On the industrial side demobilization was the liquidation of a business whose commitments had reached the staggering total of $35,000,000,000. Demobilization meant taking practically the entire industrial structure of the United States, which had become one vast munitions plant, and converting it again into an instrumentality for producing the commodities of peaceful commerce. This without stopping an essential wheel, and also in the briefest possible time, for the world was in sore need of these products. Efficient demobilization, it follows, would permit the 7,000,000 industrial war workers to turn without a break in employment from the production of war supplies to that of peace supplies.

At the base of modern business stability lies the inviolability of contracts. He who breaches a contract must expect to pay indemnity, and the Government cannot except itself from this rule. Demobilization meant the suspension and termination of war contracts running into billions in value, many of them without a scrap of paper to show as a written instrument; it meant termination without laying the Government open to the payment of damages, and therefore it implied the honorable adjustment of the claims of the contractors.

One of the conditions on which complete demobilization depended was the adoption of a future military policy for the United States. But this was in the hands, not of the military organization, but of Congress. The whole program, therefore, could not be put through until Congress had acted. After the policy was defined, then it became the duty of the demobilization forces to choose and store safely the reserve equipment for the permanent establishment and for the field use of a possible future combatant force until another war industry could be brought into existence.

When that had been done there would remain a surplus of military property. It thereupon became the function of demobilization to dispose of this property through a sales organization that would have in its stocks goods of a greater variety and value than those at the disposal of any private sales agency in the United States. This branch of the work also included the sale of great quantities of A. E. F. supplies in Europe, which was already glutted with the surpluses of its own armies. The sales at home must include the sale of hundreds of buildings put up for the war establishment.

Paradoxically, demobilization included the acquirement of large quantities of real estate—for the storage of reserve supplies and the creation of a physical plant for the permanent military establishment.

Finally, demobilization meant the delicate business of striking a cash balance that would terminate our relations with the Allies, meeting their claims against us for the supply of materials and for the use and destruction of private property abroad, and pressing our own claims against them for materials sold to them.

The astonishing thing was the swiftness with which this great program was carried through. Within a year after the last gun was fired America had returned to the normal. The whole A. E. F. had been brought back in American vessels in ten months. In that time practically the entire Army had been paid off, disbanded, and transported to its homes. War businesses were braked to a standstill in an average time of three months, without a single industrial disturbance of any consequence. At the end of the year the greater part of the manufacturers’ claims had been satisfied with compromises fair both to the contractors and to the Government. The savings in contract terminations and adjustments had run into billions of dollars. A blanket settlement had been made with the Allies, thus virtually closing up our business in Europe. A permanent military policy had been written into law. The storage buildings and spaces were filled with reserve materials inventoried, catalogued, and protected against deterioration. Packed away compactly were the tools and machinery of an embryonic war industry ready to be expanded at will in the event of another war. Materials, largely of special war value and therefore normally to be regarded as scrap and junk, had been sold to the tune of billions, the exercise of ingenuity in the sales department producing a recovery that was remarkably large, averaging 64 per cent of the war cost.

Such was our war demobilization. No other single business enterprise in all human history compared with it in magnitude; yet, in the midst of the peace negotiations and amid the economic crises fretting the earth, it attracted scant notice. To-day, only the continuing sale of surplus war materials and the adjudication of the last and most difficult of the industrial claims give evidence of the enterprise which engaged the efforts of the whole nation so short a time ago.

CHAPTER II
THE A. E. F. EMBARKS

The American Expeditionary Forces, on November 11, 1918, were ill prepared to conduct the manifold activities leading to their demobilization. Up to that day the expedition had been too busy going ahead to think much about how it was to get home. But now had come the armistice, the end. The great adventure was over. The guerre was fini.