Several important considerations influenced the responses to these questions. In the first place our whole artillery manufacturing project had been aimed at the year 1919, and in the interim the American Expeditionary Forces purchased heavy quantities of artillery in France and England--in all, nearly 5,500 field guns of the latest and best designs. Including captured _matériel_, the A. E. F. sent back to the United States after the armistice about 6,000 guns, with their full equipment of limbers, caissons, and supply vehicles. This in itself was a quantity sufficient to arm a large field force; and, on the face of it, this reserve seemed to make unnecessary any post-armistice production at all from our own ordnance plants. As a counterbalance, however, there was the industrial situation. The gun plants were heavy employers of labor. To close them all down forthwith might have created a serious amount of unemployment, to the detriment of the national prosperity. Then, too, it was good business to order the completion of _matériel_ almost complete on the day of the armistice, and this procedure was adopted as a general policy. [Illustration: _Photo by Howard E. Coffin_ FRENCH AND GERMAN AIRPLANE ENGINES AFTER COMBAT] [Illustration: _Photo by Howard E. Coffin_ RUINED TANKS NEAR CAMBRAI] General rules and policies could at best serve the field men of the Ordnance Department only as rough guides. Each of the nineteen gun factories supplied its own special problems in demobilization. The process of closing down the factories may be shown by the example of what went on after the armistice at the plant of the Bullard Engineering Works at Bridgeport, Connecticut. This was a plant producing 155-millimeter guns--the tubes only. The 155, a French weapon, was the highest-powered fieldpiece used by the A. E. F., the railroad guns not being considered to be field guns. The supply of the useful 155 was never equal to the demand. The French factories could not deliver as many as the A. E. F. needed; and, because of the difficulty of producing the recuperator, our own industry did not succeed in turning out a single completely assembled unit before the armistice, although all parts had been successfully produced ready for assembling. Here, then, was an important class of artillery in which a shortage existed, and therefore the Ordnance Department was liberal in allowing production after the armistice.