Before the return of the A. E. F. was well under way an important change took place in the organization of the official military travel bureau. Before the armistice, military transportation had been in the hands of two independent war department agencies. The Inland Traffic Service had charge of the movements of men and supplies by rail within the United States and up to the ports of embarkation. There the Embarkation Service received both, loaded them on the ships, and delivered them to the ports in France. Beyond those points the Quartermaster Service of the A. E. F. was in charge of military traffic. Both the Inland Traffic Service and the Embarkation Service were branches of the General Staff Division of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic.
In December, 1918, the Inland Traffic Service and the Embarkation Service joined to form a new branch called the Transportation Service, and for the first time the Army had a single organization in charge of all military travel, both freight and passenger, on this side of the piers in Europe. General Hines of the Embarkation Service became chief of the Transportation Service. The union brought about a coördination which made it possible for a limited equipment of railway coaches to carry troops away from the ports of debarkation as fast as the ships delivered them there.
As a rule, the overseas men did not travel so comfortably from the ports of debarkation to the demobilization centers as they had ridden when, months earlier, they had traveled from those same centers up to the ports to board the ships for France. The conditions of military transportation were different. The equipment of railway cars at the Army’s disposal was limited. It had never consisted of more than 1,500 sleeping cars—tourist sleepers they were, made by removing the rugs and hangings from first-class Pullman coaches. These 1,500 cars, in full operation, could carry less than 50,000 men at one time. Nevertheless, although before the armistice the Army supplied railroad transportation to over 8,000,000 men, nearly every one who traveled at night slept in a comfortable berth. During that period practically all the long-haul travel was between the training camps and the ports of embarkation. The forces in America proceeded to embarkation by divisions—camp by camp. Thus it was possible to arrange the shipping schedules to allow for the most convenient operation of the military rolling stock. But no such arrangement was possible during demobilization. The system of splitting up the overseas units at the ports in this country and distributing their men according to residential origin made it necessary to maintain practically continuous train service between the various Atlantic ports and the thirty-three demobilization centers. The sleeping-car equipment was not nearly large enough to serve in such an operation, and a great many soldiers rode in day coaches halfway across the continent. They did not grumble too much at the treatment. It was better than riding in French box cars, at any rate, and after all they were getting home.
One of the finest accomplishments of military transportation after the armistice was the distribution of 150,000 sick and wounded soldiers of the A. E. F. among the many military hospitals of the United States. The Transportation Service operated six hospital ships at New York. These vessels took the patients from the general debarkation hospital on Ellis Island and carried them on their way to various special evacuation hospitals in the New York metropolitan district. From there they were sent to general hospitals throughout the country. The Service kept six hospital trains in continuous operation, as well as about 250 hospital cars. No such movement of invalids was ever before known in the United States.
The records of the Transportation Service show that in disbanding the Army it carried over 7,000,000 military passengers in special cars and trains. The average journey was 500 miles. Train accidents cost the lives of only two soldiers and injured only seventeen. This high degree of safety was largely due to the fact that troop trains were held down to a running schedule of twenty miles an hour.
The whole system of distribution and travel would have worked almost automatically except for one thing—the victory parades. Whenever it could do so without too great disruption of the system, the War Department yielded to the desire of communities to celebrate with parades the return of their overseas sons. Nearly 200,000 troops in all marched in more than 450 parades, which ranged from the brief processions of single companies to such great demonstrations as those of the First Division in New York and Washington in September, 1919.
Six parades of returning overseas troops passed under the triumphal arch over Fifth Avenue at Madison Square, New York. Of these, the parades of the Twenty-seventh and Seventy-seventh Divisions, both originally composed almost exclusively of New York men, were closest to the metropolitan heart. Part of the Twenty-eighth Division paraded in Philadelphia on May 15, 1919. The Thirty-third Division paraded in Chicago in three sections in late May and early June.
These processions were but preliminary to the greatest celebration of all—the one which occurred when the First Division, first to go to France, last to come back, returned, with General John J. Pershing, the Commander-in-Chief of the American Expeditionary Forces, at its head. In arranging for the parades of the First Division, the War Department determined to show the spectators a combat division in full field panoply—and that meant equipping it with its transport animals. All divisions had left their animals in France, and solely for these spectacles the Transportation Service assembled in New York before the day of the first parade several thousand horses and mules secured from army posts as far west as Texas and then transported to New York.
The First Division gathered in the debarkation camps at New York. It included as an attached unit the specially trained drill regiment of the Third Army Corps. So augmented, it consisted of nearly 24,000 men and their wheeled equipment of artillery, service trains, repair shops, bakeries, kitchens, and so on, the motorized equipment alone numbering five hundred trucks and sixty motorcycles. The transportation of this great unit to Washington afforded a special problem that would have been impossible of solution by any organization less expert than the one which had administered military travel for so many months past. There were no facilities at Washington for the accommodation of such a number of troops, and therefore it was necessary to hold them in the New York camps and take them to Washington on the eve of the parade itself. After the New York appearance of the Division its motor fleet was sent over the highways to Washington, the vehicles incidentally carrying 1,770 men with them. The freighting to Washington of the animals and horse-drawn vehicles, including the artillery, began immediately after the New York parade disbanded and continued for several days. The twenty-two trains carrying the foot soldiers all arrived in Washington during the night before the parade, the last ones just in time to allow their passengers to find their places in the procession.
