America's Munitions 1917-1918

by Benedict Crowell; United States. War Department

Salvage undertakings touched intimately every soldier in the Army. This service which taught economy in the use of materials could with equal facility operate a laundry or dry-cleaning plant, or run a farm, or drive a good bargain in the sale of junk, or return goods that did not meet specifications and be reimbursed for them.

Wherever the experts of the service saw a leak through which the Government's money might flow out, they plugged it. An innovation in warfare as we knew it, it had to fight its way against prejudice at the start, but it developed what formerly was waste and a liability into a tremendous asset. Yet when the armistice came salvage had only commenced to show its possibilities. It had merely scratched the surface, but it had opened up unlimited fields for utilizing worn-out or unserviceable products or by-products of war. It had saved thousands of tons of shipping space in the transportation of supplies to the American Expeditionary Forces by using over again in France the things that otherwise would have had to be replaced by new; it saved this tonnage at the time when every ton saved counted heavily. In this and in the saving of materials at a time when all the raw materials of the earth would scarcely meet the insatiable demands of Moloch, the value of salvage can scarcely be measured by the money figures of its record.

SALVAGE IN THE UNITED STATES.

War salvage in the United States started on October 5, 1917, when the conservation branch was created in the Quartermaster Department. It started with an executive force of two commissioned officers and one stenographer. When the armistice was signed about 13 months later, the salvage service in the United States alone had a force of approximately 500 commissioned officers, 20,000 enlisted men, and 2,000 civilian employees.

In this period the method of clothing and feeding the American soldier had been revolutionized. The old way was to issue a uniform to a soldier and hold him responsible for the repair and cleaning of it. He owned his uniform and had to keep it in good condition at his own expense out of the $15 per month the Government paid him. The new way was for the Government itself to retain ownership of the uniform and to repair and clean it at public expense. The soldier was required to pay only for his laundry work at a uniform charge of $1 per month, much under what he would have had to pay at commercial rates.

Formerly the soldier had to repair his own shoes. The soldier prefers repaired shoes to new ones for campaign service because the former are broken in and are comfortable. After the salvage service was established the Government retained ownership of Army shoes and repaired them at Government expense.

Once the Army seldom conducted sales of the boxes and crates in which supplies were packed. Salvage undertook such sales, thereby bringing considerable revenue to the Army.

But in these and similar economies, it was not so much the saving of money that was important as it was the saving of materials at a time when the supply of all materials was scarcely adequate to the war demands. When our troops first reached France the officers were surprised at the emphasis placed upon salvage operations by the British and French armies. They were soon to learn that salvage was stressed because it supplied materials which were scarce. Glycerine, a component of high explosives, had become so short in supply that the British Ministry of Munitions paid as much as $1,250 a ton for it. The British army distilled its garbage and procured from the operation glycerine at a cost of $250 per ton. This was a financial saving of $1,000 a ton; but, more important, it supplied glycerine at the time when money did not count. The British Ministry of Munitions got the glycerine, which meant explosives for use against the Germans, which was the main thing.

The British appreciated the importance of salvage so much that one of the officers sent with the British mission to the United States early in the war was a salvage expert, included in the mission so that we might early have the benefit of the British experience in this work.