CHAPTER IIHOUSING THE SOLDIERS AND THEIR SUPPLIES
While the machinery was being devised and set in motion for forming a great army by means of the selective draft and officers were being schooled for its training, immense camps had to be provided in which hundreds of thousands of men could be trained, warehouses had to be built in which to gather and store the enormous amounts of supplies necessary for their maintenance and equipment, huge plants had to be constructed for the making of certain kinds of ordnance, and included in the vast scheme of construction work, all of it necessary almost at once, were also flying fields, embarkation depots, port and terminal facilities.
The work of building the cantonments was, alone, a very great engineering achievement. It called for an expenditure within three months of $150,000,000, more than three times that of the largest year’s work on the Panama Canal, and it demanded the construction of nearly a score of goodly sized cities, to be ready for occupancy by the following September. For this huge job, when war was declared, there was one colonel with four assistants and a few draughtsmen, clerks and stenographers. Around that lone colonel there was built up, almost over night, by telegraph and telephone, the organizationof the Government’s Construction Division, that carried through successfully the whole vast program. For the building of the cantonments, engineers, town planners and civilians having expert knowledge came to its assistance, investigating possible sites and studying their water supply, transportation facilities and availability of construction materials. Contracts were let for sixteen National Army cantonments and as many National Guard camps. These were all signed between the fifteenth and twenty-seventh of June and in three months some of them were in use, while in six months all the work had been finished, plus many additions and betterments.
The building of each meant the creation of a city that would house from forty to eighty thousand people. The ground surface had to be prepared, hills leveled, valleys filled, trees uprooted, brush cleared away and roads built. Then began the construction of barracks for the men, officers’ and nurses’ quarters, hospitals, repair shops, and all the other buildings necessary for the varied activities of the camp, amounting to more than 1,400 separate structures in each cantonment. Sewage systems and steam heating and electric lighting plants were installed. An ample water supply, with plenty of shower baths, was provided, allowing fifty gallons per day per capita, which is eighty per cent more than the average allowance in European army camps. Every care was used to assure the purity of the water. When taken from rivers it was filtered and sterilized.
The total cost of the thirty-two cantonments and camps was $179,607,497. Additions and betterments during the next six months added $22,000,000. Every camp had its garbage incinerator, coffee roastingplant, theater, repair shop and other buildings that added to the comfort and morale of the men and the efficiency of the camp’s work. Such care was taken in the sanitation of the training camps and in the assuring of a pure supply of water—sometimes making necessary the draining of surrounding areas—that the reports of the Surgeon-General showed the practical elimination of water-borne diseases among the troops in training.
Almost as rapid as the work on the cantonments and camps was that which had to provide hospitals, flying fields with all their many buildings for varied uses, huge storehouses and port and terminal facilities. At half a dozen of the Atlantic Coast cities port terminals with warehouses and wharves had been completed or were nearing completion at the end of hostilities unprecedented in size and completeness of equipment in our own or any other country. One storage warehouse provided 3,800,000 feet of storage space and another, for ordnance supplies, had 4,000,000 square feet of space into which were fitted seventy-five miles of trackage and 9,000 lineal feet of wharf frontage.
For the production and storage of certain kinds of ordnance great plants had to be built at the highest speed and, for the most part, because of their dangerous possibilities, in out of the way places where the problem was complicated by the necessity of providing housing not only for the workers who would operate the plant but also for those engaged in its construction. An instance of one of these, and there were many others, was a smokeless powder plant the building of which in eight months transformed farm land along a riverside to a busytown, containing 3,500 people, into which had gone 100,000,000 feet of lumber. It had rows of barracks for single men, blocks of cottages, other blocks of better residences, huge storage houses, laboratories, manufactories. A pumping and purification plant built among the first of the structures took from the river 90,000,000 gallons of water per day and made it fit for use. While the plant was being erected from 200 to 400 cars of freight were unloaded daily. Construction projects of this class, including plants for the production of gas, nitrate, picric acid, powder and high explosives, presented complicated problems and their cost ran from $15,000,000 to $50,000,000 each. And all were erected and in operation within a few months from the day of the first work upon them.
Eighteen months of war saw the construction of nearly five hundred important projects of these various kinds at a cost of over $750,000,000, all of them rushed to completion at the greatest possible speed.