The submarine menace made necessary the concentration of effort upon types of vessels fitted to deal with it and therefore construction of destroyers and submarine chasers was rushed and every vessel that could be effectively used was put into that service. Submarine chasers to the number of 355 were built for our own use together with fifty for another nation. A new design, the Eagle, was worked out in the Navy Department and preparations were made to produce it in quantity. The manufacturing plant had to be built from the foundation. Work upon the plant was begun in February, 1918, and the first boat was launched the following July. Its tests were successful and two had been put in commission when the armistice was signed while work was being speeded upon over a hundred more, of which part were for one of our co-belligerents. After the destroyer, the Eagle boat was believed by naval officers of our own and other nations the best weapon for the extermination of the submarine. Privately owned vessels of many kinds, to the number of nearly a thousand, were taken over and converted to naval uses and many new small craft were built in order to provide the hundreds of boats needed for patrol service and as tugs, mine sweepers, mine layers and other auxiliaries. Two battleships and twenty-eight submarines built by the navy were completed and put into service during the war. Along with this big increase in ship production went a similar expansion in naval ship-building plants and in production of implements of warfare for the navy. Before we entered the war the Navy’s ship-building capacity amounted to ways for two battleships, two destroyers, two auxiliaries and one gun-boat. At once was begun a work of expansion which within a little more than a year added five ways and, when completed, would provide facilities for the simultaneous construction of sixteen war vessels, of which seven could be battleships. Three large naval docks, which can handle the largest ships in the world, were built. Camps were constructed for the training of 200,000 men. A naval aircraft factory was built which turned out its first flying machine seven months after work started upon the factory. A little later it was producing a machine a day. Naval aviation schools were established and production was speeded in private plants of sea planes, flying boats and navy dirigibles and balloons.