To investigate claims and negotiate settlements with the European contractors the A. E. F. created its Board of Contracts and Adjustments, which for several months served as the liquidating agency for the war business. Later the unsettled cases were turned over for final disposal by the United States Liquidation Commission. The termination of the foreign production for the A. E. F. was not nearly so puzzling a problem as the disposition of the excess military stores with the expedition. We had shipped from the United States to the A. E. F. over 6,000,000 tons of military supplies, and those shipments now crowded the warehouses in the American areas. After the armistice the first step looking to the disposition of these stocks was a rough, but fairly comprehensive, inventory of all military property stored in our bases and depots. This inventory gave basis for an estimate of a surplus valued at $1,500,000,000 over and above what the diminishing forces abroad could possibly use. Nearly half these excess stores were quartermaster supplies, therefore goods more or less perishable. Long before the American cargo ships could transport these supplies back to America they would have lost value to the amount of untold millions of dollars. The Government faced an enormous loss. Whatever was to be done about it had to be done quickly. The one way out was to sell the surplus in Europe, but it was a grave question whether that could be done successfully at all. In the first place, all our army supplies had been placed in France without the payment of any import duties. So long as these supplies were being consumed by the American soldiers, well and good; but, when it was proposed to sell them to private purchasers outside the A. E. F., the French Government insisted upon its right to collect import taxes upon such supplies as were to be sold. When the United States was not ready to concede this point, then the French Government offered the alternative of permitting the United States to sell its surplus in France without payment of import duties, provided the sales were made exclusively to the French Government itself. The United States felt obliged to accept this condition.