A. E. F. HORSES TO BE SOLD
Photo from Quartermaster Department
STORAGE WAREHOUSES AT JEFFERSONVILLE DEPOT
Like the Ordnance Department and the Air Service, the Quartermaster Corps decentralized the supervision of its war industry into manufacturing districts—thirteen of them—which were called zones. When most of the purchasing activities of the War Department were brought together under the Director of Purchase, these zones came along with the transferred organization, as did also seven procurement divisions taken over from the other supply bureaus. During the demobilization, claims boards were established in all the zones and procurement divisions. These twenty primary boards were subsidiary to the general Purchase Claims Board, which in turn was responsible to the War Department Claims Board through the representative of the latter attached to the Purchase Claims Board. This was the organization which settled the vast war business conducted under the Director of Purchase.
The general policies, the application of which to the termination of the ordnance contracts we have already described, were followed in closing out the industry which manufactured our quartermaster supplies. The Government paid no prospective profits, but stood all the legitimate expenses which the manufacturer had incurred looking to future production of finished supplies.
But it was not all termination and no buying for the Director of Purchase after the armistice. There was still an enormous army in the field and camps which had to be sustained; and, while great surpluses existed in some branches of supply, in others, such as immediately perishable supplies, the stocks on hand were sufficient for only a few weeks ahead. The purchases between the date of the armistice and January 24, 1920, by which date the demobilization of troops was about complete, came to $611,000,000, of which food purchases accounted for $420,000,000.
One national inheritance from the war experience in buying quartermaster supplies has been the creation at Chicago of a permanent subsistence school to which the Army sends officers and enlisted men for training as inspectors and buyers of food supplies. Another is the creation within the War Department of a division which studies the sources and supplies of the raw materials used by war industry and also determines the priority of access to these materials by the various consuming branches of the War Department. When the war came, the United States was sadly lacking in the very knowledge which these studies will develop. During the war the development of raw materials and the determination of priorities were administered by the Council of National Defense and, later and more successfully, by the War Industries Board, which became perhaps the most powerful and important of all the emergency war organizations. The War Department is thus retaining a nucleus around which another such organization might be built in a future emergency.
No outline of the demobilization of the quartermaster war enterprises portrays an adequate picture of what happened unless it tells something about the termination of the Government’s wool business. To protect its war interests the Government requisitioned all the raw wool in the United States in 1917 and 1918. Uncle Sam himself became the wool trade, the sole dealer, the sole market. Although the Navy and several other government branches used wool, the control over the commodity was exercised by the War Department through its Wool Administrator at Boston, who reported to the Quartermaster General in Washington.
On the first day of the armistice the Government had on its hands, or was obligated to accept delivery of, about 525,000,000 pounds of wool, a quantity which may be visualized by comparing it with the total annual American production of wool, which is less than 300,000,000 pounds. About one-fifth of this quantity was Australasian wool which had been purchased by the Foreign Mission of the War Industries Board. About 100,000 bales (33,000,000 pounds) of the Australasian wool had been shipped to the United States. We were left, therefore, with a binding contract to accept 200,000 bales from the Antipodes, this to come piling in on top of an accumulation which comprised a huge surplus over and above the normal national consumption. By some clever business jockeying (the British having various American contracts which they also wished to terminate) the British Government was induced to cancel the unfulfilled portion of the wool contract.