In the general bulk sale of A. E. F. property to the French Government went American medical supplies worth $34,000,000. The Medical Corps turned over to the American Red Cross in France supplies worth $9,000,000 for use in the relief of the stricken populations of Europe. To other governments the A. E. F. sold medical supplies worth $6,000,000. The rest of the medical supplies in Europe were returned to the United States. In this country the surplus medical supplies were distributed in various ways—to the Public Health Service, into the army reserves, and (by sale) to the public.
CHAPTER XV
QUARTERMASTER SUPPLIES
The quartermaster does not loom large against the heroic background of war. The Army’s victualer and clothier collects few croix de guerre, and his interest in the Congressional Medal of Honor is impersonal. So long as his work is going well, you hear little about him; but let him once supply some tainted beef to the troops in the field or fail to deliver on time the Army’s winter underwear, and then the country takes notice of the quartermaster.
God nowadays is on the side of the army with the best business organization, as even Napoleon himself might admit if he were to look over the cash balances of the late war. By that token the Quartermaster Service was the chief factor in the victory, because that organization became approximately the business office of the Army. For purely the creature comforts—food, clothing, and shelter—the Army spent far more money than it did for its weapons and ammunition; but the activities of the army quartermasters embraced a much wider range of supplies than these. Theorize as you will about the evolution of the Army’s purchasing offices during the war until they were brought together into a single centralized purchasing agency, the fact remains that the ultimate purchasing agency was essentially the Quartermaster Service, magnified and expanded in power. General George W. Goethals was Quartermaster General when the General Staff Division of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic (which unified all army buying and brought order into the supply situation) was built around his personality and ability, and thereafter his chief assistant bore the title of “Quartermaster General, Director of Purchase and Storage.” The new Division retained all the duties of buying quartermaster supplies and assumed also the duty of buying all other supplies except the strictly technical ones. And even these were purchased by the older supply bureaus under the complete supervision of the Division of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic.
When we approach the subject of the demobilization of the war industry which produced quartermaster supplies, we confront what was, measured in tons and in dollars and cents, the greatest business undertaking of the war. These pages have been filled by the story of the spectacular contest of American industrial genius with the inanimate resources which it fabricated into airplanes, artillery, and ammunition; but what filled the freight trains and the holds of the transatlantic cargo transports and the fleets of roaring trucks on the roads of France was not arms and the machinery of destruction to the degree that it was eatables and wearables, tentage, stoves and ranges, pots and pans—quartermaster supplies. There was the main weight and bulk; into them went the most money.
The war business of the Director of Purchase was represented by nearly 16,000 contracts. The total face value of these contracts came to nearly $8,000,000,000. They represented all food procured by the Army during the war and afterwards, all forage for the Army’s animals, all clothing, all textile supplies of every sort, all shoes, harness, and other leather goods, all animals purchased, all motor vehicles, all wagons of every sort, all carts hand-drawn, engineering supplies of many kinds, all coal, oil, gasoline, paints, hospital equipment, medical and surgical supplies, hardware of all sorts, tools, tentage and other camp equipment, rope, office supplies, and many less conspicuous things. Several of these classes, it will be noted, consisted of munitions formerly procured by the separate technical supply bureaus, but the mass of them were the traditional quartermaster supplies.
To get a comprehensive and clear-cut picture of the demobilization of this branch of war industry, let us start in France and follow back the home-bound expedition after it had closed up its business abroad.
In the first place, the A. E. F. became a heavy purchaser of quartermaster supplies abroad. The purchasing office of the expedition became a great business organization. It bought supplies in almost every accessible country of Europe, and its agents even went to Africa and made purchases in Algeria and Morocco. These supplies were bought, not because America could not furnish them, but for the familiar sake of saving the use of the precious ocean tonnage. And a great deal of tonnage was saved by these foreign purchases. The Quartermaster Corps with the A. E. F. purchased 400,000 tons of miscellaneous supplies, but chiefly food and clothing, at the cost of $150,000,000. In addition, many horses were procured in Europe. The greatest tonnage saving of all, however, was brought about by the arrangement which permitted the A. E. F. to purchase coal at the Welsh mines. The cross-Channel fleet freighted more than 1,000,000 tons of coal from England. This not only relieved the transatlantic fleet of the necessity of lifting that amount of cargo, but it also permitted the employment in the Channel of vessels not well adapted to the transoceanic convoying. It is a moderate estimate that the American quartermaster purchases abroad saved the transatlantic shipment of 1,500,000 tons of cargo, a lading that would fill 300 large ships.
Naturally the armistice found France, principally, and the other nations of western Europe to a slighter extent, liberally sprinkled with A. E. F. contracts for the production of quartermaster supplies. Sixty-six French factories, for instance, were working exclusively for the Americans in producing bread, biscuits, macaroni, and candy. The question immediately arose as to the best method of stopping all European production for the A. E. F. The expedition’s warehouses and depots were crammed to their capacities, and additional supplies were on the ocean in transports bound for France. A month, even a week, earlier it had not seemed possible that the industries of America and Europe put together, could produce an oversupply of these munitions, for the A. E. F. was looking forward to a strength of 4,500,000 men in 1919. But with the sudden armistice the expedition found itself with a stock of supplies on hand which it could not possibly consume.
For that reason its European war industry was terminated abruptly. There was little of the tapering-off of production that was characteristic of the demobilization in the United States. The military authorities were not nearly so considerate of the welfare of their foreign contractors as they were of those at home. The American business abroad was so small, compared with the whole war industry of the countries of the Allies, that the outright abrogation of the American contracts could not cause a general industrial slump. But there were other considerations. The War Department could make use of much of the domestic post-armistice production, either as war reserves or as goods for sale. In Europe every pound of quartermaster supplies produced after the armistice was likely to prove a dead loss to the United States. Such supplies were not needed for military reserves, of which there was an abundance already within the United States. They could not be sold advantageously abroad, because there was no market for them, with the Allied armies dumping their enormous surpluses on that same market. They could not be shipped in reasonable time to the United States for sale, because of the lack of ocean tonnage. Consequently, whereas it was the policy within the United States to terminate war industry gradually, the keynote of our industrial demobilization abroad was outright cancellation. It was cheaper to pay cancellation indemnities than to accept the supplies that would otherwise have been produced; and this was the general policy adopted in terminating all our foreign contracts, with such exceptions, notably in some of the airplane and artillery contracts, as are noted elsewhere in this volume.