The completion of so large a quantity of the war construction after the armistice enabled the Construction Division to go through the demobilization of its industry without accumulating large stores of surplus materials. Although in form, at any rate, the Division dealt directly only with contractors who took the various jobs, actually the Division itself procured the lumber, cement, brick, structural steel, roofing, hardware, and the like, for the builders. The demand of the war construction upon the supplies of building materials was so great that nothing less than a centralized stimulation and control of the entire market could have procured the materials in the quantities needed. The Construction Division’s Procurement Division located the supplies and then arranged each building contractor’s deals for them, even stipulating the producers, quantities, and the prices which must be paid for materials. This last was important, because the war builders worked under a sharply safeguarded cost-plus contract form, and therefore the Government was keenly interested in what the materials cost. In addition to procuring supplies for the contractors, the Procurement Division also purchased equipment for the war buildings--heating, ventilating, and power plants, fire extinguishers, refrigeration equipment, boilers, engines, and machinery of many sorts. Its purchases ran at the rate of $2,000,000 a day in the early autumn of 1918. After the armistice and after the temporary suspension of effort requested in order to give the Construction Division time in which to take stock of its position, the production of building materials and supplies of which the Government would be able to make no use was rapidly terminated. The Procurement Division was made up of experts in all branches of building construction, and therefore this Division was made over after the armistice into the Construction Division Claims Board for liquidating its war business under the direction of the War Department Claims Board. In six months practically all the terminated contracts had been finally settled by this organization, at an average cancellation cost of 5 per cent of the face value of the contracts. The termination of supply contracts and of contracts with constructors of buildings not needed by the War Department after the armistice, left the Construction Division with large quantities of supplies on its hands. But these were by no means surplus supplies. The completion of a large quantity of war construction after the armistice saved the Construction Division from having to solve the problem of disposing of much surplus. Supplies accumulated for the terminated jobs were simply diverted to those ordered completed and thus utilized.