In spite of the endless complications due to the use by our forces during the early days of the war of French machine-guns and automatic rifles of a calibre different from our own, and to the insistent demands of the Air Service for special types of cartridges—tracer, armor-piercing, and incendiary—there was never a time when we did not have enough small-arms ammunition to supply our forces in the field. I might mention in this connection that one of the most perplexing problems which had to be solved by Ordnance was the manufacture of ammunition which would function equally well in two rifles—the Springfield and the Enfield—and in seven different types of machine-gun—the Benet-Mercie, the Lewis, the Vickers, the Colt, the Marlin, and the light and heavy Brownings. In these machine-guns the firing-pin points, or strikers, are different in shape and size and function differently, each giving a different weight of blow on the primers of the cartridge, yet, notwithstanding this handicap, the success of the American ammunition in this respect was remarkable. The daily average of small-arms ammunition manufactured in the United States reached the enormous total of 14,900,000 completed rounds—a production equal to that of England and France put together. The total number of cartridges of all classes produced up to the end of the war was 3,500,000,000; enough, if placed tip to primer, to put a girdle of brass and steel around the globe. At the outbreak of the war the Colt automatic pistol, of .45 calibre, was the standard arm of the American Army. This pistol was manufactured by Colt’s at Hartford, Conn., and by the government at the Springfield Armory. The Ordnance Department quickly realized, however, that even the combined capacity of these two plants would prove wholly inadequate to meet the demands of the new armies, whereupon it obtained permission from the War Department to supplement the supply of automatics with arms of other types, particularly Colt and Smith & Wesson .45-calibre revolvers—the famous “six shooters” of the plains. These revolvers did not take the rimless, or cannelured-head, cartridge used in the pistols, but this difficulty was overcome by means of a loading-clip, which had the additional advantage of enabling them to be loaded almost as quickly as an automatic. The revolver, which is somewhat less accurate and less powerful than the pistol, and which is considerably more tiring for the user, was adopted as an emergency measure only, due to the imperative necessity of supplying the troops. The demands of the A. E. F. increased so rapidly, however, that in the summer of 1918 contracts were let to eight other firms possessing equipment which could be converted to the manufacture of pistols and revolvers. It is interesting to note that among the concerns which turned from the manufacture of essentially peace-time devices to the production of implements for killing the Hun