Behind the uniformed and organized Army as it existed on the eleventh day of November was another force of a quarter of a million men, technically under arms. These were Selective Service men, drafted men, entraining that day and adding themselves to the human flood sweeping on toward Germany. In number this force alone was larger than any ever previously enrolled at one time in the American military service, except the forces called to the colors during the Civil War; yet so expanded had become our values that they attracted only passing attention in the midst of larger war activities. These inductives were one more increment—that was all.
And behind the Army itself were twenty-five million American men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, registered, classified, and numbered in the order in which they too in turn should join the current that led, if necessary, to the supreme sacrifice.
The foundation on which rested this human edifice was industrial. Nothing less than the whole of America’s material resources had been pledged to the end of victory. The whole of America’s resources! How inadequately could pigmy man realize their might before he took them all and formed and molded them into one single-purpose machine! That machine was born in travail that broke men’s bodies and reputations, that threw down the mighty from their seats and exalted those of low degree, that moved inexorably but surely. And when the machine was built it released forces terrifying even to men accustomed to administering the greatest of human activities, forces well-nigh ungovernable.
It took seven million workers, men and women, to operate the war industrial machine—seven million Americans delving in the earth for ores, chemicals, and fuels, felling the forests, quarrying the rocks, carrying the raw materials to the mills, tending the fires and the furnaces, operating the cranes, guiding the finishing machinery with a precision never before demanded, slaughtering the beeves, curing the meat, packing the vegetables, weaving the fabrics, fashioning the garments, transporting all, and accomplishing the million separate tasks necessary to the munitioning of the Army.
And as a background to all this, behind both the military and the industrial armies, was another force, perhaps the greatest force of all—the will of the people themselves, of one hundred million Americans who, without the coercion and duress of law and as a purely voluntary act, denied their appetites, their pleasures, and their vanities, contributed their utmost to the war finances, made war gardens to add to the food supply, produced millions of articles for the comfort of the soldiers both well and wounded, and in one way or another put forth effort that did not flag until victory came.
Such was America in a war that truly threatened her existence—America invincible.
The armistice put an end to all this enterprise and effort. It did more—the armistice was a command to the Government to scrap the war machine and restore its parts to the peaceful order in which they had been found. In military law, an armistice denotes the temporary cessation of hostilities; but the armistice of 1918 was a finality. Its terms destroyed the German military power. Those in authority, aware that the armistice was to be no period of waiting with collected forces for the outcome of negotiations, did not pause even to survey the magnitude of the thing they had built: they turned immediately to the task of dismantling it. Some of the processes of demobilization began before the guns ceased to fire. Five days before the armistice the A. E. F. canceled many of the foreign orders for important supplies. On November 1 we stopped sending combatant troops to France. In late October the Ordnance Department created an organization for demobilizing war industry.
However, before the machine could be knocked down and its parts distributed, it had to be stopped. There are two ways of stopping the limited express. One is to throw a switch ahead of it—effective, but disastrous to the train. The other way is to put on the brakes.
The war-industry machine had attained a momentum almost beyond mundane comparisons. Slow in gaining headway, like any other great mass, as thousands added their brains and their muscles to its progress it gathered speed until, at the first day of the armistice, it was nearing the point at which it could consume the material resources and turn them out as finished war products up to the capacity of American mechanical skill and machinery to handle them. It had not quite reached that point. Many of the vital but easily manufactured supplies had long since reached the pinnacles of their production curves, but some of the more difficult ones were not yet in full manufacture. On Armistice Day, however, the industry was not more than six months away from the planned limit of its fecundity.
For the administration of the industrial enterprise the task ahead was first to bring that momentum to a halt and then to break up the machine. The easiest way was to throw a switch ahead of it—in other words, to issue a blanket stop-order on all military manufacturing projects. But to have done that would have been to court consequences as disastrous as those of war itself. Business and industry would have fallen into chaos and the country would have been filled with jobless men. The other way, the way chosen, was to apply the brakes to the thousands of wheels.