FOREST PREPAREDNESS IN FRANCE 337 



The Wood Used by Two Million American Soldiers. — To establish the 

 American Army as a fighting unit in France and carry its operations to the 

 end of the war required 450,000,000 board feet of round or manufactured 

 timber and 650,000 cords of fuel wood. This represented a ton and a half 

 of wood for every American soldier sent overseas. Much of this material 

 was, of course, used in the construction of depot and supply facilities 

 and at base camps behind the fighting zone. But even after such 

 structures had been largely completed, the two million American troops 

 in France, fighting under the conditions which existed from the beginning 

 of the St. Mihiel offensive, required some 70,000,000 board feet monthly 

 of all classes of timber except fuel wood. 



Thirty-eight and one-half per cent of this vast quantity of timber was 

 required in the form of lumber in small dimensions for the construction 

 of barracks, hospitals, and warehouses and of rough field shelters and 

 fortifications; 27 per cent was fuel wood; railroad ties came third, with 

 13^ per cent; about 9 per cent had to be furnished in large timbers for 

 building docks, barges, trestles, and bridges. The most difficult require- 

 ment to fill was the need for 39,000 piles, in lengths up to 100 feet, used 

 chiefly in the docks built by American engineers at various French ports. 

 Six per cent of the total covered the demands for telephone and telegraph 

 poles, wire entanglement stakes, and pickets for supporting camouflage 

 nets. 



A War of Transportation. — In the last analysis, the war of 1917 was a 

 war of transportation. Nothing illustrates this fact better than the means 

 which had to be employed to obtain the enormous quantities of wood 

 required by the armies in the field and get them to the points of use. 

 Owing to the scarcity of ships, less than 1 per cent of the timber used by 

 the American forces in France was forwarded from the United States. 

 The difficulties in transporting such bulky material from neutral countries 

 like Norway and Switzerland were only sHghtly less serious. France 

 herself was short of manufactured products. Hence over 75 per cent 

 of the timber required by the American Army had to be cut from French 

 forests by our own engineer troops. 



Forest Preparedness in France. — That France was able to supply 

 these vast demands was a factor in national preparedness of the utmost 

 importance to the allied forces, particularly to the American Army, 

 which was compelled to operate far from home. If France had set 

 about deliberately, 60 years ago, to supply the armies of the allied 

 nations with timber during the great war, she could hardly have built 

 up her forest resources more effectively than her thrift and foresight had 

 actually done. France contained probably 150 billion board feet of 

 merchantable timber at the outbreak of the war. The character and 

 distribution of her forests were almost ideal for the military requirements 



