The first stage of training the men was confined largely to elementary military drill, which was a test of their physical capacity to withstand the driving routine of marching fifteen to twenty miles a day, burdened with a sixty-pound pack, ammunition, and rifle. The second stage embraced advanced military drill, involving several weeks of Swedish exercises, manipulating the army Springfield and marching and countermarching in close or extended order. The third phase was specialized warfare as taught abroad, with British and French trench instructors.
Military tactics having been revolutionized by modern trench warfare, no time was wasted in the open-country maneuvers formerly employed to accustom the troops to actual field service. The National Army was trained for the single purpose of effective trench fighting. On adjacent hillsides and plains extensive field fortifications were prepared, equipped with barbed-wire entanglements, artillery, and machine-gun emplacements, bomb-proof dugouts, communication trenches, support trenches, listening posts, and every other device which had been evolved from the war operations in Europe. The men were taught how to enter and leave a trench, to repel attacks, make raids in pursuit of information, surprise forays by day or night behind the protection of barrage fire, and how to take care of themselves, repair artillery damage, and reenforce the barbed-wire barriers.
The training was intensive and embraced a sixteen weeks' course crowded with manifold detail, which was vigorously observed. More attention was paid in the curriculum to drilling individual men, platoons, and companies than to conducting brigade, divisional, and regimental exercises, these latter being deferred until the smaller units were fit for advanced warfare. The platoon, commanded by a lieutenant, was the fighting unit in trench operations, and upon the lieutenants was therefore imposed the responsibility of training less than company units in order to effect an intimate and sympathetic cooperation between officers and men when they encountered the stern realities of warfare in Europe.
Camp conditions formed a chief subject of the Congressional investigation. The War Department had been confronted with the task of providing for a new army which had to be rushed into training, and had to depend upon congested railroad facilities to equip the camps. But everything had been done, Secretary Baker told the committee, to care for the men, and where defects had occurred they were quickly removed.
"And where, I want to know, in all history can you find an achievement comparable to that of America's in raising this great army from her citizenry in this period of time?" asked the Secretary of War. "It has never been done before, and it is to America's credit that she has accomplished it in the nine months we have been at war."
The outlook, as viewed by Secretary Baker, was that if adequate transport facilities were available, 1,500,000 men could be shipped to France during 1918. He indicated that a third of that number would be on the western front early in the year as a forerunner of the main body.
The country appeared satisfied by this prospect. The War Secretary had revealed much information regarding the military preparations to the Senate investigators; but he had to suppress much more to keep Germany—who was anxious to learn General Pershing's plans—in the dark, especially as to the number and disposition of American troops already there. The conclusions drawn from the progress of war preparations at the beginning of 1918 were that greater advances had been made than was expected. American troops would be in the thick of the fighting in the early spring and would be greatly reenforced just as soon as the Entente Allies pooled their tonnage resources.
The Administration's critics in Congress, nevertheless, were not pacified. A bill was proposed in the Senate creating a War Cabinet, the purpose of which was to divest the executives of Government departments of all authority in the conduct of the war. The new body was to be composed of "three distinguished citizens of demonstrated ability," to be named by the President and indorsed by the Senate. They were to control the administrative Cabinet officers and other department heads in the war's conduct, and adjust all differences, subject to the President's review.
The President saw in the proposed new war administration nothing but "long additional delays" and the turning of the Government's experience into "mere lost motion." He said as much to Senator Chamberlain, the author of the measure, in a letter which stoutly defended the Government's military preparations.
"The War Department," he wrote, "has performed a task of unparalleled magnitude and difficulty with extraordinary promptness and efficiency. There have been delays and disappointments and partial miscarriages of plan, all of which have been drawn into the foreground and exaggerated by the investigations which have been in progress since the Congress assembled.... But by comparison with what has been accomplished, these things, much as they were to be regretted, were insignificant, and no mistake has been made which has been repeated."