In the Chemical Warfare Service at the end of hostilities were 1,700 chemists from civil life who had worked steadily to aid in its rapid and efficient development. Under the furious goad of war the Service succeeded in reducing the cost of phosgene gas from $1.50 to 15 cents per pound and therefore increasing very greatly its usefulness in various industries, especially that of dyestuffs. The record of development and production in chemistry is one of the fairly amazing war achievements of this country and is replete with possibilities for the peaceful uses of industry.
When America entered the war, problems and needs rose up at every hand, like dragons springing from the ground, and all of them, in all their number and complexity and variety, had to be met and conquered at the same time. None of them was more difficult than this problem of the creation of a munitions industry, for it demanded a highly specialized manufacturing equipment of enormous capacity and great variety which we did not have, concerning which we had in the past known but little and for which we had always had slight regard. We possessed for it neither the plants, the skilled labor nor the experience. New industrial organizations had to be created and financed, plants had to be built, all the complicated and varied weapons of modern scientific warfare had to be designed and manufactured, and so also did many of the great number and variety of the tools with which they would be made. Not only had mechanics to be trained for much of this skill exacting work, but the enormous expansion in the Ordnance Department made necessary rapid development of knowledge and skill among the big proportion of its new members. There is nothing more interesting in the detailed story of the munitioning of our army than the frequency with which one comes upon the statement that “a school was established” for the training of personnel in this, or that, or another phase of ordnance duties.
The bare figures of the cost of all this enormous creation and expansion, made many times greater by the necessity of haste at whatever cost, give a vague sort of measuring stick of the energy and the grim purpose that went into the providing of munitions for our army. In a year and a half of war the amount of money expended or obligated for ordnance totaled $13,000,000,000—thirteen times what it cost to run the entire government for a year in the years just before the war.
CHAPTER V
CARING FOR THE WOUNDED
The story of the development of the Medical Department of the Army, its care of the human wreckage of the battlefield and of the physical welfare of the fighting forces both at home and overseas recounts one of the finest and most wonderful of the achievements of the War Department. It is the same story of marvelous expansion in quick time, of high resolve and determined effort to achieve the apparently impossible, and of results that seem almost magical in their bigness and importance and the rapidity with which they were brought about that is true of all the American war activities.
At the beginning of April, 1917, there were in the Medical Department 750 medical officers in regular service and 2,600 in reserve. The army nurse corps numbered 400 and there was an enlisted personnel of 6,600. There were seven army hospitals with a bed capacity of 5,000, aside from a few small and unimportant post hospitals. A year and a half later it had a larger personnel than that of the entire American army at the outbreak of the Spanish-American war. It numbered then 40,000 officers, 21,000 nurses and 245,000 men. In the United States there were over eighty fully equipped hospitals with a capacity of 120,000 patients and operating with the American Expeditionary Force were 219 base and camp hospitals having a capacity of 284,000 patients. It was estimated that nearly one-third of the entire medical profession in the Union went into active service with the Army and among their numbers were many of the most distinguished physicians and surgeons in the country. Of those who went overseas, nearly half that number, over 1,000, were detailed to serve with the British forces.
As an instance of the speed with which it was necessary to work to secure the needed expansion for the care of war’s wreckage the story of the building of one of the New York City debarkation hospitals is illuminating. Several acres of ground on Staten Island were secured for it and the entire plant, consisting of eighty-six buildings, including a theater of seven thousand seating capacity, with heating plant and electric light, water and sewage connections, was finished and ready for use within one hundred days from the turning of the first spadeful of earth in the preparation of the site. Its normal accommodation was for 1,500 patients, but it was so planned that it could be easily and quickly expanded to care for three times that number. One of its buildings, measuring 230 by 30 feet, was begun in the morning, finished by noon of the same day, and equipped by night. Hospital facilities in France had also to be created quickly and equipped at once with all the means of treating the victims of scientific warfare that the needs of the time had evolved. One such big institution in the Cote d’Or region, for the building of which railways had to be run to the site and concrete mixers set up and kept going day and night until it was finished, had 600 buildings of a permanent type and was, in effect, a series of ten hospitals in one, each devoted to its own specialty and having its own staff of thirty physicians and surgeons, a hundred nurses and twice as many men of the Medical and Sanitary Corps, and its own operating rooms, laboratories, kitchens, officers’ and nurses’ quarters, administration buildings and buildings for patients. A laundry capable of doing the work for 30,000 people served the entire plant. The hospital cared for 25,000 at a time and beside it was a convalescent camp having facilities for all manner of outdoor games with a capacity for 5,000 more into which the men were graduated for recovery. Nearly 800,000 soldiers of the American Army were treated in our overseas hospitals during our war period.
Of the hospitals in the United States a considerable number were in cantonments and camps and were chiefly used by the troops in training. The others, specialized for the use to which they were put, were for debarkation purposes and for the treatment of the wounded, ill, gassed, tuberculous or blinded. Debarkation hospitals received them as they were landed and from these they were transferred to receiving hospitals in and about the port city. Afterward, as soon as physically able, they were sent by hospital boat or train to a specialized hospital, if that were necessary, or if not to the general hospital nearest the patient’s home. These specializing hospitals were so located as to secure for each one whatever advantages were possible of situation and climate. Several hospital trains, each complete in itself, with kitchen, dining and ward cars, special beds for stretcher cases, and a car for the medical staff, were provided for transportation of the wounded by land, while a number of hospital boats properly equipped and staffed with physicians and nurses afforded transportation by water. In addition to the hospitals, convalescents were cared for in numbers of convalescent homes all over the country that were donated for that purpose by individuals and organizations who offered use of their homes, estates, clubhouses and other buildings. The Red Cross erected and staffed convalescent houses at all of the base and general army hospitals in the United States, which gave welcome, cheer and recreation to the recovering patients.
Through the port of New York flowed the main stream of the American Army on its way overseas and there its individual factors had to undergo final physical examination. The work of the Surgeon of the Port expanded from week to week, as his duties in connection with the army and the army transports grew, keeping pace with the increasing numbers that were sent month by month to Europe. In one mid-summer month in 1918, and subsequent months saw even greater numbers, he put his final approval of physical fitness on 272,000 soldiers bound for the battlefields of France. On the first of July, 1917, the staff of the Surgeon of the Port of Embarkation, New York, consisted of two officers and one private. A year later there were under him 530 commissioned officers, 110 contract surgeons, 340 nurses and 2,640 men, while directly under his control, exclusive of other hospitals in the same region, were thirteen hospitals having 12,500 bed capacity of which 11,000 were ready for use.
A more than fifty-fold expansion in the number of army nurses, from 400 to 21,000, was necessary to meet the need for their services. Graduating nurses entered the nurses’ corps and an army School of Nursing was established, with headquarters in Washington and branches in a score of military camps throughout the country. Many hundreds of young women enrolled, took the course of training which, intensive and somewhat specialized for army work, prepared them quickly for duty.