America laid out at once a great and thorough-going munitions program and the War Department plunged into it and speeded it at a furious pace. New designs were made and tested, new plants constructed and a big organization for the carrying on of the work was built up so rapidly that office forces doubled and trebled in a few weeks and sometimes even within a few days. In the Ordnance Division the officers’ personnel increased within a year from 225 to 4,600 and the enlisted from a little more than 800 to 47,500. Scores of technical, scientific, professional and business men left their private affairs and joined the working forces of the War Department to aid in rushing its munitions program. Upward of 16,000 contracts were quickly placed that required the working up into missiles of death of thousands of tons of raw material by hundreds of thousands of workmen. When the armistice was signed there were in the United States nearly 8,000 manufacturing plants employing 4,000,000 persons engaged in the making of ordnance. Manufacturing concerns of every imaginable sort converted their plants to the production of the direct materials of warfare for the use of our fighting men. A corset factory was using its plant for the making of grenade belts. A manufacturer of machinery for popping corn was turning out hand grenades instead. A fireworks establishment was making bombs. A typewriter company was furnishing signal pistols. A big radiator works was an important producer of shells. Artillery carriages were being made by a boiler company, a steam shovel company, and an elevator company. These carriages are very complex, each one consisting of from three to six thousand pieces, exclusive of rivets. So many were needed that, notwithstanding all the help from private industry, in order to insure the necessary quantity production the government built for their manufacture twenty-six plants, all of which were in operation in August, 1918. The intricate and delicate recoil mechanism which sewing machine and other companies began early to furnish was also made in these immense factories. In one industrial district alone, that of Pittsburg, not less than 2,000 industrial concerns were busy in September, 1918, on munitions work. They were employing nearly 200,000 men, with a pay roll of $2,000,000 a day, and their war contracts exceeded in value $2,500,000,000. In that month this district mobilized for coöperation to fill an order for prompt delivery of 33,000,000 semi-steel shells. Shell steel was then being produced at the rate of 500,000 tons per month.