The mere size of the war ordnance industry would have made the problem of its demobilization a great one, but it was also complicated with peculiar difficulties. The production of most ordnance materials differed radically from that of any articles known in normal American industry. The Quartermaster Department procured for the Army food, clothing, shoes, hand tools, and many other supplies which, though they were frequently of special design, nevertheless were not much unlike the sorts of commodities with which the contractors were already familiar. The Engineer Corps used many materials commonly employed in the peaceful pursuits. Outside of ordnance, the manufacture of aircraft alone took our industries into virgin fields of endeavor. Therefore, those factories which were making for the Army products essentially similar to products consumed by the civilian population, were ready after the armistice to resume their places in normal commerce with slight internal adjustment. But the ordnance factories--they were a different story. In ordnance production the war had witnessed some factory conversions of the most violent sort. Manufacturers of printing presses built gun carriages of new and difficult design; makers of sewing machines and automobiles undertook the difficult task of producing hydropneumatic recuperators for absorbing the recoil of field guns; producers of typewriters and water meters manufactured time fuses for shell; women’s cloak factories sewed silk powder bags; a phonograph maker produced aërial bomb sights; and one producer turned from the modern business of making corsets and took up the ancient occupation of tentmaker. For nearly all these factories the ordnance contracts virtually implied the physical reëquipment of their plants for quite different manufacturing processes. For them, too, demobilization meant a not less severe dislocation of equipment and processes in changing back again to their former work. It was the problem of the Ordnance Department after the armistice to manage the liquidation of its great war business--to halt the work, to dispose of raw materials and materials left half completed when the wheels stopped, to do something with the special factories and even the complete towns built by the Government or for the Government in the prosecution of the war enterprise, to recoup the millions advanced to finance the ordnance producers, and finally to settle with cash the obligations of the Government to the producers incurred when the contracts were terminated.