BROOMSTICK PREPAREDNESS—A STUDY IN CAUSE AND EFFECT
December 27, 1917
It is earnestly to be hoped that the congressional investigation into the fruits of our military unpreparedness will keep two objects clearly in mind. First, the aim must be to speed up the work of efficient war preparation by doing away with all the present practices that are wrong. Second, the aim should be to make evident to all our people that our present shameful shortcomings are due to failure to prepare in advance and that never again ought we to allow our governmental leaders to put us in such a humiliating and unworthy position.
It will be quite impossible to get at all the facts of our unpreparedness. Most officers will be very reluctant to testify to the whole truth. They know that they will suffer if they do so, because they have seen the punishment inflicted by the Administration on Major-General Wood for the sole reason that he dared to tell the truth about our shortcomings, and dared to advocate preparedness in advance. For this reason I am not at liberty to quote the generals, colonels, captains, and lieutenants of the artillery, infantry, medical corps, and quartermaster corps who have told me of their troubles with unheated hospitals, insufficient drugs, summer underclothes in winter weather, lack of overcoats, of shoes, of rifles, of ammunition, of cannon. But in the camps I visited I saw some things so evident that no harm can come to any officer from my speaking of them.
Last fall I saw thousands of men drilling with broomsticks. I have such a broomstick now before me. Last fall I saw thousands of men drilling with rudely whittled wooden guns. I have one such before me now. I saw them drilling with wooden machine guns as late as the beginning of December. I saw barrels mounted on sticks, on which zealous captains were endeavoring to teach their men how to ride a horse. I saw in the national army camps in Illinois and Ohio scores of wooden cannon. Doubtless any man can see them now if he goes there.
The excellent officers in the camps are as rapidly as possible remedying these deficiencies. I hope and believe that by spring they will all be remedied. But let our people not forget that for one year after Germany went to war with us we were wholly unable to defend ourselves and owed our safety only to the English and French ships and armies.
The cause was our refusal to prepare in advance. President Wilson’s message of December, 1914, in which he ridiculed those who advocated preparedness, was part of the cause. His presidential campaign on the “He kept us out of war” issue was part of the cause. We paid the price later with broomstick rifles, logwood cannon, soldiers without shoes, and epidemics of pneumonia in the camps. We are paying the price now. We pay the price in the doubled cost of necessary war supplies. We pay the price in shortage of coal and congested transportation. The refusal to prepare and the price we now pay because of the refusal stand in the relation of cause and effect.
I do not dwell on these facts to blame anybody. I dwell on them in order to wake our people to the necessity of learning the lesson they teach. Our next and permanent duty is to introduce the policy of universal obligatory military training for all our young men before they are twenty-one.