An even greater expansion of plant was to be observed throughout the country. The plant set up for the Army mobilized against Germany was a practically new creation, specialized for exactly the sort of war in which we were engaged. It was a war in which land transportation had to be linked to ocean transportation, and therefore the plant included vast facilities for the embarkation of troops and a string of mighty export terminals, or bases, strung out along the coast in order to make difficult any blockade of our overseas supply line. It was a war essentially industrial in type, with unusual emphasis laid upon the development of special industrial products, such as powder and explosives; and therefore the plant included dozens of new mills and factories, several of them industrial centers so large as to be virtually small cities in themselves, with housing and modern municipal conveniences for their employees. It was a war in which new and hitherto unknown forms of combat had sprung into existence, and therefore the plant included equipped fields for the training of soldiers in such arts as flying and the employment of poisons as weapons. Above all, it was a war which called upon the ultimate resources of American man power; and, as it turned out, the plant had to be adequate to house, school, amuse, care for, and maintain at least two million men, with all that that implies in barracks, drill grounds, parks for vehicles, water and sewer systems, lighting systems, roads, hospitals, and (in the maintenance line) depots and warehouses for supplies. It was all fresh creation, new construction. The building industry of the United States--and it is one of the largest and strongest of our industries--had never before been called upon to provide such expansion in an equal time. It follows that the entire building industry must have been engaged in the construction enterprise, that every available man who could drive a nail or lay a brick must have been employed upon government work. If he was not, he should have been; for those in charge of the construction, unable to secure sufficient labor from the entire building industry of the United States, sent ships to Porto Rico and the Bahamas and brought back thousands of workmen to help out. The Construction Division, the war-begotten organization which was in charge of this activity, with 427,000 men on its contractors’ pay rolls at the peak of its industriousness, yielded only to the United States Railroad Administration the title of greatest employer of war labor. It engaged in 581 separate construction projects, which called for an expenditure of over $1,100,000,000; and it completed most of them.