Apropos of the rapid transportation Colonel Ayres says:
"In June (1918) with the German drives in full swing, the Allies called on us to continue the extraordinary transportation of troops begun in April. The early movement had been met by filling up the divisions that sailed with the best trained men wherever they could be found. Divisions embarked after July 1 had to meet shortages with men called to the colors in the spring. By November the average period of training in the United States had been shortened to close to four months, and the average for the period July 1 to Nov. 11 was probably five months.
"In the last months of the war, the induction of men was carried forward at top speed and every device was used for hastening training. The result fully justified the effort. Into the great Meuse-Argonne offensive we were able to throw a force of 1,200,000 men, while we had many thousands of troops engaged in other parts of the line. Our training camp officers stood up to the test; our men with their intensive drilling in open-order fighting, which has characterized American training, routed the best of the German divisions from the Argonne Forest and the Valley of the Meuse."
FEEDING AND CLOTHING PROBLEMS
When an army is 3,000 or 4,000 miles from its sources of supply the amounts of supplies in reserve and in transit are enormous as compared with the quantities actually consumed each month. As an example the army purchases of blankets in 1918 were two and one-quarter times as great as the entire American production in 1914. Put differently, the blankets bought in one year for the use of 4,000,000 or 5,000,000 soldiers would have been sufficient to make good the normal consumption of blankets by 100,000,000 American civilians for two and a quarter years. So proportionately with other things, the rule for clothing was that for every man at the front there must be a three months' reserve in France, another two or three months' reserve in the United States and a third three months' supply continuously in transit.
The same thing was true of other supplies and munitions. The need for reserves and the time required for transportation called for the supply of enormous quantities and called for it at once.
An indication of the quartermaster problem may be obtained from the fact that between April 6, 1917, and May 31, 1918, there was delivered to the army 131,800,000 pairs of wool stockings, 85,000,000 undershirts, 83,600,000 drawers, 30,700,000 pairs of shoes, 26,500,000 flannel shirts, 21,700,000 blankets, 21,700,000 wool breeches, 13,900,000 wool coats, and 8,300,000 overcoats. When the troop movement was speeded up in 1918 Colonel Ayres states that the margin of woolen clothing was dangerously narrow, and to secure these and other articles in sufficient quantity it was found necessary to take control of all states of the manufacturing process, from assembling the raw material to inspecting the finished product.
At no time was there a shortage of food in the expeditionary forces. Soldiers sometimes went hungry in this as in all other wars, but the condition was local and temporary. It occurred because of transportation difficulties during periods of active fighting or rapid movement when the units outran their rolling kitchens.
In France American engineers built seventeen new ship berths and 1,000 miles of standard and 125 miles of narrow gauge railroads. The Signal Corps strung 100,000 miles of telephone wires, and 40,000 American made motor trucks were shipped overseas. In this country army construction projects cost twice as much as the Panama Canal and were on nearly as large a scale overseas.
The storage space constructed in France was more than nine-tenths as large as that built at home. The amount of food on hand from the time the American troops entered active fighting never fell below a 45 days' supply, and at the time of the submarine scare, was kept at 59 to 72 days' supply.