At first American locomotives were shipped in knocked-down parts and set up again after their arrival in France. But this method consumed too much time, when time cost high in human life and treasure. A hurried search was made for ships with holds and hatches big enough to receive such burdens. The first ship that went thus loaded carried thirty-three standard locomotives and tenders tightly packed in bales of hay. Each one was lifted from the rails beside the dock by a huge derrick, as easily as a cat lifts a kitten, and on the other side was lifted from its place in the hold to the rails, ready for express service to the front, in forty-six minutes. In all, 1,500 locomotives, either knocked-down or ready for service, were transported and 20,000 freight cars were taken over in knocked-down parts and erected again at a big assembling station. There were constructed 850 miles of standard gauge railroads for needs which the existing French railways did not meet, of which 500 miles were built in the last five months of the war. In addition, there were constructed 115 miles of light railway, while 140 miles of German light railway were repaired and made fit for operation. In order to carry our own lines across French roads without interfering with traffic it was necessary to build many miles of switches and cut-offs. Americans operated 225 miles of French railways. The transportation system made use also of 400 miles of inland waterways on which hundreds of barges towed by tugs sent over for that purpose carried army supplies. This entire huge transportation system was planned, developed, operated and manned by American railroad men, from railway company presidents and general managers to brakemen, and required the services of more than 70,000 men.
The aviation program called for big construction works in France, where seventeen large flying fields, divided into several air instruction centers, were developed. One of these aviation centers covered thirty-six square miles and was a city complete in itself, as was each of the other centers, with their barracks, dining halls, hangars, repair and assembly shops, hospital, officers’ and nurses’ quarters, welfare buildings. And all of these complete, self-contained cities, each housing thousands of people, grew in less than a year upon farming lands.
Hospitals were built upon a standardized system that could expand the number of available beds by from one thousand to five thousand in one day. When the armistice was signed there were in operation 219 base and camp hospitals and twelve convalescent camps and the hospital service was ready to provide a total of 284,000 beds. One of these hospital centers, the huge institution at Beaune, afterwards utilized by the “Khaki University,” was constructed in a few months, its 600 buildings of a permanent type including the necessary operating rooms, laboratories, administration buildings, officers’ and nurses’ quarters, and buildings for patients for a series of ten hospitals, each devoted to its own specialty and having its own staff of surgeons, physicians, nurses and men. For the building of this hospital center railways were run to the site and concrete mixers set up to provide the material, and work was kept going at high speed day and night until it was ready to receive patients.
Hundreds of construction projects were constantly under way for the housing, care, training and welfare of the army whose numbers were growing by tens of thousands every week and would in a few months more have amounted to four million men. There were receiving camps of tents and wooden barracks and dining halls and welfare structures, each of which had its water works and electric lighting and sewage disposal plants, for the debarking men; training camps; schools for the instruction of cooks, chauffeurs, Salvage Corps workers, Tank Corps men, candidates for the Engineering Corps, cavalry officers, coffee roasters, statistical officers, trench artillerymen, and for scores of other specialties in fighting and in caring for the fighting men, by intensive work through long hours every day; nearly a hundred factories in which were made candy, chocolate, crackers, hard bread and macaroni and coffee was roasted and ground, by which much tonnage was saved per month and costs were reduced; huge salvage and repair work; big laundry and sterilizing plants in one of which more than half a million pieces were washed or sterilized per week; motor truck depots and reconstruction parks—one of these latter transformed in two months from a thousand acres of farm land into a great motor plant with shops of steel and concrete covering 125,000 square feet, railways and switches, storehouses and offices; and dozens of other structures and developments in which great buildings had either to be erected or leased and adapted to new purposes.
Upon the shoulders of the Engineering Corps of the United States Army fell the task of achieving this miracle of construction and development in France. At our entrance into the war it consisted of 256 commissioned officers and 2,100 enlisted men, in seven organizations. A year and a half later it had expanded to 9,000 officers and 255,000 enlisted men, in 309 organizations of which each did a specialized kind of work. A quarry regiment got out stone from French quarries; forestry regiments, under the permission and supervision of the French Government, went into French forests and cut down trees, set up saw mills and carried on lumbering operations in order to help supply the immense lumber needs of our construction projects and so lessen the pressure upon the shipping service; highway regiments repaired roads and built new ones; railroad regiments laid hundreds of miles of railway track; a camouflage regiment composed of architects, painters, sculptors and engineers protected and disguised army operations and ran a factory for the making of camouflage material; map-making regiments printed maps immediately behind the battle lines; others developed water and electric power and installed plants for our manufacturing necessities in more than three hundred localities; still others dug trenches and tunneled under the enemy’s lines and built bridges in the rear of the fleeing foe for the immediate passage of American troops in pursuit; and sometimes they threw down picks and shovels and with hastily seized rifles and bayonets showed themselves to be as good fighters as workers.
All this vast and varied achievement in France, of which it is possible to mention here only illustrative parts of a mere outline, was made possible by the big, closely knit and smoothly working organization of the two branches of the A. E. F., the Army and its Service of Supply. At the head of it all, organizer and administrator as well as soldier and general, was General Pershing, Commander in Chief. Under him the five great divisions of General Head Quarters,—the section that saw to it that all the needed elements of warfare, men, munitions, supplies, and materials for construction, were landed in France; the section that received and distributed all these elements; the section that trained the personnel of every sort; the sections that operated the troops and secured information concerning the enemy and safe-guarded that concerning our own affairs,—carried on each its own work in a great, widely ramifying organization, systematized and highly organized down to its last detail. Running all these organizations on business principles, in addition to the army officers who directed the phases dealing with combat, were successful business and professional men from private life in the United States who gave up big salaries and important positions to work for their country in France on the pay of an army officer. Among them and spending twelve, sixteen, even twenty hours out of the twenty-four on the job of speeding each his own particular work to success were engineers of international renown who had put through mighty projects of bridging and damming rivers, building railroads and tunneling the earth, experts in financial law, in mechanics, in construction, in finance, manufacturers of automobiles, leaders in steel industries, organizers of big business, officials of important railway companies.
CHAPTER VIII
AT THE FRONT
When Americans endeavor to estimate the value of their work on the lines of battle they are bound to see and should be glad in justice to admit that our actual fighting effort was small indeed compared with the vast and bloody and appalling struggles in which our war associates had almost exhausted themselves. They are bound to see that its importance in the final decision was incommensurate with the amount of what they actually did on the fighting lines, although not, perhaps, with the extent of the nation’s preparation. It fell to America to add the deciding strength after years of battle in which the combatants had been so nearly equal that their armies on the Western front had swayed back and forth over a zone only a few miles in width.
Nevertheless, no just summing up of the last year of the war can fail to award to America the credit of having been the final deciding factor, a credit that belongs alike to the valor and size of her armies, the ability of their officers and the overwhelming might and zeal with which the whole nation had gathered itself up for the delivery of the heaviest blows in its power to give. The rapidly growing evidence of how powerful those blows would be, as shown by our enormous preparations in France and the war spirit and war activities in the United States, had convinced the enemy that unless he won decisive results by the autumn of 1918 there was no possibility of his final victory. And therefore he put forth his supreme efforts during the spring and summer of that year. The enormous scale upon which this country entered upon and carried through its preparations for war both at home and in France sent to high figures the money cost of the war to the United States, but it made immeasurable savings in human life, for anything less would have meant more months of war, even more bloody than the preceding years.
The enemy’s determination to win a decisive victory in the spring or summer of 1918 before, he believed, it would be possible for the American Army to make itself felt at the front forced England and France and Italy to make what would have been, without our help, their last stand. They had reached the limit of what they could do and were fighting “with their backs to the wall.” Exhausted by nearly four years of bitter struggle they were almost but not quite strong enough to withstand the final, determined, desperate rush of the foe for which he was gathering together all his powers. And American forces gave the aid that was needed to drive him back.