EBB TIDE
Before the American Expeditionary Forces could be disbanded in this
country it was necessary for the training camps, most of which were
to become demobilization centers after the armistice, to be evacuated
by the home forces occupying them. The fluvial system leading into
that sea of humanity which we knew as the A. E. F.--main river
crossing the ocean, chief tributaries leading up to the ports in this
country, beyond them their branch creeks and brooks, and the rills
at the sources--was running bank-full on the day of the armistice.
Demobilization, which inverted many of the processes of war and changed
familiar names into their antonyms, abruptly reversed the direction
of troop-flow, as if some tremendous power had uplifted the reservoir
and the mouth of the main stream in France above the ultimate sources
in this country. Before the expeditionary sea could drain out, the
home channels of troop supply had to discharge their contents into the
nimbus of civilian life.
The process of dissolution began within the hour in which the news of
peace came to Washington. It happened that November 11 was the first
of five days during which the Army planned to absorb 250,000 soldiers
inducted into service under the terms of the Selective Service Act.
Although it was evident that an armistice was at hand, the Railroad
Administration went ahead with preparations for the transportation of
these men to the training camps, and even dispatched the draft trains
on the morning of November 11 to pick up the selectives, although the
morning newspapers had announced that the armistice was indisputably
to begin at eleven o’clock in France. The only preparation looking
toward demobilization had been to set up telephone and telegraph
circuits over which the officials in Washington could stop and turn
back the troop trains in a minimum of time. Immediately after receiving
General Pershing’s message announcing the start of the armistice, the
Secretary of War notified the Troop-Movement Section of the Railroad
Administration to stop the draft trains. This was done within an hour,
although the trains were then in operation in every section of the
United States. Some thousands of young men who had taken the oath of
allegiance that morning, and who at the approach of noon were on troop
trains proceeding to military camps, found themselves back at home,
civilians once more, before the embers of the celebrating bonfires had
died out that night.
Hard on their heels came the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who made
up the combat divisions in training in the United States. These were
the men last to don the uniform--men who were only partially trained,
and who could be of no service to the War Department in the activities
of demobilization. Their disbandment was not a difficult undertaking.
They had been in the service so short a time that there were no
complications of back pay and incomplete records to hinder their
discharge. Moreover, they were geographically homogeneous--_i.e._,
their homes were generally in the regions surrounding the training
camps--and therefore their demobilization brought about no problem in
transportation. As a rule they were paid off and discharged at their
training camps and allowed to make their way to their homes.
Quite apart from the divisional troops, there was another great body
of soldiers in the United States on the day of the armistice. These
were men undergoing training in special camps, such as those of the
Air Service and the Quartermaster Corps, and also the troops engaged
in maintaining the great war establishment in the United States. The
demobilization of these men was more difficult. It was for them in the
first place that the War Department set up the demobilization system
which was to be seen in the perfection of operation later on when the
A. E. F. began reaching the United States _en masse_.
Soon after the armistice the War Department established by order a
system of thirty-three demobilization camps, or centers, as they
were called. In large part these centers were former training camps.
Practically all the National Army cantonments and some of the National
Guard camps were so used. Other military posts and stations were added
so as to distribute the demobilization centers evenly throughout
the country according to the distribution of population. The War
Department’s policy was to discharge soldiers in as close proximity as
possible to their former places of residence.
The special troops on duty in this country lacked homogeneity in the
regional origin of the members of the various units. Many of the
organizations were composed entirely of men chosen because of special
aptitude for special service. Single units were therefore made up of
men from widely separated parts of the United States. When the time
came to disperse these troops it was found impossible to send the units
intact to demobilization centers and there to disband them, except at
a great waste of transportation. Throughout the whole activity the
War Department husbanded transportation. Before the armistice it had
been the general policy to move men always to the eastward, since
east was forward. The armistice inverted the policy; and in order to
avoid expensive duplication of travel, the Army in assembling its
demobilization units moved its men always essentially westward until at
length they reached the camps where they were to be discharged.
Throughout the winter of 1918–1919 the disintegration of the home
forces proceeded rapidly, as the great subordinate services of the Army
tapered off their war activities and released their men. One or two of
the services, such as the Medical Department and the Motor Transport
Corps, held on to their troops for a few months in order to carry out
necessary duties connected with the disbanding of the Army and the
restoration of the military establishment to a peace footing; but
the others, such as the Air Service, the Signal Corps, the Corps of
Engineers, and the Quartermaster Corps, reduced strength as rapidly as
the country could absorb the men. These men lost their unit identity
as they proceeded toward the demobilization centers and finally found
themselves once more grouped with their neighbors, regardless of what
service any of them had performed.
By the end of February, 1919, more than 1,600,000 officers and enlisted
men had been discharged from the Army. At that time only about 300,000
of the expeditionary troops had reached the United States. The great
body of the A. E. F. was still to come, but the demobilization centers
in the United States were empty and ready for it.
The policy of discharging troops at centers adjacent to their homes
rested upon a sound foundation. As the country faced the demobilization
of 4,000,000 troops, young men most of whom had been held for many
months under the rigid restraints of army discipline, there was a
widespread apprehension that the discharged soldiers might congregate
in the larger cities and create profound economic disturbances. Upon
the War Department there was no compulsion of law to transport the
troops to their own neighborhoods before discharging them. Obviously
the easy and convenient thing was to discharge them wherever they
happened to be--at the thousand and one camps in the United States,
or at the Atlantic ports upon their arrival from France--discharge
them there, pay them off, and so farewell to them. Such, in fact, had
been army procedure before the World War. The Army discharged its
men at the posts where they were serving and paid to them the travel
allowances granted by law. Whether they used their money to pay for
actual transportation home was no concern of the Army’s. They were all
free, and most of them white and twenty-one. As long as discharges
were relatively few this procedure had no effect upon the economic
life of the nation. But what would have been the result if the War
Department had continued this practice when disbanding the 4,000,000
troops in uniform on the day of the armistice? Most of them would have
been turned loose in the vicinity of the large cities of the United
States--more than 1,000,000 of them at New York alone. Their pockets
would have been crammed with money. Congress by special enactment
raised the travel allowance for discharged soldiers to five cents a
mile, payable for the distance between the place of discharge and
the soldier’s home, whether the entire journey could be accomplished
by railroad or not. Congress also granted a bonus of $60 to every
soldier--payable also at discharge. Thousands of soldiers, when they
came up for discharge, were entitled to back pay. Thus every man
received a considerable sum of money with his discharge certificate,
and for the overseas soldier this sum probably averaged more than $100.
The streets of our cities would have been thronged with such men during
the first six months of 1919. After their hardships the temptation to
have a fling at metropolitan entertainments would have been well-nigh
irresistible. They would have been fair game for gamblers and sharp
practitioners. The rare individual might have bought his ticket and
gone soberly home, but the majority could scarcely have been expected
to show such restraint. In a little while, pockets that had jingled
with money would have been empty, the streets would have been crowded
with stranded soldiers, and the burdened municipalities would have had
to face a severe civic problem.
This was what the War Department sought to avoid, and what it
did avoid, by its demobilization policy. There was also another
consideration--that of financial economy. The War Department could
carry troops at a cost of much less than five cents a mile per capita.
Therefore, by distributing the Army about the country and discharging
every man within his own native section the War Department was able to
save millions of dollars which otherwise would have been paid out in
mileage allowances.
The good offices of the Government to the demobilized soldier did not
end when the War Department had paid him his money and discharged
him. As a special inducement to demobilized soldiers not to linger in
the communities near the demobilization centers, the United States
Railroad Administration made a special travel rate to them of two cents
a mile. In order to secure the cut rate, however, the soldier had to
buy his ticket within twenty-four hours after receiving his discharge.
Thus it was to his direct financial advantage to go home at once. Nor
did the Railroad Administration permit him to overlook the opportunity.
All the principal demobilization centers had their own railway
terminals, from which special trains for discharged soldiers departed
at intervals. The Railroad Administration set up railway ticket booths
in the offices of the camp finance officers, so that each newly
discharged man, as he turned away from the disbursing window with his
money in his hand, faced the railway ticket booth. At his elbow were
Red Cross, Y. M. C. A., and other camp welfare workers to urge him to
buy his railway ticket at once and leave on the first train. The path
of least resistance led straight home, and he was indeed a headstrong
individual who did not follow it. As a result of the whole system the
demobilization of the Army went through without any trouble at all.
The policy had an effect upon the mode of troop travel that was to
be observed even beyond the ports of embarkation in France. The
original plan had been to bring all the expeditionary divisions back
to the camps in which they had been organized and trained, and there
to disband them. There seemed to be nothing in the way of so simple
a solution of the problem. In organizing the divisions in the first
place, it had been the policy, to which there were but few exceptions,
to create divisions of men originating in the territory contiguous
to each training camp. As the divisions started for France they
possessed definite territorial identity; and the divisional names
which they commonly adopted for themselves--the New England Division,
the Sunset Division, the Buckeye Division, the Keystone Division,
and so on--usually indicated the geographical origin of the men of
the organizations. It was thought that, by transporting the overseas
divisions back to their original training camps in this country, each
would be placed in the demobilization center most convenient to the
respective homes of its soldiers.
The attempt to put this policy into practice quickly showed the fallacy
of it. Immediately it was discovered that the composition of the
divisions had radically changed during the service in France. Men had
died in battle, fallen sick, been transferred to other organizations,
and their places had been taken by replacement troops shipped from
the United States. Whole divisions had been rearranged. In the autumn
of 1918 the expeditionary divisions were no longer representative of
separate districts of the United States; each was in effect a cross
section of the whole of America.
One of the first organizations to come back from France was a minor
unit, a company, which had received its training at Camp Cody, Texas.
The unit was sent to Camp Cody for demobilization and discharge. There
it was discovered that, of every ten men who had joined the unit when
it was in training, only four remained. The other six were newcomers,
and to reach their homes they had to travel to points scattered from
Oregon to the Atlantic coast.
Had this system been followed throughout the disbanding of the
expeditionary units, it is evident that it would have cost the
Government heavily in travel allowances paid to discharged soldiers,
without saying anything about the tremendous traffic burden upon
the railroads of the country. There was nothing to do but to break
up the whole organization of the A. E. F. before sending it to the
demobilization centers, and to assemble the men once more in units that
possessed geographical identity.
The A. E. F. received instructions to attempt this break-up in
France--at least to begin it there. It was found impossible to
regroup the services of supply troops to any extent, because the
embarkation ports in France, at which the supply troops were prepared
for embarkation, were neither organized nor equipped to handle such a
difficult work. More could be done with the divisional troops at Le
Mans. Thereafter, whenever a division came into the area of Le Mans
those soldiers who had joined the division after its training had
been complete, and who did not live in the district centering in the
original training camp in America, were detached and assembled with
neighbors of theirs into territorial demobilization units, which became
known as overseas casual companies. When the division itself went on
from Le Mans to the ports it consisted only of the remnant of charter
members who had been with it from the outset.
The prescribed size of an overseas casual company was two officers and
150 men, but it was seldom convenient to send forth companies uniformly
organized. Men were not held waiting in France until casual companies
could be built up to the prescribed size. One company might consist
of fifty soldiers and the next 250, according to circumstances in the
embarkation camp.
The principal ports of embarkation in the United States before the
armistice had been New York (Hoboken), Newport News, and Boston.
To these, in the system for receiving the overseas troops, was
added Charleston, South Carolina. Charleston was opened as a port
of debarkation principally for soldiers who were proceeding to the
southern demobilization centers. The entire fleet of troop transports
was divided proportionately among these ports, the greatest number
operating between New York and the ports in France and the next
greatest between Newport News and France. In the main each port kept
its own fleet, but sometimes it became necessary to divert a vessel at
sea from her usual course.
Only in a general way did the embarkation authorities in France
pay attention to the destinations of the ships. After each loaded
transport left a French port the embarkation officials there cabled
to the Transportation Service in the United States a full description
of the troops on board. If, for example, a vessel bound for Boston
were carrying a preponderant number of soldiers from the South, the
Transportation Service used the wireless to divert the transport to
Newport News or Charleston.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
CASUALS WAITING TO BOARD SHIP AT ST. NAZAIRE]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
BOARDING _EDWARD LUCKENBACH_, CONVERTED CARGO TRANSPORT]
The passenger lists cabled to the United States often contained
the first information received in this country about the departure
of units from France. There was no news more eagerly awaited by the
people. Cities and states had often made elaborate preparations for the
reception of their overseas soldiers. A number of states and cities
sent representatives to the ports to welcome the troops home at the
gates of America. The harbor boat of the New York Mayor’s Committee of
Welcome was busy almost every day taking visiting delegations down the
bay to meet the incoming transports. In the times when from 150,000
to 200,000 soldiers were on the ocean at once in transports bound for
the United States, keeping track of each unit became difficult. The
Transportation Service set up a news and information bureau through
which the press and the public kept in touch with the movements of
organizations crossing from France.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
EMBARKATION AT BORDEAUX]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
LEFT BEHIND]
Upon the debarkation camps at the Atlantic ports fell the chief work
of splitting up the returning expedition into demobilization units.
There were five major debarkation camps--Merritt, Mills, and Upton at
New York, and Stuart and Hill at Newport News--besides numerous smaller
centers at both ports. At the height of the return movement these
camps were insufficient to accommodate the incoming thousands, and
the Transportation Service used former training camps as debarkation
camps, in both the Hoboken and Chesapeake districts. As long as Boston
and Charleston acted as ports of debarkation they, too, made use of
neighboring training camps.
Of all of the debarkation camps, Camp Merritt was the largest. In it
were to be observed some of the most interesting processes of troop
demobilization. It was the principal camp both for reception of
overseas casual companies and for the breaking-up of organized units
and the formation of casual detachments for distribution among the
thirty-three demobilization centers.
During demobilization Camp Merritt was like a great terminal post
office. The mail consisted of bulk consignments of soldier members
of the disintegrating American Expeditionary Forces. It was the task
of the post office to sort the mail for thirty-three principal
destinations. The individual soldiers were thrown into receptacles
called Hoboken Casual Companies, each, when filled up, consisting of
two officers and 150 men, and each addressed to one or another of
the demobilization centers. Each bore an identifying number, and the
numbers ran consecutively, reaching well into four figures before the
work came to an end.
Special trains frequently left the two railroad stations which served
Camp Merritt. Sometimes an entire train would be loaded with casual
companies bound for the same center. Other trains were made up of
special cars destined for different terminals. In the camp new casual
companies in skeletal form were constantly being organized. Those
scheduled to travel to the less populous sections of the country might
be several days in filling up to standard strength. Others reached full
size in a few hours. As soon as a casual company was complete, it was
dispatched immediately to its proper demobilization camp. For several
months in the spring and summer of 1919 the average interval between
the time a skeleton company was formed and the time it was dispatched
from camp was less than twenty-four hours.
Before the armistice, troops which had been inspected, equipped for the
overseas voyage, and otherwise prepared at Camp Merritt, marched east
from the camp over three miles of macadamized highway and then down the
old Cornwallis trail descending the Palisades, until they reached the
little landing on the Hudson River known as Alpine, several miles north
of the metropolitan limits of New York. There they boarded ferry-boats
and rode on them directly to the transport piers in the North
River. After the armistice, soldiers debarking at the piers boarded
ferry-boats at the pier ends, rode up the river to Alpine, climbed the
Palisades, and marched to Camp Merritt. Those bound for Camp Mills or
Camp Upton took ferry to the Long Island Railroad terminal at Long
Island City on the East River. Those ticketed for Camp Dix boarded
trains which had been run into the Hoboken yard on the spur track
constructed there by the Government after it seized the pier property
from Germany.
At the debarkation camps the Army applied its final precautions against
the importation of European diseases and insect pests. There was a
thorough disinfection of all clothing and equipment, and each principal
camp maintained a delousing plant. However clean the soldiers might
have been when they embarked in France, it was always possible for a
few of them to become infested on the transports. So far as is known,
not a cootie got through the barrage of steam, superheated air, soap,
and hot water laid down by the Army at both ends of the transatlantic
ferry route.
Before the return of the A. E. F. was well under way an important
change took place in the organization of the official military travel
bureau. Before the armistice, military transportation had been in
the hands of two independent war department agencies. The Inland
Traffic Service had charge of the movements of men and supplies by
rail within the United States and up to the ports of embarkation.
There the Embarkation Service received both, loaded them on the
ships, and delivered them to the ports in France. Beyond those points
the Quartermaster Service of the A. E. F. was in charge of military
traffic. Both the Inland Traffic Service and the Embarkation Service
were branches of the General Staff Division of Purchase, Storage, and
Traffic.
In December, 1918, the Inland Traffic Service and the Embarkation
Service joined to form a new branch called the Transportation Service,
and for the first time the Army had a single organization in charge of
all military travel, both freight and passenger, on this side of the
piers in Europe. General Hines of the Embarkation Service became chief
of the Transportation Service. The union brought about a coördination
which made it possible for a limited equipment of railway coaches to
carry troops away from the ports of debarkation as fast as the ships
delivered them there.
As a rule, the overseas men did not travel so comfortably from the
ports of debarkation to the demobilization centers as they had ridden
when, months earlier, they had traveled from those same centers up to
the ports to board the ships for France. The conditions of military
transportation were different. The equipment of railway cars at the
Army’s disposal was limited. It had never consisted of more than
1,500 sleeping cars--tourist sleepers they were, made by removing
the rugs and hangings from first-class Pullman coaches. These 1,500
cars, in full operation, could carry less than 50,000 men at one
time. Nevertheless, although before the armistice the Army supplied
railroad transportation to over 8,000,000 men, nearly every one who
traveled at night slept in a comfortable berth. During that period
practically all the long-haul travel was between the training camps
and the ports of embarkation. The forces in America proceeded to
embarkation by divisions--camp by camp. Thus it was possible to arrange
the shipping schedules to allow for the most convenient operation
of the military rolling stock. But no such arrangement was possible
during demobilization. The system of splitting up the overseas units
at the ports in this country and distributing their men according to
residential origin made it necessary to maintain practically continuous
train service between the various Atlantic ports and the thirty-three
demobilization centers. The sleeping-car equipment was not nearly large
enough to serve in such an operation, and a great many soldiers rode in
day coaches halfway across the continent. They did not grumble too much
at the treatment. It was better than riding in French box cars, at any
rate, and after all they were getting home.
One of the finest accomplishments of military transportation after the
armistice was the distribution of 150,000 sick and wounded soldiers of
the A. E. F. among the many military hospitals of the United States.
The Transportation Service operated six hospital ships at New York.
These vessels took the patients from the general debarkation hospital
on Ellis Island and carried them on their way to various special
evacuation hospitals in the New York metropolitan district. From there
they were sent to general hospitals throughout the country. The Service
kept six hospital trains in continuous operation, as well as about 250
hospital cars. No such movement of invalids was ever before known in
the United States.
The records of the Transportation Service show that in disbanding the
Army it carried over 7,000,000 military passengers in special cars and
trains. The average journey was 500 miles. Train accidents cost the
lives of only two soldiers and injured only seventeen. This high degree
of safety was largely due to the fact that troop trains were held down
to a running schedule of twenty miles an hour.
The whole system of distribution and travel would have worked almost
automatically except for one thing--the victory parades. Whenever
it could do so without too great disruption of the system, the War
Department yielded to the desire of communities to celebrate with
parades the return of their overseas sons. Nearly 200,000 troops in
all marched in more than 450 parades, which ranged from the brief
processions of single companies to such great demonstrations as those
of the First Division in New York and Washington in September, 1919.
Six parades of returning overseas troops passed under the triumphal
arch over Fifth Avenue at Madison Square, New York. Of these, the
parades of the Twenty-seventh and Seventy-seventh Divisions, both
originally composed almost exclusively of New York men, were closest
to the metropolitan heart. Part of the Twenty-eighth Division paraded
in Philadelphia on May 15, 1919. The Thirty-third Division paraded in
Chicago in three sections in late May and early June.
These processions were but preliminary to the greatest celebration of
all--the one which occurred when the First Division, first to go to
France, last to come back, returned, with General John J. Pershing,
the Commander-in-Chief of the American Expeditionary Forces, at its
head. In arranging for the parades of the First Division, the War
Department determined to show the spectators a combat division in full
field panoply--and that meant equipping it with its transport animals.
All divisions had left their animals in France, and solely for these
spectacles the Transportation Service assembled in New York before the
day of the first parade several thousand horses and mules secured from
army posts as far west as Texas and then transported to New York.
The First Division gathered in the debarkation camps at New York. It
included as an attached unit the specially trained drill regiment of
the Third Army Corps. So augmented, it consisted of nearly 24,000 men
and their wheeled equipment of artillery, service trains, repair shops,
bakeries, kitchens, and so on, the motorized equipment alone numbering
five hundred trucks and sixty motorcycles. The transportation of this
great unit to Washington afforded a special problem that would have
been impossible of solution by any organization less expert than the
one which had administered military travel for so many months past.
There were no facilities at Washington for the accommodation of such a
number of troops, and therefore it was necessary to hold them in the
New York camps and take them to Washington on the eve of the parade
itself. After the New York appearance of the Division its motor fleet
was sent over the highways to Washington, the vehicles incidentally
carrying 1,770 men with them. The freighting to Washington of the
animals and horse-drawn vehicles, including the artillery, began
immediately after the New York parade disbanded and continued for
several days. The twenty-two trains carrying the foot soldiers all
arrived in Washington during the night before the parade, the last ones
just in time to allow their passengers to find their places in the
procession.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
HOME AGAIN]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
WELCOMING RETURNING TROOPS AT HOBOKEN]
The moving spectacle which followed gave the national capital and,
through the newspaper accounts, the country, an approximation of the
Grand Review that occurred in Washington at the close of the Civil
War. For four hours the Division marched between throngs such as
Washington ordinarily knows only when a President is inaugurated, down
Pennsylvania Avenue, past the Treasury and the White House and the
reviewing stand, in which were some of the chief uniformed and civilian
dignitaries of the Government, including General Pershing. A roaring
squadron of airplanes skimmed the tree-tops between the capitol and the
war department building; an observation balloon swayed in air above
the White House; and as the steady procession passed--mile after
mile of trig ranks, bronzed faces, showy war medals and regimental
decorations, burnished caparisons, regimental bands, field guns,
limbers and caissons, ammunition trucks, quartermaster supply trains,
ambulance trains, engineering trains with strange implements mounted
upon motor trucks, horse-drawn carts for many purposes, rolling field
kitchens, and finally the jarring tanks, their caterpillar treads
leaving indelible matrices in the sun-warmed asphalt--with emotion the
spectator beheld this living presentment of the power which America had
exerted in the great war.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Air Service_
FIRST DIVISION PARADING ON PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Air Service_
VICTORY ARCH IN WASHINGTON]