HOUSING 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 organization of 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
roasting plant, 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 busy
town, 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.