In Secretary Baker's view, much of the criticism leveled at the War Department was due to a natural and praiseworthy impatience of the people at large to build a war machine worthy of their country's power. "Every one of us," he said, "wants to see our country hit like a man at the adversary." Answering the charge that the War Department had fallen down the Secretary set out to remove the impression prevalent in the country that the failures and delays were disproportionate to what had been achieved. He thereupon disclosed the results accomplished.
On April 1, 1917, a few days before the United States declared war on Germany, the army stood at 9,524 officers and 202,510 men. On December 31 of that year this force had grown to 110,856 officers and 1,428,650 men, composed of the regular army, the National Guard, and the National Army. In other respects the work accomplished by the War Department at the close of 1917 was summed up by Secretary Baker as under:
"1. A large army is in the field and in training; so large that further increments to it can be adequately equipped and trained as rapidly as those already in training can be transported.
"2. The army has been enlisted and selected without serious dislocation of the industries of the country.
"3. The training of the army is proceeding rapidly, and its spirit is high. The subsistence of the army has been above criticism; its initial clothing supply, temporarily inadequate, is now substantially complete, and reserves will rapidly accumulate. Arms of the most modern and effective kind—including artillery, machine guns, automatic rifles, and small arms—have been provided by manufacture or purchase for every soldier in France, and are available for every soldier who can be gotten to France in the year 1918.
"4. A substantial army is ready in France, where both men and officers have been additionally and specially trained and are ready for active service.
"5. Independent lines of communication and supply and vast storage and other facilities are in process of construction in France.
"6. Great programs for the manufacture of additional equipment and for the production of new instruments of war have been formulated."
An outcome of the investigation was the creation of a War Council within the War Department, composed of the Secretary of War, the Assistant Secretary of War, and five general officers. Its purpose was to supervise and coordinate the supplies of the field armies and the military relations of those armies with the War Department.
The National Army, composed of civilians enrolled under the selective draft law, was the most ambitious experiment in constructive military organization any country had ever attempted. It presented innumerable problems for which no solutions could be found in available textbooks, and the celerity with which it was converted into a real army rested wholly upon the skill with which the problems were grappled by the cantonment commanders and drill officers. Before the magnitude of a training organization could be considered and the drilling set in motion, much groundwork had to be covered in preparing the cantonments. There were sixteen of them, situated in various sections of the country, each roughly housing 40,000 men, and cost the Government at least $100,000,000. Their sites generally were in rugged, partially cleared country, marked by scrubby timber, dirt roads, wooden buildings, occasional patches of canvas, clouds of dust or acres of mud. They sprang up, in brief, out of wilderness tracts, usually some miles away from large centers of population. Their construction meant the creation out of the void of sixteen fully equipped cities, furnished with water supply, sewage systems, electric installations, governing organizations, police, and transportation. Standardization of construction was the only method by which the camps could be brought into being with dispatch. Each type of building, and every stick and board, ventilator and window sash used therein for all the cantonments were shaped to identical measurements, and produced by the enormous driving power of modern engineering, working under contract. Out of industrial plants, devising standardized material, came the camps. The number of buildings in the camps varied from 1,200 to 1,600, and included, besides the barracks proper, kitchens, shower baths and sanitary units, hospitals and administration offices, churches, schools, clubs and lodges, laundries, commissary stores, and even moving-picture theaters.