To the officers and enlisted men of the Medical Corps in this country the armistice meant only an increase of work. Therefore, in common with the other military departments the personnel of which after the armistice could see no immediate prospects of discharge, the Medical Department experienced a sharp drop in corps morale. Many of the officers and enlisted men attempted to get out at once, and some of them succeeded, but for the most part they were held in uniform; and later, when the men realized how badly their services were needed and what good they were accomplishing, they became contented and worked with good spirit until the corps could be placed on its permanent peace footing.
While the Army was expanding, the most noticeable work of the Medical Corps in this country had been that of examining the men who sought entrance to the training camps, sorting out the physically fit from the unfit. The care of military patients did not become a predominant medical activity in the United States until the late summer of 1918, when, simultaneously, the A. E. F. began sending home its first shiploads of wounded men and the influenza epidemic invaded the training camps. Meanwhile the care of war’s disabled had taken on a new meaning for the American military medical authorities. In former wars, as soon as a sick man or a wounded man had gained strength enough to travel, he was usually furloughed to his home, there to win his own way back to health if he could. In the summer of 1918 the War Department adopted the policy of not discharging disabled men from the Service until they were as nearly rehabilitated physically as medical science could make them; and even then a patient was not turned adrift, but might seek the services of other governmental agencies for specialized treatment and for reëducation that should enable him to take a place in civilian life at least as useful as the one he had left in order to join the military service. This policy had a marked effect upon the layout of the machinery which conducted the demobilization of the Army. It not only resulted in maintaining the Medical Corps, equipment and personnel, at war strength for many months after the armistice, but it also set up within the Government great new agencies for carrying out the Government’s beneficent purposes toward the ex-service men.
On the day of the armistice there were 200,000 patients in the A. E. F. hospitals in France. It was at once realized that the best interests of these men demanded their prompt return to the United States; for nowhere else could they secure the treatment most certain to restore them to complete health. The Medical Corps at home was ready for them. For months it had been constructing throughout the United States a great chain of specialized hospitals in anticipation of a heavy American casualty list in France.
Many of the 200,000 hospitalized members of the A. E. F. recovered in time to recross the ocean as members of regular military units, but more than half of them returned as patients needing more or less extended treatment in the military hospitals in this country. The policy in France was to move these men either in ambulances or in hospital trains from the interior hospitals up to hospitals near the ports of embarkation. There they were placed aboard the special hospital ships or given accommodations on the regular transports. Practically all of them debarked either at New York or at Newport News. New York could accommodate 24,000 patients at once in its regular and special debarkation hospitals. The two regular debarkation hospitals in New York—one located in the Greenhut Building and the other in the Grand Central Palace—each had beds for over 3,000 patients, and in addition the Army could call upon thirteen additional hospitals in New York in an emergency. At Newport News there was a regular and emergency equipment of 10,000 hospital beds for incoming overseas patients.
Harbor hospital boats and ambulances distributed the patients from the ships to the debarkation hospitals. There they were classified according to the sort of treatment they required. There were eighty interior hospitals which received overseas patients. The policy of the Army was to send patients whenever practicable to the hospitals nearest their homes. In the distribution of patients from the ports to the interior hospitals, the Medical Corps operated four hospital trains—three out of Hoboken and one out of Newport News—and twenty unit cars, one of which, attached to a train of regular Pullman or tourist sleepers, enabled such a train to serve as a moving hospital. Each of the regular hospital trains was made up of seven hospital cars, and carried comfortably 141 patients and 31 doctors, nurses, and orderlies. The unit cars were equipped with diet kitchens, in which could be cooked food enough for 250 patients. With this equipment 139,000 overseas patients were handled up to the end of the year 1919, and of these, 103,000 entered the country through the port of New York. On the first anniversary of the armistice thirty-six of the eighty general hospitals had been closed, an indication of the rate of convalescence among the military patients.
Photo from Engineer Department
AIR VIEW OF PERSHING STADIUM, PARIS
Photo by Signal Corps