The transportation department under the Service of Supply directs the operation, maintenance, and construction of railways, the operation of terminals, the unloading of ships, and transportation of material to warehouses or to the front. Its functions make necessary the most intimate relationship between our organization and that of the French, with the practical result that our transportation department has been able to improve materially the operations of railways generally. Constantly laboring under a shortage of rolling stock, the transportation department has nevertheless been able by efficient management to meet every emergency.
The Engineer Corps is charged with all construction, including light railways and roads. It has planned and constructed the many projects required, the most important of which are the new wharves at Bordeaux and Nantes, and the immense storage depots at La Pallice, Mointoir, and Glèvres, besides innumerable hospitals and barracks in various ports of France. These projects have all been carried on by phases, keeping pace with our needs. The Forestry Service under the Engineer Corps has cut the greater part of the timber and railway ties required.
To meet the shortage of supplies from America, due to lack of shipping, the representatives of the different supply departments were constantly in search of available material and supplies in Europe. In order to co-ordinate these purchases and to prevent competition between our departments, a general purchasing agency was created early in our experience to co-ordinate our purchases and, if possible, induce our allies to apply the principle among the allied armies. While there was no authority for the general use of appropriations, this was met by grouping the purchasing representatives of the different departments under one control, charged with the duty of consolidating requisitions and purchases. Our efforts to extend the principle have been signally successful, and all purchases for the allied armies are now on an equitable and co-operative basis. Indeed, it may be said that the work of this bureau has been thoroughly efficient and businesslike.
Our entry into the war found us with little of the equipment necessary for its conduct in the modern sense. Among our most important deficiencies in material were artillery, aviation, and tanks. In order to meet our requirements as rapidly as possible, we accepted the offer of the French Government to provide us with the necessary artillery equipment of seventy-fives, one fifty-five millimeter howitzer, and one fifty-five G. P. F. gun, from their own factories for each of the thirty divisions. The wisdom of this course is fully demonstrated by the fact that, although we soon began the manufacture of these classes of guns at home, there were no guns of the calibres mentioned manufactured in America on our front at the date the armistice was signed. The only guns of these types produced at home thus far received in France are 109 seventy-five millimeter guns.