was signed.
In addition to these five terminal depots the Construction Division provided two other ordnance warehouses for the storage of miscellaneous supplies—one at Middletown, Pa., costing $1,250,000, and the other at Augusta, Ga., costing $250,000.
The description of the powder bag-loading plants, which were built by the Construction Division, is contained in the chapter of this report relating to the production of powder and other explosives. There were three of these plants, one located at Woodbury, N. J.,another at Tullytown, Pa., and the third on the historic battle ground at Seven Pines, Va. Since these plants were perforce located at isolated places it was necessary in each case to provide housing accommodations for the workers, many of whom were women. The Construction Division built the houses at Tullytown and Woodbury while those at Seven Pines were provided by the United States Industrial Housing Corporation.
These bag-loading plants cost from $4,500,000 to $6,000,000 apiece, and they were erected in a remarkably short time. Work was started on the Woodbury project on March 19, 1918, and the plant was ready for operation on May 28, although the plant did not actually start operating until June 15. The spade was first struck into the ground at Tullytown on March 6, 1918, and on July 17 the 250 buildings of the project were ready. The work at Seven Pines began April 24, and the plant was ready for operation on August 24, 1918.
The Signal Corps, needing a special type of construction, undertook the work itself at the start of war, but by October, 1917, the Construction Division had proved itself so efficient that all Army building work in the United States, including that of the Signal Corps, was turned over to it. The work for the Signal Corps entailed the construction of the necessary buildings for flying fields, testing fields, aerial photography, and gunnery schools, balloon observation schools, repair and testing shops, and tremendous storage depots that had to be of special fireproof construction because of the inflammable nature of the oil and other materials used by the Signal Corps.
At the aviation fields a special type of portable hangar built of steel, 65 by 140 feet, was adopted. For the big bombing planes larger hangars were required but of the same-type of construction. At each aviation field were barracks for a large number of men, together with water and sanitary conveniences. There were 31 of these fields located principally in the West or Southwest.
In addition to these there were four testing fields for the aircraft service, located in the eastern half of the United States where the flying machines and the engines were being produced. One of these was at Dayton, another at Buffalo, a third at Detroit, and a fourth at Elizabeth, N. J. The aerial gunnery school at Miami, Fla., was one of the largest of the aviation-construction projects. This plant included buildings, target ranges, steel hangars, photographic laboratories and other equipment—all built at a cost of $1,500,000.
The balloon school at Lee Hall, Va., cost $1,000,000, and that at Arcadia, Calif., $500,000. At each of these schools there were barracks for the men, quarters for the laborers, and experimental buildings, not to speak of the huge sheds, 200 or more feet in length, in which the balloons were housed.
Construction for the Quartermaster Department involved the building of warehouses on a scale hitherto unknown in the United States. The warehouse plan was carefully worked out as part of the strategy of conducting the war, the Council of National Defense making the first investigations of the proper locations of supply depots, and these early findings being later amended by the General Staff. Several important considerations determined the locations of these depots and warehouses. In the first place we would require great storage and shipping facilities at tidewater; yet, if these were all to be located in one spot or in one general region, there was a possibility that a submarine blockade off the Atlantic coast could stop the shipment of supplies to the American Expeditionary Forces. Thus the first project was to locate the great supply bases at New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Norfolk. But it was evident that a relatively small number of enemy submarines operating in a comparatively restricted area could block shipment from these four ports. Therefore Charleston, S. C., and New Orleans were added to the supply-base project.
There was another thing to be taken into consideration, namely, the providing of sufficient warehouse space, so that, if there should be any blockade of ocean transportation, the manufacture of supplies could continue at its war rate and still find places to which to ship its important products. Yet if the storage were all provided at the tidewater bases, there would be danger of railroad congestion at the ports. Consequently, as auxiliary to the terminal warehouses, there was provided a system of enormous warehouses built in the interior of the United States.
The system eventually worked out to give seven expeditionary supply bases located, six of them, at the cities just named, in addition to one that had been built at Port Newark, N. J., during the winter of 1917, and nine interior depots located respectively at Baltimore, Chicago, Columbus, Ohio, Jeffersonville, Ind., New Cumberland, Pa., Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Schenectady, N. Y., and St. Louis. These latter were central in various producing districts.
The terminal projects alone involved construction on a scale that was without precedent. The interior depots and the huge terminal bases provided 690 acres of storage space, all inclosed in reinforced concrete of the most modern type. They were all built in a little over 12 months. Into them went construction enough to build a concrete building 70 feet wide from New York to Philadelphia and a wharf nearly 8 miles long, with berthing accommodations for 65 ships at once. The facilities included 650 miles of railroad and 1,000 miles of concrete roadway.
NEW ORLEANS ARMY SUPPLY BASE.
NEW ORLEANS ARMY SUPPLY BASE.
NEW ORLEANS ARMY SUPPLY BASE.
BROOKLYN ARMY SUPPLY BASE.
BROOKLYN ARMY SUPPLY BASE.
BROOKLYN ARMY SUPPLY BASE.
BROOKLYN ARMY SUPPLY BASE.
BROOKLYN ARMY SUPPLY BASE.
BROOKLYN ARMY SUPPLY BASE.
BOSTON ARMY SUPPLY BASE.
BOSTON ARMY SUPPLY BASE.
BOSTON ARMY SUPPLY BASE.
The Army supply bases at Brooklyn and at Boston are examples of the immensity of the expeditionary depots built along the Atlantic seacoast. The base at Brooklyn has approximately 4,000,000 square feet of storage space in its two huge 8-story reinforced concrete warehouses. One of these warehouses is 980 feet long by 200 feet wide and the other is 980 feet long by 300 feet wide. In addition to these, the installation at the base consists of three double-deck piers, each 150 feet wide and 1,300 feet long, and one open pier 60 feet wide and 1,300 feet long. In its railroad yards there is storage space for 1,300 cars at one time. The capacity of the base is 700,000 tons of supplies, or the equivalent of about 100 shiploads. Twelve ships of 8,000 tons, dead weight each, can be loaded at one time, and the loading of these vessels can be completed within 24 hours, so vast and complete are the facilities at this project.
Construction started at the site on May 15, 1918. More than 7,000 workmen were engaged on this job at one time, and the entire project was to be completed before July 1, 1919, while it was to be in partial operation by January 1. When the armistice was signed, 4,387,360 square feet of floor space had been completed and 187,173 cubic yards of concrete had been poured.
The base at Boston is 8 stories high, built of concrete, and gives 2,750,000 feet of storage room. Its wharves are 4,000 feet long. The work on it was started May 14, 1918, and ended October 3. In that time 200,000 cubic yards of concrete had been poured, 22,000 tons of reinforcing and structural steel put into position, 3,000,000 brick laid, 30,000 piles driven, 1,500,000 cubic yards dredged, and 30 miles of track laid. In all, 7,000 carloads of material were handled in this building.
The Norfolk base is located at Bush Bluff, 4 miles from the city. The chief feature of this project is a group of eight 1-story concrete buildings providing 2,000,000 square feet of storage space. The pier sheds are built of concrete blown by compressed air upon steel lath. The docks total a mile in length. The base can handle 600 cars of supplies in a day. In addition to the storage and shipping buildings themselves, the Construction Division provided quarters for a regiment of stevedores and a battalion of guards. A 120-bed hospital was erected at the project. The wharfage front was made of concrete piles weighing 12 tons apiece, and 217 acres of land were made by dredging outside of the piles and filling in behind them. The work was started in May and was nearly finished when the armistice was signed.
The Norfolk and Hampton Roads district has the distinction of being the center of more war construction than was conducted at any other point in the United States. There were located here the Navy arsenal, the Navy yard, the Navy training station, and thegreat Norfolk naval base. The largest construction project of all at Norfolk was the quartermaster terminal which the Construction Division built there. But in addition to these there was the Pig Point ordnance depot, described above, Camp Stuart and Camp Hill, both embarkation camps, the Artillery school at Fortress Monroe, Camp Eustis, and the Langley aviation field of the Army.
With so many construction undertakings going on at once, the labor problem proved to be an early embarrassment at the Norfolk quartermaster terminal job. However, good quarters and good food for the construction gangs at the terminal largely solved this problem. At one time in the development on the shores of this part of Chesapeake Bay, the street car and electric lighting system of Norfolk broke down under the strain. The Government thereupon took the power house and operated it thereafter for the duration of the emergency.
The interior storage depots of the Quartermaster Department provide 12,000,000 square feet of storage. They are all of permanent construction. They range in size from the one at Pittsburgh, with 184,000 square feet, to that at Schenectady with 2,500,000 square feet.
The depot at Chicago was built by the Central Manufacturing District as contractor on a site sold by its trustees to the Government. This structure, costing $3,000,000 and giving 29 acres of storage, was built completely in the period between March 4 and September 15, 1918.
There was extensive construction for the Motor Transport Corps. Few civilians perhaps realize the size attained by this branch of the Army, with its more than 3,000 officers and 100,000 men in the United States and abroad. The Construction Division designed a standardized repair shop to be used in this country or to be transported overseas as desired. There were three centers of repair, shipment, and the training of men for the Motor Transport Service, the largest being Camp Holabird at Baltimore and the others, Camp Jesup at Atlanta, and Camp Normoyle at San Antonio, Tex.
When the armistice was signed the Army had in this country thousands of motor trucks, motorcycles, and ambulances. Perhaps 80 per cent of these were located in the districts subsidiary to Camp Holabird. Consequently, there were constructed at Holabird an enormous repair shop and a shop for the taking down and shipping of motor vehicles. The machine shops at these camps were of permanent construction. Large storage facilities were also furnished.
The experiences of the Army in Mexico taught that to be effective motor transport must have adequate facilities for repair. The standardized army repair shop is of glass, steel, and concrete construction. It is operated by 55 officers and 1,400 men.
QUARTERMASTER STORAGE DEPOT BUILT BY CONSTRUCTION DIVISION AT ST. LOUIS.
QUARTERMASTER STORAGE DEPOT BUILT BY CONSTRUCTION DIVISION AT ST. LOUIS.
QUARTERMASTER STORAGE DEPOT BUILT BY CONSTRUCTION DIVISION AT ST. LOUIS.
CHICAGO PERMANENT QUARTERMASTER DEPOT WAREHOUSES.
CHICAGO PERMANENT QUARTERMASTER DEPOT WAREHOUSES.
CHICAGO PERMANENT QUARTERMASTER DEPOT WAREHOUSES.
One of the most interesting buildings provided for the Motor Transport Corps was the crating shop at Camp Holabird. The first motor trucks sent overseas were shipped completely assembled. In addition to taking up unnecessarily much-needed cargo space on the transports, they frequently arrived in poor condition, due to the effects of the salt air upon their metal parts.
Consequently, it was decided to ship trucks disassembled in crates. One of these huge vehicles could be taken apart and, except for its truck body, wrapped up in a parcel 20 feet long, 40 inches wide and 40 inches deep. The truck body could be packed in a crate 12 feet long and 6 feet wide and 1 foot thick. These crates were moisture proof.
The crating of trucks saved 75 per cent of the ship space formerly required. The crating crews became so facile that they could take down and pack in a single day from a mile and a half to two miles of trucks. This unique shop cost $500,000.
The construction at Camp Holabird started February 4, 1918. The camp now occupies 144 acres and has a cantonment for 7,000 men. The 22 buildings of an abandoned distillery on the ground were remodeled to serve as permanent storehouses for the millions of dollars' worth of tools and motor-vehicle parts which the Government acquired in the war.
For the Surgeon General's Department the Construction Division constructed hospitals in this country providing accommodations for a total of 121,000 patients, 12,000 nurses, 4,000 doctors, and 34,000 hospital operation and maintenance troops. There were 294 of these hospitals in all, built at a total cost of $127,725,000 and divided into three types: base hospitals located at the various training camps, departmental hospitals located at various other Army posts, and general hospitals for the reception of sick and wounded men returning from France. The construction of general hospitals did not cease with the signing of the armistice, and at a recent date it had provided 97,000 beds for patients.
The builders adopted a standardized type of hospital construction. The unit in this type was a single-story ward building of frame construction lined in the interior with gypsum board or some similar material. An open porch along the entire length of one side of the ward building provided opportunity for convalescents to be wheeled outdoors. Each ward had room for 34 beds and also had a diet kitchen, a nurses' room, a doctors' room, lavatories, and an inclosed solarium at the end. These buildings were connected with eachother by inclosed corridors running through the clear. At the Fox Hills Hospital, Staten Island, N. Y., there was a mile and a quarter of this corridor construction. The corridors in each case fed in toward the central administration group of buildings in which were located the operating rooms and the various laboratories.
As crews developed their teamwork some marvelous instances of speed were shown in putting up the buildings. One crew of 566 men at Fox Hills erected a complete hospital wing in one working day. At 7 o'clock in the morning the ground of the site was untouched. That night at 6 o'clock a 40-bed ward was standing finished on the site—painted, equipped with heating and ventilating apparatus, all plumbing installed, the last electric bulb screwed in, and in every respect ready for occupancy. It was like magic; yet soon thereafter the Construction Division had set the period of 10 hours as the standard time for building one of these wings.
General Hospital No. 3 located at Otisville, N. Y., has a capacity of 579 beds and is a complete military hospital plant designed for the treatment of tubercular cases. A short summary of the work done upon it will give an idea of the general nature of the construction problems incident to the building of the military hospitals during the winter and spring of 1918.
On February 2, 1918, the Constructing Quartermaster with a few officers and clerks arrived at the site of the hospital, about 37 acres of land, near the village of Otisville, Orange County, N. Y., on the southern slope of Shawangunk Mountain. The contractor and his organization came on the same day. They found the site covered with snow and with no accommodations even for the office force of the Constructing Quartermaster or the contractor, except an old creamery building, which was promptly rented and into which the two organizations moved the next day.
Actual work was started February 5 and continued through every severity of weather until the project was completed in the early part of July. The work was interrupted, hindered, and hampered by snow and mud, by transportation congestion preventing the delivery of materials on time, by the absence of local labor and the necessity for importing labor from near-by markets wherever it could be procured, and by the consequent necessity for running special trains to transport laborers to and from the job. No local facilities existed for housing any of the workmen, and temporary accommodations had to be built to accommodate 200 Italian laborers both in the matter of shelter and food.
The average height above sea level of the site of this hospital is a little over 1,000 feet. It was found after construction began that the site was full of springs, which caused further trouble and difficulty in developing the building operations.
The cost of the project was $1,681,000. About 300 carloads of material were used, including approximately 3,000,000 feet of lumber. The largest number of laborers employed at any one time was 1,795, with a working day, as a rule, of nine hours, union and nonunion labor being employed without discrimination. Water supply, sewer construction, roads, 330 feet of railway siding, sewage disposal plant, electrical installation, and boiler houses, all had to be built. The work was all completed early in July, 1918. In addition to the bed capacity of the hospital, accommodations were provided for a hospital personnel of 224.
One of the largest hospitals involving entirely new construction is General Hospital No. 21, Denver, Colo. This is also a hospital for the treatment of tuberculosis cases. The construction is permanent, hollow tile and stucco, and the hospital facilities are sufficient to accommodate 2,000 beds for recuperative and curative work. The plant consists of hospital wards, tuberculosis wards, officers' quarters, nurses' quarters, mess halls, storehouses, laundry, schoolhouse, power house, water and sewer installation, and all of the necessary utilities for the adequate operation of a completely self-contained unit.
The original authorization covered only 1,000 beds. Subsequently there was authorized an addition equally as large, and the entire project was completed on March 1, 1919. The actual capacity of the hospital is in excess of the capacity estimated when the work was begun, and it is estimated that 2,486 patients can be cared for, the cost per bed running less than $1,350. In view of the nature and character of the permanent construction involved, and the fact that this is a military hospital with the usual numerous construction details not found in civilian hospitals, the construction at this figure is regarded as exceptional.
When the Government undertook the whole enormous military construction program, it was found that there were few builders in the United States who had equipment enough to handle the bigger jobs. Consequently the Construction Division adopted the policy of acquiring equipment of various sorts, usually paying rent for it. Such equipment included locomotive cranes, concrete mixers, locomotives for trench machines, road machinery, and other heavy apparatus. This equipment was rented under an agreement that whenever the rent paid had aggregated the cost of the article rented, the latter should become the property of the Government. In this way the Government has acquired property of this sort worth about $3,000,000.
The Construction Division at all times procured raw materials for the contractors engaged upon the projects. During the summer of 1918 the division was procuring material at an average rate of nearly $1,000,000 per day.
There were many interesting incidents in connection with this activity. In the summer of 1917, when the cantonments were going up, it became necessary to provide some 60,000 stoves and heaters, yet there were not that many stoves for sale in the country including all existing stocks, nor was the capacity of the various stove works sufficient to make up the number in the three months' period before the soldiers would be going to the camps. Accordingly, officers of the division were sent out to make addresses to the workmen at the stove factories, and as a result of such efforts the companies speeded up their output until they were able to supply all of the camps with heating facilities by October 1, 1917. In this effort the Government went into the market and procured the pig iron, coke, and other supplies for the stove foundries.
The Construction Division was also able to obtain 15,000 Army kitchen ranges in three months, although that number is a normal year's output of the entire manufacturing facilities of the country.
When the project for the expeditionary supply base at Port Newark was taken up—in the late fall of 1917—the Construction Division set about it to get 63,377 piles for the foundations of this construction. There were 64 pile drivers on the job, driving in a total of 1,566 piles in a day; and to supply these the woodsmen of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and New Jersey were called upon for their best efforts. Due to the unforeseen severity of the winter, the rivers were frozen and the railroads choked with freight. Near by was the Hog Island shipbuilding project at Philadelphia, needing more piles than the railroads could deliver. The trees in the woods were frozen and often broke to pieces when they fell. In the southern logging districts the negro woodsmen refused to stay on the job because of the cold. The Construction Division then took hold, sent soldiers into the woods, felled the trees, and then put guards on the cars of piling, to see that they were not lost in transit. As a result, the piles for the Port Newark job were delivered on time.
In addition to procuring materials for its own contractors, the Construction Division also procured building materials for the Shipping Board and for the Bureau of Industrial Housing. The peak load of labor on the Army construction jobs came in the summer of 1918, when 230,000 men were on the pay roll, drawing $7,626,800 a week in pay, and still the jobs were short 150,000 unskilled men. In general, the union scale of wages and hours of labor were adopted, but the open shop was maintained. Labor troubles were infrequent and not serious. To prevent strikes the Government formed the Cantonment Adjustment Commission, consisting of three members, the Army representative being Col. J. H. Alexander, of the Construction Division. Of all the strikes that hampered our war activities, less than 1 per cent were strikes of the building trades.
When the labor shortage of 1918 was most acute the Construction Division turned to Porto Rico and the Bahamas for unskilled labor, importing 2,600 Bahamans and 13,000 Porto Ricans. This imported labor was exclusively used on southern building projects and was sent back home when the armistice was signed.
The Construction Division had charge of the operation and maintenance of the utilities of the various training camps, a work requiring a force of 452 officers and 16,559 men. In all there were 54,808 buildings at these camps to be kept in repair. This was done at the cost of $8.10 a year for each man housed. The Government supplied electricity to the camps at an average cost of $0.02½ per kilowatt hour. In a single year of operation, the 32 camps burned about 2,000,000 tons of coal for heating. This was at a cost of approximately $10 per man.
The utilities of the camps were under the management of men who could qualify to be city managers. They had the operation of water systems, fire departments, and other common conveniences of cities. Water was supplied at the rate of 55 gallons daily per man. The purity of the water and the adequacy of the sanitation may be gauged from the fact that in July and August, 1918, the annual death rate at the camps was 2.8 per thousand. In our Mexican War the annual death rate of American troops from disease was 110 per thousand; in the Civil War it was 65 per thousand; in the Spanish War 26 per thousand; and among Japanese troops in the Russo-Japanese War it was 25 per thousand. The death rate in civil life for men of the draft age is 6.7 per thousand.
Each camp and cantonment was adequately protected by fire companies equipped with the most modern apparatus, nearly all of it motorized. Each camp fire company had 60 men. A low annual fire loss in civil life is $2 per capita. In 1917, 20 American cities of about 31,000 population each showed an annual fire loss of $2.15 per capita. The average for the United States is $2.42 per capita. At the training camps, in spite of their inflammable construction, the average annual loss from fire per capita was only 46 cents.
[38]Sheds.
[38]Sheds.
[39]Pier sheds.
[39]Pier sheds.