July lst. By revising menus and conserving provision stores the emergency period was bridged without serious food shortage. As an added measure, minor procurement authority was delegated to the Holmes & Narver Honolulu office to aid in providing essential items that could be shipped directly from the Territory of Hawaii. On August 19th, H & N was notified that the USS PRIVATE J. S. MERRILL would be made available for limited cargo loading for sailing on August 25. A priority system was established so that the most critically needed items would be shipped first, and in sufficient quantities to expedite construction activities. It was extremely difficult to determine the proper priorities, since by this time almost all of the material collected in the Oakland area was needed at once as construction scheduling was daily becoming more complex. Special screening was required at this time to ascertain priority requirements, and almost the entire Purchasing Department together with key personnel from various other departments were engaged in coordinating the shipping requirements. With this united effort, H & N was able to segregate and load 3,745 measurement tons of critical materials aboard the PRIVATE MERRILL within 4 days and to dispatch more than 6,000 tons on the CRAIN shortly thereafter. With the resumption of normal shipping schedules, procurement operations for the Scientific Structures and Military Structures Programs were continued. The Procurement Department worked closely with the design groups in the Engineering Department to control the delivery of the required materials and equipment to coincide with the schedules that had been established for construction at the Jobsite. It was necessary to emphasize expediting these orders from their point of origin to the shipping point because not only did large quantitiles of basic construction commodities have to be transported to the Jobsite at regular dates, but it was also desirable that many thousands of items of special hardware, tools, and equipment as well as large quantities of technically designed and specially fabricated parts and structures follow on coordinated schedules. Of the warious scientific stations there were a great many that included items that were required to be fab- ricated in accordance with detailed drawings and technical specifications. These items ranged in type from small steel rods to large stainless steel collimator tubes, precision machined to exact tolerances, and multi-ton castings also requiring special machining operations. As time was a vital factor in this procurement, many contracts were negotiated, and in some instances fabricating plants were authorized to work around the clock and on week-ends so as to meet the delivery schedules. A number of design changes were encountered during the fabrication of special units and this circumstance further complicated procurement work. Close liaison had to be maintained between the Purchasing Department inspectors and design engineers to keep abreast of all specification and design alterations. These changes ranged from minor dimensional variances to drastic over-all changes of entire units. In several instances work had to be stopped and new negotiations entered into with the 13-18