Transcriber’s Note: Italic text is enclosed in _underscores_.
IN COMMEMORATION OF THE WORK OF
THE EIGHT THOUSAND YALE MEN
WHO TOOK PART IN THE WORLD WAR
1914–1918
HOW AMERICA WENT TO WAR
⁂
THE GIANT HAND
THE ROAD TO FRANCE I.
THE ROAD TO FRANCE II.
THE ARMIES OF INDUSTRY I.
THE ARMIES OF INDUSTRY II.
DEMOBILIZATION
HOW AMERICA WENT
TO WAR
AN ACCOUNT FROM OFFICIAL SOURCES OF
THE NATION’S WAR ACTIVITIES
1917–1920
[Illustration: _Armistice Day at Independence Hall_
_From a photograph by the Signal Corps_]
DEMOBILIZATION
OUR INDUSTRIAL AND MILITARY
DEMOBILIZATION AFTER THE ARMISTICE
1918–1920
⁂
BY BENEDICT CROWELL
THE ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF WAR AND
DIRECTOR OF MUNITIONS 1917–1920
AND ROBERT FORREST WILSON
FORMERLY CAPTAIN, UNITED STATES ARMY
_ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE
COLLECTIONS OF THE WAR AND NAVY DEPARTMENTS_
[Illustration]
NEW HAVEN
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON · HUMPHREY MILFORD · OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
MDCCCCXXI
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Halt! 1
II. The A. E. F. Embarks 9
III. The Transatlantic Ferry 30
IV. Ebb Tide 47
V. The Process of Discharging Soldiers 62
VI. Picking Up after the Army 74
VII. Soldier Welfare 92
VIII. War Contracts 112
IX. The Settlement of the War Contracts 126
X. Ordnance Demobilization 145
XI. Artillery 163
XII. Ammunition and Other Ordnance 181
XIII. Aircraft 199
XIV. Technical Supplies 214
XV. Quartermaster Supplies 234
XVI. Buildings and Lands 256
XVII. Selling the Surplus 269
XVIII. The Foreign Liquidation 287
XIX. The Balance Sheet 315
Index 323
ILLUSTRATIONS
Armistice Day at Independence Hall _Frontispiece_
_Opposite page_
The Last Shot 4
The Armistice at a Munitions Factory 4
Victory 5
Reconstruction 5
Camp Street in Le Mans Area 12
Bath House at Brest 12
In Camp Pontanezen 13
Company Street in Pontanezen 13
1. Entering “Mill” at Bordeaux 22
2. Receiving Clean Clothing in “Mill” 22
3. The “Mill” Barbershop 23
4. Through “Mill” and Ready for Home 23
Kitchens at Le Mans 30
Street in Le Mans Area No. 5 30
Casuals on Transport Leaving Brest 31
Boarding Transport from Lighters, Brest 31
Troops on Battleship Ready for Mess 36
Warships with Troops Docking at Hoboken 36
Embarking for United States 37
Mess Room on Converted Cargo Transport _Ohioan_ 37
Sailing Day at St. Nazaire 42
Transport _Maui_ Loading at St. Nazaire 42
Souvenirs of His Service 43
Embarking at St. Nazaire 43
Casuals Waiting to Board Ship at St. Nazaire 54
Boarding _Edward Luckenbach_ 54
Embarkation at Bordeaux 55
Left Behind 55
Home Again 60
Welcoming Returning Troops at Hoboken 60
First Division Parading on Pennsylvania Avenue 61
Victory Arch in Washington 61
Overseas Troops Entraining at Hoboken 66
Veterans Detraining at Camp Sherman 66
Discharged Soldiers Receiving Final Pay 67
Making Out Discharge Certificates 67
Common Grave near Cirey 78
Lost Military Baggage at Hoboken 78
Preparing Cemetery at Beaumont 79
Loading Coffins on Collection Trucks 79
1. Overflowed Cemetery at Fleville 86
2. Two Months Later--Bodies All Removed 86
1. Romagne Cemetery, April 10, 1919 87
2. Romagne Cemetery, May 30, 1919 87
Portrait of Colonel Ira L. Reeves 94
Students at Beaune University 94
Art Students in A. E. F. Training Center, Paris 95
A. E. F. Students in University of Lyon 95
Air View of Pershing Stadium, Paris 100
American Soldiers at University of Grenoble 100
A. E. F. Soldiers as Comedians 101
Judging Comedy Horse at 4th Army Horse Show 101
Disabled Veterans Taking Federal Training 108
Editorial Conference of _Stars and Stripes_ 108
Poster Used in Reëmployment Campaign 109
Employment Office at Camp Sherman 109
Sending Out the _Stars and Stripes_ 122
Graduate A. E. F. Students at Edinburgh University 122
Review of “Pershing’s Own Regiment” at Coblenz 123
Games in Le Mans Embarkation Area 123
Portrait of War Department Claims Board 144
Convalescent Reading _Stars and Stripes_ 145
Hospital Train in United States 145
Havoc Wrought by German Guns at Fort near Rheims 164
“Wipers” Ready for Tourists 164
French and German Airplane Engines after Combat 165
Ruined Tanks near Cambrai 165
American Field Guns on the Rhine 180
American Gun on Ehrenbreitstein, Coblenz 180
Destroying Captured German Ammunition 181
A Captured Ammunition Dump 181
Preparing Liberty Engines for Storage 200
Assembling Plant at Romorantin 200
Flying Field at Issoudun 201
Lame Ducks 201
American Airplane Wreckage 212
Fuel for the Bonfire 212
German Locomotive Taken Over by A. E. F. Engineers 213
Engineers Constructing Beaune University 213
Air View of A. E. F. Ordnance Docks 230
A Gas Demonstration 230
Motor Transport in France 231
Part of A. E. F.’s Surplus Motor Equipment 231
A. E. F. Supply Train on Way to Ration Dump 246
A. E. F. Flour on Way to Starving Austria 246
A. E. F. Horses to be Sold 247
Storage Warehouses at Jeffersonville Depot 247
West Indian Laborers Embarking for Home 268
View of Camp Sherman 268
In an Army Retail Store 269
Customers at Opening of Army Retail Store 269
Wreck of Coal Mine at Lens 310
Motor Transport Salvage in France 310
Portrait of Interallied Purchasers 311
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors acknowledge their indebtedness to Major Robert H. Fletcher,
Jr., General Staff, who collected from the various war department
bureaus concerned most of the material on which this book is based.
Also their thanks are due to the numerous former and present officials
of the War Department and officers of the Army who read the manuscript
and criticized it constructively.
B. C. & R. F. W.
_Washington, D. C.,
September, 1921._
DEMOBILIZATION
CHAPTER I
HALT!
At a few minutes past ten o’clock of the morning of November 11, 1918,
the Secretary of War in Washington received from General Pershing a
communication informing the Government that eleven o’clock a.m. that
day, French time, an armistice with Germany had gone into effect. No
message more momentous had ever come to the American War Department.
The World War was at an end. It was peace. It was victory.
Over there on that American front which had penetrated the supposedly
impregnable Argonne and now commanded the enemy’s main line of
communications at Sedan, boys in our own khaki wriggled, charged,
fought, plunged ahead all the morning, like the players of some
mighty football team gaining every inch of advance possible before
an intermission; and finally, as the whistles shrilled and the great
silence fell at last upon a theatre that had shaken and roared with
the thunder of war for more than four years, they set their heels into
the turf of a line that was to be held as a starting-off place if the
armistice, too, should prove to be only an intermission and a period of
recuperation.
Behind these outpost men were the American Expeditionary Forces, two
million strong. Behind the A. E. F. in America was a training and
maintenance army nearly as numerous.
Behind the uniformed and organized Army as it existed on the eleventh
day of November was another force of a quarter of a million men,
technically under arms. These were Selective Service men, drafted
men, entraining that day and adding themselves to the human flood
sweeping on toward Germany. In number this force alone was larger than
any ever previously enrolled at one time in the American military
service, except the forces called to the colors during the Civil War;
yet so expanded had become our values that they attracted only passing
attention in the midst of larger war activities. These inductives were
one more increment--that was all.
And behind the Army itself were twenty-five million American men
between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, registered, classified,
and numbered in the order in which they too in turn should join the
current that led, if necessary, to the supreme sacrifice.
The foundation on which rested this human edifice was industrial.
Nothing less than the whole of America’s material resources had been
pledged to the end of victory. The whole of America’s resources! How
inadequately could pigmy man realize their might before he took them
all and formed and molded them into one single-purpose machine! That
machine was born in travail that broke men’s bodies and reputations,
that threw down the mighty from their seats and exalted those of
low degree, that moved inexorably but surely. And when the machine
was built it released forces terrifying even to men accustomed to
administering the greatest of human activities, forces well-nigh
ungovernable.
It took seven million workers, men and women, to operate the war
industrial machine--seven million Americans delving in the earth for
ores, chemicals, and fuels, felling the forests, quarrying the rocks,
carrying the raw materials to the mills, tending the fires and the
furnaces, operating the cranes, guiding the finishing machinery with
a precision never before demanded, slaughtering the beeves, curing
the meat, packing the vegetables, weaving the fabrics, fashioning the
garments, transporting all, and accomplishing the million separate
tasks necessary to the munitioning of the Army.
And as a background to all this, behind both the military and the
industrial armies, was another force, perhaps the greatest force
of all--the will of the people themselves, of one hundred million
Americans who, without the coercion and duress of law and as a purely
voluntary act, denied their appetites, their pleasures, and their
vanities, contributed their utmost to the war finances, made war
gardens to add to the food supply, produced millions of articles for
the comfort of the soldiers both well and wounded, and in one way or
another put forth effort that did not flag until victory came.
Such was America in a war that truly threatened her existence--America
invincible.
The armistice put an end to all this enterprise and effort. It did
more--the armistice was a command to the Government to scrap the war
machine and restore its parts to the peaceful order in which they
had been found. In military law, an armistice denotes the temporary
cessation of hostilities; but the armistice of 1918 was a finality.
Its terms destroyed the German military power. Those in authority,
aware that the armistice was to be no period of waiting with collected
forces for the outcome of negotiations, did not pause even to survey
the magnitude of the thing they had built: they turned immediately to
the task of dismantling it. Some of the processes of demobilization
began before the guns ceased to fire. Five days before the armistice
the A. E. F. canceled many of the foreign orders for important
supplies. On November 1 we stopped sending combatant troops to France.
In late October the Ordnance Department created an organization for
demobilizing war industry.
However, before the machine could be knocked down and its parts
distributed, it had to be stopped. There are two ways of stopping the
limited express. One is to throw a switch ahead of it--effective, but
disastrous to the train. The other way is to put on the brakes.
The war-industry machine had attained a momentum almost beyond mundane
comparisons. Slow in gaining headway, like any other great mass,
as thousands added their brains and their muscles to its progress
it gathered speed until, at the first day of the armistice, it was
nearing the point at which it could consume the material resources and
turn them out as finished war products up to the capacity of American
mechanical skill and machinery to handle them. It had not quite
reached that point. Many of the vital but easily manufactured supplies
had long since reached the pinnacles of their production curves, but
some of the more difficult ones were not yet in full manufacture. On
Armistice Day, however, the industry was not more than six months away
from the planned limit of its fecundity.
For the administration of the industrial enterprise the task ahead
was first to bring that momentum to a halt and then to break up the
machine. The easiest way was to throw a switch ahead of it--in other
words, to issue a blanket stop-order on all military manufacturing
projects. But to have done that would have been to court consequences
as disastrous as those of war itself. Business and industry would have
fallen into chaos and the country would have been filled with jobless
men. The other way, the way chosen, was to apply the brakes to the
thousands of wheels.
The magnitude of the task ahead was appalling. The liquidation of the
war industry was seen to be a matter as complex, as intricate, as full
of the possibilities of error and failure as the mobilization itself.
In only one respect did demobilization begin with an advantage: there
was at hand an organization, the organization which had administered
the creation of the Army and the manufacture of its supplies, ready to
be turned into a wrecking crew.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
THE LAST SHOT]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
THE ARMISTICE AT A MUNITIONS FACTORY]
Balanced against this situation was the countering fact that the men
of this organization were war weary. Ahead of them were none of the
conspicuous rewards that follow conspicuous war service. The nation
does not award medals and other honors to those who restore the
conditions of peace. The people themselves were satiated with war and
desired nothing so much as a space in which they could forget battles
and campaigns. At best, demobilization was to be a thankless job.
Moreover, many of the executives, particularly those in the industrial
organization, were men of large personal affairs, serving their country
at a sacrifice. For the most part they were disheartened men, denied
the satisfaction of seeing the full fruition of their plans have its
effect against a hateful enemy. Every interest of personal gain
called to them after the armistice to desert their official posts and
return to the satisfactions of private endeavor, and only the righteous
sense of their duty to the nation held them in the organization.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Howard E. Coffin_
VICTORY
WAR TROPHIES IN PLACE DE LA CONCORDE, PARIS]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Howard E. Coffin_
RECONSTRUCTION
BRITISH SOLDIER’S GRAVE IN FIELD NEAR MEAUX]
It was necessary for the organization not only to remain intact,
but to speed the activities of demobilization as it had sped those
of mobilization. The pre-armistice spirit had in some way to be
maintained. On November 11 the war was costing the United States about
$50,000,000 a day. Every day of indecision in adopting the plan of
demobilization and every day’s delay in carrying out the plan added
tremendously to the burden of taxation that would rest upon the nation
for generations to come.
Demobilization meant, first of all, the disbanding of the American
Army. Whatever economic considerations might graduate the termination
of war industry, no such considerations were to be permitted to retard
the homeward progress of the troops. Four million American homes
demanded their men at once; and whether the immediate return of the
troops meant unemployment and distress or not, the Government was
determined to comply with the demand.
The creation of the Army and its movement toward France had involved
the rail transportation of about 8,000,000 soldiers in special cars and
trains. The home movement would require an operation almost as great.
Of the 2,000,000 men of the American Expeditionary Forces, more than
half had crossed the ocean in foreign ships, all of which, of course,
were withdrawn from our service immediately after the armistice. The
unbroken eastward transatlantic procession of troopships had continued
for about fourteen months. On the first day of the armistice the
transatlantic ferrying capacity of the American-flag troopships was
not much in excess of 100,000 men a month. Moreover, practically all
our troop transports had reached the point of having to be laid up
for reconditioning. Assuming, however, that they could be kept in
continuous operation, they could not bring back to America more than
two-thirds of the troops in the time it had taken the whole A. E. F.
to cross to France. Yet the problem of demobilization was to repatriate
the A. E. F. in that time at most.
Demobilization involved a final cash settlement with everyone of the
four million men under arms; computations of back pay, complicated as
they were with allotments and payments for government war bonds and the
war risk insurance; and, finally, the payment to each soldier of the
sixty-dollar bonus voted by the Congress. Demobilization also included
the care of the wounded for many months after the fighting ceased,
their physical and mental reconstruction, and their reëducation to
enable them to take useful places in the world.
On the industrial side demobilization was the liquidation of a business
whose commitments had reached the staggering total of $35,000,000,000.
Demobilization meant taking practically the entire industrial structure
of the United States, which had become one vast munitions plant,
and converting it again into an instrumentality for producing the
commodities of peaceful commerce. This without stopping an essential
wheel, and also in the briefest possible time, for the world was in
sore need of these products. Efficient demobilization, it follows,
would permit the 7,000,000 industrial war workers to turn without a
break in employment from the production of war supplies to that of
peace supplies.
At the base of modern business stability lies the inviolability of
contracts. He who breaches a contract must expect to pay indemnity,
and the Government cannot except itself from this rule. Demobilization
meant the suspension and termination of war contracts running into
billions in value, many of them without a scrap of paper to show as a
written instrument; it meant termination without laying the Government
open to the payment of damages, and therefore it implied the honorable
adjustment of the claims of the contractors.
One of the conditions on which complete demobilization depended was the
adoption of a future military policy for the United States. But this
was in the hands, not of the military organization, but of Congress.
The whole program, therefore, could not be put through until Congress
had acted. After the policy was defined, then it became the duty
of the demobilization forces to choose and store safely the reserve
equipment for the permanent establishment and for the field use of a
possible future combatant force until another war industry could be
brought into existence.
When that had been done there would remain a surplus of military
property. It thereupon became the function of demobilization to dispose
of this property through a sales organization that would have in its
stocks goods of a greater variety and value than those at the disposal
of any private sales agency in the United States. This branch of the
work also included the sale of great quantities of A. E. F. supplies in
Europe, which was already glutted with the surpluses of its own armies.
The sales at home must include the sale of hundreds of buildings put up
for the war establishment.
Paradoxically, demobilization included the acquirement of large
quantities of real estate--for the storage of reserve supplies and the
creation of a physical plant for the permanent military establishment.
Finally, demobilization meant the delicate business of striking a cash
balance that would terminate our relations with the Allies, meeting
their claims against us for the supply of materials and for the use and
destruction of private property abroad, and pressing our own claims
against them for materials sold to them.
The astonishing thing was the swiftness with which this great program
was carried through. Within a year after the last gun was fired America
had returned to the normal. The whole A. E. F. had been brought back
in American vessels in ten months. In that time practically the entire
Army had been paid off, disbanded, and transported to its homes. War
businesses were braked to a standstill in an average time of three
months, without a single industrial disturbance of any consequence. At
the end of the year the greater part of the manufacturers’ claims had
been satisfied with compromises fair both to the contractors and to
the Government. The savings in contract terminations and adjustments
had run into billions of dollars. A blanket settlement had been made
with the Allies, thus virtually closing up our business in Europe.
A permanent military policy had been written into law. The storage
buildings and spaces were filled with reserve materials inventoried,
catalogued, and protected against deterioration. Packed away compactly
were the tools and machinery of an embryonic war industry ready to be
expanded at will in the event of another war. Materials, largely of
special war value and therefore normally to be regarded as scrap and
junk, had been sold to the tune of billions, the exercise of ingenuity
in the sales department producing a recovery that was remarkably large,
averaging 64 per cent of the war cost.
Such was our war demobilization. No other single business enterprise in
all human history compared with it in magnitude; yet, in the midst of
the peace negotiations and amid the economic crises fretting the earth,
it attracted scant notice. To-day, only the continuing sale of surplus
war materials and the adjudication of the last and most difficult of
the industrial claims give evidence of the enterprise which engaged the
efforts of the whole nation so short a time ago.