MAP NO. 10
SERVICES OF SUPPLY. SHOWING PORTS AND RAILROAD COMMUNICATIONS.
Next to Pershing himself, Harbord was most familiar with the planning and forming of an organization which would be equal to handling an unprecedented problem, three thousand miles from home. That story about the old quartermaster, who said that everything was going beautifully until a war came along and ruined his organization, had a most palpable application when a department which had carried on the routine of supplying our small regular army had to design a service equal to our demands in France. It was unequal to the task. A new and comprehensive system which experience had demonstrated to be suited to our needs divided the activities of the army into two territorial departments. One, that of the zone of advance, running from the outskirts of our training area in Lorraine to the front, was to have charge of the fighting. The other was to see that the fighters reached the front and were supplied when they arrived. His headquarters at Tours, the Commanding General of the new Services of Supply—the "S. O. S.," as the army knew it—was to be the head of a principality, of almost the breadth of France itself, under the kingdom of Pershing.
One day, when at last our long period of drill and preparation was having the substantial result of making our pressure at the front felt in earnest, Pershing said: "I'm going to send Harbord to troops, but I shall have him back——" the plan being to have him back as Chief of Staff, I understood. Harbord had his desire, the desire of every soldier, for field service. A brigadier-general now, he was given the brigade of Marines in place of Brigadier-General Doyen, who had been invalided home, where he died, as the result of his hard service in France. One week I saw him in the barracks building at Chaumont, surrounded by hundreds of adjutants, in the direction of the whole, and the next week I found him in charge of one part—but that a very combatant part—of the whole: with no stenographer, but writing his reports and orders on the little folding typewriter.
His new command required the tact of a man of the world as well as of a soldier among soldiers. There are no better fighters than the Marines; none prouder in their spirit of corps. The only Marine brigade in France was not pleased at the thought of having a regular in command. It wanted one of its own corps. Harbord had not been about among the officers and men many times before the Marines were saying, "Well, if we had to have an army man, we're glad we've got Harbord." By the time they were fighting in Belleau Wood, they had put their globe insignia on his collar, which he was proud to wear. He was adopted into the Marines, while regular officers were saying that he had better make his transfer official.
His record of the battle was a model of military reports, which did not hesitate to acknowledge mistakes in detail, the point being that the Marines won the wood. Promoted to be a major-general and to command the 2nd Division (which included the Marines), he led the race-horse 2nd in the counter-offensive in the Château-Thierry operations, which was the turn of the tide against the Germans. After this success the next step for him seemed to be a corps command, and possibly the command of an army, in the course of the rapid promotions that were due to care for the immense forces now arriving in France. His division had only just been relieved, when he received a hurry call to go to Chaumont. When he arrived, Pershing looked him over to see how he had been standing the strain of two months of severe fighting, after his ten months of harassing strain as Chief of Staff. Harbord appeared fresh, and ready for another year's hard work.
"Harbord, I'm going to send you down to straighten out things in the S. O. S.," Pershing then told him....
"Well, you see what my general has done to me," Harbord remarked a few hours later in an outburst to a friendly ear. "He's taken me away from my division,—but," he added, "he's my general. He knows what he wants me to do——" Then a toss of the head, and from that moment his thought was concentrated on his new duties.
Things had been going badly in the Services of Supply. There was congestion at the ports; construction work was not proceeding. In view of the enormous demands which would arise when we should have two million men, instead of the million we had planned, in the autumn, the situation had suddenly become most serious. Washington, with our own ports sensitive to delays at those on the other side of the Atlantic, had about decided to send General Goethals to France to take charge of the Services of Supply as a co-ordinate commander with General Pershing. This was a radical departure. It meant two commanders in France instead of one, directly responsible to Washington. Such divided authority in such a crisis stirred the apprehension of every soldier lest in a great crisis the fighting branch should not be supreme over every other branch which served its will and necessities. The simplest of military principles required that the commander of the forces at the front must command the whole, or his fearful responsibility for needless loss of life rested on inadequate authority.
Harbord, Pershing's right-hand man, was the counter to Washington's suggestion; that major of cavalry, whom nobody knew in the days when Goethals was building the Panama Canal, would prove that we already had a Goethals of our own in France. Without going over the ground of the pioneer stages of the Services of Supply, covered in my first book, the requirement upon which all transport depended was construction. We must enlarge the plant which France offered us for our needs. This meant building new docks to accommodate the requisite shipping, webs of spur tracks, immense areas of warehouses at the ports and others inland to accommodate our supplies; plants for assembling our railroad locomotives and cars brought from home; repair shops for them, and for guns and gun carriages, ambulances and aeroplanes and automobiles, motor trucks, and all other vehicular transport. More important still, there must be repair shops for human beings—enormous hospitals for caring for the sick and wounded, who might come by the hundreds of thousands in a single month. Hospital trains must be ready for their transport from the front. Enormous bakeries must provide hundreds of thousands of loaves every day. There must be barracks for the nurses and all the workers; barracks for the aviators and helpers who were drilling; lighters for disembarking troops when they arrived; camps, where they could spend the night ashore. Railroad sidings must enlarge railroad capacity; more spur tracks must be built wherever we had railheads at the front, and regulating stations which should dispatch the trains to the railheads. Around quiet villages must arise temporary cities of our building, connected with all the other activities in a system which was punctual and dependable.