Meanwhile Watervliet and Watertown will continue to be what they were before 1917--the main reliance of the Army for its guns of the largest calibers for use at the coastal forts and on railway mounts. At best, the production of such weapons is a slow and intricate process, and the only way to procure a supply of them is to keep producing them all the time. Watertown makes the forgings for these guns, and Watervliet, with its own great equipment augmented by machinery from the dismantled war plants, can now manufacture guns up to 16 inches in caliber and howitzers from 12 to 16 inches. At Watervliet, too, has been stored some of the machinery from the American Ordnance Base Depot in France for relining big guns and restoring them to use. Now let us look at the two chief auxiliaries to the two gunmaking arsenals, the Rochester Gun Plant and the Erie Howitzer Plant, which are now “stand-by” factories for the production of field artillery of the smaller sizes--75-millimeter and 4.7-inch guns and 155-millimeter howitzers. The Rochester Gun Plant, with its own war tools and with the equipment concentrated there during the demobilization, is now equipped to turn out 360 75-millimeter guns every month. Its equipment includes not only the elaborate finishing machinery, but also a shop capable of heat-treating and rough-machining 200 sets of black forgings for the gun every month. This plant alone can produce 75’s to keep pace with the needs of a great army, including its battle wastage, until a new gun industry can come into existence. All the buildings are new steel and concrete structures. The plant was built on twelve and a half acres of ground at Rochester during the war by the Symington-Anderson Company for the Government. This site is now leased by the Government. Its purchase would guarantee the continued existence of this important military asset. The Rochester plant is held entirely in ordinary: machinery slushed in grease and boxed, and materials at hand in every department ready for machining, but watchmen the only occupants of the buildings. Not the least important part of the plant’s equipment is a book containing a detailed mechanical description of every one of the 521 manufacturing operations in the production of a 75-millimeter gun, and including even a chart showing the correct organization of the working forces at the plant. Even such complete plans, however, cannot be made to include the small kinks and short cuts of shop practice, which must be developed and learned by actual experience at the machines. Any future force of plant operatives, therefore, would have to learn the obscure secrets of manufacture before the plant could reach great efficiency.