Prior to the war with Germany the Ordnance Department, in providing .30-caliber ammunition for our Army rifles and machine guns, had thought in terms of millions and had placed its ammunition orders on that scale. But when hostilities were at hand and steel and walnut were being assembled into rifles to arm the indefinitely increasing millions of Yankee soldiers that we would send and keep on sending to Europe until victory was ours, small-arms ammunition stepped out of the million class and became an industry whose units of production were reckoned by the billion. The war increased the human strength of the American Army approximately thirty times. That ratio of increase was carried over into a production of ammunition for rifles and machine guns. The story of ammunition in the war is the story of a three-billion output forced from a hundred-million capacity. In this effort we find another of those frequent industrial romances which the war produced in America; for, when called upon to do more than an industrial possibility, as we regarded such things in 1917, the contriving executive and organizing ability and the skillful hands of the ammunition industry made good. Our .30-caliber ammunition capacity in the United States prior to the war was about 100,000,000 cartridges per year. We actually produced in the war period the huge total of 3,507,023,300 small-arms cartridges. Pushed at feverish haste, such expansion naturally recorded its mistakes and its failures; but none of these was fatal or irremediable. The fact will always remain that a difficult art was enlarged in time to take care of every demand of the American Army for small-arms ammunition, and that no military operation on our part was held up by lack of this ammunition. Hence it is submitted that the production of small-arms cartridges was one of the genuine achievements of our Ordnance Department. Let us consider first the production of the .30-caliber service ammunition, which may be regarded as the standard product of the ammunition industry. This was the ammunition used in our two service rifles, the Springfield or United States model of 1903 and the United States model of 1917, which is a modification of the British rifle, pattern 1914, and in most of the machine guns which we fired in France, although we used the 8-millimeter cartridge with the Chauchat machine rifle. When the war broke out we had on hand approximately 200,000,000 rounds of .30-caliber cartridges. Most of these had been manufactured by the Government at the Frankford Arsenal, which was, in fact, practically the only plant in the United States equipped to produce this ammunition in any appreciable quantities.