Photo by Signal Corps
COMPANY STREET IN PONTANEZEN
With the combat troops mass travel could be conducted at its greatest efficiency. The divisional troops were homogeneous, their transportation needs were essentially alike, and a single order could control the movements of tens of thousands of them at once. The supply troops, on the other hand, were heterogeneous. They were organized in thousands of units of varying sizes and kinds. Many of them, particularly officers, were serving in the organization as individuals attached to no particular units. The travel problems of these various elements differed widely. Therefore it was decided to handle the embarkation of divisional troops and supply troops separately. The general demobilization plan adopted about the middle of December, 1918, provided for the establishment of a great embarkation center for the divisional troops—an area which should be convenient to all three ports of embarkation, in which area the combat troops in their large units could be prepared for the overseas voyage, and from which they could go directly to the ships without pausing in the embarkation cities. The installations at the ports themselves were to be used especially in the embarkation of supply troops.
At Le Mans, a spot about midway between Paris and the Biscay coast, the A. E. F. possessed a plant that might be expanded quickly to serve as the divisional embarkation center. When the great flood of American troops began debouching upon French soil in the early summer of 1918 it became evident to the command of the expedition that it needed an area in which the incoming divisions might assemble as their units debarked from the transports and where they might rest while their ranks were being built up to prescribed strength by the addition of replacements. By this time, too, the system of supplying replacement troops to the A. E. F. had become automatic. The replacements were the only American soldiers who crossed to France without definite objective. They were to be used in France as the A. E. F. needed them to fill up its divisional ranks. It was necessary, therefore, to provide a reservoir upon which the depleted combat divisions could draw for replacements. Le Mans was selected as the site of this reservoir and also as the assembling point for the debarking organized divisions. The Le Mans area before the armistice was known as the A. E. F.’s classification and replacement camp.
The reasons which brought about the selection of Le Mans as the site for the replacement and divisional depot served also to make the place the ideal location for the expedition’s embarkation center. Le Mans was at the junction of trunk-line railroads leading to Brest, St. Nazaire, and Bordeaux. It also possessed good railroad connections with Paris and with the front, which in the summer of 1918 had been advanced by the Germans until it was close to the metropolitan limits of Paris and was therefore not far from Le Mans. The depot was established in July, 1918, when the Eighty-third Division occupied the area as its depot division. At that time the depot as projected contemplated the construction of eight divisional camps, each to accommodate 26,000 men, and two forwarding camps, one with accommodations for 25,000 men and the other for 15,000. In other words, the camp eventually was to accommodate a quarter of a million troops. No military center in the United States compared in size with this project.
At the time of the armistice the development of Le Mans had made good progress. It could then maintain about 120,000 troops. On December 14, when Le Mans was officially designated as the embarkation center, its capacity had been increased to 200,000. Shortly after the armistice began, its transient population jumped to 100,000, and it never fell below this mark until the late spring of 1919, when the greater part of the combat divisions of the A. E. F. had embarked for the United States.
The Le Mans center had the duty of completely preparing for embarkation all troops received in the area. Theoretically every man who passed through Le Mans was prepared to go directly to a transport. This meant bathing and delousing for every man who came to the camp, inspecting his equipment and supplying new clothing and other personal articles if he needed them, and perfecting his service records so that he might encounter no difficulty in securing his final pay and discharge in the United States. To do this important work quickly and well, it was necessary to operate an institution of impressive size.
The dimensions of the whole camp were tremendous. There was nothing like it in the United States. A man could walk briskly for an hour in a single direction at Le Mans and see nothing but tents, barracks, drill fields, and troops lined up for preliminary or final inspections. The task of feeding this city full of guests was so great that the camp administration found it economical to build a narrow-gauge railroad system connecting the kitchens with the warehouses. Food moved up to the camp cookstoves by the trainload, and the same locomotives that brought the supplies hauled away the refuse. A whole adjacent forest was cut down to supply firewood. When the Americans occupied the section there were no adequate switching facilities, nor were there storage accommodations. The Quartermaster Corps, which operated the storage project, cleared a field in the midst of a wood and used the clearing for an open storage space (the surrounding trees giving a degree of shelter), connecting the place with the railroad by constructing a spur track. Thereafter, even after great warehouses had been built in the clearing and it had become the supply depot for the entire camp, requiring the services of 6,000 troops in its operation, the place was known to the camp as “The Spur.” As an addition to this storage, smaller covered warehouses were provided at all the divisional sub-depots. At one time the corrals of the camp contained 10,000 horses and mules. In one week in February, 1919, nearly 32,000 troops arrived in camp, a fact indicating the rate at which troops passed through to embarkation. The Quartermaster Corps opened two great central commissaries that were in effect department stores. The camp operated a large laundry, a shoe repair shop, a clothing repair shop, and numerous other industrial plants.
The equipment installed at Le Mans was duplicated in smaller scale at the three embarkation ports. Yet even these port installations could not be called small. Camp Pontanezen at Brest could give accommodations to 80,000 men at once. The largest embarkation camps in the United States were smaller than this. There were thirteen smaller camps and military posts at Brest. The two embarkation camps at Bordeaux could house 22,000 men, but there were billeting accommodations in the district for thousands of others. The construction at St. Nazaire was considerably larger than that at Bordeaux, but not so extensive as that at Brest.
Most of these camps were built after the armistice, and the engineer constructors and the embarking troops elbowed each other as embarkation and construction proceeded simultaneously. Some of the camps had served as rest camps prior to the armistice, but these had to be greatly enlarged and improved in equipment before they could give adequate service as embarkation camps. The weather along the northwestern coast of France is intensely uncomfortable and disagreeable to Americans. In the winter and spring especially, the rains and mists are almost incessant. It was not always possible to choose ideal sites for the embarkation camps in France. The sites had to be near the ports, and in the thickly inhabited countryside the American authorities were forced to accept whatsoever areas they could get, without being too insistent upon such fine points as natural drainage and pleasant surroundings.