The primary need of this country when it entered the war was that of ships. The necessity was urgent and it was evident that they would have to be provided in constantly increasing number by dozens and scores and hundreds, for a great army would have to be ferried across the Atlantic, with munitions in enormous amount and mountains of supplies, equipments and food. Unless a bridge of boats could be thrust across the ocean, and it could be renewed as fast as destroyed by submarine warfare, nothing that this nation could do in the prosecution of the war would be of the least value, for all her effort would be paralyzed. The enemy was depending upon submarine operations to paralyze that effort and was confident it could be done. The U-boats were sinking ships in 1917 at the rate of 6,000,000 tons a year, and destruction had so much exceeded construction that the world’s supply of shipping had been greatly depleted. What remained was not sufficient to meet the already existing needs and the submarine inroads upon it were steadily lessening its tonnage. Therefore the United States would have to build ships, and more ships. If the submarines sunk them, more would have to be produced to take their places. And so the production of ships became for America the primary and most pressing problem of her war effort. But for many decades America had not been a ship building nation. When she entered the war her ships were carrying a little less than nine and seven-tenths per cent of her own imports and exports. In the whole country there were only sixty-one ship-yards, both steel and wood, totaling 235 ways. About three-quarters of the capacity of the steel ship-yards, of which there were thirty-seven, had been already preëmpted for the essential expansion of the navy, and many of the wooden yards were unfit for modern ship-building. Less than 50,000 men were working in these yards, their number representing, probably, the sum total of the workers in this country whose industrial training had prepared them for ship-building tasks. And among the men accustomed to the organizing and carrying through of great construction enterprises only a scant few had had experience in the building of ships. They had built railroads and engines and cities and bridges and dams and machinery, but not ships. In short, the country was so scantily supplied with the facilities, the experience and the skill needed for the production of ships as to be next door to destitute of them. And ships were its primary and most urgent need.