This great record was made possible not only by the utilization of all tonnage that could be adapted to such service, but also by the operation of the shipping at its highest efficiency. The drop in morale among the personnel of the Transportation Service in the first disheartening weeks of the armistice was soon offset by the spirit of the transportation men in early 1919 when they realized the great value of the service they were rendering to their comrades of the expedition and to the country at large. When it bore into their consciousness that they were exceeding all expectations in delivering troops from France to the United States, they fell to with a spirit unexcelled even in the days when every soldier set down in France was so much added insurance of a speedy end to the war. Ship vied with ship to cut down steaming time, and the ports competed with each other in dispatching vessels to sea.
Under such circumstances all records for shipping efficiency fell. In 1918, with every energy bent upon the attainment of maximum efficiency, the average turn-around, or round voyage across the ocean and back, of the American troop transports was something over 36 days. In 1919 during the return movement it dropped to 32.6 days.
The oil-burning transport Great Northern, which was bought outright by the War Department in the spring of 1918, proved to be the fleetest thing that ever plied the Atlantic. Leaving Hoboken on June 24, 1919, with a few passengers, a few days later she landed them at Brest, took on 2,999 troops by moonlight, and recrossed to Hoboken—all within twelve days, five hours, and thirty minutes. No other vessel, military or commercial, ever equaled this speed. The Great Northern also established the record of eighteen transatlantic cycles at the average rate of twenty-three days for each; and in the whole war enterprise she transported more troops per ton of capacity than did any other troopship. She was closely crowded for honors, however, by her sister ship Northern Pacific.
The vessels alone could not write such records except through the coöperation of the port organizations on both sides of the Atlantic. Before the armistice the capacities of the ports, especially of those in France, were a sharper limitation upon the expansion of American power at the front than was the shortage in ocean shipping. After the armistice the improvement in shipping efficiency was attained largely by speeding up the loading and unloading of transports in port. On May 17 the transport Maui at Brest took aboard 3,612 troops and sailed for America in three hours and thirty-five minutes after arriving. These soldiers had to be carried out to her in lighters, and they boarded her at the rate of sixty-five a minute. On the same day the transport Cape May, one of the converted cargo vessels, arrived at Bordeaux and sailed on the same tide with a load of 1,928 troops, having been dispatched in one hour and nineteen minutes. These were extreme instances, but they were indicative of the efficiency of the port machinery.
At first the Transportation Service would fix no schedule for the return of the expedition, except the general one that it hoped to bring back the last man before January 1, 1920. By the beginning of spring, 1919, the situation looked so much better that the Service brought out a schedule showing the probable troop-carrying capacity available in the French ports by months, and estimating this capacity for several months ahead. The schedule promised a gradual increase until the shipping reached a goal of 250,000 embarkations a month. On the basis of this schedule the command of the A. E. F. fixed priorities for embarkation and published both the schedule and priority dates, to the excitement of the men of the expedition, most of whom were then still in France. To be sure, the authorities promised nothing definitely and informed the soldiers that the schedule would be met “if practicable”; yet the men of the A. E. F. banked on the Transportation Service to fulfill its predictions.
The goal of 250,000 embarkations a month was the extreme maximum which the Service thought it might attain if everything went right. Yet three months later, when embarkations approached 400,000, the goal had been passed by 50 per cent. The actual performance brought 300,000 overseas soldiers home two months ahead of schedule, and 300,000 others beat the schedule by one month. Here was the equivalent of 900,000 men returned and discharged from service one month earlier than the nation had any reason to expect. The cost of maintaining such a force in arms for one month is approximately $66,000,000, a saving which must be set down to the credit of the administration that made it possible.
The days spent at sea by the returning troops were not time wasted. Although the embarkation officers in France did their best to send out with each soldier a complete record of his service, in the press of the work it was not always possible to attain this ideal. It was unjust to hold back a soldier from embarkation because his records were incomplete; yet before he could secure his discharge his papers had to be in perfect shape. The Transportation Service, through its debarkation camps in the United States, took it upon itself to perfect the individual records of the soldiers, and it did most of this work on the ships at sea. In special schools at Hoboken and Newport News the Service trained a force of traveling personnel adjutants for assignment to the transports. As soon as a troopship started out from France the personnel adjutant aboard opened an office, and from that moment until the ship docked he was busy from morning to night smoothing up the service records. He also compiled the papers which the debarkation camps would need and instructed the troops in the procedure to be followed after landing.
Unexpectedly, the Transportation Service found itself obliged to bring home in first-class accommodations many more persons than it had carried to Europe in that style. Thousands of officers had crossed before the armistice in commercial liners, and so had crowds of red cross and other welfare workers. Numerous soldiers had acquired wives in Europe. Military regulation gave these women and their husbands accompanying them the right to occupy first-class quarters on transports. After the armistice several congressional committees and hundreds of experts employed by the Government in the peace negotiations traveled first-class on the transports in both directions. The result was that on July 1, 1919, at the ports in France awaiting first-class transportation to America there were 32,000 persons over and above the capacity of such accommodations in sight for several months to come. To have brought them all back in the state to which they were entitled would have made necessary the full operation of the entire transport fleet for three months beyond the time when the return movement actually ceased. To settle the matter the Service adopted the expedient of bringing home several thousand junior officers quartered in the troop spaces of certain of the larger and faster vessels. Although some outcry arose over this treatment, the majority of the officers were too glad to get home at all to be critical of the mode of their transportation.
Not a man of the 2,000,000 passengers lost his life as the result of marine disaster after the armistice. The worst accident occurred shortly after midnight on January 1, 1919, when, during a blinding rainstorm, the great transport Northern Pacific, with a load of 2,500 troops, two-thirds of whom were sick and wounded men, went aground on the Long Island shore near the entrance to New York harbor. The sea was rough, the wind making, and as the ship turned port side to the beach and worked up on the sand, pounding heavily, rescue for the time was impossible. The weather was cold, the ship’s machinery was out of commission, and she was lightless and unheated. It took three days to rescue the passengers; yet, despite the severity of the experience, no person on board suffered seriously from it. The pounding had so damaged the ship’s hull that many of the plates had to be renewed. A more serious injury was a broken stern-post. In former marine practice such an injury meant the casting of a new post in steel. The Navy, as in the instance of the broken machinery in the interned German ships, resorted to the electric welding torch for repairing the broken stern-post, saving several months in time and perhaps $50,000 in money.
