SECTION I. ON LAND.
CHAPTER I
THE MAKING OF THE ARMY
The United States sprang into the greatest war the world has ever known, a war in which men and machines and resources were being consumed in enormous quantities, with an army numbering, all told, only 212,000. The first necessity was to create, train and equip an army that would, at the earliest possible moment, number millions of men and thousands of officers. American sentiment had always been strongly opposed to the principle of compulsory military service and the only attempt the country had ever made to use the draft system, during the Civil War, had caused dissatisfaction, disturbance and riot in civil life and in its military results had been practically a failure. Through many days of discussion in Congress and throughout the country the question was threshed out, while enlistments to the number of over 800,000 were swelling the ranks of the Regular Army, National Guard and Reserve Corps organizations. In the end, there was general agreement that only the draft system could furnish the enormous numbers of men required and draw them from civil life with democratic justice and with due regard to social and economic interests.
As a large number of foreign born citizens had come here to escape the compulsory military service of their native countries, there were many grave fears of the result and it was even expected that in centers of foreign population there would be riotous demonstrations of protest. But those who were thus apprehensive had not rightly estimated the intelligence, the democracy and the Americanism of the whole citizenship of the country, foreign as well as native born.
The success of the Selective Service Law, enacted by Congress on May 18, 1917, was as spectacular as it was complete. The entire machinery of registration, compilation and report was organized and made ready for operation in the eighteen days following the enactment of the law and was wholly manned by volunteer service from civil life. On June 5th, in a single day, without disturbance or protest anywhere, the entire male population of the country between the ages of twenty-one and thirty, inclusive, went to the registration booths and registered for military service, and practically all the returns were in Washington within twenty-four hours. Two subsequent registrations of young men who had reached the age of twenty-one after June 5th brought the number of registrants up to a little more than 10,000,000 men.
On September 12th, 1918, occurred the registration under the extended age limits of eighteen to forty-five when over 13,000,000 names were added to the list. Thus in a year and a half of war America listed and classified as to physical fitness and occupational and domestic status her full available power of 23,700,000 men. Out of the first great registration and the two small ones supplementing it and from the Regular Army and the National Guard there had been sent overseas at the signing of the armistice, November 11th, 1918, a little more than 2,000,000 men and there were in the United States, ready for transportation to France, 1,600,000. The American Army totaled at that time 3,665,000. A few of those who had gone were in Italy, Russia, or elsewhere, but nearly all of them were in France, trained, equipped and either on the fighting line, in supporting divisions, or waiting in the rear ready for the front. Those in the American training camps were being transported to France at the rate of from 200,000 to 300,000 per month and would all have been overseas by early spring of 1919. The work of classifying the registrants of September, 1918, and of making the selections for military service was already under way and the flow of these men into the training camps had begun. The plans were all ready for operation for calling into military service 3,000,000 more men from this registration, for training them in the American camps two or three months and then sending them to France for a final training period of six or eight weeks. If the war had continued until the next summer, as it was then universally believed it would, the United States would have had ready for service at the front, within two years of its declaration of war, an army of between 6,000,000 and 7,000,000 men, taken from civilian life, trained, equipped and transported across the Atlantic Ocean within that time.
The mechanism by which this army was gathered, examined, selected, classified and sent to training camps worked as smoothly, as efficiently and as swiftly as if the country had been trained for a century in martial methods. The quotas to be furnished by states, counties and smaller districts were apportioned and local boards were appointed to have charge of the task of calling the selected men, examining and classifying them and sending to the training camps those finally chosen as physically fit for the service and able to serve without injury to dependents or to essential industry.
Registration also had been carried on under these local boards, each registrant being numbered in order. The draft call was made by means of a lottery drawing in Washington where each number that was drawn summoned all the men of the same registration number in all of the 4,500 local boards throughout the country. The local boards called in the men whose numbers were chosen, examined them as to physical condition, considered their claims to exemption, if such were made, on the ground of being the necessary support of dependents or of being engaged in an essential industry, decided for or against them and certified their names to the district board, which acted as a board of review for local boards, as exempted or held for service. If approved for service by the district board, the local board inducted them into the service and sent them to a cantonment or camp to begin their military training. Each of these 4,500 local boards was officered by three men, one of whom had to be a physician. All of them were civilians who worked practically without pay, until, after some months, a small allowance was made for their remuneration. They carried through the arduous work, frequently entailing many hours per day, in addition to their regular business or professional affairs, which had to be much neglected meanwhile, in order that they might offer this important service to their country at the moment of need. The draft organization, besides these 13,500 local board members, included over 1,000 district board members, medical, legal and industrial advisers, clerks, Government appeal agents, and others amounting, all told, to a compact, nation-wide body of over 190,000.
The democratic ideals of America have never had a more searching trial or a more triumphant vindication than was afforded by the swift and efficient making of this Army of Freedom. Columbia stretched out a summoning finger, saying, “I need you!” and there came to her service millionaire’s son and Chinese laundryman, descendant of generations of Americans and immigrant of a day, farmer, banker, merchant, clerk, country school teacher, university professor, lawyer, physician, truck driver, yacht owner, down-and-outer, social favorite—from village and country and town and city they came, representing every occupation, every social grade, every economic condition in the republic. On the democratic level of service to the country they gathered in the barracks and without a whimper or a word of protest the millionaire’s son cleaned out stables, the young man reared in luxury washed his own mess kit and served on the kitchen police, and all of them worked at their training and their drill as hard as day laborers from dawn till dark.
Fourteen tribes of American Indians were represented among the soldiers of the National Army, as the forces formed from the Selective Service were called for more than a year, to distinguish them from the Regular Army and the National Guards. Then all three were merged into the single organization of the United States Army. Among the most efficient soldiers were several regiments of negroes. Every civilized nation on the face of the globe, every language, and every important dialect were represented in the ranks of the soldiers of freedom who carried the Stars and Stripes on the battle fields of France. Through the office of the base censor of the American Expeditionary Forces passed letters in forty-nine languages. Chinese, Syrian and Dane, Persian and Irishman, Japanese and Italian, Latin American and Swede, vied with the New Englander, the Kentuckian, the Texan and the Kansan in loyalty to the United States, in enthusiasm for our ideals and willingness to defend them with their lives. In the September registration men of fifty-two different tongues were listed in New York City. In the first draft men were called and accepted who claimed birth in twenty-two separately listed countries, while a contingent from Central and South America was not credited in the official report to the separate nations they represented and nearly two thousand men from scattered and small countries were lumped together under the designation of “Sundries.” But all of them zealously fought for America.
A great many of these foreign-born men already spoke English. And the education of those who did not began as soon as they were inducted into the army and was continued along with their military training. In every cantonment to which came men who did not understand English schools were established in which they were taught to speak, read and write the language. All the training and all the life around them were in English and this constant association and the daily lessons soon made most of the men fairly proficient.
Along with the training in English went instruction in American ideals, in the reasons why America was in the war and in what the war meant to them individually. The aim was to give to these foreign-born men the kind of training in patriotism and in democratic ideals, condensed into a few weeks, that the American gets by birthright and surroundings. Many, varied and ingenious were the ways by which this was done. There were short talks on war news, on American principles of government, on why America was in the war, on why it was a war for freedom, and similar topics. The special days and the heroes of nations that have their own traditions of revolt against tyranny were celebrated by “national nights” to which came all the sons of that nation in the camp and as many others as could crowd into the auditorium. There were music and speeches and national songs and the hymns of the Allies and in all the talking the speakers would link up American democracy, its mission in the world and the reasons why America was in the war with the traditions of freedom, the heroes of liberty and the sacrifices for democracy and justice of the nation whose celebration was being held. Pamphlets and leaflets, written by men of their own nationality, in English usually, but in their own tongue for those who could not yet read English, which explained the causes of the war, the aims of the combatants and America’s motives and outlined American history in a simple and readable way, were circulated among the men. In a word, these foreign-born soldiers-in-the-making were educated and broadened and so imbued with democratic principles and American ideals that in spirit they rapidly became good Americans, even if they elected to continue citizens of their native land.
But all who wished could be naturalized during their military training. In every cantonment was a court of naturalization and by a special law it had been made possible to shorten the time ordinarily needed for this process. Any man who was going forth to fight the battles of civilization in the American army could become an American citizen, even if he had not previously declared his intention, while he was being trained. In one day at one of the cantonments men of fifty-six nationalities were naturalized. At this camp sessions were held from eight till five o’clock and were often continued until midnight, so many were there who wished to become citizens. The majority of the aliens in the selective service did so choose and the great bulk of the foreign-born part of the huge army that was ferried across the Atlantic had acquired American citizenship. Aliens who did not wish to serve could, and some thousands did, claim, and were granted, exemption on that ground.
Now and then Columbia’s summoning finger brought to the training camp a slacker, or a religious or a conscientious objector. Patient and careful inquiry was given to every case and no effort was spared to make sure that each was receiving exact justice. The official report of the Provost Marshal General for the first draft reckoned that out of the more than 3,000,000 called for service no more than 150,000 of those who failed to appear on time were not accounted for by enlistment, transference or death. The reports of the local boards showed that the bulk of this residue was composed of aliens who had left this country to enlist in their own armies. Out of the remainder of 50,000 a great many of the failures to report were due to the ignorance or heedlessness of workingmen who had moved, between registration and the call, from one job to another in a different locality.
The exemption usually given to religious objectors was extended, after a few months, to include those who based their objections to sharing in warfare upon grounds of conscience even if they were not members of a religious organization. Out of the 3,600,000 men inducted into the service a little less than 4,000 were accepted or recognized as conscientious objectors. A large number of these were assigned to work on farm or industrial furloughs. Some entered non-combatant service and a few were allowed to join the Friends’ Reconstruction Unit. Several hundred refused any service whatever and were sent to prison. In the training camps the conscientious objectors were segregated and placed in the charge of an army officer who was often able by tact and persuasion to influence them to a different point of view. Some swallowed their objections very soon, took up the work of training more or less sullenly, and presently, seeing a better light and feeling the influence of the patriotism and enthusiasm surging round about them, became as good soldiers of Uncle Sam as any of their comrades. The problem of the slacker and the objector was a small one in the making of the great army that was sent overseas, but it was a vexatious one for the honest-hearted men who had charge of it and who took infinite pains to dispense even-handed justice in every case. “My company,” said the captain in one large cantonment under whose command were grouped the slackers, the religious objectors and the protesters for conscience’s sake, “is the most interesting one in the camp—and the most trying.”
Development battalions were established in nearly all the cantonments and did a good work in raising the efficiency of some of the men of the army by helping them to reach better physical condition. To these battalions were sent men who developed minor physical defects and the men sometimes received from the local boards who fell short of the physical standards set by the army. Medical treatment, courses of physical training and, if necessary, surgical operations brought many of them to so much better bodily condition that they could undertake limited service. Many were sent to the forests of the Northwest as part of the regiment that did most necessary work in helping to get out spruce lumber for airplane construction. Others were prepared for clerical and semi-civilian work in the army, thus releasing for active service those who had had it in charge. A goodly number improved so much under treatment that they were enabled to undertake active army service. All told, about 250,000 men passed through the development battalions, of whom nearly half were made fit for duty in either the first, second or third class. Educational work was also carried on in the battalions and many who were either illiterate or had had very little schooling received elementary instruction from former school teachers, of whom there were many in the ranks. Short talks on the duties of citizenship, phases of American history, public questions, and the causes and progress of the war and the encouragement of discussion broadened the outlook and stimulated the minds of the men.
The necessity of organizing and training a huge army in a few months made equally necessary a revolution in some army methods, a revolution that was brought about by the Committee on the Classification of Personnel appointed early in the war. For most of its work, which constantly broadened and became more and more important, it had no precedents, for, except a little experimenting in the British army, nothing like it had ever been attempted before. In scope and function and purpose it was one of those bold innovations upon army traditions and methods which the Secretary of War introduced into the training of this new army of democracy, with results so successful and important that when the complete story of them is known it will be seen that they put a new spirit into military training and were in no small measure responsible for the splendid record made by the American army.
The Director of the Committee was a civilian, a university professor and specialist in psychology who had won distinction by his ability to give that science practical and fruitful application in daily life. Its work was so varied and so well developed in all its phases that it is possible to give here only the barest resume of its achievements. By the methods it devised all the men who entered a cantonment, after they had passed their physical examinations, underwent psychological tests to determine the speed and accuracy of their mental actions, the quality of their native intelligence and the extent of its development. Then they passed on to interviewers who examined and classified them according to their education and training, their occupations and degree of skill. Afterward came trade tests to discover whether or not the men had truly reported their occupations and ability.
These trade tests and the methods of their application, as finally developed, were the result of much work and investigation by the Committee that had brought in the services of psychological experts, employment experts, statisticians and others. Their purpose was to procure a dependable record of the special ability of every soldier who possessed any kind of skill that would serve any one of the army’s varied needs. Every army unit must have specialists of several kinds and in an army that had to be built up at high speed it was necessary to find these specialists among its numbers. Bitter experience developed the fact, very soon, that the account of themselves which the men gave in answer to the questions of the interviewers frequently could not be depended on and the trade tests, which were of three kinds, oral, picture and performance, were devised to meet this necessity quickly and easily.
As the soldier passed through these various examinations his interviewers entered upon his record card his physical and mental qualifications, his trade or profession and his degree of proficiency. Thus was tabulated, for the first time in the history of any army in any nation, the exact physical, mental and industrial ability of every soldier in the American army. These records were kept by the unit to which the soldier was assigned, and followed him if he was changed to another, for the information of the officers under whom he served. A glance at such a card gave to an officer the knowledge he should have concerning the aptitudes, the abilities and the character of any of his men whom he might wish to assign to some particular service. If skilled men were wanted in any of the scores of special occupations which the modern army demands they could quickly and easily be brought together, with the sure knowledge that they would be able to do what was expected of them. One of the greatest of the many problems facing those who had to make an army of millions of men out of raw civilians in a few months was to be sure of getting the right man for the right place, and the Committee on Classification of Personnel, an innovation in the making of armies, solved it.
Similar tests helped to determine the qualifications of officers and enabled their superiors to judge their fitness for any specified duty with accuracy. The Personnel work was conducted by men chosen for it because of their aptitude and their experience in civil life and they were then trained especially for it in schools for that purpose instituted at army camps.
These individual records and the service records of the entire army, both privates and officers, with the history of each unit, are to be preserved among the archives of the Government.
This great army, growing at the rate of a hundred thousand per month, nearly the whole of it composed of civilians who had been entirely lacking in military knowledge and training, without interest in martial affairs and, in large part, averse to the principle of warfare as a means of settling human disputes, had to be trained in the quickest possible time for participation in the greatest, the most shocking and the most scientific war of all history. The Regular Army and the National Guard together could furnish no more than 9,500 officers, a mere handful compared with the number needed. Beginning in May, 1917, four series of Officers’ Training Camps were held, each series lasting three months, at which men studied and drilled with grueling intensity twelve hours a day, fitting themselves for the work of training the Selective Service men who began to be gathered into the cantonments early in September. At these camps were trained, all told, 80,000 officers, from second lieutenants to colonels, although the higher commissions were granted only at the first two series because of the urgent need, at first, for officers of all grades. There were also several special training schools, one for colored officers of the line, and others in Porto Rico, Hawaii and the Philippines. Several thousand officers were trained and graduated also from Reserve Officers’ Training Corps units established at over a hundred colleges and universities.
French and British officers and British non-coms were sent by their governments to the United States to aid by giving practical training out of their own experience and their assistance was of great value. After our own men began to go overseas and have training and experience at the front many of them were brought back for the higher importance of the instruction they could give.
View Across One End of a Cantonment Three Months After its Construction was Begun
Training a Machine Gun Company
From the training camp schools of intensive study and drill many thousands of young men were assigned for work at the special officers’ training camps where officers were prepared for the specialized duties of the Signal, Engineer and Quartermasters Corps, and for coast and field artillery and machine gun work. Here also there were long hours and steady, close application. From these special training camps 60,000 officers were graduated. A shortened and intensified course at West Point greatly increased the number of its graduates ready for officers’ service with the army.
In the autumn of 1918 five hundred colleges and universities became a part of the great program of the War Department. Each of these institutions was transformed into a martial training school and nearly all the men students of the whole five hundred, about 170,000 in all, joined the Students’ Army Training Corps, thus becoming members of the United States Army. But while these youths spent much time on drill and training they also were expected to keep up their other studies. For this was a scientific war and demanded for its prosecution men skilled in many branches of learning. The young men were being trained to be not only soldiers but also engineers, chemists, physicians, geologists, physicists, and specialists in many other lines. From their ranks the most promising were selected and sent to military camps for six weeks of a course of rigid and intensive military training in some special line of military service. West Point graduates, army officers with experience on the other side, officers loaned by our Allies, had charge of the military supervision and work of this great body of students. And during the summer of 1918 7,000 members of university and college faculties attended special training camps to prepare themselves to assist in this work. The school year’s training was expected to yield, by the spring of 1919, from 60,000 to 70,000 officers.
Thus, by training, selection, rigid test, more intensive training, the hardest of hard work, and still more training under men who had proved their worth in battle and had brought back dearly won knowledge of present day methods of warfare, the need for more, and more, and ever more officers for the rapidly expanding army was met. And in the camps and cantonments the daily drill, drill, drill, and again drill, drill, drill, of a million and a half of soldiers was constantly carried on.
Early in the course of all these activities it was perceived that it would be advisable to reconstruct the entire plan of organization of the army in order to make the size and number of its fighting units correspond with those of the English and French armies and thus simplify the brigading of our troops with the others and the exchanging of units in the front lines. This reorganization was carried out, as was also the merging together into one body of the three organizations, Regular Army, National Guard and National Army, in the midst of all the high-speeded preparations for war.
Another revolution in army methods, the result of the imperious necessity for the highest efficiency possible to obtain, whether from soldier or officer, individual or army, was the sweeping away of the old system of promotion by seniority. All officers below the rank of Brigadier-General, under these new regulations, had to undergo the passing of judgment upon them every three months by their immediate superiors. They were rated according to their physical and personal qualities, capacity for leadership, intelligence, and value to the service, and promotion depended upon how well they passed these tests.
CHAPTER II
HOUSING THE SOLDIERS AND THEIR SUPPLIES
While the machinery was being devised and set in motion for forming a great army by means of the selective draft and officers were being schooled for its training, immense camps had to be provided in which hundreds of thousands of men could be trained, warehouses had to be built in which to gather and store the enormous amounts of supplies necessary for their maintenance and equipment, huge plants had to be constructed for the making of certain kinds of ordnance, and included in the vast scheme of construction work, all of it necessary almost at once, were also flying fields, embarkation depots, port and terminal facilities.
The work of building the cantonments was, alone, a very great engineering achievement. It called for an expenditure within three months of $150,000,000, more than three times that of the largest year’s work on the Panama Canal, and it demanded the construction of nearly a score of goodly sized cities, to be ready for occupancy by the following September. For this huge job, when war was declared, there was one colonel with four assistants and a few draughtsmen, clerks and stenographers. Around that lone colonel there was built up, almost over night, by telegraph and telephone, the organization of the Government’s Construction Division, that carried through successfully the whole vast program. For the building of the cantonments, engineers, town planners and civilians having expert knowledge came to its assistance, investigating possible sites and studying their water supply, transportation facilities and availability of construction materials. Contracts were let for sixteen National Army cantonments and as many National Guard camps. These were all signed between the fifteenth and twenty-seventh of June and in three months some of them were in use, while in six months all the work had been finished, plus many additions and betterments.
The building of each meant the creation of a city that would house from forty to eighty thousand people. The ground surface had to be prepared, hills leveled, valleys filled, trees uprooted, brush cleared away and roads built. Then began the construction of barracks for the men, officers’ and nurses’ quarters, hospitals, repair shops, and all the other buildings necessary for the varied activities of the camp, amounting to more than 1,400 separate structures in each cantonment. Sewage systems and steam heating and electric lighting plants were installed. An ample water supply, with plenty of shower baths, was provided, allowing fifty gallons per day per capita, which is eighty per cent more than the average allowance in European army camps. Every care was used to assure the purity of the water. When taken from rivers it was filtered and sterilized.
The total cost of the thirty-two cantonments and camps was $179,607,497. Additions and betterments during the next six months added $22,000,000. Every camp had its garbage incinerator, coffee roasting plant, theater, repair shop and other buildings that added to the comfort and morale of the men and the efficiency of the camp’s work. Such care was taken in the sanitation of the training camps and in the assuring of a pure supply of water—sometimes making necessary the draining of surrounding areas—that the reports of the Surgeon-General showed the practical elimination of water-borne diseases among the troops in training.
Almost as rapid as the work on the cantonments and camps was that which had to provide hospitals, flying fields with all their many buildings for varied uses, huge storehouses and port and terminal facilities. At half a dozen of the Atlantic Coast cities port terminals with warehouses and wharves had been completed or were nearing completion at the end of hostilities unprecedented in size and completeness of equipment in our own or any other country. One storage warehouse provided 3,800,000 feet of storage space and another, for ordnance supplies, had 4,000,000 square feet of space into which were fitted seventy-five miles of trackage and 9,000 lineal feet of wharf frontage.
For the production and storage of certain kinds of ordnance great plants had to be built at the highest speed and, for the most part, because of their dangerous possibilities, in out of the way places where the problem was complicated by the necessity of providing housing not only for the workers who would operate the plant but also for those engaged in its construction. An instance of one of these, and there were many others, was a smokeless powder plant the building of which in eight months transformed farm land along a riverside to a busy town, containing 3,500 people, into which had gone 100,000,000 feet of lumber. It had rows of barracks for single men, blocks of cottages, other blocks of better residences, huge storage houses, laboratories, manufactories. A pumping and purification plant built among the first of the structures took from the river 90,000,000 gallons of water per day and made it fit for use. While the plant was being erected from 200 to 400 cars of freight were unloaded daily. Construction projects of this class, including plants for the production of gas, nitrate, picric acid, powder and high explosives, presented complicated problems and their cost ran from $15,000,000 to $50,000,000 each. And all were erected and in operation within a few months from the day of the first work upon them.
Eighteen months of war saw the construction of nearly five hundred important projects of these various kinds at a cost of over $750,000,000, all of them rushed to completion at the greatest possible speed.
CHAPTER III
FEEDING AND EQUIPPING THE ARMY
The Quartermasters Corps, which formerly totaled 500 officers and 5,000 enlisted men, with its facilities and routine adapted to the feeding and equipping of an army of 127,000 men, had at once not only to meet the needs of the vastly expanding forces and to keep abreast of the actual growth and immediate demands of the army as it came into being, but it had also to anticipate and prepare to meet what would be the much greater needs of a much larger army six or eight months in advance.
While a million and a half of men were being examined, classified and called to service and more than thirty cantonments and camps were being built in which to house and train them and other construction projects were being rushed forward, the Quartermasters Corps had to provide their uniforms and clothing and accumulate in storage the food for their subsistence. At the same time, it had to make sure that it could meet the constantly enlarging needs of the coming months when the army would grow like a Jonah’s gourd with every passing week. Production had to be stimulated and turned aside from its usual channels and enormous quantities of material used for new purposes. It was an emergency that required the practical making over of the methods and purposes of American industry and in the process the Quartermasters Corps had to be both the directing and supervising agency and the channel of communication between industry and the army.
A soldier’s outfit of clothing for a year cost $65.51 and numbered twenty-three different items of a dozen different branches of manufacturing industry. The initial equipment for one man’s shoes alone cost $14.25. During the sixteen months from April 1st, 1917, to the end of July, 1918, the army was supplied, among other things, with 27,000,000 pairs of shoes, field and marching; 29,800,000 pairs of breeches, light and heavy; 19,800,000 coats, both wool and cotton; 192,200,000 shirts, undershirts and drawers, for both summer and winter wear; 156,600,000 pairs of stockings of cotton and light and heavy weight wool; and 21,000,000 blankets. And by the end of July the Corps already was taking measures to provide the clothing necessary during the coming year for the army of 5,000,000 men for which the War Department was preparing. That meant it must have on hand whenever and wherever they should be required, among many other things, all of which at the signing of the armistice it had either ready or in sight, 17,000,000 blankets, 28,000,000 woolen breeches, 34,000,000 woolen drawers, 8,000,000 overcoats, 33,000,000 pairs of shoes, 110,000,000 pairs of stockings, 9,000,000 overseas caps, 25,000,000 flannel shirts.
Ten great storage depots were maintained in as many different regions of the country where huge quantities of equipment were kept and from which the camps in that district were supplied. Other storage plants had to be kept full at the ports of embarkation from which the troops bound for overseas service were outfitted. On the other side of the Atlantic stock depots were maintained with complete equipment for ninety days’ supply for all the troops, numbering finally over 2,000,000, that were sent overseas. As an indication of the enormous quantities of clothing which had to be sent across the Atlantic, on the first of July, 1918, there were, along with similar large quantities of other supplies, on docks in the United States ready for shipment, 2,700,000 blankets, 840,000 pairs of spiral puttees, 7,500,000 pairs of stockings, 1,400,000 pairs of field shoes, 203,000 pairs of hip rubber boots, 713,000 overseas caps, 697,000 woolen breeches, 709,000 overcoats.
A force of inspectors kept the output of the manufacturing contractors constantly under rigorous watch and whenever supplies were not up to the specified standard they were rejected. Because it is of the first importance that a soldier’s feet be always in the best condition, great care was taken in properly fitting each individual. A scientific means was devised of measuring the soldier’s foot when he received his first pair of shoes and of testing the fit so that he could be sure of entire comfort in his foot-gear, no matter what the length of the hikes he should take. And after being perfectly fitted the first time, with each successive pair—each year in the service in the United States he received three pairs and four pairs for each year abroad—he had only to ask for another exactly similar.
The American army has always been a well fed army. In the pre-war days, when it was the smallest army maintained by any large state, experts from other nations, versed in the quantity and quality of army rations, said that the American was the best fed of all armies. And this was still true during the great war, though its numbers leaped on by magic strides. Whether in training at home, in camp on the other side, or on the battle front, the American soldier had better food and more of it than the soldier of any other nation. For instance, extra rations from American supplies were issued to American soldiers when brigaded with those of any other army, in addition to those supplied by the commissariat of the army with which they were working. No experiments were made upon the doughboy in the matter of food and experts saw to it that his ration was agreeable to the taste, well-balanced and nutritious. That it was good was proved by the fact that the average soldier gained from ten to twelve pounds in weight after entering the service.
Food experts were constantly busy devising the best means of preserving the food until it reached the army kitchens, whether in the home camps or behind the lines at the front. A part of their mission was also to eliminate waste. Coffee roasting plants were installed in all the large camps at home and overseas, for the double purpose of giving the soldier better coffee—coffee made within twenty-four hours after the bean had been roasted—and to prevent the waste, about two cents on each pound, which results when the roasted coffee is kept for long periods and so deteriorates in strength and quality. A school was established to which men were sent to learn the art of roasting coffee properly and after they became expert they were detailed to the different camps at home and abroad to take charge of the coffee roasting plants. Lemon drops were found to be a desirable part of the army ration, as they supply needed factors of food, help to quench thirst and are much enjoyed by the soldiers. To make sure that the drops supplied should be of the best quality a formula was prepared calling for pure granulated sugar and the best quality of fruit and the candy makers taking the contract were held strictly to that standard. The same care was taken to see that manufacturers of chocolate candies should use the best cocoa beans in making them. The candy ration for troops on overseas service was a half pound every ten days for each soldier, and a great deal of this was made, toward the end of the war, in factories which the Quartermasters Corps established in France.
The American soldier’s daily ration consisted of twenty-seven articles of food, weighing altogether about four and a half pounds and costing about 50 cents per man, and it had to be ready for him regularly and promptly every day, wherever he might be. No second grade material of any kind was bought and constant inspection of raw materials, of processes and places, of preparation and of army kitchens kept the food up to the standard demanded. It was bought in enormous quantities and, in order to stabilize prices in all sections of the country, part of the supplies was secured through the Food Administration and the remainder by means of a system of zone buying. During the ten months from September 1st, 1917, to the end of June, 1918, 225,000,000 pounds of sugar were required and from the 1917 crop of vegetables and fruits the army bought and used 75,000,000 cans of tomatoes and 20,000,000 pounds of prunes. From the listed amounts of thirty articles of food demanded for the subsistence for one year of an army of 3,000,000 men, the approximate size of the American army before the September draft, the following items are taken. They will give an idea of the size of the task which the Quartermasters Corps undertook in the feeding of our soldiers at home and abroad: Fresh beef, 478,515,000 pounds; bacon, 48,000,000 pounds; potatoes, 782,925,000 pounds; jam, 7,665,000 cans; flour, 915,000,000 pounds; coffee, 61,320,000 pounds; tea, 7,665,000 pounds; canned pork and beans, 4,000,000 cases; canned tomatoes, 6,000,000 cases; evaporated milk, 2,992,500 cases; butter, 15,330,000 pounds. More than six thousand different packers supplied the canned vegetables bought for the army in the summer of 1918, approximately 300,000,000 cans, enough to girdle the earth if the cans were laid in line, end to end.
The necessity of conserving shipping space led to the use of dehydrated vegetables, of which the Quartermasters Corps in the summer of 1918 contracted for 16,000,000 pounds. The soldiers of the American Expeditionary Force received a ration of 16 ounces of pure wheat flour per day each. No wheat saving substitute was used there, for the reason that field bakers must work swiftly and can not afford to experiment with flour mixtures. At the training camps in the United States kitchens were stationary and bakers definitely located and here the prescribed amount of substitutes was used, with satisfactory results. The Subsistence Division of the Corps worked out a special reserve ration for use in the trenches and under first line conditions in France. It was carried in containers proof against rats, water and poisoning in gas attacks. Schools were established for army cooks and bakers, so that only skilled and experienced men should serve the food from army kitchens.
But the Quartermasters Corps, while it was feeding and clothing the army, did not forget to be thrifty and it instituted and developed a remarkable system of conservation and reclamation that eliminated wastefulness and turned waste products into wealth. It reduced army waste of food stuffs, including bread, cooked meat and bones, to three-fifths of a pound per day per man, a figure much lower than the average waste of the civilian population in the cities of the United States.
Every camp, both in the United States and overseas, had its repair shops where every article of clothing—hats, shoes, overcoats, stockings, leggins, breeches, coats, gloves—that could be made to give farther service was put into shape. In one month in the summer of 1918 more than a million articles of clothing and equipment were repaired. Fats were extracted from garbage, manure was sold, waste materials of various sorts were sold or turned over to one or another army organization that could find use for them. A school was established with a three months’ course at which several hundred men were constantly in training to take charge of the repair, dry cleaning and laundry shops of the army and of the prevention of waste in the handling of food in the camps and the reclamation of values from garbage and waste materials.
Out of the importance of this work of reclamation and conservation came the formation of the Field Salvage Service. The members of this Service, after training at a school for this special work, were sent overseas to collect, classify and dispose of the wreckage of guns, shells, tools, all the implements of war that strew a battlefield after an engagement, and which, in former wars, would have been considered of no value. The Salvage Service also operated through all our lines, from the front trenches back through the training camps and lines of communication to every base port, collecting worn or damaged articles of every sort, and turning them to some kind of use. Even empty tin cans were collected and tin and solder salvaged.
The Service had in active operation in France at the end of hostilities four depots, twenty shops and sixty-six laundries and disinfectors. Of all the items it received for renovation and repair it recovered 91 per cent. and utilized the remaining nine per cent. for raw material in repair work. The value of its work during the last month of war was estimated at over $12,300,000, or more than $4,000,000 per day.
Under the care of the Quartermasters Corps was developed the Motor Truck Service, which later became a separate Corps—the “Gas Hounds,” as it was called both in and out of the army. At the beginning of our participation in the war the Corps had only 3,000 trucks, most of them in bad condition after hard service on the Mexican border. During the nineteen months of war there were shipped to France 110,000 vehicles and 15,000 tons of spare parts, and in mid-summer of 1918 the Service had 2,700 officers and 77,000 men. The Motor Transport Corps became of the first importance as a means of transport of troops and supplies, both in the United States and overseas, but especially so in France. Its work in moving men, munitions and supplies to the front was of such great consequence that it deserves the credit of having been an important factor in the winning of the war. In order to assure the quantity production that was urgently needed designs were standardized and all branches of the automotive industry united for their manufacture in close coöperation. Training camps were established to provide officers and men for the operation and maintenance of the Service both in the United States and in France and training was given also at several immense base repair shops. The courses varied from two to eight weeks and 15,000 men were in training at one time.
The American army was the best paid of all the armies of the contending nations. The private and the non-commissioned officer received from two to twenty-five times the pay of privates and non-commissioned officers in the British, French, Italian and German armies. Except for the grades of Lieutenant-General and General in the British forces, the pay of the American officers was also considerably greater than officers received in any of the other armies. The payroll amounted to $40,000,000 per month for every million of officers and men abroad, and was almost as much more for the forces at home. The rapid and tremendous expansion of the payroll, coming at the same time that the Quartermasters Corps was, by necessity, greatly expanding and reorganizing its personnel and was undertaking the huge tasks of providing food, clothing and equipment for the army, somewhat demoralized the system of payment for the first year of war effort. But an individual pay card system was devised which simplified the vexatious problem.
The personnel of the Quartermasters Corps expanded from five hundred officers and 5,000 enlisted men to 9,000 officers, 150,000 enlisted men and 75,000 civilian employees, while the entire Corps was reorganized, several new divisions created and their work specialized, and finally, so enormous and varied were the tasks which came under its supervision that several of them were transferred to other offices of the War Department or new corps were developed to take charge of them. The total expenditures and obligations of the Quartermasters Corps for the war amounted to about $7,000,000,000.
CHAPTER IV
CREATING A MUNITIONS INDUSTRY
Simultaneously with the work of making the new, huge army, of housing and training it, meeting its immediate and preparing to meet its future needs of clothing and equipment, the War Department had to provide, against the time in a very few months when these troops would be at the front, the munitions with which it would fight—heavy and light artillery, machine guns, rifles, automatic pistols, grenades, bombs, gas shells, cartridges, every death-dealing instrument made necessary by modern scientific warfare. And it had not even the facilities with which to make most of them. The few existing plants had to be enlarged, new ones erected, and even the tools for the making of some of the munitions had to be manufactured before work could begin upon the arms themselves. For many years the whole nation had set its face against increase in the army or in the providing of supplies for it in excess of peace time needs. The commercial manufacture of munitions was repugnant to the spirit of American industry, which had never engaged in it to more than a very slight extent. The making of ordnance is a highly specialized form of manufacturing industry and when we entered the war there were in the United States only two large private concerns and six Government arsenals which were versed in its special processes. In the Ordnance Division of the War Department there were only 97 commissioned officers whose training had given them the knowledge necessary to supervise and direct ordnance manufacture.
Conference with our co-belligerents resulted in a scheme of coöperation in the making of munitions which pooled the resources of all the associated nations in raw materials, manufacturing facilities, labor and finished products in order to make more rapid the production by each and all of them of all death-dealing weapons.
America laid out at once a great and thorough-going munitions program and the War Department plunged into it and speeded it at a furious pace. New designs were made and tested, new plants constructed and a big organization for the carrying on of the work was built up so rapidly that office forces doubled and trebled in a few weeks and sometimes even within a few days. In the Ordnance Division the officers’ personnel increased within a year from 225 to 4,600 and the enlisted from a little more than 800 to 47,500. Scores of technical, scientific, professional and business men left their private affairs and joined the working forces of the War Department to aid in rushing its munitions program. Upward of 16,000 contracts were quickly placed that required the working up into missiles of death of thousands of tons of raw material by hundreds of thousands of workmen. When the armistice was signed there were in the United States nearly 8,000 manufacturing plants employing 4,000,000 persons engaged in the making of ordnance. Manufacturing concerns of every imaginable sort converted their plants to the production of the direct materials of warfare for the use of our fighting men.
A corset factory was using its plant for the making of grenade belts. A manufacturer of machinery for popping corn was turning out hand grenades instead. A fireworks establishment was making bombs. A typewriter company was furnishing signal pistols. A big radiator works was an important producer of shells. Artillery carriages were being made by a boiler company, a steam shovel company, and an elevator company. These carriages are very complex, each one consisting of from three to six thousand pieces, exclusive of rivets. So many were needed that, notwithstanding all the help from private industry, in order to insure the necessary quantity production the government built for their manufacture twenty-six plants, all of which were in operation in August, 1918. The intricate and delicate recoil mechanism which sewing machine and other companies began early to furnish was also made in these immense factories. In one industrial district alone, that of Pittsburg, not less than 2,000 industrial concerns were busy in September, 1918, on munitions work. They were employing nearly 200,000 men, with a pay roll of $2,000,000 a day, and their war contracts exceeded in value $2,500,000,000. In that month this district mobilized for coöperation to fill an order for prompt delivery of 33,000,000 semi-steel shells. Shell steel was then being produced at the rate of 500,000 tons per month.
Sixteen new plants for the forging and machining of cannon were built by the Government at a cost of $35,000,000. Two siege gun plants and twenty-six plants for the making of gun carriages and recoil mechanism were completed at a cost, altogether, of $65,000,000. One of the plants for the making of cannon, of which the construction is typical of all, was wholly brought into being after our entrance into the war. Ground for the factory was broken in July, 1917, and in nine months from that date the first completed gun was ready for shipment. The decision early in our participation in the war that our artillery equipment should conform in general to the standard calibers of our war associates made it necessary to alter our existing facilities and create new ones, but the coöperation it made possible resulted, in the end, in a more rapid equipment of our Expeditionary Forces although it delayed somewhat the beginning of our production.
Ordinarily it takes a considerable time to manufacture artillery, big guns requiring two years and lighter ones from six to ten months. We had to create new plants, new tools, new processes. But at the end of the war we had done all this and had produced 5,000 trench guns, 4,900 light and medium guns, 695 heavy guns and 19 railway guns and mounts—more than 10,000 complete artillery units, and a total of 30,880 units had been contracted for. Many gun forgings and completed guns had been sent to England and France and many spare parts had been supplied to our own Expeditionary Forces. At the signing of the armistice an output of about 500 guns a month had been reached. Among them were 155 mm. howitzers, of which we had reached a sufficient production to exceed our own needs and 600 had been sold to France. There were also 7-inch, 14-inch and 16-inch guns, mortars and howitzers mounted on railway carriages that could be moved quickly from place to place. A 75 mm. field gun and an 8-inch howitzer, each self-propelling and mounted on a caterpillar tractor that could climb hills and knock down trees, were ready to be sent overseas and were the advance couriers of a quantity production in these types that was already beginning. Several kinds of caterpillar tractors of from two to ten tons were designed, produced and put to the service of the artillery.
Machine guns became of more and more importance as the war progressed and by the time of the entrance of the United States the demand for them was urgent and prodigious. Their manufacture in the United States was delayed somewhat for the completing and testing of the Browning machine gun, in order to secure a standard gun superior to the older types which could be produced in quantity, and the working out of plans for its manufacture. It soon proved its superiority in the speed and surety with which it works so triumphantly that both the French and British governments asked for whatever surplus over its own needs the United States could give them. The tools for the making of the guns had first to be produced and work that would ordinarily have taken a year was rushed through in half the time. But within a year quantity production of guns had been reached. Of machine guns and automatic rifles we produced during nineteen months a total of 181,662, and during the months immediately preceding the armistice we had reached a monthly production rate more than twice that of France and nearly three times that of England. The production of heavy Brownings began in March, 1918, and by the end of the following October there had been made of these 39,500 and of light Brownings 47,000.
When we entered the war we had only two plants capable of making our own rifles, which were of a different caliber from those of any other nation. One of those factories had been shut down and dismantled and the other, which had been making rifles continuously for the United States for over a hundred years, was producing only twelve hundred rifles per month. The appropriation by Congress for the preceding fiscal year had been for rifles and pistols combined only $250,000. The work was immediately begun of adapting the British Enfield rifle, which was rechambered for our cartridges because they are more powerful than the British and do not jam. But manufacture of this Modified Enfield, Model 1917, was started during the summer of 1917 and over 2,000,000 of them had been produced by the end of October, 1918. During the same time Springfields, which are still used for certain purposes, to the number of 844,000, had also been manufactured, and the Springfield Armory was then producing more rifles in a day than it had formerly made in a month.
To the making of the Modified Enfield rifle go 84 parts and a total of 164 pieces. These parts were all standardized so that any of those made in either of the three large plants that manufactured this rifle could be used in any other. This made possible the rapid rate at which they were turned out. Rigorous tests for each part and close inspection of every process, together with the enthusiastic interest of the employees, made the number of rejected rifles negligible. The employees of one concern, of their own inspiration and desire, adopted the slogan of “one million rifles for 1918” after they had subscribed $1,000,000 to the third Liberty Loan. This plant, which had under roof more than thirty-three acres, was built in 1915 to manufacture rifles for the British Government, but soon after our entrance into the war signed a contract with the United States. It speeded production so rapidly that by mid-summer of 1918 it was two months in advance of its expected production.
Automatic pistols proved of so much value at the front that General Pershing, as soon as the American troops had got well into the fighting, asked for the supply to be quadrupled and at once numerous private plants began to manufacture them. One firm that had been steadily turning out automatics at the rate of 1,500 per day prepared to double its capacity when the front line needs were made known. Of these and revolvers there had been sent to the front 600,000 up to the end of September, 1918. Of small arms ammunition, including that for machine guns, rifles, pistols and revolvers, American factories produced a total of about three billion rounds. Monthly production had reached a rate of 289,000,000 rounds. The armor piercing, tracer and incendiary bullets used in the Aircraft Service and in anti-aircraft defense were developments of the war and had to be designed for our own guns and to have special facilities for their production.
For the loading of shells four huge government plants were constructed with a combined loading capacity of more than 5,000,000 shells per month. They were larger than any similar plants in the world. One of them covered nearly 3,000 acres and was built and put into operation, from the breaking of the ground, in a little more than six months. For the housing of its employees a town was brought into existence, within that time, with heating, lighting and power plants, police and fire departments, cottages for families, dormitories with hot and cold shower baths for single men, club-houses, a theater, restaurants, a baseball field and tennis courts. Of high explosive shells of all sizes there had been made, at the end of September, 1918, 2,500,000; of low explosive shells, 3,100,000; of shrapnel, 5,800,000; and of grenades of all types 11,870,000. One grenade factory had established a pace of a million per month.
The tank, which was the answer to the machine gun, was one of the important new weapons evolved by the war, its basic idea having been suggested by the American farm caterpillar tractor, from which a British engineer worked out the formidable engine of battle which it became. Early in our participation the American Government began arrangements for a considerable tank production and experiments and investigations were started to better the design of those in use in the Allied armies. A Tank Corps was formed to have charge of the recruiting and training of the personnel, which numbered thousands of well trained men, but design and production remained in the hands of the Ordnance Department. The United States adopted two types, one the smaller form used by the French Army, of which 4,000 were being made, and the other a modification and improvement of the large tank used by the British, with whom a joint program of tank construction was being carried out when the armistice was signed. Liberty motors furnished motive power, which gave a speed of eleven miles per hour, and each carried a crew of eleven men, two six-inch guns and several machine guns. Some were equipped with wireless.
This huge tank, finished examples of which had been tested and approved, was forty feet long and could climb steep hills, cross trenches and smash down large trees. It would have been taken across the ocean by hundreds during the winter and great companies of them would have plunged into the enemy’s lines with the resumption of fighting in the spring of 1919. The component parts of a goodly number had already been made in the United States and sent to England for assembly.
A considerable part of the needs of our co-belligerents for propellants and explosives was being met in the United States when we entered the war and it was necessary that we provide our own supplies without interfering with this production for them. In all, four nitrate plants were constructed or started, and work upon them was rushed as fast as the supply of labor and materials made possible, while extensions and additions were made to existing facilities. Many scientists and technologists constantly carried on experimental and research work upon processes for the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen and other problems connected with the supply of nitrates, and always with the aim in view of developing methods that would have economic as well as military value. The results were such as to make the nation for the first time in its history independent of any foreign country for the charge in the guns of its soldiers and also to bring much nearer the day when the United States would be independent of the nitrate deposits in foreign lands for its commercial and agricultural needs. The toluol for the manufacture of nearly all of the TNT used in loading high explosive shells was recovered as a by-product in the manufacture of illuminating gas. At the works of twenty-eight gas companies in different parts of the country plants were constructed, placed in the charge of experts and skilled workers and kept under the closest and most vigilant guard for the recovery of this important product, of which hundreds of thousands of gallons were necessary. As a result of the measures taken and rushed through, the supply of propellant and explosive material needed by our war associates was not interfered with and the loading of American ammunition was not delayed.
The hideousness of war was immeasurably increased during the world conflict by the new uses that were made of chemical science. When these new applications of the death-dealing possibilities of chemistry were first made by the German army the civilized world drew back, horrified and appalled. But when a barbarous foe makes savage use of science those who are fighting him must, in sheer self-defense, meet him with similar weapons. Therefore, when America became a belligerent, averse as all her people were to the use of such weapons, regard for the safety of her troops at the front made it necessary to prepare for this peculiarly hideous and detestable form of war. As with other munitions, the industry to produce the implements of chemical warfare had first to be created. The Government built great plants and the immediate need stimulated scientific investigation, with results that were like a tale of magic, so rapidly did these and contributory chemical industries grow.
The American Government did not overcome its reluctance to use toxic gases until we had gone forward several months in war preparations, when it was found, just as the English and the French had found, that it would have to be done. It was November, 1917, when ground was broken on a Maryland riverside farm for a huge plant that would produce overwhelming quantities of chlorine, phosgene and mustard gas. When the armistice was signed a year later the three hundred acres were covered with vats and kilns, refrigerators, boilers, steel towers, chimneys, pipe lines, railways, and all the other means for carrying on the most deadly manufacturing processes known to man. For much of the machinery needed there were no existing models and many important parts of the immense plant were designed while it was being built. Experts from the French and British gas factories who came to assist in this development saw it rapidly evolve beyond their own knowledge and stayed to learn rather than to teach. Subsidiary plants were built also, and, altogether, American poison gas factories had a total production, during the last weeks of the war, of an average of two hundred tons per day. The British production, speeded to its highest possible point, was never more than thirty tons per day, the French was much less and the German is supposed to have been between thirty and fifty tons per day. Airplanes had been made and successfully tested for the dropping upon German fortified places, such as Metz and Coblenz, of containers holding a ton each of mustard gas with time fuses fitted for explosion a few hundred feet above the forts. Heavier than air, the gas from each container, settling to earth, would not have left a living thing, human or animal, upon, above or under the ground, within or outside of buildings, on a space the size of a large city block.
A new poison gas was developed, far more deadly than any previously in use, and its manufacture carried on with the greatest secrecy. At the end of the war ten tons a day were being produced and it was estimated that a single ton dropped in bombs and containers upon a city of a million inhabitants would have killed them all. Three thousand tons of it were to be ready in the battle zone by March 1, 1919.
Knowledge of these preparations and surety of what would, therefore, happen in the early spring of 1919 are believed by military authorities to have been an important factor in the sudden collapse of the German military plans.
Gas was employed in offensive operations in many and varied ways and these and defensive measures were so important that the necessity for a new division of military activities resulted in the organization of the Chemical Warfare Service in the summer of 1918. Five months old at the end of hostilities, the Service then contained 1,600 commissioned officers and 18,000 men. Defensive measures also had been rushed steadily forward, investigation and experiment had produced a better and more comfortable gas mask than was in use and a big Government gas defense plant had been built, equipped and started upon production with skilled workers. The monthly production of gas masks in the autumn of 1918, of which this plant made the major part, had reached 925,000. The total production for the year and a half was over 5,000,000, with 3,000,000 extra canisters, 500,000 horse masks and large quantities of ointments, antidotes and suits for protection against enemy mustard gas. The American gas mask was recognized by all the war associates as the best on the Western front.
In the Chemical Warfare Service at the end of hostilities were 1,700 chemists from civil life who had worked steadily to aid in its rapid and efficient development. Under the furious goad of war the Service succeeded in reducing the cost of phosgene gas from $1.50 to 15 cents per pound and therefore increasing very greatly its usefulness in various industries, especially that of dyestuffs. The record of development and production in chemistry is one of the fairly amazing war achievements of this country and is replete with possibilities for the peaceful uses of industry.
When America entered the war, problems and needs rose up at every hand, like dragons springing from the ground, and all of them, in all their number and complexity and variety, had to be met and conquered at the same time. None of them was more difficult than this problem of the creation of a munitions industry, for it demanded a highly specialized manufacturing equipment of enormous capacity and great variety which we did not have, concerning which we had in the past known but little and for which we had always had slight regard. We possessed for it neither the plants, the skilled labor nor the experience. New industrial organizations had to be created and financed, plants had to be built, all the complicated and varied weapons of modern scientific warfare had to be designed and manufactured, and so also did many of the great number and variety of the tools with which they would be made. Not only had mechanics to be trained for much of this skill exacting work, but the enormous expansion in the Ordnance Department made necessary rapid development of knowledge and skill among the big proportion of its new members. There is nothing more interesting in the detailed story of the munitioning of our army than the frequency with which one comes upon the statement that “a school was established” for the training of personnel in this, or that, or another phase of ordnance duties.
The bare figures of the cost of all this enormous creation and expansion, made many times greater by the necessity of haste at whatever cost, give a vague sort of measuring stick of the energy and the grim purpose that went into the providing of munitions for our army. In a year and a half of war the amount of money expended or obligated for ordnance totaled $13,000,000,000—thirteen times what it cost to run the entire government for a year in the years just before the war.
CHAPTER V
CARING FOR THE WOUNDED
The story of the development of the Medical Department of the Army, its care of the human wreckage of the battlefield and of the physical welfare of the fighting forces both at home and overseas recounts one of the finest and most wonderful of the achievements of the War Department. It is the same story of marvelous expansion in quick time, of high resolve and determined effort to achieve the apparently impossible, and of results that seem almost magical in their bigness and importance and the rapidity with which they were brought about that is true of all the American war activities.
At the beginning of April, 1917, there were in the Medical Department 750 medical officers in regular service and 2,600 in reserve. The army nurse corps numbered 400 and there was an enlisted personnel of 6,600. There were seven army hospitals with a bed capacity of 5,000, aside from a few small and unimportant post hospitals. A year and a half later it had a larger personnel than that of the entire American army at the outbreak of the Spanish-American war. It numbered then 40,000 officers, 21,000 nurses and 245,000 men. In the United States there were over eighty fully equipped hospitals with a capacity of 120,000 patients and operating with the American Expeditionary Force were 219 base and camp hospitals having a capacity of 284,000 patients. It was estimated that nearly one-third of the entire medical profession in the Union went into active service with the Army and among their numbers were many of the most distinguished physicians and surgeons in the country. Of those who went overseas, nearly half that number, over 1,000, were detailed to serve with the British forces.
As an instance of the speed with which it was necessary to work to secure the needed expansion for the care of war’s wreckage the story of the building of one of the New York City debarkation hospitals is illuminating. Several acres of ground on Staten Island were secured for it and the entire plant, consisting of eighty-six buildings, including a theater of seven thousand seating capacity, with heating plant and electric light, water and sewage connections, was finished and ready for use within one hundred days from the turning of the first spadeful of earth in the preparation of the site. Its normal accommodation was for 1,500 patients, but it was so planned that it could be easily and quickly expanded to care for three times that number. One of its buildings, measuring 230 by 30 feet, was begun in the morning, finished by noon of the same day, and equipped by night. Hospital facilities in France had also to be created quickly and equipped at once with all the means of treating the victims of scientific warfare that the needs of the time had evolved. One such big institution in the Cote d’Or region, for the building of which railways had to be run to the site and concrete mixers set up and kept going day and night until it was finished, had 600 buildings of a permanent type and was, in effect, a series of ten hospitals in one, each devoted to its own specialty and having its own staff of thirty physicians and surgeons, a hundred nurses and twice as many men of the Medical and Sanitary Corps, and its own operating rooms, laboratories, kitchens, officers’ and nurses’ quarters, administration buildings and buildings for patients. A laundry capable of doing the work for 30,000 people served the entire plant. The hospital cared for 25,000 at a time and beside it was a convalescent camp having facilities for all manner of outdoor games with a capacity for 5,000 more into which the men were graduated for recovery. Nearly 800,000 soldiers of the American Army were treated in our overseas hospitals during our war period.
Of the hospitals in the United States a considerable number were in cantonments and camps and were chiefly used by the troops in training. The others, specialized for the use to which they were put, were for debarkation purposes and for the treatment of the wounded, ill, gassed, tuberculous or blinded. Debarkation hospitals received them as they were landed and from these they were transferred to receiving hospitals in and about the port city. Afterward, as soon as physically able, they were sent by hospital boat or train to a specialized hospital, if that were necessary, or if not to the general hospital nearest the patient’s home. These specializing hospitals were so located as to secure for each one whatever advantages were possible of situation and climate. Several hospital trains, each complete in itself, with kitchen, dining and ward cars, special beds for stretcher cases, and a car for the medical staff, were provided for transportation of the wounded by land, while a number of hospital boats properly equipped and staffed with physicians and nurses afforded transportation by water. In addition to the hospitals, convalescents were cared for in numbers of convalescent homes all over the country that were donated for that purpose by individuals and organizations who offered use of their homes, estates, clubhouses and other buildings. The Red Cross erected and staffed convalescent houses at all of the base and general army hospitals in the United States, which gave welcome, cheer and recreation to the recovering patients.
Through the port of New York flowed the main stream of the American Army on its way overseas and there its individual factors had to undergo final physical examination. The work of the Surgeon of the Port expanded from week to week, as his duties in connection with the army and the army transports grew, keeping pace with the increasing numbers that were sent month by month to Europe. In one mid-summer month in 1918, and subsequent months saw even greater numbers, he put his final approval of physical fitness on 272,000 soldiers bound for the battlefields of France. On the first of July, 1917, the staff of the Surgeon of the Port of Embarkation, New York, consisted of two officers and one private. A year later there were under him 530 commissioned officers, 110 contract surgeons, 340 nurses and 2,640 men, while directly under his control, exclusive of other hospitals in the same region, were thirteen hospitals having 12,500 bed capacity of which 11,000 were ready for use.
A more than fifty-fold expansion in the number of army nurses, from 400 to 21,000, was necessary to meet the need for their services. Graduating nurses entered the nurses’ corps and an army School of Nursing was established, with headquarters in Washington and branches in a score of military camps throughout the country. Many hundreds of young women enrolled, took the course of training which, intensive and somewhat specialized for army work, prepared them quickly for duty.
The developments of scientific warfare, with its new and fearful weapons of death and its new modes of attack, laid new duties upon the medical profession and new demands upon its knowledge and its methods of healing. It restores one’s faith in human nature, after realizing the devilish ingenuity of the death and wound dealing instruments of the world war, to find how incessantly the ministers of healing worked in hospital and laboratory behind the lines to evolve new agents and new methods for the mending of the wreckage from the front. Whatever else may or may not have been won out of the vast destruction of the world war, the medical profession can be assured that its devotion and its heroic labors have been rewarded by a wonderful advance in the frontiers of its knowledge.
The army medical officer found new problems facing him at every fresh development of the conflict, and to fit him for grappling with these new phases of human needs the Medical Department of the Army established numberless schools and courses of study at medical institutions, at hospitals and wherever could be brought together the factors necessary for this specialized and intensive training. Physicians and surgeons in overseas hospitals had evolved a number of new and effective methods for the treatment of casualties of various kinds and medical officers newly inducted into the service had to have instruction in these developments, while for those who had to undertake recently specialized work it was necessary to have whatever training in that specialty had become possible.
Intensive training and clinical opportunities were provided for instruction in new methods in war surgery and fractures and in the treatment of infected wounds; there were schools for the training of medical officers in the use of X-rays; of laboratory specialists; for special work with diseases of the heart; for treatment of pneumonia and of those infectious diseases that are of frequent occurrence when large bodies of men are brought together. A particularly determined effort was made along preventive lines to lessen in the American Army both at home and in France the menace of venereal disease, always feared for its power to lower the efficiency of armies. Instruction by various means, an incessant campaign of vigilance by specially trained physicians, treatment of infected men, military punishment of offenders, endeavors to control the surroundings of camps, all were among the methods with which this scourge of all armies was combated, with remarkable success. The percentage of such diseases in the Army was below what it is in civilian life and very much below that of its prevalence in the Allied Armies.
One of the schools made necessary by the new methods of training instituted in the American Army was that for the instruction of military psychologists who were needed for the work of examining the men, as they came from their local boards and were inducted into the training camps, in order to eliminate those mentally unfit for army service and grade those accepted according to their mental qualifications, for the information of their officers, as already described in the chapter on “The Making of the Army.” Under the supervision of the Medical Corps, this school trained many officers for psychological work at the cantonments, the course lasting two months. This development, an American idea, was something new in the making and training of armies, but it proved its value in the higher efficiency gained by enabling officers to select for special duties the men best fitted for them and so increasing the efficiency of the fighting units.
A new development of wartime medical science was made necessary by air warfare which soon brought into being the flight surgeon who kept under his observation the men in training at flying fields. So important did this division of the Medical Corps quickly become that special facilities were provided for the training of flight surgeons and laboratories were established for the investigation of the medical problems connected with the air service.
Until the influenza epidemic swept the country in the autumn of 1918, after devastating the populations of Europe, the disease figures of the American Army had set a new low record both at home and overseas. For the year ending with the first of September, 1918, which covered the time from the first gathering of men in the cantonments, the death rate for all troops in the United States was 6.37, which is a lower rate than that in civilian life for similar ages. But when the plague of influenza, which on its way around the world took a toll of 6,000,000 lives, descended upon the camps and cantonments in the United States the death rate rose to 32.15 per thousand. For the entire term of the war the disease death rate was 17 per thousand in the expeditionary forces and 16 per thousand in the army at home. The comparison of these figures with the rate maintained before the passage of the epidemic shows how deadly it was. During the summer months of 1918 the death rate for the troops both at home and overseas fell to 2.8 per thousand. During the Mexican war the disease death rate was 110 per thousand, during the Civil War in the Northern Armies it was 65 per thousand and during the Spanish-American war 26 per thousand. During the last named war the most important cause of death was typhoid fever, before which medical science was then as helpless as it was during this war under the influenza scourge. It had conquered that menace and typhoid, by its precautions, was almost eliminated from our army both at home and abroad. But notwithstanding the devastations of influenza the disease death rate in the American Army was cut to a lower figure than had been reached by any army in previous wars. The lowest previously recorded was that of the Japanese during the Russo-Japanese war, which was 20 per thousand.
The battle death rate of the American Expeditionary Forces was 57 per thousand, considerably higher than it had been in any of our previous wars. In the Mexican war it was 15, in the Civil war in the Northern Armies 33, and in the Spanish-American war 5 per thousand.
Overseas, during the eight months ending with mid-October, 1918, only four per cent of the admissions to hospital because of disease resulted in death. Of the wounded and injury cases treated during the same period a little less than nine per cent died and over 85 per cent were returned to duty. Of the American Expeditionary Forces 4,000 were permanently crippled and 125 were totally blinded.
The medical officers of all the armies won remarkable results in the quick healing of wounds and the reduction of death from battle casualties by establishing hospital stations immediately behind the fighting lines, regardless of danger. This brave course, together with the efforts of the enemy to annihilate them and their hospitals, caused much loss of life among them. The Medical Corps of the American Expeditionary Forces had 46 killed and 212 wounded in action, and a total of 442 casualties of all kinds.
It was a comprehensive system of caring for the physical welfare of the American troops that was devised and carried out by the Medical Department. It had the fighting man constantly under its eye from the moment of his physical examination for induction into the army until he was examined for his final discharge. It analyzed his water supply, it examined his food and inspected his kitchens, it waged war against flies and mosquitoes in his camps, it made his environment sanitary and it devoted itself to his welfare if he was ill or wounded.
One of the finest of all its multifold and varied works was the scheme for the reconstruction of disabled men and their preparation for a life as useful and successful as they would have enjoyed if unhurt. The principles of occupational therapy were applied to the treatment of ill or wounded soldiers in hospitals, beginning with manual work for the redevelopment of strength and dexterity and continuing with occupational aids for the restoring of the nervous system and the bringing about of a cheerful outlook. Nurse-teachers were prepared for this work by courses of intensive training, lasting from two to four months. By the time the tide of injured men returning to this country was at its height this reconstruction work was in progress in nearly fifty hospitals, some 700 officers and men of the army had been detailed to serve as instructors and assisting them were 1,200 nurse-teacher aids trained in occupational therapy.
After he had been restored to physical and mental health in the hospital any soldier who was permanently disabled was given the opportunity of reëducating himself, if necessary, in order that he might continue to take a self-supporting part in the work of the world. The nation had pledged itself thus to care for its disabled defenders. With the exception of Canada, the United States was the only country to make this duty, from the first, the affair of the whole people, functioning through the Government. By act of Congress, the work of re-training war cripples was placed in the charge of the already existing Board of Vocational Education, whose agents would get into touch with the disabled men as soon as they arrived from France, tell them that the nation would engage to make them economically efficient again and show them that their rehabilitation depended only upon their own desire and energy. The crippled soldier could choose any line of work, agriculture, industry, commerce, any of the professions, and either add to the training he had previously acquired, or, if it was necessary, undertake a new kind of occupation. There lay before him the possibility of a variety of education that ranged from six months of shop work to a complete college course of four years. Whatever artificial limbs or appliances he needed were supplied and if he were short of cash a civilian outfit was furnished. Until this training was completed his pay continued at the same rate as during his last month of active service, or it equaled, if this were greater, the monthly sum to which he was entitled under the War Risk Insurance law. Injured men in all branches of the nation’s defense who needed this reëducation were made to feel that in no sense were they receiving charity but that the country was only, and gladly, discharging a sacred obligation.
Educational institutions all over the land offered their coöperation and the use of all their facilities in the carrying out of this scheme of re-training and so also did shops and factories and industrial and commercial bodies of all sorts. A few months after the wounded began to return about 13,000 men had registered with the Federal Board for Vocational Education and it was estimated that there would probably be about 10,000 more who would need to share in the benefits of the plan.
CHAPTER VI
THE WELFARE OF THE SOLDIERS
Into the forming and shaping of the American Army for the World War went something new in the making of armies, something hitherto unthought of in the history of wars, for its training was based upon a new idea, a bold innovation upon military traditions. The method of army training had always been to minimize the individuality of the fighting man, to lessen it to the disappearing point, and so the more surely and easily and completely merge the individual in the fighting mass. Only so, it was believed, could the necessary discipline, unity and uniformity of an army be secured.
But when the United States entered the war and set about the creation of a great fighting force its Secretary of War inspired the task with a new ideal and the whole making of the American Army was based on the idea of developing and heightening the individuality of the soldier, of discovering, improving and utilizing his personal qualities. The unceasing effort was to make of him a better citizen, a better, finer and more capable man, in the conviction that thus he would be also a better soldier. Believing that the higher the grade of the individuals who compose an army the higher will be the grade of the army, all the training, the environment and the treatment of the soldier, from the time he entered the service until he was discharged, were calculated to develop him physically, mentally and morally as an individual, to inspire him as a person and, in general, to make of him a more intelligent, resourceful, upright, self-dependent, capable and moral man than he was before he entered the army. The immediate purpose was to make a better army, an army of thinking, reasoning units, and therefore an army so intelligent and alert that it would at once perceive the fundamental necessity for discipline and instant obedience and would gain more speedily than by the old method the needful unity and uniformity, while its composite individuals would be more capable of efficient action if deprived by the chance of battle of their accustomed leadership.
That was the first and chief purpose. But behind it lay also the determination that these millions of American young men, the flower of the nation, the beloved of their homes, should be, as far as possible, enabled to preserve themselves from those debasements, corruptions and blights of army life which the world, ages ago, had grown accustomed to accept as inevitable. The purpose was that, so far as foresight and effort could command so unprecedented a result, these young men should bring back no scars or wounds other than those dealt by the enemy. The outcome of this bold experiment was a complete vindication of the vision and the faith of the man who insisted it should be tried.
The preceding pages have shown this purpose of individual development and betterment at work in the methods of training the soldier, giving him at least some measure of education when he was deficient in that respect, instilling in him the principles of good citizenship, inspiring him with patriotism and enthusiasm for American ideals, broadening his outlook, appealing to his intelligence and ambition, discovering and improving his aptitudes and assigning him to work for which he was fitted. Coöperating with the methods and purposes of the system of military training was a large and varied program of recreation designed to fill the soldier’s leisure hours and to work hand in hand with that training to make him at once a better man and a better soldier. A part of this program, that of the Commission on Training Camp Activities, was created by and carried on by the War Department, but many civilian organizations constantly coöperated with it and seconded its efforts.
Within the War Department the Commission on Training Camp Activities—it had its twin in the Navy Department—was appointed by the Secretary of War to provide for the men in training such a comprehensive recreational and educational program as would entertain their leisure hours, stimulate and develop their faculties and better their morale. The Commission, with its representatives in every camp, aimed, as one of its purposes, to make the American army a singing army. Trained musicians and song leaders developed and encouraged vocal and instrumental ability and aided in the forming and training of bands and singing groups. As much music as possible was brought into the daily life and work of all the camps.
An athletic director in each camp organized sports and in consequence baseball, football, cross-country running and other competitive games were of frequent occurrence. Skilled instructors in boxing, wrestling and other such personal sports improved the resourcefulness and the physique of the men. Every large camp had its Liberty Theater seating from one thousand to three thousand men, built on modern lines and equipped for any ordinary performance. Theater managers and dramatic directors and coaches wearing the khaki of Uncle Sam’s service brought to the task of entertaining the soldiers and developing dramatic ability among them the knowledge and the skill gained by years of study and practical experience. Theatrical attractions of every sort, vaudeville, drama, moving pictures, musical artists, entertainers of varied kinds, made the tour of these theaters and plays were given in them by amateur companies formed among the men in the camps.
Educational work of such varied sort was constantly carried on as part of the program of the Training Camp Committee as to give to much of the leisure time of every camp almost an academic atmosphere. The machinery of the university extension work and of the educational department of the Y. M. C. A. was utilized to provide for those wishing to take them a wide variety of college and commercial school courses. English was taught to those of little education and to those of foreign birth. Every camp had its classes in French. There was instruction in subjects which would prepare men to transfer from one branch of the service to another. And always and everywhere there were schools or classes or courses of study for intensive training in one or another phase of military affairs—training for those who would have to undertake these specific and varied duties, training for those who would instruct others in them, training for officers. Every camp and cantonment buzzed with these activities by which the men of a nation unused to military affairs and hating war zealously trained themselves for battle and schooled themselves in new methods of warfare.
The Commission on Training Camp Activities went vigorously into the work of education in social hygiene and the enforcement of law in order to make and keep the camp environment, the camps and the men themselves morally wholesome, to the end that the army should be of the best fighting material and that the men who composed it should return to their homes as fine and clean as when they left. A determined and unceasing effort was made to keep alcohol and the prostitute away from the cantonments. Wide zones in which the sale or gift of alcohol to soldiers was forbidden surrounded each training area. One section of the Commission dealt directly with the problem of woman and girl camp followers and sought to lessen this evil by work among the women themselves, by securing better enforcement of local police regulations and by educational and reformatory work in camp communities. A great educational program was carried on by the Government by which instruction in sex hygiene was given in the training camps. During the first six months of cantonment training more than a million men were reached in this way, and the work was continued with equal energy throughout the war period.
A system of government insurance, provided by act of Congress and taking the place of the old-time pension system, enabled any member of the fighting forces of the United States to insure himself against death or total permanent disability at a low premium, which was taken from his monthly pay. At the end of hostilities 4,000,000 of these insurance policies had been taken out by officers and men of the Army and Navy, totaling over $37,000,000,000. Most of them were for the maximum amount of $10,000. Arrangements were made that would enable each holder of a policy to continue it, if he so desired, after leaving the service. Allotments of pay which could be made directly to dependents and allowances paid by the United States to the families of men in service, if such allowance was necessary, helped to relieve the mind of the soldier of worry as to the welfare of his loved ones.
Unique in all history and an integral part of the War Department’s purpose to make army service become a means of personal development and betterment for every individual soldier was the extensive educational scheme for the Expeditionary Forces in France. The War Department and the Army Educational Commission of the Y. M. C. A. coöperated in the devising and carrying out of this plan, which enabled the officers and men of the American Army in France to continue their school, academic, technical or professional training while in camp. Worked out and put into operation in the summer of 1918, when the armistice was signed some 200,000 men, chiefly in the Service of Supply, had already begun studies of various kinds, but the scheme did not reach full development until some weeks later.
Interior of a Cantonment Library
As finally established in the winter of 1919, this educational plan ran the whole gamut of mental training, from learning to spell to post-graduate work in science, art and the professions. In the Army of Occupation there were compulsory schools for all illiterates, but otherwise the work was optional, and took the place of part of the hours of daily drill. Post schools were established for units of 500 or more men, and generally there were forty such schools for each division. Enrollment at the post schools ran as high as 2,000 and more. Correspondence courses were arranged for men with smaller isolated units. In each army division a high school gave both regular and vocational courses.
Located at Beaune, in the Cote d’Or region, where the huge base hospital had been built, in the great series of buildings no longer needed for trainloads of wounded men was the “Khaki University,” at which were given academic, agricultural, professional, commercial and technical courses of three months each. Of its many buildings four hundred were used for class room purposes and others were converted into laboratories, dormitories, libraries and recreation halls. Fourteen colleges comprised this Khaki University which, including the agricultural college associated with it but located elsewhere, became for the time of its existence the largest educational institution in the world. Its colleges gave instruction in language, literature, philosophy, science, fine and applied arts, journalism, education, engineering, music, business, medicine, and all other subjects usually provided for at educational institutions of every sort, whether technical, academic, commercial or professional. Especial attention was paid to agriculture. The engineering school offered a full variety of courses in civil, electrical, mining, mechanical and sanitary engineering. The college of arts, with an art training center near Paris, had 1,000 students and gave instruction in architecture, sculpture, painting, interior decoration, town planning, industrial art, landscape gardening, and furnished guidance for the study of art museums and structures of esthetic value. In the libraries of the Khaki University were 500,000 volumes. Its faculty numbered 500 members and 15,000 men, all of them privates and officers of the A. E. F., enrolled when the institution opened. The Y. M. C. A., whose Army Educational Commission had devised and organized the entire huge educational scheme, turned it all over to the War Department in the spring of 1919.
Many of the faculty members of important universities and colleges in the United States aided in the working out of this comprehensive educational plan and, under the direction of the Army Educational Commission of the Y. M. C. A. and army officers, coöperated with them in the immediate supervision of the schools. Nearly 50,000 officers and men whose record cards showed them to have been school teachers or university or college professors before they were soldiers were detailed from the army for the work of teaching this huge body of pupils in the post schools and at Beaune.
French and British universities and colleges threw open their doors for those who were prepared to undertake collegiate and post-graduate work. With the Sorbonne leading the list, thirty French institutions offered lectures and courses of study, while at Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin, Liverpool, Manchester, St. Andrews, and elsewhere in the British Isles a welcome awaited the American army man. Furloughs were granted to officers and enlisted men for this work and during the latter part of the winter and the spring of 1919 2,000 worked at British universities, filling to the last one the possibility for their accommodation, although four times as many had applied for the privilege. As many more attended the Sorbonne and other institutions in Paris, while the provincial universities and colleges of France had also their quota.
Solicitous for the welfare of the Expeditionary Force and determined that its members should not fall below the high standard it had established of individual worth and soldierly quality, the War Department met the problem of leaves of absence in a strange land by establishing “leave areas” in especially interesting sections of France wherein was offered a varied program of rest, change, recreation and entertainment. More than a dozen famous resorts in the Alps, the Pyrenees, along the Riviera and elsewhere were leased in whole or in part and put in charge of the Y. M. C. A., which saw to it that the men on leave had a thoroughly good time. Once in four months each soldier in service was entitled to a week’s outing at whichever one of these leave areas he preferred to visit. Beginning in the winter of 1918, during the first year of the operation of this system 220,000 soldiers were thus given an opportunity for recreation and sent back to their duties wholesomely refreshed.
Several civil organizations coöperated with the War Department in work for the welfare of the soldier in training and overseas and very greatly aided the Government in its effort to enable the men who composed the army to return to their homes better and more capable men than they were when they left upon their country’s service. These and their activities are described in more detail in the chapter on “Big Brothering the Army.” But here the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations, the War Camp Community Service, the Jewish Welfare Board, the Knights of Columbus, the Salvation Army and the American Library Association must be referred to briefly because of the very great importance of what they did for the welfare of the American soldiers and because of their influence upon the character of the American Army.
More than five hundred service buildings were operated by these organizations in the various camps and cantonments in this country alone, and many hundreds more overseas. They furnished to the men wholesome club life, in comfortable houses, with music, games, lectures, reading and writing facilities and athletic equipment. The Young Women’s Christian Association built, furnished and officered at least one hostess house in every camp, wherein the women relatives and friends of the soldiers could meet them in homelike surroundings. The American Library Association installed in the camps specially designed buildings, manned them with trained workers and provided many thousands of volumes which were kept in constant circulation.
The War Camp Community Service worked in the localities surrounding the camp, where it aided the citizens in efficient expression of their universal spirit of hospitality and friendliness toward the troops, maintained clubs for soldiers on leave, provided information bureaus, recreation and entertainment, and, in general, helped to create and preserve between the men in training and the community in which they were located a normal and helpful social relationship.
So, in a year and a half, America expanded her army of 212,000 into an army of 2,000,000 men overseas, a million and a half in training, and two million more preparing, as these latter were sent across the ocean, to take their places in the cantonments. She turned this democratically chosen material from raw civilians of peace-loving traditions into gallant fighters and fused a heterogeneous mass of nationalities into a solid body inspired by and fighting for American ideals. It was an army so eager to get into the struggle for liberty and justice against militarism and autocracy and its spirit was so high and unanimous that every regiment leaving a cantonment for overseas service celebrated the coming of its orders with enthusiasm and was envied by all those not yet chosen. It was an army that, above everything else, was the expression of the mind, the heart and the soul of the American people. Almost every home in the nation had some part in it and it went upon its war adventure with the prayers, the blessings, the love and the ardent wish to serve its needs of the whole people. Never was an army sent to war so fathered and mothered, so big-sistered and big-brothered, so loved and cheered by an entire nation and provided for by its Government with such care and far-seeing vision as this that sailed from the ports of America for the battlefields of France.
CHAPTER VII
MAINTAINING THE ARMY IN FRANCE
To receive, care for and handle the army in France made necessary prodigious works that, like everything else in the prosecution of the war, had to be planned and executed at the highest possible speed. While the making of the army, the building of cantonments, the development of flying fields, the creation of an industry for the supplying of munitions, the building of shipyards and ships, the expansion of the navy, and all the multitude of wartime tasks to which the nation at once turned its energies were being pushed breathlessly forward, a vast development of facilities had to be begun and carried on in France before our army and its supplies could even be landed upon French shores and transported to the front.
The chief ports of France were already being utilized to their utmost capacity by France and England, and for either of these nations to give up any portion of the port facilities they were using would have meant a serious detriment to their war effort. Therefore it was necessary for the United States to develop sufficiently for our needs the smaller and more backward harbors and port towns. Our shipments of troops and supplies began to land in France at the end of June, 1917, and at once the ports it was possible for America to use became badly congested because of the lack of unloading facilities. In response to the sore need of our war associates and their urgent request our khaki-clad men were sent over in a constantly increasing stream that grew month by month to ever larger proportions. With each 25,000 men it was necessary to dispatch simultaneously enough supplies of every sort to maintain those men for four months. And at the same time had to be shipped the varied kinds and immense amounts of material for the development of the ports, the building of storehouses, the making of camps, the providing of railways and rolling stock, and all the rest of the work to be done.
As the vessels carrying all these war necessities crowded into the small and undeveloped French ports in the summer of 1917 they had to wait their turns at the docks. It often happened that a ship would discharge the most needed part of its cargo, give up its place to some other ship which also carried sorely needed supplies and wait for another turn to land the rest of its load. Sometimes, so great was the congestion because of the lack of berthing and unloading facilities, a ship would find it better, rather than wait for another opportunity, to return to the United States with part of its original cargo still aboard, reload and cross the ocean again, when it would appear at the French port by the time its next turn came around.
By the following summer, a year after these things were happening, so enormous were the developments and improvements this country had made, that with 250,000 and sometimes even 300,000 soldiers per month pouring into the French ports, with all the vast amounts of food, equipment, clothing and munitions for their use that went in with them, and with all the huge and varied quantities of construction material also being landed, the port facilities were equal to all needs and docks, warehouses and unloading machinery were ready for the still greater demands upon them which would presently have followed if the war had not come to an end.
A great part of the material for this development had to be shipped from the United States, as well as the tools with which the work was done. The piles for the building of the docks, the lumber for the barges on which to place the pile drivers, the material for long blocks of storehouses, the rails and cars and locomotives for the making and operating of hundreds of miles of track, lumber for the building of barracks for the thousands of workmen, dredges, cranes, steam shovels, tools and materials of every sort—almost all had to be shipped from the United States and unloaded at the small, congested French ports, which were being enlarged and developed all the time that this work of unloading was going on in the cramped and crowded space.
In all, more than a dozen French ports were used by the American Government and in each one more or less expansion and development had to be done to make it serviceable, and in all the more important ones a very great amount of development work was instituted and carried through at breakneck speed. So much was done that through the last months of the war it would have been of little strategic value to the Germans if they could have gained possession of the Channel ports of France, for which they had striven mightily in order to cut off communications between England and the British armies in the field, for by that time there was room for them also at the more southerly ports. St. Nazaire was opened first and was followed by Bordeaux, Brest, Le Havre, La Rochelle, Rochefort, Rouen, Marans, Tonnay-Charente, Marseilles and others.
One of the Docks in a French Port Developed by the United States
St. Nazaire, through which poured immense numbers of American troops and vast quantities of supplies, in the early summer of 1917 was a sleepy little fishing village with a good natural harbor which was used only by occasional tramp steamers and coastwise shipping. The berthing and unloading facilities were meager, small, old and dilapidated. The harbor basin was dredged and enlarged, piers were built affording three times the former berthing capacity, the unloading facilities were multiplied by ten. At Bordeaux, in June, 1917, there were berths for seven ships and no more than two ships per week could be unloaded. Dredging and construction made it possible for seven ships at the existing pier to discharge their cargoes at the same time and inside of eight months docks a mile long, which the French told the American engineers could not possibly be finished in less than three years, were built on swampy land, concrete platforms, railroad tracks, and immense warehouses were erected and huge electric cranes were set up for lifting cases of goods from ships to cars. Approximately 7,000,000 cubic feet of lumber were used in this construction, nearly all of it shipped from the United States. In less than a year it was possible to unload, instead of two ships in a week, fourteen ships all at the same time. The amount of development, of dredging and construction, that had to be done at these two ports alone indicates the size of the task which awaited the United States Government overseas before our men and their supplies could even be landed in France.
There were very few supplies available in Europe for the American Army. Practically everything for their maintenance had to be shipped from the home base, and no chances could be taken with the possible cutting of the line of supply by enemy operations at sea. Therefore, for every soldier sent to France there went an amount of food and clothing sufficient to meet his needs for four months—an immediate supply for thirty days and a reserve for ninety days. The supply was kept at that level by adding to the amount already sent, with each fresh unit of 25,000 men embarked from America, the increase needed for them. As our Army overseas grew to 500,000, to 1,000,000, to 2,000,000, and with each new leap of the numbers subsistence and clothing for their four months’ use also crossed the ocean, great cities of warehouses sprang up, almost overnight, for the storing of these immense quantities of goods. Each port had its base supply depot a few miles back from the shore where were stored the materials as they were unloaded from the ships. Here was kept, in the depots of all the ports, a part of the reserve sufficient to maintain the entire Army, whatever its size at any given time, for forty-five days. Well inland, midway between the base ports and the front lines, was another series of warehouse cities to which the goods were forwarded from the base warehouses and from which they were distributed to the final long line of storage depots immediately behind the battle zones. In the intermediate warehouses was kept constantly a thirty days’ supply for all the American forces in France and in the distributing warehouses behind the front and at hospital, aircraft and other centers of final distribution there was always on hand a sufficient supply for fifteen days. Most of the material for all this vast network of storage houses had to be shipped from the United States. This was especially true of the base supply depots and the early construction. Later, much of the wood was cut by American engineering troops in French forests. Let two or three of these warehouse cities afford an idea of the immensity of the task of housing the supplies for our armies.
At the St. Nazaire supply depot nearly two hundred warehouses afforded 16,000,000 square feet of open and covered storage. Back of Bordeaux there was wrought in a few months a transformation from miles of farms and vineyards to long rows upon rows of iron and steel warehouses, each fifty by four hundred feet and affording, all told, nearly ten million feet of storage. At Gievres, what was a region of scrub growth upon uncultivated land became in a few months an intermediate supply depot of three hundred buildings, covering six square miles, needing 20,000 men to carry on its affairs and having constantly in storage $100,000,000 worth of supplies.
These and all the other depots had to have their barracks for the housing of the thousands of men for their operation. In each one a sufficient supply of pure water had to be developed, for nowhere in France was there enough wholesome water for American needs. Usually either artesian wells were sunk or existing sources were enlarged and purified, and reservoirs, tanks and piping were installed. One water-works and pumping station had a capacity of 6,000,000 gallons a day. Let a supply depot at which 8,000 enlisted men were employed illustrate them all. Rows of neat, two-story barracks housed the men and a huge mess hall, which served also as church, theater and entertainment hall, accommodated 3,100 men at a sitting and allowed 6,200 to dine in an hour. Planned on scientific principles, its overhead service, from which the food was heaped on the mess kits of the doughboys, enabled them to pass quickly in an unbroken line from the serving stations, of which there was one for each company, to the dining tables. Four smaller dining halls seating 500 each added the accommodations necessary for the entire camp. The food was cooked in two large, concrete-floored kitchens, each 312 by 60 feet and having thirteen big stoves, and in two smaller kitchens of three stoves each. An underground sewer carried the camp refuse to the sea, there were plenty of hot and cold shower baths and the whole was lighted by electricity.
At all large supply stations and permanent camps there were huge bakeries, each baking thousands of pounds of bread every day, coffee roasting and grinding plants—one of these prepared 70,000 pounds of coffee per day—ice and cold storage plants that made their own ice, of which one had a daily capacity of 500 tons of ice and held 6,500 tons of beef, big vegetable gardens cultivated by soldiers temporarily unfit for duty at the front, hospitals, nurses’ and officers’ quarters.
Within a few weeks after our entrance into the war, and before the first troops had sailed for France, a railroad commission was at work there studying the transportation problem which would have to be solved and preparing for the huge organization which would have to be set up before we could give efficient aid. At first the American Army was simply a commercial shipper over French lines, then American cars and engines were sent over and operated by American personnel on the French roads, under French supervision, and a little later most of the American lines of communication were taken over by the American Army. And hundreds of miles of railroads and switches were built and operated at terminals, between base ports and supply depots, in the supply stations, at the front, and between camps and other centers.
At first American locomotives were shipped in knocked-down parts and set up again after their arrival in France. But this method consumed too much time, when time cost high in human life and treasure. A hurried search was made for ships with holds and hatches big enough to receive such burdens. The first ship that went thus loaded carried thirty-three standard locomotives and tenders tightly packed in bales of hay. Each one was lifted from the rails beside the dock by a huge derrick, as easily as a cat lifts a kitten, and on the other side was lifted from its place in the hold to the rails, ready for express service to the front, in forty-six minutes. In all, 1,500 locomotives, either knocked-down or ready for service, were transported and 20,000 freight cars were taken over in knocked-down parts and erected again at a big assembling station. There were constructed 850 miles of standard gauge railroads for needs which the existing French railways did not meet, of which 500 miles were built in the last five months of the war. In addition, there were constructed 115 miles of light railway, while 140 miles of German light railway were repaired and made fit for operation. In order to carry our own lines across French roads without interfering with traffic it was necessary to build many miles of switches and cut-offs. Americans operated 225 miles of French railways. The transportation system made use also of 400 miles of inland waterways on which hundreds of barges towed by tugs sent over for that purpose carried army supplies. This entire huge transportation system was planned, developed, operated and manned by American railroad men, from railway company presidents and general managers to brakemen, and required the services of more than 70,000 men.
The aviation program called for big construction works in France, where seventeen large flying fields, divided into several air instruction centers, were developed. One of these aviation centers covered thirty-six square miles and was a city complete in itself, as was each of the other centers, with their barracks, dining halls, hangars, repair and assembly shops, hospital, officers’ and nurses’ quarters, welfare buildings. And all of these complete, self-contained cities, each housing thousands of people, grew in less than a year upon farming lands.
Hospitals were built upon a standardized system that could expand the number of available beds by from one thousand to five thousand in one day. When the armistice was signed there were in operation 219 base and camp hospitals and twelve convalescent camps and the hospital service was ready to provide a total of 284,000 beds. One of these hospital centers, the huge institution at Beaune, afterwards utilized by the “Khaki University,” was constructed in a few months, its 600 buildings of a permanent type including the necessary operating rooms, laboratories, administration buildings, officers’ and nurses’ quarters, and buildings for patients for a series of ten hospitals, each devoted to its own specialty and having its own staff of surgeons, physicians, nurses and men. For the building of this hospital center railways were run to the site and concrete mixers set up to provide the material, and work was kept going at high speed day and night until it was ready to receive patients.
Hundreds of construction projects were constantly under way for the housing, care, training and welfare of the army whose numbers were growing by tens of thousands every week and would in a few months more have amounted to four million men. There were receiving camps of tents and wooden barracks and dining halls and welfare structures, each of which had its water works and electric lighting and sewage disposal plants, for the debarking men; training camps; schools for the instruction of cooks, chauffeurs, Salvage Corps workers, Tank Corps men, candidates for the Engineering Corps, cavalry officers, coffee roasters, statistical officers, trench artillerymen, and for scores of other specialties in fighting and in caring for the fighting men, by intensive work through long hours every day; nearly a hundred factories in which were made candy, chocolate, crackers, hard bread and macaroni and coffee was roasted and ground, by which much tonnage was saved per month and costs were reduced; huge salvage and repair work; big laundry and sterilizing plants in one of which more than half a million pieces were washed or sterilized per week; motor truck depots and reconstruction parks—one of these latter transformed in two months from a thousand acres of farm land into a great motor plant with shops of steel and concrete covering 125,000 square feet, railways and switches, storehouses and offices; and dozens of other structures and developments in which great buildings had either to be erected or leased and adapted to new purposes.
Upon the shoulders of the Engineering Corps of the United States Army fell the task of achieving this miracle of construction and development in France. At our entrance into the war it consisted of 256 commissioned officers and 2,100 enlisted men, in seven organizations. A year and a half later it had expanded to 9,000 officers and 255,000 enlisted men, in 309 organizations of which each did a specialized kind of work. A quarry regiment got out stone from French quarries; forestry regiments, under the permission and supervision of the French Government, went into French forests and cut down trees, set up saw mills and carried on lumbering operations in order to help supply the immense lumber needs of our construction projects and so lessen the pressure upon the shipping service; highway regiments repaired roads and built new ones; railroad regiments laid hundreds of miles of railway track; a camouflage regiment composed of architects, painters, sculptors and engineers protected and disguised army operations and ran a factory for the making of camouflage material; map-making regiments printed maps immediately behind the battle lines; others developed water and electric power and installed plants for our manufacturing necessities in more than three hundred localities; still others dug trenches and tunneled under the enemy’s lines and built bridges in the rear of the fleeing foe for the immediate passage of American troops in pursuit; and sometimes they threw down picks and shovels and with hastily seized rifles and bayonets showed themselves to be as good fighters as workers.
All this vast and varied achievement in France, of which it is possible to mention here only illustrative parts of a mere outline, was made possible by the big, closely knit and smoothly working organization of the two branches of the A. E. F., the Army and its Service of Supply. At the head of it all, organizer and administrator as well as soldier and general, was General Pershing, Commander in Chief. Under him the five great divisions of General Head Quarters,—the section that saw to it that all the needed elements of warfare, men, munitions, supplies, and materials for construction, were landed in France; the section that received and distributed all these elements; the section that trained the personnel of every sort; the sections that operated the troops and secured information concerning the enemy and safe-guarded that concerning our own affairs,—carried on each its own work in a great, widely ramifying organization, systematized and highly organized down to its last detail. Running all these organizations on business principles, in addition to the army officers who directed the phases dealing with combat, were successful business and professional men from private life in the United States who gave up big salaries and important positions to work for their country in France on the pay of an army officer. Among them and spending twelve, sixteen, even twenty hours out of the twenty-four on the job of speeding each his own particular work to success were engineers of international renown who had put through mighty projects of bridging and damming rivers, building railroads and tunneling the earth, experts in financial law, in mechanics, in construction, in finance, manufacturers of automobiles, leaders in steel industries, organizers of big business, officials of important railway companies.
CHAPTER VIII
AT THE FRONT
When Americans endeavor to estimate the value of their work on the lines of battle they are bound to see and should be glad in justice to admit that our actual fighting effort was small indeed compared with the vast and bloody and appalling struggles in which our war associates had almost exhausted themselves. They are bound to see that its importance in the final decision was incommensurate with the amount of what they actually did on the fighting lines, although not, perhaps, with the extent of the nation’s preparation. It fell to America to add the deciding strength after years of battle in which the combatants had been so nearly equal that their armies on the Western front had swayed back and forth over a zone only a few miles in width.
Nevertheless, no just summing up of the last year of the war can fail to award to America the credit of having been the final deciding factor, a credit that belongs alike to the valor and size of her armies, the ability of their officers and the overwhelming might and zeal with which the whole nation had gathered itself up for the delivery of the heaviest blows in its power to give. The rapidly growing evidence of how powerful those blows would be, as shown by our enormous preparations in France and the war spirit and war activities in the United States, had convinced the enemy that unless he won decisive results by the autumn of 1918 there was no possibility of his final victory. And therefore he put forth his supreme efforts during the spring and summer of that year. The enormous scale upon which this country entered upon and carried through its preparations for war both at home and in France sent to high figures the money cost of the war to the United States, but it made immeasurable savings in human life, for anything less would have meant more months of war, even more bloody than the preceding years.
The enemy’s determination to win a decisive victory in the spring or summer of 1918 before, he believed, it would be possible for the American Army to make itself felt at the front forced England and France and Italy to make what would have been, without our help, their last stand. They had reached the limit of what they could do and were fighting “with their backs to the wall.” Exhausted by nearly four years of bitter struggle they were almost but not quite strong enough to withstand the final, determined, desperate rush of the foe for which he was gathering together all his powers. And American forces gave the aid that was needed to drive him back.
Of high importance among the things that America did to help bring about decision between the battle lines was her share in the final agreement upon unified control of the associated armies in France. It was the voice of the United States Government through its representation in the Supreme War Council that carried the day for this measure and led to the appointment in March, 1918, of Marshal Foch as Generalissimo of the Allied and Associated Armies, an action which military authorities are agreed should have been taken long before and which, when finally brought about, was fruitful of the best results.
The aim of the War Department, as carried out by General Pershing, Commander in Chief of the American Expeditionary Forces, was to make the American Army in France an integral force, able to take the offensive and to carry on its own operations, and with that end in view he shaped its training and planned for its use at the front after its arrival in France. While he offered and furnished whatever troops Marshal Foch desired for use at any part of the battle line, General Pershing refused to distribute all his forces, insisted upon building them up as they became ready for the front into a distinctive American Army—at the signing of the armistice the First, Second and Third American Armies had been thus created—and by the time the American forces had begun to make themselves felt at the front he had substituted American methods of training, finding them better adapted to his men than the European, and in his last battle, the decisive action in the Meuse-Argonne region, his staff work was all American.
The plan of training carried out, except in the later months when the demand for troops at the front was immediate and urgent, allowed each division after its arrival in France one month for instruction in small units, a second month of experience by battalions in the more quiet trench sectors and a third month of training as complete divisions. When the great German offensive began in Picardy in March, 1918, General Pershing had four divisions ready for the front and offered to Marshal Foch whatever America had in men or materials that he could use. None of the Allied commanders believed that men so recently from civilian life could be used effectively in battle and it was only General Pershing’s knowledge of the character of his men, his insistent faith that they would make good under any trial of their mettle and his willingness to pledge his honor for their behavior under fire that induced Marshal Foch to accept his offer.
Brilliantly did these men justify their commander’s faith in them in this and in all the later battles in which they took part. In all, 1,390,000 were in action against the enemy. Less than two years before they had been clerks, farmers, brokers, tailors, authors, lawyers, teachers, small shop keepers, dishwashers, newspaper men, artists, waiters, barbers, laborers, with no thought of ever being soldiers. Their education, thoughts, environment, whole life, had been aloof from military affairs. They had been trained at high speed, in the shortest possible time, four or five months, and sometimes less, having taken the place of the year or more formerly thought necessary. But it was American troops that stopped the enemy at Chateau-Thierry and at Belleau Wood in June, when the Germans were making a determined drive for Paris and had reached their nearest approach to the French capital. They fought the enemy’s best guard troops, drove them back, took many prisoners and held the captured positions. Because of their valor and success the Wood of Belleau will be known hereafter and to history as “the Wood of the American Marines,” although other American troops fought with the Marines in that brilliant action. In the pushing back of the Marne salient in July, into which General Pershing, with absolute faith in the dependability of his men, threw all of his troops who had had any sort of training, American soldiers shared the place of honor at the front of the advance with seasoned French troops. Through two weeks of stubborn fighting the French and the Americans advanced shoulder to shoulder and steadily drove the enemy, who until that time had been just as steadily advancing, back to the Vesle and completed the object of reducing the salient.
Early in August the First American Army was organized under General Pershing’s personal command and took charge of a distinct American sector which stretched at first from Port sur Seille to a point opposite Verdun and was afterwards extended across the Meuse to the Argonne Forest. For the operation planned against the formidable enemy forces in front of him General Pershing assembled and molded together troops and material, all the elements of a great modern army, transporting the 600,000 troops mostly by night. The battle of St. Mihiel, for which he had thus prepared, began on September 12th, and this first offensive of the American First Army was a signal success. The Germans were driven steadily backward, with more than twice the losses of our own troops and the loss of much war material, and the American lines were established in a position to threaten Metz.
Two American divisions operating with the British forces at the end of September and early in October held the place of honor in the offensive that smashed the Hindenburg line, which had been considered impregnable, at the village of St. Vendhuile. In the face of the fiercest artillery and machine gun fire these troops, supported by the British, broke through, held on and carried forward the advance, capturing many prisoners. Two other divisions, assisting the French at Rheims in October, one of them under fire for the first time, conquered complicated defense works, repulsed heavy counter attacks, swept back the enemy’s persistent defense, took positions the Germans had held since 1914 and drove them behind the Aisne river.
The battle of St. Mihiel was a prelude to the Meuse-Argonne offensive and was undertaken in order to free the American right flank from danger. Its success enabled General Pershing to begin preparations at once for the famous movement that, more than any other single factor, brought the war to its sudden end. No military forces had ever before tackled the Argonne Forest. French officers did not believe it could be taken. With the exception of St. Mihiel, the German front line, from Switzerland to a point a little east of Rheims, was still intact. The purpose of the American offensive was to cut the enemy’s lines of communication by the railroads passing through Mézières and Sedan and thus strangle his armies. The attack began on September 26 and continued through three phases until the signing of the armistice. Twenty-one American divisions were engaged in it, of which two had never before been under fire and three others had barely been in touch with the front, but of these their commander said that they quickly became as good as the best. Eight of the divisions were returned to the front for second participation, after only a few days rest at the rear. In all, forty German divisions were used against the American advance, among them being many picked regiments, the best the German army contained, seasoned fighters who had been in the war from the start. They brought to the defense of their important stronghold an enormous accumulation of artillery and machine guns and the knowledge that they must repulse the offensive and save their communications or give up their entire purpose and confess themselves beaten. German troops did no more desperate and determined fighting in the war than in this engagement.
Mobile Kitchen Back of the Front Lines
An American Big Gun in France
Day after day the American troops moved slowly forward, over rugged, difficult ground, broken by ravines and steep hills, through dense underbrush, in the face of deadly fire from artillery and nests of machine guns hidden in every vantage point, through incessant rain and mud and fog and penetrating cold, pushing the enemy steadily back, until they reached Sedan, cut the German Army’s most important line of communication, and so brought the end of the war in sight. For a few days later came the German request for an armistice and terms of peace.
Aiding the fighting men at the front were non-combatant troops who by their courage and zeal helped greatly and won high honor. Regiments of engineers worked with the lines at the front, keeping the roads open, building railways, repairing bridges in front of the advancing lines to enable them to pour across in pursuit of the fleeing enemy, and, in the earlier months, mining and tunneling under the enemy’s lines and constructing trenches. Much of the time they worked under fire and it sometimes happened that, suddenly attacked, they seized rifles from the dead and wounded around them and fought back the assaulting party. The camoufleurs worked close behind and sometimes at the front, disguising roadways, ammunition dumps, artillery and machine gun positions, concealing the advance of troops, most of the time in the shelled areas and often under fire. Immediately behind the front lines during the St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne offensives and under the protection of camouflage the map makers and printers of the American Army had big rotary presses on trucks and turned out the necessary maps at once as they were needed. British and French lithographers had told them it could not be done, but their mobile map-making trains kept in touch with the army, turning out a million maps during the Argonne drive.
The Signal Corps gave services of such inestimable value that without them the successes of the combatant troops would have been impossible. The war enlarged the personnel of the Corps from 1,500 to 205,000, of whom 33,500 were in France, where they strung 126,000 miles of wire lines alone, of which 39,000 miles were on the fighting fronts. Their duties were varied and highly specialized and demanded the greatest skill and efficiency. Regardless of danger the personnel of the Corps carried on their work with the front lines, went over the top with the infantry, and even established their outposts or radio stations in advance of the troops. A non-combatant body, it lost in killed, wounded and missing, 1,300, a higher percentage than any other arm of the service except the infantry. Its photographers made over seventy miles of war moving picture films and more than 24,000 still negatives, much of both within the fighting areas.
The enemy captured 4,500 prisoners from the American forces and lost to them almost 50,000, so that the Americans took ten for each one they lost. The American Army captured also in the neighborhood of 1,500 guns. There were 32,800 Americans killed in action and 207,000 were wounded, of whom over 13,500 died of their wounds, while the missing numbered almost 3,000. The total casualties of all kinds, exclusive of prisoners returned, for the Army amounted to 288,500, while those for the Marine Corps totaled over 6,000 additional. The battle death rate for the expeditionary forces was 57 per thousand.
In recognition of their exceptionally courageous and self-forgetful deeds on the battle field nearly 10,000 members of the American Expeditionary Forces received decorations from the French, British, Belgian and Italian Governments. Our own rarely bestowed and much coveted Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest recognition for valor the Government can give, was won by 47 heroes, while Distinguished Service Medals were awarded to several hundred individuals and to a goodly number of fighting units.
Those of their own officers who had had a lifetime of military training and experience marveled at the spirit of these civilian soldiers and their feeling was voiced by one of them who said, “They have taken our West Point tradition of implicit obedience and run away with it, as they have with every other soldierly quality.”
Field Marshal Haig complimented the American divisions who had fought under him upon “their gallant and efficient service,” and “the dash and energy of their attacks,” said that their deeds “will rank with the highest achievements of the war” and told them, “I am proud to have had you in my command.”
Marshal Foch said that “the American soldiers are superb” and told how, when General Pershing wished to concentrate his army in the Meuse-Argonne sector, notwithstanding its many obstacles and forbidding terrain, he consented, saying to the American general, “Your men have the devil’s own punch. They will get away with all that.”
Other British and French officers on many occasions praised the “gallantry” and “the high soldierly qualities” of these civilian troops, their “energy, courage and determination,” their “discipline, smartness and physique,” said they were “splendid fighters with marked initiative,” and one French general commanding an American division that was in battle for the first time declared that their “combative spirit and tenacity” rivaled that of “the old and valiant French regiments” with which they were brigaded. German documents captured not long after our men had begun to take an important part showed that the foe already had a good opinion of the American soldier, for they spoke of his expertness with weapons, his courage, his determination, his fighting qualities and—curious soldierly quality for a German to recognize—his honor in battle.
Many observers of our own and other nations bore witness to the fine character of the American soldiers back of the fighting lines, among their fellow soldiers of the other armies and the civilian population. Their cheerfulness, high spirits, good nature and simple, human helpfulness gave new heart to the soldiers of the Allies with whom they fraternized and made warm friends of the people in the cities, towns, villages and countrysides with whom they came in contact. The Secretary of War, after several weeks of intimate study of our army in France, said that it was “living in France like the house guests of trusting friends.” And the Chairman of the Commissions on Training Camp Activities, after two months of investigation in all the American camps in France declared, as the result of this long and intimate association, that the question Americans should consider was not “whether our troops overseas were worthy of us and our traditions but whether we were worthy of our army.”