A workforce of 5,000 built Camp Devens in Massachusetts on an 8,000-acre site, with 22 sawmills supplying the project. Twenty miles of roadway were completed in the first few weeks. At Camp Dodge in Iowa, 1.25 miles of sewer line and 0.75 mile of water line were laid per day.

One ENR report described a 1,200-man engineering regiment undergoing training in Monterey, Calif. They were being schooled in military mapmaking, timber and pontoon bridge building and fortification building. Skilled tradesmen would eventually be assigned occupational specialties such as surveyors and draftsmen, miners and quarrymen, carpenters, mechanics, axmen and teamsters.

A New York engineering regiment taking shape in 1917 called for “powder men, carpenters, dock builders, blacksmiths, plumbers, electricians, engine men (steam and gas), machinists, masons, calkers, riggers, horse-shoers, saddlers, cooks, chauffeurs, draftsmen and surveyors.” The U.S. supplied 1.5 million horses to the war effort, which hauled supplies and pulled artillery.

Reports in ENR from leading engineering schools emphasized that underclassmen were advised to remain at their studies, and upperclassmen planning to leave college for military service should consider going into industry as the nation’s manufacturing capability was just as important in warfare as the army in the field. A representative from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology stated, “Modern developments have placed the conduct of a war on the skill of engineers—mechanical, electrical and chemical—fully as much as on the fighting qualities of armies.”

An article titled “Government Building Operations Need Strong Central Control” described a sophisticated chart developed by the Ordnance Bureau with a timeline of overlapping steps needed to produce cartridges. The progress chart let managers identify and correct delays, a forerunner of the critical path project delivery method.

Municipal public works departments reduced their construction activities, redirecting materials and manpower for war-related work. An embargo on road material enacted by the Council of National Defense in November 1917 caused most highway construction to halt.

A long article discussed labor supply problems. Groups of immigrant workers, headed by an interpreter, would leave a job on short notice, as there was plentiful work on railway projects. Laborers working alone were often restless. “On some Chicago track-elevation work done by a railway company, 2,870 men were employed during a period of six months to maintain a working force of about 400. The average time spent on the work was less than five days for each man.” Turnover was attributed to drinking, or that many laborers were transients drifting from job to job, aided by employment agencies offering free transportation to other jobs.

Labor unrest prompted a series of ENR editorials in 1918, which predicted that labor “would demand and get a larger share of the profits of industry” and would seek better working conditions. Editors urged owners to compromise. Weeks later, the War Labor Conference Board recognized the right to organize and instituted the eight-hour work day, a condition only achieved by a few unions before then.

The government created the Railroads’ War Board, which operated all the lines in the eastern U.S. as a single 120,000-mile entity, pooling their facilities to better handle the abnormally high volume of traffic. Antitrust laws were suspended, and 2 million railroad workers, the nation’s single largest industry, became public employees.

A crash shipbuilding effort kicked off. Because steel was needed elsewhere it was decided that most wartime cargo ships would be made of wood. Gen. Goethals, head of the Emergency Fleet Corp., issued contracts to dozens of shipyards, with delivery of finished vessels expected throughout 1918. The U.S. government also constructed three enormous shipyards from scratch, at Hog Island in Philadelphia, Newark, N.J., and Bristol, Pa. These yards, with a total of 90 shipways, built vessels with simplified, almost rectangular hulls, using structural steel shapes fabricated at bridge and structural steel shops. This near-assembly-line process was expected to significantly shorten shipbuiding times.

Insufficient housing near the Bristol yard necessitated a rapid program to build 3,000 housing units in six weeks so the entire 6,000-person workforce could be accommodated. Construction of the Hog Island plant bogged down due to severe winter weather, inadequate rail trackage and an isolated location which made it difficult to hire and retain workers. Completed ships began launching in great numbers in the summer of 1918, finally overtaking the tonnage of Allied ships sunk by the Germans, but the huge leap in shipbuilding capacity occurred too late to materially affect the war effort.

The first ENR article, unbylined, on the activities of U.S. troops in France described an extensive, 100-acre U.S. ordnance base that included machine shops for overhauling artillery and shops for repairing trucks and tractors. The 600-ft-long buildings were assembled from 20-ft x 35-ft modular units made of corrugated metal, brought from the U.S. Another article sketched out a program that built portable housing for the troops. The components for the 20 x 217 ft buildings were fabricated in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, shipped to France and assembled quickly with bolts.

ENR sent its managing editor, Robert K. Tomlin Jr., to cover the war from a construction perspective. Tomlin was a degreed engineer who had worked on railroad and water tunnel projects before joining the staff of ENR. He was the first U.S. engineer to serve as a war correspondent. He traveled to France in December 2017 and wrote dozens of articles over the next eight months. In September 2018 he was commissioned as a captain in the Corps of Engineers and assigned to the office of technical information. After the war ended he returned to ENR.

One of his first articles outlined a great network of 60-cm-gauge light railways under construction by U.S. engineering regiments, whose function was “to carry forward as near to the front as possible ammunition, forage, road material, rations, lumber and fuel, and transport troops and wounded men.” Given its narrow gauge it could easily be repaired after suffering damage from artillery attacks.

Tomlin visited a French quarry, where he noted that much of the work was done by hand labor, in contrast to American quarries that employed more machinery. Three months later he visited a newly-established U.S. quarry in France with a U.S.-supplied machine plant, which was producing far greater output.

At a munitions plant in Paris, 9,000 women were producing 50,000 artillery shells per day. Tomlin wrote an article about his experience of being in Paris while it was undergoing bombardment by a long-range German gun and aerial attacks.

He reported on a key advance depot, which he called “the great arterial system of army traffic whose heart is at our army’s docking basins and railway yards.” It had 19 warehouses, each 50 ft x 500 ft, railway yards consisting of 50 miles of track and two steel ammunition structures. It was one of the most valuable railway and freight-handling centers of the war effort.

Other headlines of his articles, such as “American Forestry Units Are Working 53 Tracts of French Timber Land” and “American Army’s Water-Works Projects in France Number About Four Hundred” indicate the scope of engineers’ efforts to support U.S. forces as 250,000 American soldiers arrived in France each month.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers consisted of 256 officers and 2,100 enlisted men when the U.S. entered the war in April 1917. By June 1918 there were 7,800 engineer officers and 200,000 enlisted men.