To provide a basis of fact for all such acts of administration in the demobilization, the district boards first took a rapid but thorough inventory of the ordnance industrial situation. This they did by means of questionnaires sent to all the contractors. Each questionnaire, when returned to the district board, showed the status of the contract at the time and how the contractor’s business and his employees would be affected by a termination. The general ordnance policy was to permit contractors (after the first emergency suspension which, it will be remembered, had been requested immediately after the armistice was signed) to continue their work on a diminishing scale for a few weeks, while they made their arrangements to engage once more in commercial work. Some of the contracts, including all the late, standardized ones, provided for the termination of work upon thirty days’ notice. If, however, the enforcement of this provision would create any considerable amount of unemployment, the district boards allowed such contractors to complete an average thirty days’ production, but to spread out the work over a longer period of time. There were variations of the general policy when it was applied to special classes of ordnance industry. For instance, the many contractors who were machine-finishing the artillery shell were permitted to keep their plants in full operation until January 31, 1919, when the work had to cease abruptly. All source industries--industries, that is, producing rough forgings and other raw and semi-finished materials for ordnance manufacture--were taken from war work forthwith. Then, too, as noted, in various classes of large ordnance, or ordnance of exceedingly difficult manufacture, the orders were greatly reduced and the contractors permitted to go ahead and complete the residue, no matter how long it might take. Such ordnance included gun carriages, recuperators, tanks, optical instruments, and other supplies of the sort. This reduced production continued for more than a year after the general stoppage of war industry. Some of the Mark VIII tanks (the Anglo-American design) were delivered to the Army as late as June 1, 1920. So expeditiously was the work of termination carried on in the other classes of manufacture (and these made up the greater part of the ordnance industry) that by January 1, 1919, nearly all war ordnance production had either been terminated altogether or was dwindling to the vanishing point under specific agreements. After February 1 the only war ordnance factories in operation were the exceptional plants noted in the preceding paragraph.