From the training camp schools of intensive study and drill many thousands of young men were assigned for work at the special officers’ training camps where officers were prepared for the specialized duties of the Signal, Engineer and Quartermasters Corps, and for coast and field artillery and machine gun work. Here also there were long hours and steady, close application. From these special training camps 60,000 officers were graduated. A shortened and intensified course at West Point greatly increased the number of its graduates ready for officers’ service with the army.
In the autumn of 1918 five hundred colleges and universities became a part of the great program of the War Department. Each of these institutions was transformed into a martial training school and nearly all the men students of the whole five hundred, about 170,000 in all, joined the Students’ Army Training Corps, thus becoming members of the United States Army. But while these youths spent much time on drill and training they also were expected to keep up their other studies. For this was a scientific war and demanded for its prosecution men skilled in many branches of learning. The young men were being trained to be not only soldiers but also engineers, chemists, physicians, geologists, physicists, and specialists in many other lines. From their ranks the most promising were selected and sent to military camps for six weeks of a course of rigid and intensive military training in some special line of military service. West Point graduates, army officers with experience on the other side, officers loaned by our Allies, had charge of the military supervision and work of this great body of students. And during the summer of 1918 7,000 members of university and college faculties attended special training camps to prepare themselves to assist in this work. The school year’s training was expected to yield, by the spring of 1919, from 60,000 to 70,000 officers.
Thus, by training, selection, rigid test, more intensive training, the hardest of hard work, and still more training under men who had proved their worth in battle and had brought back dearly won knowledge of present day methods of warfare, the need for more, and more, and ever more officers for the rapidly expanding army was met. And in the camps and cantonments the daily drill, drill, drill, and again drill, drill, drill, of a million and a half of soldiers was constantly carried on.
Early in the course of all these activities it was perceived that it would be advisable to reconstruct the entire plan of organization of the army in order to make the size and number of its fighting units correspond with those of the English and French armies and thus simplify the brigading of our troops with the others and the exchanging of units in the front lines. This reorganization was carried out, as was also the merging together into one body of the three organizations, Regular Army, National Guard and National Army, in the midst of all the high-speeded preparations for war.
Another revolution in army methods, the result of the imperious necessity for the highest efficiency possible to obtain, whether from soldier or officer, individual or army, was the sweeping away of the old system of promotion by seniority. All officers below the rank of Brigadier-General, under these new regulations, had to undergo the passing of judgment upon them every three months by their immediate superiors. They were rated according to their physical and personal qualities, capacity for leadership, intelligence, and value to the service, and promotion depended upon how well they passed these tests.
CHAPTER II
HOUSING THE SOLDIERS AND THEIR SUPPLIES
While the machinery was being devised and set in motion for forming a great army by means of the selective draft and officers were being schooled for its training, immense camps had to be provided in which hundreds of thousands of men could be trained, warehouses had to be built in which to gather and store the enormous amounts of supplies necessary for their maintenance and equipment, huge plants had to be constructed for the making of certain kinds of ordnance, and included in the vast scheme of construction work, all of it necessary almost at once, were also flying fields, embarkation depots, port and terminal facilities.
The work of building the cantonments was, alone, a very great engineering achievement. It called for an expenditure within three months of $150,000,000, more than three times that of the largest year’s work on the Panama Canal, and it demanded the construction of nearly a score of goodly sized cities, to be ready for occupancy by the following September. For this huge job, when war was declared, there was one colonel with four assistants and a few draughtsmen, clerks and stenographers. Around that lone colonel there was built up, almost over night, by telegraph and telephone, the organization of the Government’s Construction Division, that carried through successfully the whole vast program. For the building of the cantonments, engineers, town planners and civilians having expert knowledge came to its assistance, investigating possible sites and studying their water supply, transportation facilities and availability of construction materials. Contracts were let for sixteen National Army cantonments and as many National Guard camps. These were all signed between the fifteenth and twenty-seventh of June and in three months some of them were in use, while in six months all the work had been finished, plus many additions and betterments.
The building of each meant the creation of a city that would house from forty to eighty thousand people. The ground surface had to be prepared, hills leveled, valleys filled, trees uprooted, brush cleared away and roads built. Then began the construction of barracks for the men, officers’ and nurses’ quarters, hospitals, repair shops, and all the other buildings necessary for the varied activities of the camp, amounting to more than 1,400 separate structures in each cantonment. Sewage systems and steam heating and electric lighting plants were installed. An ample water supply, with plenty of shower baths, was provided, allowing fifty gallons per day per capita, which is eighty per cent more than the average allowance in European army camps. Every care was used to assure the purity of the water. When taken from rivers it was filtered and sterilized.
The total cost of the thirty-two cantonments and camps was $179,607,497. Additions and betterments during the next six months added $22,000,000. Every camp had its garbage incinerator, coffee roasting plant, theater, repair shop and other buildings that added to the comfort and morale of the men and the efficiency of the camp’s work. Such care was taken in the sanitation of the training camps and in the assuring of a pure supply of water—sometimes making necessary the draining of surrounding areas—that the reports of the Surgeon-General showed the practical elimination of water-borne diseases among the troops in training.