The policy of discharging troops at centers adjacent to their homes rested upon a sound foundation. As the country faced the demobilization of 4,000,000 troops, young men most of whom had been held for many months under the rigid restraints of army discipline, there was a widespread apprehension that the discharged soldiers might congregate in the larger cities and create profound economic disturbances. Upon the War Department there was no compulsion of law to transport the troops to their own neighborhoods before discharging them. Obviously the easy and convenient thing was to discharge them wherever they happened to be—at the thousand and one camps in the United States, or at the Atlantic ports upon their arrival from France—discharge them there, pay them off, and so farewell to them. Such, in fact, had been army procedure before the World War. The Army discharged its men at the posts where they were serving and paid to them the travel allowances granted by law. Whether they used their money to pay for actual transportation home was no concern of the Army’s. They were all free, and most of them white and twenty-one. As long as discharges were relatively few this procedure had no effect upon the economic life of the nation. But what would have been the result if the War Department had continued this practice when disbanding the 4,000,000 troops in uniform on the day of the armistice? Most of them would have been turned loose in the vicinity of the large cities of the United States—more than 1,000,000 of them at New York alone. Their pockets would have been crammed with money. Congress by special enactment raised the travel allowance for discharged soldiers to five cents a mile, payable for the distance between the place of discharge and the soldier’s home, whether the entire journey could be accomplished by railroad or not. Congress also granted a bonus of $60 to every soldier—payable also at discharge. Thousands of soldiers, when they came up for discharge, were entitled to back pay. Thus every man received a considerable sum of money with his discharge certificate, and for the overseas soldier this sum probably averaged more than $100. The streets of our cities would have been thronged with such men during the first six months of 1919. After their hardships the temptation to have a fling at metropolitan entertainments would have been well-nigh irresistible. They would have been fair game for gamblers and sharp practitioners. The rare individual might have bought his ticket and gone soberly home, but the majority could scarcely have been expected to show such restraint. In a little while, pockets that had jingled with money would have been empty, the streets would have been crowded with stranded soldiers, and the burdened municipalities would have had to face a severe civic problem.
This was what the War Department sought to avoid, and what it did avoid, by its demobilization policy. There was also another consideration—that of financial economy. The War Department could carry troops at a cost of much less than five cents a mile per capita. Therefore, by distributing the Army about the country and discharging every man within his own native section the War Department was able to save millions of dollars which otherwise would have been paid out in mileage allowances.
The good offices of the Government to the demobilized soldier did not end when the War Department had paid him his money and discharged him. As a special inducement to demobilized soldiers not to linger in the communities near the demobilization centers, the United States Railroad Administration made a special travel rate to them of two cents a mile. In order to secure the cut rate, however, the soldier had to buy his ticket within twenty-four hours after receiving his discharge. Thus it was to his direct financial advantage to go home at once. Nor did the Railroad Administration permit him to overlook the opportunity. All the principal demobilization centers had their own railway terminals, from which special trains for discharged soldiers departed at intervals. The Railroad Administration set up railway ticket booths in the offices of the camp finance officers, so that each newly discharged man, as he turned away from the disbursing window with his money in his hand, faced the railway ticket booth. At his elbow were Red Cross, Y. M. C. A., and other camp welfare workers to urge him to buy his railway ticket at once and leave on the first train. The path of least resistance led straight home, and he was indeed a headstrong individual who did not follow it. As a result of the whole system the demobilization of the Army went through without any trouble at all.
The policy had an effect upon the mode of troop travel that was to be observed even beyond the ports of embarkation in France. The original plan had been to bring all the expeditionary divisions back to the camps in which they had been organized and trained, and there to disband them. There seemed to be nothing in the way of so simple a solution of the problem. In organizing the divisions in the first place, it had been the policy, to which there were but few exceptions, to create divisions of men originating in the territory contiguous to each training camp. As the divisions started for France they possessed definite territorial identity; and the divisional names which they commonly adopted for themselves—the New England Division, the Sunset Division, the Buckeye Division, the Keystone Division, and so on—usually indicated the geographical origin of the men of the organizations. It was thought that, by transporting the overseas divisions back to their original training camps in this country, each would be placed in the demobilization center most convenient to the respective homes of its soldiers.
The attempt to put this policy into practice quickly showed the fallacy of it. Immediately it was discovered that the composition of the divisions had radically changed during the service in France. Men had died in battle, fallen sick, been transferred to other organizations, and their places had been taken by replacement troops shipped from the United States. Whole divisions had been rearranged. In the autumn of 1918 the expeditionary divisions were no longer representative of separate districts of the United States; each was in effect a cross section of the whole of America.
One of the first organizations to come back from France was a minor unit, a company, which had received its training at Camp Cody, Texas. The unit was sent to Camp Cody for demobilization and discharge. There it was discovered that, of every ten men who had joined the unit when it was in training, only four remained. The other six were newcomers, and to reach their homes they had to travel to points scattered from Oregon to the Atlantic coast.
Had this system been followed throughout the disbanding of the expeditionary units, it is evident that it would have cost the Government heavily in travel allowances paid to discharged soldiers, without saying anything about the tremendous traffic burden upon the railroads of the country. There was nothing to do but to break up the whole organization of the A. E. F. before sending it to the demobilization centers, and to assemble the men once more in units that possessed geographical identity.
The A. E. F. received instructions to attempt this break-up in France—at least to begin it there. It was found impossible to regroup the services of supply troops to any extent, because the embarkation ports in France, at which the supply troops were prepared for embarkation, were neither organized nor equipped to handle such a difficult work. More could be done with the divisional troops at Le Mans. Thereafter, whenever a division came into the area of Le Mans those soldiers who had joined the division after its training had been complete, and who did not live in the district centering in the original training camp in America, were detached and assembled with neighbors of theirs into territorial demobilization units, which became known as overseas casual companies. When the division itself went on from Le Mans to the ports it consisted only of the remnant of charter members who had been with it from the outset.
The prescribed size of an overseas casual company was two officers and 150 men, but it was seldom convenient to send forth companies uniformly organized. Men were not held waiting in France until casual companies could be built up to the prescribed size. One company might consist of fifty soldiers and the next 250, according to circumstances in the embarkation camp.
The principal ports of embarkation in the United States before the armistice had been New York (Hoboken), Newport News, and Boston. To these, in the system for receiving the overseas troops, was added Charleston, South Carolina. Charleston was opened as a port of debarkation principally for soldiers who were proceeding to the southern demobilization centers. The entire fleet of troop transports was divided proportionately among these ports, the greatest number operating between New York and the ports in France and the next greatest between Newport News and France. In the main each port kept its own fleet, but sometimes it became necessary to divert a vessel at sea from her usual course.