For all of this reconstruction and refitting work there was insufficient skilled labor, indeed, insufficient labor of any sort, because the needs of the fighting forces were drawing men by the hundred thousand into the training camps and the equally urgent needs of the ship-building program, the munitions manufacture, the coal mines, the hundreds of factories that were turning their attention to the vital necessities of warfare, were draining the labor supply. There were insufficient numbers also of trained personnel to officer and man the huge transport service that would be necessary. Training for this work was carried on in schools on shore and on ships at sea, and civilian officers and crews were taken into the service. Sailors from the navy yards turned to with a will for mechanical labor in the repairing and refitting of ships, their zeal compensating, in some measure, for their lack of skill. The British Government gathered up all the ships it could spare, taking risks with its own supply of food and raw materials, and sent them to take part in this enterprise upon whose success depended the fate of the Allied cause. The seized liners were ready for service long ahead of the time in which any one had thought they could be repaired, the first of them taking their trial trips within five months of the declaration of war and the remainder becoming ready for service at various times within the next four months. So much more efficient had the engineers of the navy made them that the utmost speed the Germans had been able to get out of several of them was increased by two or three knots. The French and Italian Governments supplied a few ships, and the United States Shipping Board furnished scores of merchant ships, as they became available under its program of ship-building and taking over of sea-going vessels. Later in the war period a number of vessels were obtained from Holland.