Transcriber’s Note

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IN COMMEMORATION OF THE WORK OF
THE EIGHT THOUSAND YALE MEN
WHO TOOK PART IN THE WORLD WAR
1914–1918

HOW AMERICA WENT TO WAR
⁂
THE GIANT HAND
THE ROAD TO FRANCE I.
THE ROAD TO FRANCE II.
THE ARMIES OF INDUSTRY I.
THE ARMIES OF INDUSTRY II.
DEMOBILIZATION

HOW AMERICA WENT
TO WAR

AN ACCOUNT FROM OFFICIAL SOURCES OF
THE NATION’S WAR ACTIVITIES
1917–1920

Armistice Day at Independence Hall

From a photograph by the Signal Corps

DEMOBILIZATION
OUR INDUSTRIAL AND MILITARY
DEMOBILIZATION AFTER THE ARMISTICE
1918–1920

⁂

BY BENEDICT CROWELL
THE ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF WAR AND
DIRECTOR OF MUNITIONS 1917–1920

AND ROBERT FORREST WILSON
FORMERLY CAPTAIN, UNITED STATES ARMY

ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE
COLLECTIONS OF THE WAR AND NAVY DEPARTMENTS

NEW HAVEN
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON · HUMPHREY MILFORD · OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
MDCCCCXXI

Copyright, 1921, by
Yale University Press

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The authors acknowledge their indebtedness to Major Robert H. Fletcher, Jr., General Staff, who collected from the various war department bureaus concerned most of the material on which this book is based. Also their thanks are due to the numerous former and present officials of the War Department and officers of the Army who read the manuscript and criticized it constructively.

B. C. & R. F. W.

Washington, D. C.,
September, 1921.

DEMOBILIZATION

CHAPTER I
HALT!

At a few minutes past ten o’clock of the morning of November 11, 1918, the Secretary of War in Washington received from General Pershing a communication informing the Government that eleven o’clock a.m. that day, French time, an armistice with Germany had gone into effect. No message more momentous had ever come to the American War Department. The World War was at an end. It was peace. It was victory.

Over there on that American front which had penetrated the supposedly impregnable Argonne and now commanded the enemy’s main line of communications at Sedan, boys in our own khaki wriggled, charged, fought, plunged ahead all the morning, like the players of some mighty football team gaining every inch of advance possible before an intermission; and finally, as the whistles shrilled and the great silence fell at last upon a theatre that had shaken and roared with the thunder of war for more than four years, they set their heels into the turf of a line that was to be held as a starting-off place if the armistice, too, should prove to be only an intermission and a period of recuperation.

Behind these outpost men were the American Expeditionary Forces, two million strong. Behind the A. E. F. in America was a training and maintenance army nearly as numerous.

Behind the uniformed and organized Army as it existed on the eleventh day of November was another force of a quarter of a million men, technically under arms. These were Selective Service men, drafted men, entraining that day and adding themselves to the human flood sweeping on toward Germany. In number this force alone was larger than any ever previously enrolled at one time in the American military service, except the forces called to the colors during the Civil War; yet so expanded had become our values that they attracted only passing attention in the midst of larger war activities. These inductives were one more increment—that was all.

And behind the Army itself were twenty-five million American men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, registered, classified, and numbered in the order in which they too in turn should join the current that led, if necessary, to the supreme sacrifice.

The foundation on which rested this human edifice was industrial. Nothing less than the whole of America’s material resources had been pledged to the end of victory. The whole of America’s resources! How inadequately could pigmy man realize their might before he took them all and formed and molded them into one single-purpose machine! That machine was born in travail that broke men’s bodies and reputations, that threw down the mighty from their seats and exalted those of low degree, that moved inexorably but surely. And when the machine was built it released forces terrifying even to men accustomed to administering the greatest of human activities, forces well-nigh ungovernable.

It took seven million workers, men and women, to operate the war industrial machine—seven million Americans delving in the earth for ores, chemicals, and fuels, felling the forests, quarrying the rocks, carrying the raw materials to the mills, tending the fires and the furnaces, operating the cranes, guiding the finishing machinery with a precision never before demanded, slaughtering the beeves, curing the meat, packing the vegetables, weaving the fabrics, fashioning the garments, transporting all, and accomplishing the million separate tasks necessary to the munitioning of the Army.

And as a background to all this, behind both the military and the industrial armies, was another force, perhaps the greatest force of all—the will of the people themselves, of one hundred million Americans who, without the coercion and duress of law and as a purely voluntary act, denied their appetites, their pleasures, and their vanities, contributed their utmost to the war finances, made war gardens to add to the food supply, produced millions of articles for the comfort of the soldiers both well and wounded, and in one way or another put forth effort that did not flag until victory came.

Such was America in a war that truly threatened her existence—America invincible.

The armistice put an end to all this enterprise and effort. It did more—the armistice was a command to the Government to scrap the war machine and restore its parts to the peaceful order in which they had been found. In military law, an armistice denotes the temporary cessation of hostilities; but the armistice of 1918 was a finality. Its terms destroyed the German military power. Those in authority, aware that the armistice was to be no period of waiting with collected forces for the outcome of negotiations, did not pause even to survey the magnitude of the thing they had built: they turned immediately to the task of dismantling it. Some of the processes of demobilization began before the guns ceased to fire. Five days before the armistice the A. E. F. canceled many of the foreign orders for important supplies. On November 1 we stopped sending combatant troops to France. In late October the Ordnance Department created an organization for demobilizing war industry.

However, before the machine could be knocked down and its parts distributed, it had to be stopped. There are two ways of stopping the limited express. One is to throw a switch ahead of it—effective, but disastrous to the train. The other way is to put on the brakes.

The war-industry machine had attained a momentum almost beyond mundane comparisons. Slow in gaining headway, like any other great mass, as thousands added their brains and their muscles to its progress it gathered speed until, at the first day of the armistice, it was nearing the point at which it could consume the material resources and turn them out as finished war products up to the capacity of American mechanical skill and machinery to handle them. It had not quite reached that point. Many of the vital but easily manufactured supplies had long since reached the pinnacles of their production curves, but some of the more difficult ones were not yet in full manufacture. On Armistice Day, however, the industry was not more than six months away from the planned limit of its fecundity.

For the administration of the industrial enterprise the task ahead was first to bring that momentum to a halt and then to break up the machine. The easiest way was to throw a switch ahead of it—in other words, to issue a blanket stop-order on all military manufacturing projects. But to have done that would have been to court consequences as disastrous as those of war itself. Business and industry would have fallen into chaos and the country would have been filled with jobless men. The other way, the way chosen, was to apply the brakes to the thousands of wheels.

The magnitude of the task ahead was appalling. The liquidation of the war industry was seen to be a matter as complex, as intricate, as full of the possibilities of error and failure as the mobilization itself. In only one respect did demobilization begin with an advantage: there was at hand an organization, the organization which had administered the creation of the Army and the manufacture of its supplies, ready to be turned into a wrecking crew.

Photo by Signal Corps

THE LAST SHOT

Photo by Signal Corps

THE ARMISTICE AT A MUNITIONS FACTORY

Balanced against this situation was the countering fact that the men of this organization were war weary. Ahead of them were none of the conspicuous rewards that follow conspicuous war service. The nation does not award medals and other honors to those who restore the conditions of peace. The people themselves were satiated with war and desired nothing so much as a space in which they could forget battles and campaigns. At best, demobilization was to be a thankless job. Moreover, many of the executives, particularly those in the industrial organization, were men of large personal affairs, serving their country at a sacrifice. For the most part they were disheartened men, denied the satisfaction of seeing the full fruition of their plans have its effect against a hateful enemy. Every interest of personal gain called to them after the armistice to desert their official posts and return to the satisfactions of private endeavor, and only the righteous sense of their duty to the nation held them in the organization.

Photo by Howard E. Coffin

VICTORY

WAR TROPHIES IN PLACE DE LA CONCORDE, PARIS

Photo by Howard E. Coffin

RECONSTRUCTION

BRITISH SOLDIER’S GRAVE IN FIELD NEAR MEAUX

It was necessary for the organization not only to remain intact, but to speed the activities of demobilization as it had sped those of mobilization. The pre-armistice spirit had in some way to be maintained. On November 11 the war was costing the United States about $50,000,000 a day. Every day of indecision in adopting the plan of demobilization and every day’s delay in carrying out the plan added tremendously to the burden of taxation that would rest upon the nation for generations to come.

Demobilization meant, first of all, the disbanding of the American Army. Whatever economic considerations might graduate the termination of war industry, no such considerations were to be permitted to retard the homeward progress of the troops. Four million American homes demanded their men at once; and whether the immediate return of the troops meant unemployment and distress or not, the Government was determined to comply with the demand.

The creation of the Army and its movement toward France had involved the rail transportation of about 8,000,000 soldiers in special cars and trains. The home movement would require an operation almost as great. Of the 2,000,000 men of the American Expeditionary Forces, more than half had crossed the ocean in foreign ships, all of which, of course, were withdrawn from our service immediately after the armistice. The unbroken eastward transatlantic procession of troopships had continued for about fourteen months. On the first day of the armistice the transatlantic ferrying capacity of the American-flag troopships was not much in excess of 100,000 men a month. Moreover, practically all our troop transports had reached the point of having to be laid up for reconditioning. Assuming, however, that they could be kept in continuous operation, they could not bring back to America more than two-thirds of the troops in the time it had taken the whole A. E. F. to cross to France. Yet the problem of demobilization was to repatriate the A. E. F. in that time at most.

Demobilization involved a final cash settlement with everyone of the four million men under arms; computations of back pay, complicated as they were with allotments and payments for government war bonds and the war risk insurance; and, finally, the payment to each soldier of the sixty-dollar bonus voted by the Congress. Demobilization also included the care of the wounded for many months after the fighting ceased, their physical and mental reconstruction, and their reëducation to enable them to take useful places in the world.

On the industrial side demobilization was the liquidation of a business whose commitments had reached the staggering total of $35,000,000,000. Demobilization meant taking practically the entire industrial structure of the United States, which had become one vast munitions plant, and converting it again into an instrumentality for producing the commodities of peaceful commerce. This without stopping an essential wheel, and also in the briefest possible time, for the world was in sore need of these products. Efficient demobilization, it follows, would permit the 7,000,000 industrial war workers to turn without a break in employment from the production of war supplies to that of peace supplies.

At the base of modern business stability lies the inviolability of contracts. He who breaches a contract must expect to pay indemnity, and the Government cannot except itself from this rule. Demobilization meant the suspension and termination of war contracts running into billions in value, many of them without a scrap of paper to show as a written instrument; it meant termination without laying the Government open to the payment of damages, and therefore it implied the honorable adjustment of the claims of the contractors.

One of the conditions on which complete demobilization depended was the adoption of a future military policy for the United States. But this was in the hands, not of the military organization, but of Congress. The whole program, therefore, could not be put through until Congress had acted. After the policy was defined, then it became the duty of the demobilization forces to choose and store safely the reserve equipment for the permanent establishment and for the field use of a possible future combatant force until another war industry could be brought into existence.

When that had been done there would remain a surplus of military property. It thereupon became the function of demobilization to dispose of this property through a sales organization that would have in its stocks goods of a greater variety and value than those at the disposal of any private sales agency in the United States. This branch of the work also included the sale of great quantities of A. E. F. supplies in Europe, which was already glutted with the surpluses of its own armies. The sales at home must include the sale of hundreds of buildings put up for the war establishment.

Paradoxically, demobilization included the acquirement of large quantities of real estate—for the storage of reserve supplies and the creation of a physical plant for the permanent military establishment.

Finally, demobilization meant the delicate business of striking a cash balance that would terminate our relations with the Allies, meeting their claims against us for the supply of materials and for the use and destruction of private property abroad, and pressing our own claims against them for materials sold to them.

The astonishing thing was the swiftness with which this great program was carried through. Within a year after the last gun was fired America had returned to the normal. The whole A. E. F. had been brought back in American vessels in ten months. In that time practically the entire Army had been paid off, disbanded, and transported to its homes. War businesses were braked to a standstill in an average time of three months, without a single industrial disturbance of any consequence. At the end of the year the greater part of the manufacturers’ claims had been satisfied with compromises fair both to the contractors and to the Government. The savings in contract terminations and adjustments had run into billions of dollars. A blanket settlement had been made with the Allies, thus virtually closing up our business in Europe. A permanent military policy had been written into law. The storage buildings and spaces were filled with reserve materials inventoried, catalogued, and protected against deterioration. Packed away compactly were the tools and machinery of an embryonic war industry ready to be expanded at will in the event of another war. Materials, largely of special war value and therefore normally to be regarded as scrap and junk, had been sold to the tune of billions, the exercise of ingenuity in the sales department producing a recovery that was remarkably large, averaging 64 per cent of the war cost.

Such was our war demobilization. No other single business enterprise in all human history compared with it in magnitude; yet, in the midst of the peace negotiations and amid the economic crises fretting the earth, it attracted scant notice. To-day, only the continuing sale of surplus war materials and the adjudication of the last and most difficult of the industrial claims give evidence of the enterprise which engaged the efforts of the whole nation so short a time ago.

CHAPTER II
THE A. E. F. EMBARKS

The American Expeditionary Forces, on November 11, 1918, were ill prepared to conduct the manifold activities leading to their demobilization. Up to that day the expedition had been too busy going ahead to think much about how it was to get home. But now had come the armistice, the end. The great adventure was over. The guerre was fini.

At once a great wave of homesickness spread over the A. E. F. That song of careless valor, “Where do we go from here?” to the swinging beat of which a million men had marched forward over the French roads, became a querulous “When do we go home?” When indeed? It had taken nearly a year and a half to transport the A. E. F. to France. Disregarding the fact that the Army overseas had at its disposal less than half as many troopships as had supported it up to November 11, before the men could start home in great numbers there had first to be created in France an embarkation system with a capacious equipment of camps and port buildings, if the expedition were to return in good order and not as a disorganized mob.

Never was a daily journal scanned with such emotion as was the Stars and Stripes by its readers during this period of waiting. The Stars and Stripes was the official newspaper of the enlisted men of the A. E. F. After the armistice anything pertaining to the return of the troops to America was the most important news which the publication could possibly print. The Stars and Stripes published the monthly schedules of transport sailings, told of the extraordinary expansion of the Yankee transport fleet, noted the continual improvement in the shipping efficiency of that fleet, rejoiced in black-face type when some ocean flyer broke the record for the turn-around, as the round trip to America and back was called, and in general kept the personnel of the expedition informed of the movement homeward. But, although the return of the A. E. F. was a transportation feat actually more astonishing than that which had placed the forces in Europe, yet to the hundreds of thousands of homesick boys who watched the brown fields of France turn green in the spring of 1919, the pace of the snail and the turtle seemed speed itself in comparison to the progress made by the demobilization machine.

The A. E. F. in November, 1918, possessed no port equipment capable of quick conversion into a plant for embarking the expedition. There had been no need of large port installations in France for the use of debarking troops. The A. E. F. had crossed to France under a scheme of identification that was a marvel of system and organization. Once the system was perfected, every military unit bore as part of its name a so-called item number that told the debarkation officers (by reference to the shipping schedules) exactly where each unit should go upon arrival. So it was with individuals and small detachments traveling as casuals. Their item numbers placed them instantly in the great structure of the A. E. F. No need for vast port rest camps in which thousands must wait until G. H. Q. disposed of them. They were placed before they sailed from America. Expense and confusion saved by the art of management!

The armistice changed all about. Our military ports in France had to become ports for the embarkation of troops with an equipment vastly expanded. America had sent to France an Army perfectly clothed and accoutered. For the sake of uniformity the home ports of embarkation had prepared the 2,000,000 troops for the voyage, and this meant issuing smaller or larger quantities of clothing and other personal articles to practically every man who sailed. The A. E. F. proposed to return its men to their homes well dressed, clean, and self-respecting, and it was logical, too, to accomplish this purpose in France in the process of embarking the troops. To carry out the plan, however, required an extensive plant, something not to be materialized by a wave of the hand. France after the armistice was to witness an extensive military construction carried on by the Americans at their ports.

Brest, Bordeaux, and St. Nazaire had been the three principal landing places for our troops sent to France directly from the United States. Brest, near the northeasternmost extremity of France, possessed a harbor with water that could accommodate the largest ships afloat, but the water near shore was too shallow for docks at which large ships could berth. Consequently the troops rode in lighters between ships and shore. This was Brest’s chief disadvantage as a military port, but it was not a serious disadvantage.

Next southward came St. Nazaire, on the Loire River a few miles inland. The first of the expeditionary troops landed at St. Nazaire, in July, 1917. The port boasted of docks with berths for troopships, but the waters of the river were too shallow for the largest transports.

Still farther south was Bordeaux, fifty-two miles from the ocean on the Gironde River. What few troops landed at Bordeaux were incidental, for the port construction at Bordeaux and other great developments at Bassens and Pauillac nearer the mouth of the river were conducted by the A. E. F. with the view of making the Gironde the chief ocean terminal for the reception of army supplies shipped from the United States. Troopships could tie up to the docks at Bordeaux, but the Gironde was so narrow and its tidal currents were so swift that the military administration of the port had to manage the stream on a schedule as it might operate a single-track railroad. There were several places in the river where vessels could not pass each other.

After November 11 followed a few days of indecision and bewilderment in the A. E. F. No one in Europe knew precisely what the armistice meant or what the victorious armies could expect. Quickly, however, it transpired that the armistice was permanent; it was peace itself for all practical purposes, and the only forces we should need to maintain in France would be those chosen to conduct the measured advance into Germany and to garrison the occupied territory. Within a week General Pershing designated the troops for the Army of Occupation and released the rest of the American Expeditionary Forces (more than half its total numerical strength) for return to the United States as soon as transportation facilities were available. He charged the Chief Quartermaster of the expedition with the duty of embarking the returning forces.[1]

The Chief Quartermaster of the A. E. F. at once designated Brest, St. Nazaire, and Bordeaux as the ports of embarkation. The early plan was to send 20 per cent of the expedition home via Bordeaux and the rest in equal numbers through St. Nazaire and Brest. As it worked out, practically all the overseas soldiers returned through these three ports, although a few sailed from Marseilles, Le Havre, and La Pallice. The division of work, however, did not materialize as planned. Bordeaux handled less than its fifth of the forces, and the embarkations at St. Nazaire were not much larger than those at Bordeaux. The great mass of the A. E. F. came back via Brest, and at Brest was set up the largest installation for the embarkation of passengers the world had ever seen.

Photo by Signal Corps

CAMP STREET IN LE MANS AREA

Photo by Signal Corps

BATH HOUSE AT BREST

The troops of the A. E. F. were of two general sorts—those of the line organized by divisions, corps, and armies, also known as combat troops, and those of supply, who conducted the thousand and one enterprises necessary to the maintenance of a force as large as the A. E. F. three thousand miles away from home. The two sorts of troops were not evenly balanced in number, the combat troops being considerably the more numerous. It was evident that their embarkation offered separate problems.

Photo by Howard E. Coffin

IN CAMP PONTANEZEN

Photo by Signal Corps

COMPANY STREET IN PONTANEZEN

With the combat troops mass travel could be conducted at its greatest efficiency. The divisional troops were homogeneous, their transportation needs were essentially alike, and a single order could control the movements of tens of thousands of them at once. The supply troops, on the other hand, were heterogeneous. They were organized in thousands of units of varying sizes and kinds. Many of them, particularly officers, were serving in the organization as individuals attached to no particular units. The travel problems of these various elements differed widely. Therefore it was decided to handle the embarkation of divisional troops and supply troops separately. The general demobilization plan adopted about the middle of December, 1918, provided for the establishment of a great embarkation center for the divisional troops—an area which should be convenient to all three ports of embarkation, in which area the combat troops in their large units could be prepared for the overseas voyage, and from which they could go directly to the ships without pausing in the embarkation cities. The installations at the ports themselves were to be used especially in the embarkation of supply troops.

At Le Mans, a spot about midway between Paris and the Biscay coast, the A. E. F. possessed a plant that might be expanded quickly to serve as the divisional embarkation center. When the great flood of American troops began debouching upon French soil in the early summer of 1918 it became evident to the command of the expedition that it needed an area in which the incoming divisions might assemble as their units debarked from the transports and where they might rest while their ranks were being built up to prescribed strength by the addition of replacements. By this time, too, the system of supplying replacement troops to the A. E. F. had become automatic. The replacements were the only American soldiers who crossed to France without definite objective. They were to be used in France as the A. E. F. needed them to fill up its divisional ranks. It was necessary, therefore, to provide a reservoir upon which the depleted combat divisions could draw for replacements. Le Mans was selected as the site of this reservoir and also as the assembling point for the debarking organized divisions. The Le Mans area before the armistice was known as the A. E. F.’s classification and replacement camp.

The reasons which brought about the selection of Le Mans as the site for the replacement and divisional depot served also to make the place the ideal location for the expedition’s embarkation center. Le Mans was at the junction of trunk-line railroads leading to Brest, St. Nazaire, and Bordeaux. It also possessed good railroad connections with Paris and with the front, which in the summer of 1918 had been advanced by the Germans until it was close to the metropolitan limits of Paris and was therefore not far from Le Mans. The depot was established in July, 1918, when the Eighty-third Division occupied the area as its depot division. At that time the depot as projected contemplated the construction of eight divisional camps, each to accommodate 26,000 men, and two forwarding camps, one with accommodations for 25,000 men and the other for 15,000. In other words, the camp eventually was to accommodate a quarter of a million troops. No military center in the United States compared in size with this project.

At the time of the armistice the development of Le Mans had made good progress. It could then maintain about 120,000 troops. On December 14, when Le Mans was officially designated as the embarkation center, its capacity had been increased to 200,000. Shortly after the armistice began, its transient population jumped to 100,000, and it never fell below this mark until the late spring of 1919, when the greater part of the combat divisions of the A. E. F. had embarked for the United States.

The Le Mans center had the duty of completely preparing for embarkation all troops received in the area. Theoretically every man who passed through Le Mans was prepared to go directly to a transport. This meant bathing and delousing for every man who came to the camp, inspecting his equipment and supplying new clothing and other personal articles if he needed them, and perfecting his service records so that he might encounter no difficulty in securing his final pay and discharge in the United States. To do this important work quickly and well, it was necessary to operate an institution of impressive size.

The dimensions of the whole camp were tremendous. There was nothing like it in the United States. A man could walk briskly for an hour in a single direction at Le Mans and see nothing but tents, barracks, drill fields, and troops lined up for preliminary or final inspections. The task of feeding this city full of guests was so great that the camp administration found it economical to build a narrow-gauge railroad system connecting the kitchens with the warehouses. Food moved up to the camp cookstoves by the trainload, and the same locomotives that brought the supplies hauled away the refuse. A whole adjacent forest was cut down to supply firewood. When the Americans occupied the section there were no adequate switching facilities, nor were there storage accommodations. The Quartermaster Corps, which operated the storage project, cleared a field in the midst of a wood and used the clearing for an open storage space (the surrounding trees giving a degree of shelter), connecting the place with the railroad by constructing a spur track. Thereafter, even after great warehouses had been built in the clearing and it had become the supply depot for the entire camp, requiring the services of 6,000 troops in its operation, the place was known to the camp as “The Spur.” As an addition to this storage, smaller covered warehouses were provided at all the divisional sub-depots. At one time the corrals of the camp contained 10,000 horses and mules. In one week in February, 1919, nearly 32,000 troops arrived in camp, a fact indicating the rate at which troops passed through to embarkation. The Quartermaster Corps opened two great central commissaries that were in effect department stores. The camp operated a large laundry, a shoe repair shop, a clothing repair shop, and numerous other industrial plants.

The equipment installed at Le Mans was duplicated in smaller scale at the three embarkation ports. Yet even these port installations could not be called small. Camp Pontanezen at Brest could give accommodations to 80,000 men at once. The largest embarkation camps in the United States were smaller than this. There were thirteen smaller camps and military posts at Brest. The two embarkation camps at Bordeaux could house 22,000 men, but there were billeting accommodations in the district for thousands of others. The construction at St. Nazaire was considerably larger than that at Bordeaux, but not so extensive as that at Brest.

Most of these camps were built after the armistice, and the engineer constructors and the embarking troops elbowed each other as embarkation and construction proceeded simultaneously. Some of the camps had served as rest camps prior to the armistice, but these had to be greatly enlarged and improved in equipment before they could give adequate service as embarkation camps. The weather along the northwestern coast of France is intensely uncomfortable and disagreeable to Americans. In the winter and spring especially, the rains and mists are almost incessant. It was not always possible to choose ideal sites for the embarkation camps in France. The sites had to be near the ports, and in the thickly inhabited countryside the American authorities were forced to accept whatsoever areas they could get, without being too insistent upon such fine points as natural drainage and pleasant surroundings.

This statement is particularly applicable to Pontanezen, which was pitched on high but poorly drained ground. Ordinarily the Army would not have occupied such a location without first making permanent improvements. The continual rains, the lack of strong drainage, and the heavy traffic of men, animals, and trucks combined to make the Pontanezen site in 1919 a morass of quaking mud. Only the strongest of emergencies justified its use. Because of the daily cost of maintaining the A. E. F. and because the expeditionary soldiers themselves wished to return home as soon as possible, regardless of the conditions of their travel, it was decided to make use of these port camps even while they were being constructed, instead of holding up the whole movement until the camp arrangements could be made perfect.

Tales of suffering among our soldiers at Pontanezen came to the United States and were even aired on the floors of Congress, but the suffering alleged was more apparent than real. Those who went through the experience of residence in Pontanezen, even at its worst, were not injured in health. Despite appearances, the camp’s sanitary arrangements were of high merit. The medical records of Camp Pontanezen show that its sickness and death rates, leaving the domestic epidemic of influenza altogether out of the comparison, were as low as those of the best camps in the United States.

In the spring of 1919 most of the construction work at the embarkation camps was complete, and they became more comfortable. The camps consisted of miles of one-story, tar-papered, rough-board buildings connected with wooden sidewalks of duck-boards. Pontanezen was a complete American city set down amid the quaint roads of old Brittany. It had newspapers, banks, theatres, stores, public libraries, restaurants, hospitals, churches, telephones, and electric lights, and even a narrow-gauge railway for freighting about its supplies. The entire American military population in the camps at Brest quite outnumbered the French inhabitants of the region. The water system installed by the Engineers to serve all the American establishments at the port was sufficient for the city of 150,000 people. There was a special camp for casual officers. A section of this camp was set aside for the French, English, Belgian, and Italian wives that American soldiers had married abroad. There was a hospital camp, a camp for the white troops on permanent duty at the port, and another for colored troops so assigned. There were numerous small camps for labor battalions, and a special camp for engineer and motor transport organizations. Not far away was a large German prison camp.

In one important respect embarkation in France differed from what it had been in the United States. It was extremely necessary to rid the home-coming troops of body vermin before placing them on the ships. The delousing process at our French ports of embarkation was the most thorough experienced by the doughboy during his foreign service, and this process chiefly distinguished embarkation abroad from that which the soldier had known at Hoboken and Newport News.

Our forebears shared none of the modern aversion to discussion of the louse. One of the great monarchs of France set the stamp of his royal approval upon scratching publicly when one itched, and Robert Burns once addressed a poem to a louse. The louse, however, cannot survive American habits of personal cleanliness; and, justly enough, the insect has become associated with filth and has dropped out of polite conversation. The war revived the fame of this parasite. An inspection at one time revealed the fact that 90 per cent of the American troops at the front were infested. These men naturally wrote home about it, and then the louse, euphemized as “cootie,” became a national figure.

There was a serious aspect to the situation, however, that the military authorities could not overlook. Besides being a source of discomfort, the louse is the sole carrier of one of the most dread diseases that afflict mankind—typhus fever. In bygone times typhus was known variously as army fever, camp fever, or jail fever. It was particularly prevalent in this country at the time of the Revolution, and it existed to some extent here during the Civil War—an indication of what must have been the condition of individual American soldiers in those days. Typhus exists to-day practically as an endemic on the central plateau of Mexico, the range of the disease touching the border of the United States. The disease cannot invade this country, however, because of the lack of carriers. But if the A. E. F. had returned to the United States with its 2,000,000 men lice-infested, the demobilized soldiers might have distributed typhus carriers from one end of the country to the other and exposed the nation to a terrible menace.

The sanitary regulations of the A. E. F. kept typhus away from the troops by controlling the lice. The Quartermaster Corps operated a number of mobile delousing plants just behind the front lines and in the billeting areas to the rear. It is interesting to note that these plants had to be camouflaged because the airmen of the enemy sometimes mistook them for batteries of artillery and directed gunfire upon them. As these plants increased in number and efficiency they reduced the lousiness of the combat troops to a scant 3 per cent.

As long as our troops remained in France largely billeted on the French population, it was unlikely that the field sanitary measures could extinguish the louse altogether; but the command of the expedition determined that at the ports of embarkation the American doughboy should bid good-bye to P. vestimenti forever. The importance of completely delousing the troops was emphasized in the same G. H. Q. memorandum that had set up the embarkation system.

In pursuance of this policy every embarkation camp in France was established in two isolated sections. One section was known as the “dirty” camp and the other as the “clean” camp. Upon arrival from the front the troops first took quarters in the “dirty” camp. Between the two sections lay the buildings in which the camp administration conducted all the various processes of preparing soldiers for embarkation for the United States. One of the most important of these activities was bathing and delousing the troops. As far as scientific measures could prevent it, not a louse was permitted to cross from the “dirty” camp to the “clean” camp. The measures were highly effective. Only a few men were found to be infested upon arrival in America. For these there were final delousing facilities at all our debarkation camps. When the overseas veterans took trains for home at the Atlantic ports they were completely verminless. The medical officers at the demobilization centers in this country failed to discover a single exception.

The embarkation plant at Bordeaux was known to returning soldiers as “The Mill.” Its processes were typical of those at all the embarkation camps in France. The Bordeaux mill ground swiftly, yet ground exceeding fine. To it came the raw material—dirty, ragged, weary humanity. It reached out for this material, whirled it into its machinery, and a little while later delivered from the other end its finished product—clean, well-clothed, deloused, and comfortable American soldiers, their service records compiled up to the minute, American money in their pockets, and a mighty self-respect swelling their chests.

To France America sent the best clothed and best equipped army that had ever stepped on European soil. The two million men arrived in France outfitted almost completely in new clothing and equipment which they had received in the American embarkation camps just before they boarded the transports. In 1919 we brought home the first American army that had ever fought in a great war and returned in anything but rags. By special act Congress gave permission to each discharged soldier to keep his uniform and certain other equipment when he returned to civilian life. Even though, for most of the men coming up into the embarkation ports in France, their final discharge was only a few weeks away, nevertheless the military organization there saw to it that every man was decently clad before he began the return voyage, and this often meant the issue of entirely new articles. The Quartermaster Corps abroad wanted to win from the folks at home the verdict, when they had looked over their restored boys—“Guess they took pretty good care of you over there, after all.”

The “mill” at Bordeaux was housed in a long, low hut with separate departments for the chief operations necessary to the preparation of troops for embarkation, the steps being arranged progressively. At the entrance end were the executive offices. Here the soldier, as he passed through, received his service records, withdrawn from his company’s files, and also a Red Cross bag in which to carry his personal trinkets and his record cards and papers on the journey through the “mill.” Next he came to the records inspection section, where officers perfected the entries in his record. Here he also received a copy of the orders under which his unit was traveling, his pay card, and a card known as the individual equipment record. On the equipment card appeared the printed names of all articles which a completely outfitted American soldier should wear or carry wherever he went. Next the soldier stood before an inspector who examined the worn equipment, noted wherein it was incomplete, labeled any damaged or worn-out articles for discard and salvage, and checked on the equipment card such new articles as should be issued to the soldier later on. The standard equipment of each returning soldier was as follows:

The soldier next went to the disrobing room, where he divested himself of all clothing except his shoes, which he was to carry through with him. The cootie would not cling to leather. Then he passed on to a medical examination for infectious disease. If he passed this safely, he proceeded to the bathing department, where, under the watchful eyes of a sergeant, he soaped and scrubbed himself thoroughly, first in a hot shower bath and then in a cold one. Experience had taught that the greatest enemy of the louse was plain soap and water and plenty of it. Meanwhile certain of his discarded garments, if they were in good condition or if they could be repaired for future wear, had been sent from the disrobing room to the steam sterilizer in another part of the building. The sterilization process took thirty minutes, which was just about the time it took the soldier to go through the “mill.”

Scrubbed and clean, the soldier went from the bath into another room where doctors examined him for diseases of the throat, lungs, and skin. After that, the barber shop and a hair cut. The barber shop at the “mill” was equipped with fifty chairs.

At last the object of these official attentions reached his goal, the equipment room. What he had feared in the process were the two medical inspections, either of which might stop his progress instanter and send him scurrying to a camp hospital for observation or treatment. In either circumstance, his embarkation would be deferred indefinitely. But if he were allowed to reach the equipment room, he knew he was safe. Here he found great bins containing large quantities of the articles named on the equipment card. As he passed the bins every soldier received clean socks and underclothing, new tape for his identification tags and a clean shelter half in which to carry his equipment. He also received such new articles as were checked on his equipment card.

Photo by Signal Corps

1. ENTERING “MILL” AT BORDEAUX

Photo by Signal Corps

2. RECEIVING CLEAN CLOTHING IN “MILL”

In the dressing room beyond, he found waiting for him a uniform and the serviceable portions of the outfit he had brought with him to the “mill,” all the textile articles having been thoroughly deloused and sterilized. He found his old uniform, if that had been in good condition; otherwise, a new one or a respectable one from the repair factory. Sometimes his old uniform came back shrunken and faded by the hot steam of the delousing plant. In that event a serviceable uniform was substituted for it.

The final station in the “mill” was the pay office. It sometimes happened that troops came up for embarkation with their pay months in arrears. Now, with his records perfected, the soldier received all his back pay. Thanks to the exchange system set up by the A. E. F. in the embarkation camps, he received his pay in American money, perhaps the first he had seen in many months. The “feel” of the familiar bills and the jingle of the silver were like a taste of home. Clean, neatly clothed, restored once more to man’s estate, the soldier emerged from the “mill” and made his way to quarters in the “clean” camp, his heart light because he knew now that he was going home “toot sweet.” The sense of well-being moved one soldier-poet to praise of the “mill” as follows:

“Ye go in one end dirty, broke,

So dog tired ye can’t see a joke.

Ye come out paid, an’ plum’ remade,

A self-respectin’ soldier.”

The embarkation plant at Bordeaux, if pressed, could cleanse, delouse, equip, and otherwise prepare for the home voyage 180,000 men in a month. During the busy times in 1919 a continuous column of men filed through the departments. They went through in blocks of twelve. In each of the various departments were ten booths, each accommodating twelve men.

Photo by Signal Corps

3. THE “MILL” BARBERSHOP

Photo by Signal Corps

4. THROUGH “MILL” AND READY FOR HOME

The processes at the other embarkation camps were essentially the same. In each of the Le Mans divisional camps was installed a bathing and delousing plant with a capacity of 1,200 men an hour. For the sterilization of clothing in the area there were three large central “disinfesting” plants, five smaller stationary steam sterilizers, and more than a dozen mobile sterilizers.

The two port camps at Bordeaux were known as Camp Neuve and Camp Genicart. After the armistice these two camps were reorganized and enlarged. Camp Neuve became the “dirty” or entrance camp. It accommodated 5,400 men. Camp Genicart was designated as the “clean” or evacuation camp, and its barracks could house nearly 17,000 men. The busiest day for Bordeaux was Sunday, May 11, 1919, when 6,399 men passed through the “mill” and made ready to embark. St. Nazaire handled 15,306 embarkations on June 17, 1919, its record day.

Salvage was an important operation at all the embarkation points in France. Thousands of articles of apparel discarded by the returning troops were not so worn but that they could be made serviceable again. The salvage plant at Le Mans could repair 1,700 pairs of shoes, dry-clean, sterilize, and repair 4,000 pieces of clothing, wash 10,000 garments in the laundry, and disinfect 10,000 blankets every day. The plant occupied eight buildings, and the average value of clothing repaired monthly was over $150,000. There were salvage plants also at Brest, St. Nazaire, and Bordeaux, the one at Brest being of great size.

The task of feeding men at the embarkation camps gave the Quartermaster Corps one of its chief problems. Each divisional sub-depot at Le Mans carried at all times sufficient food to supply the appetites of 25,000 men for fifteen days, and in addition the central warehouses contained 500,000 emergency rations to substitute for the garrison rations if anything went wrong with the food supply. In December, 1918, the subsistence services in the area had been built up to the capacity of 500,000 rations cooked and served each day.

At Brest also the feeding arrangements were laid out on an immense scale. The men ate food prepared in standard kitchens, each capable of providing subsistence for thousands. The cold-storage and other storage spaces of one of the standard kitchens were large enough to hold such items as 10,000 pounds of beef and 6,000 pounds of bread. The kitchen facilities included a meat cutting room, a tool room, a scullery, a garbage incinerator, a great mess hall, and finally the galleys, each of which contained four large hotel ranges with work-tables, serving tables, and all necessary cooking utensils. Ten men did the cooking in each galley. Each mess hall was 280 feet long. End to end, its metal topped tables measured 495 feet in length. Galleys, storage rooms, and mess halls had cement floors. The whole plant was illuminated by electricity.

Each mess hall at Brest was operated on the cafeteria plan. Each was equipped to feed 20,000 soldiers. The men entered the hall marching in column of squads. They passed through the galleys, filling their kits with hot food, then secured places at the tables, ate, and left the hall at the opposite end, where there were refuse cans in which to scrape off their dishes and also tanks of boiling, soapy water and hot rinsing water. Here they cleaned their equipment. The facilities were such that each kitchen could serve a brigade of troops entering the building at the ordinary marching pace. Frequent inspections kept the food up to standard. The camps at Brest also maintained night soup stands at which any soldier could get bread and hot soup between the hours of 8:30 p.m. and 2:30 a.m. The force that operated the messing facilities at Brest numbered 1,600 officers and men.

At Bordeaux the troops temporarily occupying the embarkation camps cooked their own meals at the mess halls, drawing their supplies from the camp organization. At St. Nazaire the messes were similar to those at Brest. The old army transport McClellan, which had crossed to France in the first American convoy in 1917, was stationed at St. Nazaire, where it served the subsistence organization as a floating refrigerator with capacity for 3,000,000 pounds of food. The McClellan was too old to stand the buffeting of the North Atlantic, and the Embarkation Service, unwilling to risk bringing her home, turned the ship over to the A. E. F. After the expedition had returned to the United States the Government sold the McClellan to France.

To the individual soldier, quite the most important branch of the embarkation organization was that one which paid the money due him from the Government. It paid him his money in francs, either in the currency itself or by check, and then saw to it that he exchanged his French money for its equivalent in American currency. Both of these enterprises in finance—disbursement and exchange—were in the hands of the A. E. F. Quartermaster Corps. The disbursement offered little difficulty, although the monthly pay roll at Brest sometimes contained as many as 100,000 names, while those at St. Nazaire and Bordeaux were proportionately large. The question of foreign exchange presented more of a problem.

Soon after the van of the A. E. F. reached France the Treasury Department at Washington requested the War Department to pay all its troops on foreign soil in the money of the country in which they chanced to be stationed. This meant that most of the men of the expedition received their pay in francs. Before the armistice, questions of currency exchange were of slight concern to the overseas soldier. After the Government had deducted his allotment to his dependents, his monthly premium payment for war risk insurance, and his partial payment for any Liberty Bonds he might have purchased through the Army, there was not much left for him, anyhow. When francs were cheaper he received more of them from the pay officer than he had expected, but as long as he stayed in France and spent his money there the rate of exchange made little difference to him.

French exchange continually strengthened during the sojourn of the expedition in France—until after the armistice began. The normal value of francs is 5.18 to the dollar. In July, 1917, the rate was 5.70. This rate gradually improved until at its strongest point it stood at 5.45. The few wounded men and casuals returning to the United States during this period were thus able to benefit financially by exchanging their French savings for American currency.

After the armistice, however, and during the very time the expeditionary troops were returning to the United States in greatest numbers, the exchange value of the franc slumped badly. Shortly after November 11, 1918, the rate was 5.80 to 1. It continued to fall steadily until in the autumn of 1919 it took 9.70 francs to purchase one dollar. It follows that the provident soldier who had saved the francs paid to him on a basis of less than six to the dollar lost heavily when he was forced to convert his savings back into dollars again on a basis of nearly ten francs to the dollar. The loss was particularly heavy upon officers who maintained drawing and savings accounts in French banks or who had not cashed their pay checks. Sometimes, too, officers lost their checks. Later they obtained duplicates, which the declining exchange had made less valuable. The War Department considered itself bound to protect soldiers from losses on this account. Congress is now considering a war department bill which, if enacted into law, will provide for the reimbursement of losses incurred by soldiers because of variations in foreign exchange.

It was good financial policy for the A. E. F. to leave all its French currency behind as it embarked for the United States, and to bring home only American money. Yet it would have resulted in confusion in the A. E. F. finances to have changed the pay system at the ports of embarkation. Therefore the Quartermaster Corps did the next best thing: it paid off the embarking troops in francs as usual and then immediately converted their francs into American currency. Since both payment and exchange were at the same rate of exchange, there was no loss to the troops in this transaction.

In order to provide the American money for this exchange it was necessary for the Treasury to ship to France great quantities of currency. It took the A. E. F. some time to convince the Treasury Department of the necessity for such shipments. The day after the armistice began, the command of the A. E. F. cabled to the Treasury requesting the immediate shipment of $500,000 in currency, an order afterwards increased to $2,000,000. This money did not actually reach the A. E. F. until the last day of January, 1919. By that date the expedition was beginning to embark rapidly. There was not enough American currency in Europe to buy all the French money of the expeditionary troops, and only by the most strenuous efforts could the Quartermaster Corps provide money for exchange until the first shipment of currency arrived from the United States. Finance officers were stationed in Paris, London, and at the principal seaports with orders to buy all the American money they could secure. By combing the banks and the countingrooms of brokers and by maintaining in Paris a fund from which shipments were rushed by motor convoys to the ports as these exhausted their supplies of currency, the Corps managed to keep the exchange system running. After the January shipment of $2,000,000 the Treasury Department arranged for an automatic supply of $10,000,000 every month.

Meanwhile, at the ports the Corps had built up the exchange plan. Booths were set up on all docks, and a force of disbursing quartermasters was organized to go on board all transports and exchange the money of soldiers who had failed to make the exchange on shore. The A. E. F. passed an order making it compulsory for all soldiers to exchange their cash before sailing. Notices to this effect were posted conspicuously in all the embarkation camps. In the larger units the officers attended to the matter, collecting the French money from their men, receiving American money for it from the exchange officers, and then distributing the familiar currency among the troops. Individuals and men traveling in small units attended to their own exchange. The quartermasters at Brest distributed as much as $400,000 in American currency in a single day. Up to July 1 Brest had paid out $60,000,000 in American money to troops boarding ship there.

By the late spring of 1919 most of the combat divisions, except those on active duty with the Army of Occupation, had crossed the ocean or had started for home. By that time the facilities at the base ports had been developed to a capacity that enabled them to handle all further embarkations, and the command of the expedition closed and abandoned the embarkation center at Le Mans. All of the physical equipment there went to the French Government under the terms of the general sale consummated in August of that year. On June 30 Bordeaux was closed as a port of embarkation. It had embarked 258,000 troops. St. Nazaire officially ceased to exist as a port of embarkation on July 26, although thereafter it embarked a few casuals. Approximately 500,000 American soldiers said farewell to France at St. Nazaire.

A million and a quarter American expeditionary soldiers departed from Brest for the United States. Brest was the last of the ports to close. The embarkation of the millionth American at Brest seemed almost as momentous as the arrival of the millionth American in France a year earlier. In August General Pershing and the historic First Division sailed from Brest, and the last of the combat troops had gone. On October 1 American troops were stationed in France only at Brest and in Paris, but Brest continued in operation as the port of embarkation until the last American had departed. On October 1 there were a few thousand men still to sail, but the A. E. F. no longer existed in France. Its headquarters had moved to Washington. The great task was done.

CHAPTER III
THE TRANSATLANTIC FERRY

On the first day of the armistice, before Washington knew its exact terms or could form an estimate of how great a force we should have to maintain in France pending the conclusion of permanent peace, General Frank T. Hines, the Chief of the Embarkation Service, which had administered the great work of transporting the 2,000,000 men of the A. E. F. to France and had carried nearly half of them across the ocean in its own ships, placed before the Secretary of War a plan for the return of the troops.

It can be said that the outlook for the speedy repatriation of the overseas soldiers was not bright. It had taken nearly seventeen months to transport the expedition to Europe, and more than half of the men had crossed in the ships of other nations. England had been the chief contributor of tonnage to our overseas movement prior to November 11. To build up on the western front the numerical superiority that was the chief factor in the victory, the British Empire combed the seas for suitable passenger ships, cut her own civilian requirements to the minimum, and devoted to our transport service every ton of troop-carrying capacity she could procure. France and Italy had each supplied a few vessels.

Photo by Signal Corps

KITCHENS AT LE MANS

Photo by Signal Corps

STREET IN LE MANS AREA NO. 5

With the immense fleet thus assembled the War Department transported men across the Atlantic with an intense concentration of effort never before known. First in the determination that the Germans should not conquer, later in the assurance that we ourselves should win, the Department shipped the troops over with scarcely a thought of how they were going to get back again. Future events were to be allowed to take care of themselves.

Now such events had come to pass. England, faced with the sudden necessity of returning her own colonial soldiers to their native lands, and looking ahead, too, to the restoration of her all-important foreign commerce, immediately withdrew her tonnage from our service. France and Italy did likewise. The magnificent “bridge of ships” on which the American Expedition had crossed the Atlantic melted away, and 2,000,000 Americans found themselves partially marooned in a strange land.

Photo by Signal Corps

CASUALS ON TRANSPORT LEAVING BREST

Photo by Signal Corps

BOARDING TRANSPORT FROM LIGHTERS, BREST

Yet not completely marooned. The fleet of American-flag troopships assembled during the war had on the day of the armistice a one-trip capacity of 112,000 military passengers. Operated in armed and guarded convoys, this shipping could not quite average one round-trip transatlantic voyage a month; its transporting capacity under war conditions was somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 troops a month. The armistice did away with the need of steaming in convoy and allowed the transports to be operated by the much more efficient system of individual sailings. Under such conditions the monthly capacity of the American-flag fleet was about 150,000 men. This capacity was to be discounted somewhat by the fact that practically all of the vessels had reached a point of having to be retired for a season of reconditioning and repair. It was evident that, unless this fleet were aided, it would take it, under the most favorable conditions, over a year to bring home the A. E. F.; and it was likelier that, actually, the spring of 1920 would be at hand before the last of the overseas soldiers set foot once more on their native soil. General Hines’s plan provided for such aid. It discounted in advance the subsequent fact that the Allies withdrew their passenger ships, and turned to our own resources for increased transport capacity.

It appeared that we should have considerable tonnage available for such use—tonnage released by the armistice from other service. For one source, there was the Navy. Its battleships and cruisers variously had been protecting the coast, convoying transports, and holding themselves ready in the combined Grand Fleet to meet the expected German naval attack in force. These duties had come to an end. The Hines plan contemplated the temporary conversion of a number of war vessels into troop carriers by the installation of berths and messing accommodations. Although all foreign tonnage was to be withdrawn at once, the Transportation Service hoped to secure some additional capacity by chartering passenger vessels from foreign owners under new arrangements.

The most promising source of new capacity, however, lay in the fleet of army cargo transports which, on the day of the armistice, represented about 2,500,000 deadweight tonnage[2] in the aggregate. The armistice immediately rendered a great part of this tonnage no longer necessary to the Government in the maintenance of a vast overseas supply service. The A. E. F. was thereafter to exist on a garrison basis, requiring only the ordinary garrison supplies of food and clothing. The great cargoes of ordnance and aircraft, of raw steel and semi-finished materials for the French and English munitions plants, of horses and mules, of railway and engineering supplies—the tonnage which had laden the cargo fleet in the past and had heaped up at the Atlantic terminals—were to cross the ocean no more. It was proposed to take the best of the cargo transports and convert them immediately into troopships.

The War Department adopted the entire plan, and the first act of the Transportation Service was to begin a survey of the cargo fleet to determine what vessels were most suitable for conversion. Only the larger and faster boats would serve, and of course they had to be ships with holds adapted to the installation of troop quarters. Specialized vessels, such as tankers and ore carriers, would not do.

For the Transportation Service the armistice was but an episode. It merely changed the character of its work and added to the volume of it. The peak of the operations curve, so far as troop transportation was concerned, was not reached until eight months after the armistice had been in effect. The thousands of troops in the Transportation Service yearned for discharge and home as ardently as did the rest of the Army; yet these men realized that it would be months before their work could end. Meanwhile they would have to see hundreds of thousands proceeding to demobilization camps as rapidly as steamships and trains could carry them, with never a thought of the transportation men who had made their early discharge possible.

The resulting drop in morale was one difficulty which the Transportation Service faced at the outset of its labors in demobilization, but one which it met and solved successfully. Another more concrete one had to do with the operation of troopships. Early in the war the Army had turned over to the Navy the task of operating most of the troopships at sea, principally because the military authorities found themselves unable to compete with the high wages of the munitions industries in securing civilian crews for vessels. The Navy, with the uniform it offered and its appeal to patriotism, had no such trouble; and consequently it assumed the operation of the troop transports and manned them with bluejackets. These young Americans enlisted for danger and adventure and had no stomach for the work of operating a collection of prosaic ferry-boats across the now safe Atlantic. The Navy Department, seeing that it could not hold them in service, notified the War Department to take back its ships. This the Transportation Service did, hiring civilian crews and placing them aboard the troop transports at a rate that relieved the Navy of the work entirely by the summer of 1919, except that the Navy continued to operate three or four troopships with crews made up of men serving under term enlistments.

While the Transportation Service was contemplating the conversion of many of its cargo carriers into troopships and the consequent use of the vessels for a number of months to come, it was subjected to pressure from the owners of some of these same ships, who demanded that the Government give them up. Practically all of its cargo tonnage the Army held under charter from private ownership, the charters running during the emergency. After the armistice the vessel owners naturally desired to get back into the race for foreign commerce. It was to the interest of the United States that the military tonnage be so employed at the earliest possible time, but the early return of the overseas expedition was even more important, and it received the priority.

Another obstacle in the way of carrying out the Service’s demobilization plan swiftly and efficiently was the congested condition of the American shipyards, practically all of which were engaged to the limits of their capacities in new construction for the Emergency Fleet Corporation. This congestion not only hampered the project to convert the cargo vessels into troop carriers, but it also strung out the necessary work of overhauling the regular troop transports already in commission. For over a year these vessels had been driven mercilessly through fair weather and foul, with never a let-up for the general repairing and reconditioning which every ship needs at intervals. Large forces had been carried on all of them as part of the crews to keep the vessels going somehow by making emergency repairs whenever needed. Only conditions as they existed before the armistice warranted such abuse. The armistice occurred opportunely for most of these vessels, and particularly for the ex-German liners. War or no war, they had about reached the point where they had to be drydocked, regardless of the effect upon the overseas movement. After the armistice it would have been folly to set this tonnage at another great task without first putting it in good condition. To do the work the Transportation Service had at its disposal only its own repair yards at New York and the drydock and ship repair yard of the Newport News Shipbuilding Company. Because of this limitation the shipping was tied up longer than would normally have been necessary.

The survey conducted by the Transportation Service immediately after the armistice designated fifty-eight cargo transports for conversion. They were the largest vessels of the cargo fleet, and conversion equipped them to carry, on the average, 2,500 troops on each. Thus the project added 125,000 accommodations to the trip capacity of the troop-carrying fleet as it existed on the day of the armistice—more than doubling it in size. By December 13 the survey was complete and the marine architects were drawing the conversion specifications for the individual vessels; and on that day the Service awarded the first of the contracts, that for converting the Buford (which later carried the exported radicals to Russia and gained fame as the “Soviet Ark”). The cost of remodeling the Buford was $70,000, and the contractor completed the work in twenty-eight days. By the end of the year twenty conversion contracts had been placed. Others followed at intervals until April 29, 1919, when the last of them was signed. Before June 1 all fifty-eight ships were in service as troopships.

In spite of adverse conditions in industry the ship contractors made extraordinarily good time in remodeling these vessels. Such conversion was practically a rebuilding job. It meant tearing out practically the entire interiors of the hulls and rebuilding to provide troop quarters, galleys, mess rooms, and sanitary facilities. The average time for completing this work was forty-one days and the average cost was more than $161,000. The total cost was about $9,000,000.

It will be seen that the project, because of its expense if on no other account, was a bold step for the Transportation Service to take. The cost of conversion per passenger accommodated was about $72—more than the cost of a single steerage passage across the Atlantic on a commercial liner. Looked at in a broader way, however, the expenditure of the $9,000,000 was really an economy, for it enabled the Government to bring home and discharge several hundred thousand soldiers weeks and even months sooner than would otherwise have been possible.

This single act of converting the cargo transports into troop carriers did more than any other one thing to expedite the return of the A. E. F.; yet the aggressiveness of the Transportation Service did not end there. Under the terms of the peace treaty Germany agreed to turn over to the Allies under charter most of the remnant of her formerly great passenger-carrying merchant fleet. For nearly five years these vessels had swung at their moorings in German harbors and rivers. At her pier in the river Elbe was the Imperator, the largest ship in the world, exceeding in size her sister ship Vaterland, which had become the U. S. Transport Leviathan. The Allied Maritime Transport Council, which had allocated world tonnage in the struggle against the submarine, decided to divide this fresh German tonnage equally between Great Britain and the United States, giving us all the larger vessels because we possessed harbors that could accommodate them. The smaller ships England was to use in repatriating her Australian troops.

General Hines, the chief of our Transportation Service, took part in the proceedings in London, securing from the Council ten large German vessels. At once a U. S. navy board, headed by Admiral Benson, chief of the Bureau of Operations during the great struggle, went to Germany to put the allotted ships in condition for service. Repairs were quickly made, and presently all ten ships, propelled by machinery unfamiliar to American sailors, sailed out of the German harbors and into the harbor at Brest, manned from bridges to firing rooms by Yankee bluejackets and their officers.

From the London conference General Hines went to see various shipping concerns in European Allied and neutral countries and secured by charter thirty-three passenger ships in all—thirteen from Italian owners, twelve from Spanish and Dutch ownership, and eight from French interests.

Long before this event the Navy had taken fourteen of its battleships and ten armored cruisers and by the installation of berths and other accommodations had turned them into passenger boats capable of carrying 28,600 troops at once. These vessels added to the homeward movement more than a division of troops a month.

Photo by Signal Corps

TROOPS ON BATTLESHIP READY FOR MESS

Photo by Signal Corps

WARSHIPS WITH TROOPS DOCKING AT HOBOKEN

Thus was the Atlantic rebridged after the armistice and with a structure even broader and more capacious than the one on which the expedition had crossed to France. On June 23, 1919, the troopship fleet reached its greatest expansion. On that day it consisted of 174 vessels with trip accommodations for 419,000 troops. It could have transported the entire A. E. F. in five trips, with room to spare. It was greater in capacity than the combined facilities at our disposal before the armistice, yet practically all of it sailed under the Stars and Stripes. In number of ships it was four times as large as the troop fleet which the Army held in charter and ownership on November 11. It outnumbered by forty vessels the combined fleet both of American and of Allied troopships at our disposal before the armistice. Yet on the day of the armistice we seemed to have exhausted the possibilities of ocean shipping!

Photo by Signal Corps

EMBARKING FOR UNITED STATES

Photo by Signal Corps

MESS ROOM ON CONVERTED CARGO TRANSPORT OHIOAN

Always courageous and swift in action, the Transportation Service was one of the first of the war department bureaus to anticipate the armistice and the consequent demobilization. On November 1, ten days ahead of the armistice, upon the confidential intelligence that the German Government had ordered its fleet out to give battle to the Grand Fleet of the Allies, and further assured that the defeat of Germany on land was in sight, the Transportation Service stopped the overseas movement of all combat troops. Primarily this action was taken to avoid a disaster to our troop transports, a disaster almost bound to occur if in the expected forthcoming naval engagement any of the German warships were by chance able to slip through the Allied cordon and reach the Atlantic. After the armistice the anticipatory act of the Transportation Service proved to be of material benefit in demobilization, for it had kept away from France at least four divisions of troops, diminishing by so much the work of bringing back the expedition.

On the fifth day of the armistice General Pershing named thirty divisions that were to conduct the advance of the Army of Occupation to the Rhine and hold open the communications, designated the supply troops to support the divisions, and released the rest of the Expeditionary Forces for return to the United States as soon as transportation facilities could be provided. This order freed nearly half the expedition for demobilization. A million men were thus ready to return home at once.

While the authorities in France were preparing for the embarkation to come, there was at hand a job in overseas transportation to which the Transportation Service could turn with such troopships as were available for immediate use. In England on the day of the armistice there were stationed more than 70,000 American soldiers, most of them members of the air service squadrons undergoing training in the British aviation camps. Their embarkation through the large British seaports offered no particular difficulty. On our own regular transports and in such space as the Army could secure on British commercial liners, this whole force was set down in the United States within six weeks after the armistice began.

The embarkation of the A. E. F. in France may be said to have started about the middle of December, simultaneously with the appearance of the order establishing the three embarkation ports and the embarkation area at Le Mans. From then on week by week the embarkations of home-coming troops steadily increased in number. In January the first of the converted cargo transports joined the troopship fleet. A little later some of the chartered foreign tonnage appeared in the service. About that time, too, the Navy began adding its increment of war vessels fitted out as troop carriers. In the late spring we secured the German tonnage. In June, 1919, the American troop sailings reached a maximum never before attained in any military or civilian movement. In that month 368,300 American soldiers embarked on transports in France, and 343,600 landed on American soil. The movement exceeded by 60,000 men that of the greatest month in the transport of the A. E. F. to France. In taking the forces to France we had been assisted by the merchant marines of the principal Allies to the limit of their combined capacities, but we brought back the expedition single-handed.

This great record was made possible not only by the utilization of all tonnage that could be adapted to such service, but also by the operation of the shipping at its highest efficiency. The drop in morale among the personnel of the Transportation Service in the first disheartening weeks of the armistice was soon offset by the spirit of the transportation men in early 1919 when they realized the great value of the service they were rendering to their comrades of the expedition and to the country at large. When it bore into their consciousness that they were exceeding all expectations in delivering troops from France to the United States, they fell to with a spirit unexcelled even in the days when every soldier set down in France was so much added insurance of a speedy end to the war. Ship vied with ship to cut down steaming time, and the ports competed with each other in dispatching vessels to sea.

Under such circumstances all records for shipping efficiency fell. In 1918, with every energy bent upon the attainment of maximum efficiency, the average turn-around, or round voyage across the ocean and back, of the American troop transports was something over 36 days. In 1919 during the return movement it dropped to 32.6 days.

The oil-burning transport Great Northern, which was bought outright by the War Department in the spring of 1918, proved to be the fleetest thing that ever plied the Atlantic. Leaving Hoboken on June 24, 1919, with a few passengers, a few days later she landed them at Brest, took on 2,999 troops by moonlight, and recrossed to Hoboken—all within twelve days, five hours, and thirty minutes. No other vessel, military or commercial, ever equaled this speed. The Great Northern also established the record of eighteen transatlantic cycles at the average rate of twenty-three days for each; and in the whole war enterprise she transported more troops per ton of capacity than did any other troopship. She was closely crowded for honors, however, by her sister ship Northern Pacific.

The vessels alone could not write such records except through the coöperation of the port organizations on both sides of the Atlantic. Before the armistice the capacities of the ports, especially of those in France, were a sharper limitation upon the expansion of American power at the front than was the shortage in ocean shipping. After the armistice the improvement in shipping efficiency was attained largely by speeding up the loading and unloading of transports in port. On May 17 the transport Maui at Brest took aboard 3,612 troops and sailed for America in three hours and thirty-five minutes after arriving. These soldiers had to be carried out to her in lighters, and they boarded her at the rate of sixty-five a minute. On the same day the transport Cape May, one of the converted cargo vessels, arrived at Bordeaux and sailed on the same tide with a load of 1,928 troops, having been dispatched in one hour and nineteen minutes. These were extreme instances, but they were indicative of the efficiency of the port machinery.

At first the Transportation Service would fix no schedule for the return of the expedition, except the general one that it hoped to bring back the last man before January 1, 1920. By the beginning of spring, 1919, the situation looked so much better that the Service brought out a schedule showing the probable troop-carrying capacity available in the French ports by months, and estimating this capacity for several months ahead. The schedule promised a gradual increase until the shipping reached a goal of 250,000 embarkations a month. On the basis of this schedule the command of the A. E. F. fixed priorities for embarkation and published both the schedule and priority dates, to the excitement of the men of the expedition, most of whom were then still in France. To be sure, the authorities promised nothing definitely and informed the soldiers that the schedule would be met “if practicable”; yet the men of the A. E. F. banked on the Transportation Service to fulfill its predictions.

The goal of 250,000 embarkations a month was the extreme maximum which the Service thought it might attain if everything went right. Yet three months later, when embarkations approached 400,000, the goal had been passed by 50 per cent. The actual performance brought 300,000 overseas soldiers home two months ahead of schedule, and 300,000 others beat the schedule by one month. Here was the equivalent of 900,000 men returned and discharged from service one month earlier than the nation had any reason to expect. The cost of maintaining such a force in arms for one month is approximately $66,000,000, a saving which must be set down to the credit of the administration that made it possible.

The days spent at sea by the returning troops were not time wasted. Although the embarkation officers in France did their best to send out with each soldier a complete record of his service, in the press of the work it was not always possible to attain this ideal. It was unjust to hold back a soldier from embarkation because his records were incomplete; yet before he could secure his discharge his papers had to be in perfect shape. The Transportation Service, through its debarkation camps in the United States, took it upon itself to perfect the individual records of the soldiers, and it did most of this work on the ships at sea. In special schools at Hoboken and Newport News the Service trained a force of traveling personnel adjutants for assignment to the transports. As soon as a troopship started out from France the personnel adjutant aboard opened an office, and from that moment until the ship docked he was busy from morning to night smoothing up the service records. He also compiled the papers which the debarkation camps would need and instructed the troops in the procedure to be followed after landing.

Unexpectedly, the Transportation Service found itself obliged to bring home in first-class accommodations many more persons than it had carried to Europe in that style. Thousands of officers had crossed before the armistice in commercial liners, and so had crowds of red cross and other welfare workers. Numerous soldiers had acquired wives in Europe. Military regulation gave these women and their husbands accompanying them the right to occupy first-class quarters on transports. After the armistice several congressional committees and hundreds of experts employed by the Government in the peace negotiations traveled first-class on the transports in both directions. The result was that on July 1, 1919, at the ports in France awaiting first-class transportation to America there were 32,000 persons over and above the capacity of such accommodations in sight for several months to come. To have brought them all back in the state to which they were entitled would have made necessary the full operation of the entire transport fleet for three months beyond the time when the return movement actually ceased. To settle the matter the Service adopted the expedient of bringing home several thousand junior officers quartered in the troop spaces of certain of the larger and faster vessels. Although some outcry arose over this treatment, the majority of the officers were too glad to get home at all to be critical of the mode of their transportation.

Not a man of the 2,000,000 passengers lost his life as the result of marine disaster after the armistice. The worst accident occurred shortly after midnight on January 1, 1919, when, during a blinding rainstorm, the great transport Northern Pacific, with a load of 2,500 troops, two-thirds of whom were sick and wounded men, went aground on the Long Island shore near the entrance to New York harbor. The sea was rough, the wind making, and as the ship turned port side to the beach and worked up on the sand, pounding heavily, rescue for the time was impossible. The weather was cold, the ship’s machinery was out of commission, and she was lightless and unheated. It took three days to rescue the passengers; yet, despite the severity of the experience, no person on board suffered seriously from it. The pounding had so damaged the ship’s hull that many of the plates had to be renewed. A more serious injury was a broken stern-post. In former marine practice such an injury meant the casting of a new post in steel. The Navy, as in the instance of the broken machinery in the interned German ships, resorted to the electric welding torch for repairing the broken stern-post, saving several months in time and perhaps $50,000 in money.

Photo by Signal Corps

SAILING DAY AT ST. NAZAIRE

Photo by Signal Corps

TRANSPORT MAUI LOADING AT ST. NAZAIRE

The A. E. F. sold most of its property in Europe. The cargo transports brought home about 850,000 tons of military freight—a small fraction of the property held by the expedition at the time of the armistice. The goods were sold abroad at a loss, the average recovery being considerably under that received from the sale of similar goods in the United States. Yet it was good policy to do what was done. Europe needed the supplies and we needed the ship-space for other purposes. If the materials had been returned to the United States for sale, out of the proceeds would have had to be deducted the transportation cost; and the Government was little, if anything, out of pocket by the transaction.

Photo by Signal Corps

SOUVENIRS OF HIS SERVICE

Photo by Signal Corps

EMBARKING AT ST. NAZAIRE

Among the materials freighted home were 100,000 tons of road-making machinery. This the War Department turned over to the Department of Agriculture to be used in the construction of highways in the United States. The cargo transports also brought back large ordnance stores, principally artillery, much of it of British and French manufacture. The shipments included a large number of captured German cannon, brought back for distribution among American communities as war trophies.

While the returning troop movement was at its height the Transportation Service was winding up its war business and returning to a permanent peace footing. This program consisted principally of disposing of its vessels and its shore establishments. On November 11, 1918, the Service was operating 580 vessels with a total deadweight of nearly 4,000,000 tons. At the end of 1919 the army fleet consisted of only the few transports actually owned by the Government through purchase, construction, or seizure from Germany or Austria.

Most of its vessels the Army held under charter from private owners. The best interests of the United States required the return of these ships to their ownership just as soon as the Army could do without them. The cargo boats were first to go. In February, 1919, the Transportation Service began turning them back—redelivering them, it was called—at the rate of three ships a day. In July, when the peak of the overseas troop movement had passed, the Service began disposing of its chartered troopships (including the converted cargo transports), redelivering the last of them in December.

The Government faced tremendous costs in these transactions. The charters provided that the Army must restore the shipping to its owners in its original condition, ordinary wear and tear excepted. Nearly every ship had been remodeled to a greater or less extent to make it more serviceable to the Army. All the domestic shipyards and repair yards were glutted with work, and it was evident that it would be a long time before the Transportation Service could recondition the vessels. Meanwhile the Service would have to maintain all of this idle shipping at a heavy continuing expense.

Instead of reconditioning the ships, therefore, the Transportation Service adopted the policy of returning vessels as they were, at the same time compensating the owners with lump-sum settlements for damage done by war service. In most instances the owners were glad enough to accept such an arrangement. To protect the Government in the settlements, joint boards of vessel survey, each consisting of an army, a navy, and a United States shipping board official, were set up at all the ports where ships were to be redelivered. Expert marine surveyors under their direction made detailed examinations of all the ships. With these surveys in hand, and with the complete history of each ship and of the service it had undergone while in the War Department’s possession, the survey boards were able to arrive at a close estimate of the amount of the Government’s financial liability in each case. The owners also employed their expert surveyors, and out of the two examinations grew negotiations which arrived at compromise settlements.

In December, 1918, the Service redelivered ships of approximately 189,000 deadweight tons. In January the redelivered ships aggregated 461,000 deadweight tons; in February, 470,000; and in March occurred the heaviest redelivery, amounting to approximately 532,000 deadweight tons. Redeliveries crossed the two-million-deadweight-ton mark shortly after the middle of April. By June most of the cargo transports had been restored to their owners, except those which had been converted into troop carriers. On June 15 the Army began dispensing with the use of battleships and cruisers, the last of the twenty-four being withdrawn on August 1. The break-up of the troop fleet began in earnest on August 1, and by the first anniversary of the armistice most of the chartered troopships had gone back to commercial work.

Many questions of admiralty law arose in connection with the restoration of the transports to the merchant marine. The legal branch of the Transportation Service on the day of the armistice consisted of but two lawyers. By that time a large number of maritime claims awaiting adjudication had accumulated, and it was recognized that such claims would multiply during the progress of negotiations leading to the redelivery of the vessels. With much difficulty the Service built up a force of twenty admiralty lawyers. In fact, the War Department, after the armistice, was so badly in need of lawyers for use in the liquidation of war business, that for several months it was forced to maintain the rule that no man of legal training should be discharged from the military service.

In breaking up the fleet of troop transports the Transportation Service found opportunity to create for the War Department a large permanent reserve of troopships without expense to the Government for their maintenance. The German and Austrian ships seized by the Government at the outset of the war became in large part the property of the Army. Most of these vessels were admirably adapted to war service, but they were too large and too costly in operation to justify their continuance in the transport service of the peace-time establishment. Consequently the Transportation Service turned thirteen of them over to the Shipping Board under an agreement providing for their charter to private operators, subject to their recall by the Army in the event of another war. These ships can accommodate approximately 50,000 troops at once. All of the special military fittings have been classified and stored away ready for use again, if it ever becomes necessary.

When the war traffic ended, the Transportation Service found itself in possession of enormous port facilities. Prior to the armistice the Government had seized or leased over seventy steamship piers at various Atlantic and Gulf ports; but even such facilities being entirely inadequate to the vast amount of shipping contemplated, the Government began the construction of seven great port bases located at Boston, Brooklyn, Port Newark, Philadelphia, Norfolk, Charleston, and New Orleans. Not one of these projects was complete on November 11. One of the early demobilization questions to be settled was what to do with these installations. Should the Government abandon them and set down as loss the millions spent, or go ahead with their erection and perhaps make the whole enterprise profitable by leasing the facilities to American commerce? The latter course was chosen. The contractors completed the construction at a total cost of $143,000,000. As the new piers became ready for use the Transportation Service turned back its leased piers to their owners. Then, as the military traffic dwindled, the space in the base terminals was leased to private ship operators. These terminals, among the largest and finest in the United States, are now rendering an important service to our foreign trade, but on terms ensuring their instant availability to the Government in the event of a future emergency.[3]

CHAPTER IV
EBB TIDE

Before the American Expeditionary Forces could be disbanded in this country it was necessary for the training camps, most of which were to become demobilization centers after the armistice, to be evacuated by the home forces occupying them. The fluvial system leading into that sea of humanity which we knew as the A. E. F.—main river crossing the ocean, chief tributaries leading up to the ports in this country, beyond them their branch creeks and brooks, and the rills at the sources—was running bank-full on the day of the armistice. Demobilization, which inverted many of the processes of war and changed familiar names into their antonyms, abruptly reversed the direction of troop-flow, as if some tremendous power had uplifted the reservoir and the mouth of the main stream in France above the ultimate sources in this country. Before the expeditionary sea could drain out, the home channels of troop supply had to discharge their contents into the nimbus of civilian life.

The process of dissolution began within the hour in which the news of peace came to Washington. It happened that November 11 was the first of five days during which the Army planned to absorb 250,000 soldiers inducted into service under the terms of the Selective Service Act. Although it was evident that an armistice was at hand, the Railroad Administration went ahead with preparations for the transportation of these men to the training camps, and even dispatched the draft trains on the morning of November 11 to pick up the selectives, although the morning newspapers had announced that the armistice was indisputably to begin at eleven o’clock in France. The only preparation looking toward demobilization had been to set up telephone and telegraph circuits over which the officials in Washington could stop and turn back the troop trains in a minimum of time. Immediately after receiving General Pershing’s message announcing the start of the armistice, the Secretary of War notified the Troop-Movement Section of the Railroad Administration to stop the draft trains. This was done within an hour, although the trains were then in operation in every section of the United States. Some thousands of young men who had taken the oath of allegiance that morning, and who at the approach of noon were on troop trains proceeding to military camps, found themselves back at home, civilians once more, before the embers of the celebrating bonfires had died out that night.

Hard on their heels came the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who made up the combat divisions in training in the United States. These were the men last to don the uniform—men who were only partially trained, and who could be of no service to the War Department in the activities of demobilization. Their disbandment was not a difficult undertaking. They had been in the service so short a time that there were no complications of back pay and incomplete records to hinder their discharge. Moreover, they were geographically homogeneous—i.e., their homes were generally in the regions surrounding the training camps—and therefore their demobilization brought about no problem in transportation. As a rule they were paid off and discharged at their training camps and allowed to make their way to their homes.

Quite apart from the divisional troops, there was another great body of soldiers in the United States on the day of the armistice. These were men undergoing training in special camps, such as those of the Air Service and the Quartermaster Corps, and also the troops engaged in maintaining the great war establishment in the United States. The demobilization of these men was more difficult. It was for them in the first place that the War Department set up the demobilization system which was to be seen in the perfection of operation later on when the A. E. F. began reaching the United States en masse.

Soon after the armistice the War Department established by order a system of thirty-three demobilization camps, or centers, as they were called. In large part these centers were former training camps. Practically all the National Army cantonments and some of the National Guard camps were so used. Other military posts and stations were added so as to distribute the demobilization centers evenly throughout the country according to the distribution of population. The War Department’s policy was to discharge soldiers in as close proximity as possible to their former places of residence.

The special troops on duty in this country lacked homogeneity in the regional origin of the members of the various units. Many of the organizations were composed entirely of men chosen because of special aptitude for special service. Single units were therefore made up of men from widely separated parts of the United States. When the time came to disperse these troops it was found impossible to send the units intact to demobilization centers and there to disband them, except at a great waste of transportation. Throughout the whole activity the War Department husbanded transportation. Before the armistice it had been the general policy to move men always to the eastward, since east was forward. The armistice inverted the policy; and in order to avoid expensive duplication of travel, the Army in assembling its demobilization units moved its men always essentially westward until at length they reached the camps where they were to be discharged.

Throughout the winter of 1918–1919 the disintegration of the home forces proceeded rapidly, as the great subordinate services of the Army tapered off their war activities and released their men. One or two of the services, such as the Medical Department and the Motor Transport Corps, held on to their troops for a few months in order to carry out necessary duties connected with the disbanding of the Army and the restoration of the military establishment to a peace footing; but the others, such as the Air Service, the Signal Corps, the Corps of Engineers, and the Quartermaster Corps, reduced strength as rapidly as the country could absorb the men. These men lost their unit identity as they proceeded toward the demobilization centers and finally found themselves once more grouped with their neighbors, regardless of what service any of them had performed.

By the end of February, 1919, more than 1,600,000 officers and enlisted men had been discharged from the Army. At that time only about 300,000 of the expeditionary troops had reached the United States. The great body of the A. E. F. was still to come, but the demobilization centers in the United States were empty and ready for it.

The policy of discharging troops at centers adjacent to their homes rested upon a sound foundation. As the country faced the demobilization of 4,000,000 troops, young men most of whom had been held for many months under the rigid restraints of army discipline, there was a widespread apprehension that the discharged soldiers might congregate in the larger cities and create profound economic disturbances. Upon the War Department there was no compulsion of law to transport the troops to their own neighborhoods before discharging them. Obviously the easy and convenient thing was to discharge them wherever they happened to be—at the thousand and one camps in the United States, or at the Atlantic ports upon their arrival from France—discharge them there, pay them off, and so farewell to them. Such, in fact, had been army procedure before the World War. The Army discharged its men at the posts where they were serving and paid to them the travel allowances granted by law. Whether they used their money to pay for actual transportation home was no concern of the Army’s. They were all free, and most of them white and twenty-one. As long as discharges were relatively few this procedure had no effect upon the economic life of the nation. But what would have been the result if the War Department had continued this practice when disbanding the 4,000,000 troops in uniform on the day of the armistice? Most of them would have been turned loose in the vicinity of the large cities of the United States—more than 1,000,000 of them at New York alone. Their pockets would have been crammed with money. Congress by special enactment raised the travel allowance for discharged soldiers to five cents a mile, payable for the distance between the place of discharge and the soldier’s home, whether the entire journey could be accomplished by railroad or not. Congress also granted a bonus of $60 to every soldier—payable also at discharge. Thousands of soldiers, when they came up for discharge, were entitled to back pay. Thus every man received a considerable sum of money with his discharge certificate, and for the overseas soldier this sum probably averaged more than $100. The streets of our cities would have been thronged with such men during the first six months of 1919. After their hardships the temptation to have a fling at metropolitan entertainments would have been well-nigh irresistible. They would have been fair game for gamblers and sharp practitioners. The rare individual might have bought his ticket and gone soberly home, but the majority could scarcely have been expected to show such restraint. In a little while, pockets that had jingled with money would have been empty, the streets would have been crowded with stranded soldiers, and the burdened municipalities would have had to face a severe civic problem.

This was what the War Department sought to avoid, and what it did avoid, by its demobilization policy. There was also another consideration—that of financial economy. The War Department could carry troops at a cost of much less than five cents a mile per capita. Therefore, by distributing the Army about the country and discharging every man within his own native section the War Department was able to save millions of dollars which otherwise would have been paid out in mileage allowances.

The good offices of the Government to the demobilized soldier did not end when the War Department had paid him his money and discharged him. As a special inducement to demobilized soldiers not to linger in the communities near the demobilization centers, the United States Railroad Administration made a special travel rate to them of two cents a mile. In order to secure the cut rate, however, the soldier had to buy his ticket within twenty-four hours after receiving his discharge. Thus it was to his direct financial advantage to go home at once. Nor did the Railroad Administration permit him to overlook the opportunity. All the principal demobilization centers had their own railway terminals, from which special trains for discharged soldiers departed at intervals. The Railroad Administration set up railway ticket booths in the offices of the camp finance officers, so that each newly discharged man, as he turned away from the disbursing window with his money in his hand, faced the railway ticket booth. At his elbow were Red Cross, Y. M. C. A., and other camp welfare workers to urge him to buy his railway ticket at once and leave on the first train. The path of least resistance led straight home, and he was indeed a headstrong individual who did not follow it. As a result of the whole system the demobilization of the Army went through without any trouble at all.

The policy had an effect upon the mode of troop travel that was to be observed even beyond the ports of embarkation in France. The original plan had been to bring all the expeditionary divisions back to the camps in which they had been organized and trained, and there to disband them. There seemed to be nothing in the way of so simple a solution of the problem. In organizing the divisions in the first place, it had been the policy, to which there were but few exceptions, to create divisions of men originating in the territory contiguous to each training camp. As the divisions started for France they possessed definite territorial identity; and the divisional names which they commonly adopted for themselves—the New England Division, the Sunset Division, the Buckeye Division, the Keystone Division, and so on—usually indicated the geographical origin of the men of the organizations. It was thought that, by transporting the overseas divisions back to their original training camps in this country, each would be placed in the demobilization center most convenient to the respective homes of its soldiers.

The attempt to put this policy into practice quickly showed the fallacy of it. Immediately it was discovered that the composition of the divisions had radically changed during the service in France. Men had died in battle, fallen sick, been transferred to other organizations, and their places had been taken by replacement troops shipped from the United States. Whole divisions had been rearranged. In the autumn of 1918 the expeditionary divisions were no longer representative of separate districts of the United States; each was in effect a cross section of the whole of America.

One of the first organizations to come back from France was a minor unit, a company, which had received its training at Camp Cody, Texas. The unit was sent to Camp Cody for demobilization and discharge. There it was discovered that, of every ten men who had joined the unit when it was in training, only four remained. The other six were newcomers, and to reach their homes they had to travel to points scattered from Oregon to the Atlantic coast.

Had this system been followed throughout the disbanding of the expeditionary units, it is evident that it would have cost the Government heavily in travel allowances paid to discharged soldiers, without saying anything about the tremendous traffic burden upon the railroads of the country. There was nothing to do but to break up the whole organization of the A. E. F. before sending it to the demobilization centers, and to assemble the men once more in units that possessed geographical identity.

The A. E. F. received instructions to attempt this break-up in France—at least to begin it there. It was found impossible to regroup the services of supply troops to any extent, because the embarkation ports in France, at which the supply troops were prepared for embarkation, were neither organized nor equipped to handle such a difficult work. More could be done with the divisional troops at Le Mans. Thereafter, whenever a division came into the area of Le Mans those soldiers who had joined the division after its training had been complete, and who did not live in the district centering in the original training camp in America, were detached and assembled with neighbors of theirs into territorial demobilization units, which became known as overseas casual companies. When the division itself went on from Le Mans to the ports it consisted only of the remnant of charter members who had been with it from the outset.

The prescribed size of an overseas casual company was two officers and 150 men, but it was seldom convenient to send forth companies uniformly organized. Men were not held waiting in France until casual companies could be built up to the prescribed size. One company might consist of fifty soldiers and the next 250, according to circumstances in the embarkation camp.

The principal ports of embarkation in the United States before the armistice had been New York (Hoboken), Newport News, and Boston. To these, in the system for receiving the overseas troops, was added Charleston, South Carolina. Charleston was opened as a port of debarkation principally for soldiers who were proceeding to the southern demobilization centers. The entire fleet of troop transports was divided proportionately among these ports, the greatest number operating between New York and the ports in France and the next greatest between Newport News and France. In the main each port kept its own fleet, but sometimes it became necessary to divert a vessel at sea from her usual course.

Only in a general way did the embarkation authorities in France pay attention to the destinations of the ships. After each loaded transport left a French port the embarkation officials there cabled to the Transportation Service in the United States a full description of the troops on board. If, for example, a vessel bound for Boston were carrying a preponderant number of soldiers from the South, the Transportation Service used the wireless to divert the transport to Newport News or Charleston.

Photo by Signal Corps

CASUALS WAITING TO BOARD SHIP AT ST. NAZAIRE

Photo by Signal Corps

BOARDING EDWARD LUCKENBACH, CONVERTED CARGO TRANSPORT

The passenger lists cabled to the United States often contained the first information received in this country about the departure of units from France. There was no news more eagerly awaited by the people. Cities and states had often made elaborate preparations for the reception of their overseas soldiers. A number of states and cities sent representatives to the ports to welcome the troops home at the gates of America. The harbor boat of the New York Mayor’s Committee of Welcome was busy almost every day taking visiting delegations down the bay to meet the incoming transports. In the times when from 150,000 to 200,000 soldiers were on the ocean at once in transports bound for the United States, keeping track of each unit became difficult. The Transportation Service set up a news and information bureau through which the press and the public kept in touch with the movements of organizations crossing from France.

Photo by Signal Corps

EMBARKATION AT BORDEAUX

Photo by Signal Corps

LEFT BEHIND

Upon the debarkation camps at the Atlantic ports fell the chief work of splitting up the returning expedition into demobilization units. There were five major debarkation camps—Merritt, Mills, and Upton at New York, and Stuart and Hill at Newport News—besides numerous smaller centers at both ports. At the height of the return movement these camps were insufficient to accommodate the incoming thousands, and the Transportation Service used former training camps as debarkation camps, in both the Hoboken and Chesapeake districts. As long as Boston and Charleston acted as ports of debarkation they, too, made use of neighboring training camps.

Of all of the debarkation camps, Camp Merritt was the largest. In it were to be observed some of the most interesting processes of troop demobilization. It was the principal camp both for reception of overseas casual companies and for the breaking-up of organized units and the formation of casual detachments for distribution among the thirty-three demobilization centers.

During demobilization Camp Merritt was like a great terminal post office. The mail consisted of bulk consignments of soldier members of the disintegrating American Expeditionary Forces. It was the task of the post office to sort the mail for thirty-three principal destinations. The individual soldiers were thrown into receptacles called Hoboken Casual Companies, each, when filled up, consisting of two officers and 150 men, and each addressed to one or another of the demobilization centers. Each bore an identifying number, and the numbers ran consecutively, reaching well into four figures before the work came to an end.

Special trains frequently left the two railroad stations which served Camp Merritt. Sometimes an entire train would be loaded with casual companies bound for the same center. Other trains were made up of special cars destined for different terminals. In the camp new casual companies in skeletal form were constantly being organized. Those scheduled to travel to the less populous sections of the country might be several days in filling up to standard strength. Others reached full size in a few hours. As soon as a casual company was complete, it was dispatched immediately to its proper demobilization camp. For several months in the spring and summer of 1919 the average interval between the time a skeleton company was formed and the time it was dispatched from camp was less than twenty-four hours.

Before the armistice, troops which had been inspected, equipped for the overseas voyage, and otherwise prepared at Camp Merritt, marched east from the camp over three miles of macadamized highway and then down the old Cornwallis trail descending the Palisades, until they reached the little landing on the Hudson River known as Alpine, several miles north of the metropolitan limits of New York. There they boarded ferry-boats and rode on them directly to the transport piers in the North River. After the armistice, soldiers debarking at the piers boarded ferry-boats at the pier ends, rode up the river to Alpine, climbed the Palisades, and marched to Camp Merritt. Those bound for Camp Mills or Camp Upton took ferry to the Long Island Railroad terminal at Long Island City on the East River. Those ticketed for Camp Dix boarded trains which had been run into the Hoboken yard on the spur track constructed there by the Government after it seized the pier property from Germany.

At the debarkation camps the Army applied its final precautions against the importation of European diseases and insect pests. There was a thorough disinfection of all clothing and equipment, and each principal camp maintained a delousing plant. However clean the soldiers might have been when they embarked in France, it was always possible for a few of them to become infested on the transports. So far as is known, not a cootie got through the barrage of steam, superheated air, soap, and hot water laid down by the Army at both ends of the transatlantic ferry route.

Before the return of the A. E. F. was well under way an important change took place in the organization of the official military travel bureau. Before the armistice, military transportation had been in the hands of two independent war department agencies. The Inland Traffic Service had charge of the movements of men and supplies by rail within the United States and up to the ports of embarkation. There the Embarkation Service received both, loaded them on the ships, and delivered them to the ports in France. Beyond those points the Quartermaster Service of the A. E. F. was in charge of military traffic. Both the Inland Traffic Service and the Embarkation Service were branches of the General Staff Division of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic.

In December, 1918, the Inland Traffic Service and the Embarkation Service joined to form a new branch called the Transportation Service, and for the first time the Army had a single organization in charge of all military travel, both freight and passenger, on this side of the piers in Europe. General Hines of the Embarkation Service became chief of the Transportation Service. The union brought about a coördination which made it possible for a limited equipment of railway coaches to carry troops away from the ports of debarkation as fast as the ships delivered them there.

As a rule, the overseas men did not travel so comfortably from the ports of debarkation to the demobilization centers as they had ridden when, months earlier, they had traveled from those same centers up to the ports to board the ships for France. The conditions of military transportation were different. The equipment of railway cars at the Army’s disposal was limited. It had never consisted of more than 1,500 sleeping cars—tourist sleepers they were, made by removing the rugs and hangings from first-class Pullman coaches. These 1,500 cars, in full operation, could carry less than 50,000 men at one time. Nevertheless, although before the armistice the Army supplied railroad transportation to over 8,000,000 men, nearly every one who traveled at night slept in a comfortable berth. During that period practically all the long-haul travel was between the training camps and the ports of embarkation. The forces in America proceeded to embarkation by divisions—camp by camp. Thus it was possible to arrange the shipping schedules to allow for the most convenient operation of the military rolling stock. But no such arrangement was possible during demobilization. The system of splitting up the overseas units at the ports in this country and distributing their men according to residential origin made it necessary to maintain practically continuous train service between the various Atlantic ports and the thirty-three demobilization centers. The sleeping-car equipment was not nearly large enough to serve in such an operation, and a great many soldiers rode in day coaches halfway across the continent. They did not grumble too much at the treatment. It was better than riding in French box cars, at any rate, and after all they were getting home.

One of the finest accomplishments of military transportation after the armistice was the distribution of 150,000 sick and wounded soldiers of the A. E. F. among the many military hospitals of the United States. The Transportation Service operated six hospital ships at New York. These vessels took the patients from the general debarkation hospital on Ellis Island and carried them on their way to various special evacuation hospitals in the New York metropolitan district. From there they were sent to general hospitals throughout the country. The Service kept six hospital trains in continuous operation, as well as about 250 hospital cars. No such movement of invalids was ever before known in the United States.

The records of the Transportation Service show that in disbanding the Army it carried over 7,000,000 military passengers in special cars and trains. The average journey was 500 miles. Train accidents cost the lives of only two soldiers and injured only seventeen. This high degree of safety was largely due to the fact that troop trains were held down to a running schedule of twenty miles an hour.

The whole system of distribution and travel would have worked almost automatically except for one thing—the victory parades. Whenever it could do so without too great disruption of the system, the War Department yielded to the desire of communities to celebrate with parades the return of their overseas sons. Nearly 200,000 troops in all marched in more than 450 parades, which ranged from the brief processions of single companies to such great demonstrations as those of the First Division in New York and Washington in September, 1919.

Six parades of returning overseas troops passed under the triumphal arch over Fifth Avenue at Madison Square, New York. Of these, the parades of the Twenty-seventh and Seventy-seventh Divisions, both originally composed almost exclusively of New York men, were closest to the metropolitan heart. Part of the Twenty-eighth Division paraded in Philadelphia on May 15, 1919. The Thirty-third Division paraded in Chicago in three sections in late May and early June.

These processions were but preliminary to the greatest celebration of all—the one which occurred when the First Division, first to go to France, last to come back, returned, with General John J. Pershing, the Commander-in-Chief of the American Expeditionary Forces, at its head. In arranging for the parades of the First Division, the War Department determined to show the spectators a combat division in full field panoply—and that meant equipping it with its transport animals. All divisions had left their animals in France, and solely for these spectacles the Transportation Service assembled in New York before the day of the first parade several thousand horses and mules secured from army posts as far west as Texas and then transported to New York.

The First Division gathered in the debarkation camps at New York. It included as an attached unit the specially trained drill regiment of the Third Army Corps. So augmented, it consisted of nearly 24,000 men and their wheeled equipment of artillery, service trains, repair shops, bakeries, kitchens, and so on, the motorized equipment alone numbering five hundred trucks and sixty motorcycles. The transportation of this great unit to Washington afforded a special problem that would have been impossible of solution by any organization less expert than the one which had administered military travel for so many months past. There were no facilities at Washington for the accommodation of such a number of troops, and therefore it was necessary to hold them in the New York camps and take them to Washington on the eve of the parade itself. After the New York appearance of the Division its motor fleet was sent over the highways to Washington, the vehicles incidentally carrying 1,770 men with them. The freighting to Washington of the animals and horse-drawn vehicles, including the artillery, began immediately after the New York parade disbanded and continued for several days. The twenty-two trains carrying the foot soldiers all arrived in Washington during the night before the parade, the last ones just in time to allow their passengers to find their places in the procession.

Photo by Signal Corps

HOME AGAIN

Photo by Signal Corps

WELCOMING RETURNING TROOPS AT HOBOKEN

The moving spectacle which followed gave the national capital and, through the newspaper accounts, the country, an approximation of the Grand Review that occurred in Washington at the close of the Civil War. For four hours the Division marched between throngs such as Washington ordinarily knows only when a President is inaugurated, down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the Treasury and the White House and the reviewing stand, in which were some of the chief uniformed and civilian dignitaries of the Government, including General Pershing. A roaring squadron of airplanes skimmed the tree-tops between the capitol and the war department building; an observation balloon swayed in air above the White House; and as the steady procession passed—mile after mile of trig ranks, bronzed faces, showy war medals and regimental decorations, burnished caparisons, regimental bands, field guns, limbers and caissons, ammunition trucks, quartermaster supply trains, ambulance trains, engineering trains with strange implements mounted upon motor trucks, horse-drawn carts for many purposes, rolling field kitchens, and finally the jarring tanks, their caterpillar treads leaving indelible matrices in the sun-warmed asphalt—with emotion the spectator beheld this living presentment of the power which America had exerted in the great war.

Photo by Air Service

FIRST DIVISION PARADING ON PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE

Photo by Air Service

VICTORY ARCH IN WASHINGTON

CHAPTER V
THE PROCESS OF DISCHARGING SOLDIERS

Four hours after the First Division finished parading in Washington, its troops were in Camp Meade, thirty miles away, where the “emergency” soldiers in the division’s ranks were to be discharged. There, like the millions who had preceded them into the demobilization centers, they fell into the hands of two expert crews, each competing with the other in speeding up the processes of discharge from the Army.

The two principal operations in the discharge of a soldier were (1) examining him physically and (2) computing how much the Government owed him and paying over to him the amount determined. These two activities were in the hands of central organizations functioning at the demobilization centers. The preparation of the soldier’s certificate of discharge and of the papers for his permanent record, to be retained in the government files, was in the hands of his company officers.

For the first time after a great war the American Army retained a complete record of the exact physical condition of every soldier at the time of his discharge. Had the Army done this in the past, doubtless it would have saved the Government much trouble and expense arising from fraudulent claims for alleged physical disability arising from military service. The purpose of the final physical examinations at the camps was not only to give the Government this record, but also to discover any men who might be suffering from contagious diseases or from infirmities susceptible of cure under further treatment in the army hospitals. The Army would not let men go until the Medical Department had done all it could for them.

The boards of physicians and surgeons which conducted the examinations were made up of specialists in seven branches of medicine, including dentistry. As each soldier entered the examination building, he was first taken in hand by officers who explained to him what the Government would do in the way of compensation for disabilities incurred in the Service and who urged him to make claim for any disability from which he knew he was suffering. For this purpose he received a claim form to fill out. He then passed through the seven sections of the examination; and if this scrutiny disclosed no disability, and if he had claimed none, he was granted a clean bill of health and passed on to the pay officers.

The degree of disability was expressed in percentage. A rated disability of 50 per cent meant that in the opinion of the examiners the soldier’s earning power in his former occupation had been decreased by half by reason of injury or infirmity incurred in the military service. Under the law the Bureau of War Risk Insurance automatically granted compensation to disabled veterans of the war up to eighty dollars a month (for total disability), requiring only that the disabled soldier prepare his claim on a form sent to him by the Bureau upon its receipt of the report of the examining board at the demobilization center. Disability of less than 10 per cent was not compensatable under the law, and so the examining boards certified to the Bureau of War Risk Insurance only the records of disability amounting to 10 per cent or more.[4]

At first it took the medical boards a considerable time to give examinations to large units of troops awaiting discharge; but Washington kept putting more and more pressure upon the demobilization centers to speed up, until finally the flat order went forth that all troops arriving at a camp must be put through to discharge within forty-eight hours thereafter. Since sometimes the greater part of a division of troops, or even a whole division, reached a demobilization camp practically at once, the order meant day and night work for the examiners, until they had cleared away the accumulations of men. At such times the boards raced with the finance crews, the doctors exulting if they passed men faster than the disbursing officers could make out the pay rolls, and the latter crowing when they could twiddle their thumbs and wait for men to come from the examination rooms.

The cash settlement between Uncle Sam the employer and his four million soldier employees was a transaction much more complicated than would appear at first glance. There were many elements to be considered in computing the final pay of a soldier, and to determine these elements for each man of the four million the pay officers had to make a complete search of the records each time.