Moreover, the manufacturing facilities for machine guns in this country were much more limited in extent than the public had any notion of then or to-day. Both England and France had depended mainly upon their own manufacturing facilities for their machine guns, the weapons which they secured on order from the United States being supplementary and subsidiary to their own supplies. We had at the outbreak of the war only two factories in the United States which were actually producing machine guns in any quantity at all. These were the Savage Arms Corporation, which in its factory at Utica, N. Y., was nearing the completion of an order for about 12,500 Lewis guns for the British and Canadian Governments, and the Marlin-Rockwell Corporation, which had manufactured a large number of Colt machine guns of the old lever type for the Russian Government. The Colt factory in the spring of 1917 was equipping itself with machinery to produce the 4,125 Vickers guns, the order for 4,000 of which had been placed the previous December by the War Department on recommendation of the Machine Gun Board. None of these guns, however, had been completed when the United States entered the war. The Colt Co. also held a contract for Vickers guns to be produced for the Russian Government. It was therefore evident that we should have to build up in the United States almost a completely new capacity for the production of machine guns. Nevertheless, we took advantage of what facilities were at hand; and at once, in fact within a week after the declaration of war, began placing orders for machine guns. The first of these orders came on April 12, when we placed a contract with the Savage Arms Corporation for 1,300 Lewis guns, which, as manufactured by that corporation, had by this time been overhauled in design and much improved. This order was subsequently heavily increased. On June 2 we placed an order with the Marlin-Rockwell Corporation for 2,500 Colt guns, these weapons to be used in the training of our machine-gun units. In this connection the reader should bear continually in mind that throughout the development of machine-gun manufacture we utilized all existing facilities to the limit in addition to building up new sources of supply. In other words, whenever concerns were engaged in the manufacture of machine guns, whatever their make or type, we did not stop the production of these types in these plants and convert the establishments into factories for making other weapons; but we had them continue in the manufacture in which they were engaged, giving them orders which would enable them to expand their facilities in their particular lines of production. Then when it became necessary for us to find factories to build Browning guns and some of the other weapons on which we specialized, we found new capacity entirely for this additional production.