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Title: Demobilization: our industrial and military demobilization after the armistice, 1918-1920
Author: Crowell, Benedict, Wilson, Robert Forrest
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Demobilization: our industrial and military demobilization after the armistice, 1918-1920" ***
INDUSTRIAL AND MILITARY DEMOBILIZATION AFTER THE ARMISTICE,
1918-1920 ***
Transcriber’s Note: Italic text is enclosed in _underscores_.
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
[Illustration: _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_
[Illustration]
NEW HAVEN
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON · HUMPHREY MILFORD · OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
MDCCCCXXI
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Halt! 1
II. The A. E. F. Embarks 9
III. The Transatlantic Ferry 30
IV. Ebb Tide 47
V. The Process of Discharging Soldiers 62
VI. Picking Up after the Army 74
VII. Soldier Welfare 92
VIII. War Contracts 112
IX. The Settlement of the War Contracts 126
X. Ordnance Demobilization 145
XI. Artillery 163
XII. Ammunition and Other Ordnance 181
XIII. Aircraft 199
XIV. Technical Supplies 214
XV. Quartermaster Supplies 234
XVI. Buildings and Lands 256
XVII. Selling the Surplus 269
XVIII. The Foreign Liquidation 287
XIX. The Balance Sheet 315
Index 323
ILLUSTRATIONS
Armistice Day at Independence Hall _Frontispiece_
_Opposite page_
The Last Shot 4
The Armistice at a Munitions Factory 4
Victory 5
Reconstruction 5
Camp Street in Le Mans Area 12
Bath House at Brest 12
In Camp Pontanezen 13
Company Street in Pontanezen 13
1. Entering “Mill” at Bordeaux 22
2. Receiving Clean Clothing in “Mill” 22
3. The “Mill” Barbershop 23
4. Through “Mill” and Ready for Home 23
Kitchens at Le Mans 30
Street in Le Mans Area No. 5 30
Casuals on Transport Leaving Brest 31
Boarding Transport from Lighters, Brest 31
Troops on Battleship Ready for Mess 36
Warships with Troops Docking at Hoboken 36
Embarking for United States 37
Mess Room on Converted Cargo Transport _Ohioan_ 37
Sailing Day at St. Nazaire 42
Transport _Maui_ Loading at St. Nazaire 42
Souvenirs of His Service 43
Embarking at St. Nazaire 43
Casuals Waiting to Board Ship at St. Nazaire 54
Boarding _Edward Luckenbach_ 54
Embarkation at Bordeaux 55
Left Behind 55
Home Again 60
Welcoming Returning Troops at Hoboken 60
First Division Parading on Pennsylvania Avenue 61
Victory Arch in Washington 61
Overseas Troops Entraining at Hoboken 66
Veterans Detraining at Camp Sherman 66
Discharged Soldiers Receiving Final Pay 67
Making Out Discharge Certificates 67
Common Grave near Cirey 78
Lost Military Baggage at Hoboken 78
Preparing Cemetery at Beaumont 79
Loading Coffins on Collection Trucks 79
1. Overflowed Cemetery at Fleville 86
2. Two Months Later--Bodies All Removed 86
1. Romagne Cemetery, April 10, 1919 87
2. Romagne Cemetery, May 30, 1919 87
Portrait of Colonel Ira L. Reeves 94
Students at Beaune University 94
Art Students in A. E. F. Training Center, Paris 95
A. E. F. Students in University of Lyon 95
Air View of Pershing Stadium, Paris 100
American Soldiers at University of Grenoble 100
A. E. F. Soldiers as Comedians 101
Judging Comedy Horse at 4th Army Horse Show 101
Disabled Veterans Taking Federal Training 108
Editorial Conference of _Stars and Stripes_ 108
Poster Used in Reëmployment Campaign 109
Employment Office at Camp Sherman 109
Sending Out the _Stars and Stripes_ 122
Graduate A. E. F. Students at Edinburgh University 122
Review of “Pershing’s Own Regiment” at Coblenz 123
Games in Le Mans Embarkation Area 123
Portrait of War Department Claims Board 144
Convalescent Reading _Stars and Stripes_ 145
Hospital Train in United States 145
Havoc Wrought by German Guns at Fort near Rheims 164
“Wipers” Ready for Tourists 164
French and German Airplane Engines after Combat 165
Ruined Tanks near Cambrai 165
American Field Guns on the Rhine 180
American Gun on Ehrenbreitstein, Coblenz 180
Destroying Captured German Ammunition 181
A Captured Ammunition Dump 181
Preparing Liberty Engines for Storage 200
Assembling Plant at Romorantin 200
Flying Field at Issoudun 201
Lame Ducks 201
American Airplane Wreckage 212
Fuel for the Bonfire 212
German Locomotive Taken Over by A. E. F. Engineers 213
Engineers Constructing Beaune University 213
Air View of A. E. F. Ordnance Docks 230
A Gas Demonstration 230
Motor Transport in France 231
Part of A. E. F.’s Surplus Motor Equipment 231
A. E. F. Supply Train on Way to Ration Dump 246
A. E. F. Flour on Way to Starving Austria 246
A. E. F. Horses to be Sold 247
Storage Warehouses at Jeffersonville Depot 247
West Indian Laborers Embarking for Home 268
View of Camp Sherman 268
In an Army Retail Store 269
Customers at Opening of Army Retail Store 269
Wreck of Coal Mine at Lens 310
Motor Transport Salvage in France 310
Portrait of Interallied Purchasers 311
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.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
THE LAST SHOT]
[Illustration:
_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.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Howard E. Coffin_
VICTORY
WAR TROPHIES IN PLACE DE LA CONCORDE, PARIS]
[Illustration:
_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.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
CAMP STREET IN LE MANS AREA]
[Illustration:
_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.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Howard E. Coffin_
IN CAMP PONTANEZEN]
[Illustration:
_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:
1 Barrack Bag
2 Undershirts
2 Pairs of Drawers
2 Pairs of Socks
1 Pair of O. D. Gloves
2 O. D. Shirts
1 Pair of Shoes
1 Pair of Laces
1 Pair of Breeches
1 O. D. Coat
1 Overseas Cap
1 Pair of Leggins
1 Chevron (for noncommissioned officers)
1 Shelter Half
3 Blankets
1 Overcoat
1 Slicker
1 Shaving Brush
1 Toothbrush
1 Tube Tooth Paste
1 Comb
1 Piece of Shaving Soap
1 Towel
1 Cake of Soap
2 Identification Tags
1 Belt
1 Razor
1 Ammunition Belt
1 Pack Carrier
1 Haversack
1 Canteen
1 Canteen Cover
1 Condiment Can
1 Meat Can
1 Cup
1 Knife
1 Fork
1 Spoon
1 First Aid Pouch
1 First Aid Packet
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.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
1. ENTERING “MILL” AT BORDEAUX]
[Illustration:
_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.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
3. THE “MILL” BARBERSHOP]
[Illustration:
_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.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
KITCHENS AT LE MANS]
[Illustration:
_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.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
CASUALS ON TRANSPORT LEAVING BREST]
[Illustration:
_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.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
TROOPS ON BATTLESHIP READY FOR MESS]
[Illustration:
_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!
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
EMBARKING FOR UNITED STATES]
[Illustration:
_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.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
SAILING DAY AT ST. NAZAIRE]
[Illustration:
_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.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
SOUVENIRS OF HIS SERVICE]
[Illustration:
_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.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
CASUALS WAITING TO BOARD SHIP AT ST. NAZAIRE]
[Illustration:
_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.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
EMBARKATION AT BORDEAUX]
[Illustration:
_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.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
HOME AGAIN]
[Illustration:
_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.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Air Service_
FIRST DIVISION PARADING ON PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE]
[Illustration:
_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.
The records were often voluminous. The private soldier’s base pay
was $30 a month. His records showed when he was last paid, and the
Government owed him for the interval between his last pay day and
the date of his discharge, at the rate of $30 a month. But perhaps
he had been deducting a certain amount of his pay each month as an
allotment to his dependents. He could deduct up to $15 a month, and the
Government would match him dollar for dollar when it paid the allotment
to his dependents. At any rate, any allotment was deducted from his
final pay, too. Was he insured with the War Risk Insurance Bureau? If
so, the pay officer deducted a premium from each month’s pay due him,
and the premium varied with each man’s age. Perhaps he had purchased
a Liberty Bond through the War Department. In that event the monthly
partial payment was deducted. Deductions had to be made for sickness
incurred not in line of duty, or to fulfill penalties imposed by
courts-martial. After March 1, 1919, every soldier was entitled to draw
a bonus of $60, and this was included in his final pay. Finally the law
granted him a mileage allowance at the rate of five cents a mile for
the distance between his place of discharge and his home. And this did
not mean the distance to the railroad station nearest his home, but the
distance clear home, to his front door, even though he lived off in
the back country forty miles from the railroad. The pay officer had to
have at his elbow, not only the tables of railroad distances, but also
complete road maps of the district served by the demobilization center.
It should be remembered that pay officers were personally responsible
for errors in their work, and if the Government chanced to lose money
as the result of error, the unfortunate disbursing officer or his
bondsmen had to make it good. In spite of the many elements entering
into the pay computations, the finance crews at the centers grew
astonishingly expert in making out the pay rolls. It became so that a
team of two pay officers could enroll names on the pay sheet at the
rate of two names a minute.
To accomplish such a result the Director of Finance, in whose hands
eventually centered all the finance activities of the War Department,
swept aside hampering regulations and precedents and adopted the direct
methods of business. This impatience of red tape was not better shown
than in the treatment of wounded men in the American hospitals. The
regulations were hard and fast in adherence to the rule that a soldier
could be paid only upon the representations of facts as written into
his service records. Wounded men, however, picked up unconscious on
the battle field, often too sick for months thereafter to look out
for their personal affairs, in thousands of instances had lost their
service records altogether. The matter came to a focus in early 1919
when the finance officer at Walter Reed Hospital at Washington reported
that there were nearly a thousand patients in that institution who
possessed no records at all to show what the Government owed them.
The Director of Finance thereupon issued instructions that they and
all other wounded men in the domestic hospitals should be paid off on
the basis of their sworn affidavits setting forth the amounts owed to
them by the Government. The finance officer at Walter Reed Hospital
collected the affidavits, but, feeling his personal responsibility,
hesitated to certify the pay roll; whereupon the Director of Finance
showed his courage by certifying it himself, thus setting a precedent
which the hospital officers were willing to follow.
That was one departure from tradition. A more important one, because it
concerned more men, did away with the individual final statements which
all soldiers in the past had been required to make when coming up for
discharge. The final statement was an elaborate form which each soldier
filled out, at the cost of considerable time and effort. Moreover, the
pay officers could not work rapidly from these forms. For them was
substituted the final-payment roll which served for an entire company
of men and which could be made up quickly by the company officers.
Working with individual final statements, a certain demobilization
center had been able to discharge four hundred men a day. As soon as
the final-payment roll was adopted the same crew at the same camp was
able to discharge men at the rate of fifteen hundred a day.
The men who paid off the demobilized troops at the camps were trained
for the work in a finance service school established immediately
after the armistice at Camp Meigs, in the District of Columbia. The
school graduated some 250 experts in army camp finance. These men were
distributed among the demobilization centers, working in teams of two
men each. For a long time the work of discharging the Army kept these
teams at work from dawn until late at night, with never even a Sunday
as holiday.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
OVERSEAS TROOPS ENTRAINING AT HOBOKEN]
[Illustration:
_Felix J. Koch Photo_
VETERANS DETRAINING AT CAMP SHERMAN]
From the pay-roll teams the certified sheets went to another set of
finance teams for “change-listing.” The final payments to soldiers were
made in cash. The “change-listers” took the pay rolls and computed
precisely how many bills of each denomination, how many half-dollars,
how many quarters and dimes and nickels and pennies, it would require
to pay off all the men without requiring one of them to make change
at the window. The aggregate change lists went to the camp disbursing
officer, and he procured the cash from the nearest bank. The banks
nearest to some of the camps were miles away through desolate
country, and sometimes a disbursing officer had to bring back in his
automobile as much as a million dollars in currency. He rode under the
escort of a heavy guard and was further protected by armed men in his
camp office. Losses incurred through robbery were insignificant.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
DISCHARGED SOLDIERS RECEIVING FINAL PAY]
[Illustration:
_Felix J. Koch Photo_
MAKING OUT DISCHARGE CERTIFICATES]
Every morning the disbursing officer turned over to his assistants the
exact quantity of bills and small change needed to cover the payments
to be made that day. The men reported to the pay office in companies.
Their officers called out their names one by one, and when each man
had verified his cash he received his discharge certificate, on the
back of which was endorsed the amount of money just paid to him in
final settlement. At that moment he was no longer a soldier. He could
do as he pleased from that time on, but he usually yielded to the good
influences of those urging him to proceed directly to his home.
The Seventy-seventh Division was paid off and discharged at Camp Upton
in two days. There were 27,000 men in the division as it reached the
demobilization camp. The problem of the finance officers was simplified
by the fact that practically all of the men resided in New York City,
which made it easy to compute mileage. Each man received an average
of $100, including the bonus, an amount which is probably a fair
approximation of what was paid to the average overseas soldier upon
discharge. The advantage of speed in demobilization was not all to the
soldier. It cost about two dollars a day to maintain a private soldier
in the Service. Each day’s delay, therefore, in demobilizing the
Seventy-seventh Division cost the Government $54,000.
A further simplification of methods resulted in promptness in
discharging commissioned officers. The disbursing officer at a
demobilization camp saw all officers in three classes--those who in
service had been accountable for neither government property nor money;
those who had been accountable for property only; and those who had
been in possession of government funds. The officers of Class 1 could
be paid off finally at discharge; but the accounts of accountable
officers were subject to audit, and their final pay was withheld
until these audits were made. Inasmuch as officers often came up for
discharge with two or three months’ back pay due them, the withholding
of such considerable amounts of money for an extended period imposed
a hardship upon them. Under the old system it would have been a long
time before all of the discharged officers could have received their
final pay. In fact, after the termination of every previous war in
which American emergency troops had ever engaged it was a long time
before the Government finally settled the pay claims of the accountable
officers. The accumulation of officers’ accounts in the spring of 1919
became so great as to make it evident that under the existing plan
the War Department would be a dozen years at least in auditing all of
them; which meant--if the old audit system were to be continued--that
it would be 1931 before some of the World War officers received their
final pay for their services.
The Director of Finance determined to do better than that. To be
sure, the audit of the property accounts was required by law; but
instead of continuing the system of auditing them in Washington, the
Director of Finance arranged for a force of field auditors to go to the
demobilization centers and audit the property accounts as they were
presented. The result was that the officers responsible for property
were enabled to draw their final pay with their discharge certificates.
Officers responsible for government money occupied a different status,
but such officers were relatively few in number. The former plan in
use required the audit of their accounts by the Treasury Department,
and it was evident that the Treasury Department would be a year or
more in making these audits. Meanwhile none of the discharged officers
would be able to draw their final pay. This auditing arrangement was a
requirement, not of law, but of military regulation, which the Director
of Finance was able to sweep aside, paying off such officers finally
upon the receipt of statements from them accounting in detail for the
money which they had handled. The Government risked nothing by this
innovation, because officers accountable for money were required to
give bond to indemnify the Government against losses. On the other hand
the change made it possible for discharged accountable officers to
receive their final pay within a month after discharge.
On February 24, 1919, the President signed a bill granting a cash
bonus of sixty dollars to every soldier who had been in uniform before
November 11, 1918. The payment of the bonus to soldiers still to be
discharged after the bonus law was in effect offered no difficulty at
all, since the camp disbursing officers needed only to add the bonus to
the final pay of each man coming up for discharge. But on February 24
approximately 1,600,000 troops had already been discharged. The payment
of the bonus to these men added measurably to the burden of work upon
the Finance Service.
The Director of Finance announced that he would begin paying the bonus
on March 1. The Zone Finance Officer at Washington was designated as
the official to pay the bonus to officers and enlisted men who had
already been discharged. He hastily organized an office with about
sixty new and inexperienced clerks. Meanwhile the newspapers, the Red
Cross, the American Legion, and all other organizations concerned with
the welfare of discharged soldiers spread the tidings of the bonus
payment and urged all discharged men to present their claims for it
at once. It is doubtful if ever before a national publicity campaign
reached its mark with such thoroughness in such a brief period of time.
Claims for the bonus snowed upon Washington at the rate of 100,000 a
day, and within two weeks practically all of the discharged 1,600,000
had filed their claims. The pay office grew until it numbered more than
a thousand clerks. With this force it cleaned up the whole job in two
months’ time.
Never before had government checks been issued at such a rapid rate. It
was necessary to make use of the most modern labor-saving appliances in
accomplishing this record of payment. The Bureau of Engraving, which
prints the paper money for the Government, engraved a special check
with the sixty-dollar amount printed in, so that it was necessary for
the clerical force only to date the checks, fill in the names of
payees, and then sign the instruments. The Zone Finance Officer himself
was the only person in his department authorized to sign checks on the
Treasury. However, upon his request the Treasury Department authorized
five clerks whom he designated to sign his name for him. The Treasury
further authorized the use of the pantograph or multiple signing
device, which enabled each designated clerk to sign five checks with
one writing of the signature. On the name line of each check was typed
in the payee’s name, his address, and his army serial number. The Zone
Finance Officer adopted a window envelope through which could be seen
the recipient’s name and address as written on the check inside, and
this measure saved the great labor of addressing the envelopes. All
checks were typed in triplicate--one original and two carbon copies.
Both copies were filed away to be the Government’s record of the
transaction. The cases in which the duplicates were filed filled a
large room.
Soldiers of the surname of Smith received 15,200 of these bonus checks,
and these were only the Smiths among the 1,600,000 troops discharged
before March 1, 1919. If the same percentage carried through the rest
of the Army, it is evident that there were enough Smiths in uniform to
make up an entire combat division with a sufficient residue over to
provide the necessary accompaniment of supply troops. If pushed to it,
the Smith family could fight a respectable war on its own account. But
the balance of power is maintained by the Brown army. The Brown family
collected 9,000 of the 1,600,000 bonus checks issued from Washington in
the spring of 1919.
Although every effort was made to pay off all troops in full at the
time of their discharge, there were many men who, through their own
fault or the fault of those in command of them, or else because of
conditions over which there was no control, failed to receive all
of the money rightfully theirs when they left the military service.
For such men the remedy was the claim. A financial claim against the
Government is notoriously a static thing. At the present day there
are Civil War claims still outstanding and unsettled. The Director
of Finance determined that the World War should leave behind it no
great body of soldier claimants to haunt Washington and nurse their
grievances for years to come. Under the ordinary procedure the claims
of soldiers for arrears of pay had to go through the channels of both
the War Department and the Treasury Department before final payments
could be made. The Director of Finance sought and, on January 30, 1919,
received a decision of the Comptroller of the Treasury which permitted
the former to settle back-pay claims without reference to the Treasury
Department when there was no construction of law involved and the
rights of the claimants were evident.
Although the claimants numbered many thousands, the number was
relatively small compared to the total number of men in uniform. At
the end of the calendar year 1919, less than 5 per cent of the nearly
4,000,000 men who were under arms on the first day of the armistice had
filed claims with the War Department. Three-fourths of the claims were
for the refund of allotments deducted from pay but for one reason or
another never paid by the Government to the allottees; so that only a
little more than 1 per cent of the Army left the service with claims
resulting from errors in soldiers’ pay accounts. Because of the more
intricate financial relations between officers and the War Department,
the claims of officers were greater in proportion, but the officers’
claims submitted up to the end of the year 1919 amounted in number to
only 10 per cent of the total number of officers commissioned.
The failure of the Government in many instances to pay over allotments
to soldiers’ dependents arose from a multiplicity of causes. In the
first place, the legal method of paying allotments changed in the
midst of the active part of the war. The War Risk Insurance Bureau for
many months paid to soldiers’ dependents the allotments granted by the
soldiers, plus the amount which the Government added to each allotment.
In June, 1918, Congress enacted a law requiring that all allotments
of this form be paid directly by the War Department, leaving the War
Risk Insurance Bureau to pay only those allotments which did not carry
government allowances with them. The troops were at once apprised of
this change; but because of the failure of individuals to discontinue
their deductions to the War Risk Insurance Bureau, or because officers,
busy with other things, neglected to do it for men under their command,
or because of the loss of papers in the mails, thousands of pay
deductions continued to go in to the Bureau of War Risk Insurance long
after that bureau had discontinued paying the allotments to dependents.
Out of this situation arose thousands of claims from discharged
soldiers.
In other instances allotments were made to persons residing in enemy
countries or in countries cut off from mail communication, Russia being
the principal one of the latter class. Failures to deliver allotments
for this reason resulted in claims.
As to soldiers’ pay, there were many reasons why payment was not always
accurate. Sometimes amounts were withheld by the Government erroneously
as court-martial forfeitures or because of alleged losses of government
property. Men upon promotion often failed to note on their pay vouchers
that they were entitled to the advanced pay, and so failed for a time
to receive their increases. Some failed to receive the increase in pay
due for foreign service, and some did not get their cash commutations
of rations and quarters while on leave at the recreational areas in
France. In all there were fourteen major classes of claims for back pay.
There were claims of still another class--claims for personal baggage
lost by the Government in transporting the Army.
Although the individual soldier’s affidavit was largely used in the
settlement of claims, still such a short-cut method of arriving at a
judgment was permissible only when the official records were missing.
The gradual concentration of records after the armistice, and sometimes
the discovery of lost records as the disbanding Army cleared up its
quarters, often brought to light papers that had been missing when the
troops were discharged. Every claim submitted involved on the part of
the Finance Service a search of the records. Since many of the records
on which the claim depended were in the possession of the A. E. F. in
France, it was impossible for a long time to do much in Washington with
such claims. The A. E. F. records returned to the United States in the
early autumn of 1919, but it was several months thereafter before they
were properly sorted, filed, and made available for research.
During the first fifteen months after the armistice, the claims
submitted to the War Department by former enlisted men totaled 184,256.
Of these, about 64,000 were paid in that period, 33,000 declined,
and 6,400 transferred to some other branch of the Government for
settlement--103,000 claims disposed of and 81,000 still in process of
adjudication and settlement.
CHAPTER VI
PICKING UP AFTER THE ARMY
Even in the United States, with its well-developed trunk-checking and
baggage-transfer systems, the management of any considerable amount
of personal luggage gives concern to the traveler. In a foreign land,
travel with baggage is nothing less than an ordeal; and the man who
can convoy a fleet of trunks over a foreign tour and bring them all
back without loss to the home port, may safely regard himself as an
expert globe-trotter. What, then, of the A. E. F.? It was on foreign
soil, in a land where military traffic had almost altogether superseded
civilian, and the troops had little benefit of the services which
ordinarily look out for civilians. The soldiers, by the nature of
things, could not give personal attention to their baggage. You might
multiply the troubles of the individual traveler by the two million
men of the A. E. F., and still fall short of even half of the baggage
problem of that organization.
The baggage problem was one of those unforeseen complications which
arose to make the task of maintaining the expedition harder than it had
at first seemed to be. It was by no means entirely a transportation
problem, although whole organizations, when advancing toward France,
often had to leave their baggage behind them to follow by train or
ship, and this baggage, entrusted to unfamiliar hands, sometimes went
astray. But the greatest losses occurred in France itself, where
the troops were quartered. Units were often moved on short notice.
Expecting eventually to return to the same billets, the soldiers left
their effects where they were and traveled light; but seldom did it
happen that they returned to that area again. Other organizations moved
into the places thus vacated, themselves later on to move forward and
leave baggage behind. In the course of time, literally millions of
pieces of American military baggage in France became beautifully and
thoroughly lost.
This state of affairs called into being a military unit strange to our
army structure--the Lost Baggage Bureau of the A. E. F., established
as a branch of the Quartermaster Department. Before the armistice
the Lost Baggage Bureau had attempted to do little more than set up
certain facilities, notably a central baggage depot at Gievres, the
Q. M. headquarters of the A. E. F., in which divisions ordered up to
the trenches could store their excess baggage. This arrangement did
well enough until the fighting ended, and then for the first time the
lost-baggage problem began to make its magnitude manifest. After the
armistice tens of thousands of enquiries about lost baggage began to
shower down upon the Services of Supply, making it evident that great
quantities of American property must be scattered throughout the
area occupied by the Yankee troops in France. The little one-horse
Lost Baggage Bureau gave way to an extensive organization, known as
the Baggage Service of the A. E. F. The function of the new Service
thereafter was to manage the transportation of all troop baggage during
the exodus from France and to locate, collect, and if possible restore
to its ownership, all baggage lost by the soldiers of the expedition.
The Baggage Service went at the problem with a plan drawn true to
scale. American troops had been quartered at one time or another in
fifty-nine departments of the Republic of France. This great territory
the Baggage Service divided for its purposes into twenty-one zones.
In each zone it placed a local organization in charge of an officer
whose instructions were to go over his district with a fine-tooth comb
and collect and forward to the central office at Gievres all lost
articles belonging to individual American soldiers or to the Army as a
whole. The search which then ensued not only took in hotels, railroad
stations, police headquarters, and other obvious places in which
lost property might be expected to collect, but it involved also a
house-to-house search of all areas in which American troops had been
billeted upon the French population. Each day the zone officers sent to
headquarters reports which contained the descriptions of the articles
found. The central baggage office took this information and indexed it,
together with the descriptions of the 90,000 pieces of baggage which
had accumulated in the Gievres warehouse up to the time the armistice
began. By May 1, 1919, all of the territory occupied by the Americans
had been thoroughly searched over and cleaned up, and hundreds of
thousands of pieces of baggage, once lost, had been catalogued and
stored at the headquarters of the various base sections or in the
central warehouse at Gievres.
Although most of this baggage was obviously the property of individual
soldiers, the search also turned up a great deal of government
property. This included some twenty rolling kitchens in good condition,
abandoned for one reason or another, hundreds of rifles and pistols,
numerous helmets, many uniforms still wearable, and even bags of mail
which had never reached destination. The searching parties came upon a
lone army mule resigned to its apparent fate of ending its days as an
adjunct to an impressive manure pile in a French peasant’s dooryard.
By the time the search was complete and the baggage had been collected,
the troops were then moving in such numbers up to the French ports
of embarkation for their passage home to the United States that it
was found to be impossible to restore their lost property to them _en
route_. The Baggage Service in France was able to hand over to their
owners only about 50,000 pieces of baggage. In early June, 1919, it was
decided to ship all the remaining unclaimed baggage to Hoboken, where
the owners could obtain it after their return to the United States. The
baggage thus shipped filled sixty-three baggage cars and provided a
large part of the lading of an entire cargo transport. With the baggage
to Hoboken went the records from Gievres, to be used by the Lost
Baggage Service at Hoboken in restoring property to overseas soldiers
returned to the United States.
The A. E. F.’s Baggage Service, besides finding and caring for lost
baggage, was charged with the important duty of acting as the baggage
agent for the returning expedition. There was no counterpart to such an
organization before the armistice. Had there been, the Expeditionary
Forces would have had practically no baggage problem at all, so far as
the loss of baggage _en route_ was concerned; for, on the way home,
thanks to the new Service, the troops lost scarcely any baggage. Here,
then, was another new military organization called into existence
by our experience in the World War; one which proved its usefulness
and thereby won a place for itself in any plans for large military
operations in the future. The Baggage Service saved its own cost over
and over again, for the Government itself is often responsible for the
loss of the personal baggage of soldiers and expects to pay in cash
the claims presented. Indeed, many claims for lost baggage which had
accrued at A. E. F. headquarters were settled by the restoration of the
baggage itself to its owners.
In handling baggage for the traveling expedition, the Baggage Service
set up branches at all the important A. E. F. troop centers and at all
the American embarkation ports in France. The function of the baggage
men at the troop centers was to see to it that when units departed
their baggage went forward with them, properly marked and routed. The
Service took charge, not only of organization baggage, but of the
baggage of individual soldiers as well. At the ports its branches acted
as checking, storing, and forwarding agents. Brest was the largest of
our embarkation ports in France, and at Brest the official baggage
office was operated by five officers and one hundred enlisted men. The
official “baggage room” at Brest was a whole huge warehouse located
on one of the jetties. The military passengers awaiting embarkation
at Brest usually numbered well over 100,000, and it took an immense
storage space to contain all their baggage.
Officers of the baggage organization met all troop trains arriving in
the Brest area. On these trains were thousands of officers and enlisted
men traveling alone or in small groups as casuals. From these the
military baggage agents secured their railroad baggage checks, together
with cards on which the travelers wrote identifying descriptions of
their baggage. Thereafter the individual traveler had no further
baggage worries. The Baggage Service secured the pieces from the
railroad stations, loaded them on trucks and took them to the central
warehouse, and then made out index cards identifying them and showing
their location in storage. These cards were made out in the owners’
names and filed alphabetically. Whenever a transport was preparing to
sail, the embarkation authorities sent to the Baggage Service a copy of
the passenger list. The baggage people checked over this list against
the record cards, and were thus able easily to assemble the baggage
belonging to the passengers to sail on that ship. The baggage was taken
out to the transport on lighters, and the canceled identification
cards were thereupon stamped with the name of the transport and the
date of sailing and then filed away in the dead file. The baggage of
organizations was handled in the same way, except that the troop units
did not abandon the practice of sending their own baggage details along
with their baggage to watch it. These detachments of soldiers remained
with the baggage at all times, even when it was stored in the warehouse.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
COMMON GRAVE NEAR CIREY
(See page 89.)]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
LOST MILITARY BAGGAGE AT HOBOKEN]
The military organization in the United States had nothing comparable
to the A. E. F.’s Baggage Service to take charge of the baggage of
traveling troops, but it did have an organization to handle lost
baggage. This was not a branch of the Quartermaster Department, as it
was in France, but an agency set up by the Transportation Service,
an independent bureau of the General Staff’s Division of Purchase,
Storage, and Traffic. It was called the Lost Baggage Section, and it
operated exclusively at Hoboken. Although we had several other ports
of debarkation for the returning expedition, Hoboken was designated to
receive all the lost baggage from France. When, in late June, Hoboken
received the vast accumulation of lost baggage which had been stored
at Gievres and at the base headquarters of the A. E. F., the work of
the Lost Baggage Section began in earnest. One of the great Hoboken
pier-heads, with its echoing, barnlike storage room and adjoining
offices, was given over exclusively to the Lost Baggage Section, which
put to work more than two hundred clerks to handle the voluminous
correspondence which sprang up immediately. Individual owners, their
relatives, various soldier-relief organizations, and even members of
Congress who had interested themselves in soldiers, deluged the Lost
Baggage Section with enquiries. When the armistice was a year old the
Section had handled 2,000,000 pieces of miscellaneous baggage, and had
succeeded in delivering eleven pieces of every dozen received from
France.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
PREPARING CEMETERY AT BEAUMONT]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
LOADING COFFINS ON COLLECTION TRUCKS]
In the United States, among the troops quartered at the cantonments,
camps, posts, and stations of the war-time establishment and traveling
over the American railroads, there was no such baggage problem as had
fretted the A. E. F., but nevertheless there was one of considerable
size. Shortly after the armistice the Transportation Service took
cognizance of an accumulation of reports which it had received telling
of baggage, ostensibly the property of soldiers, which was remaining
unclaimed at railroad stations and at posts formerly occupied by
troops. It happened that about that time the general baggage agents of
the principal American trunk lines held a convention in Washington.
The Transportation Service seized the opportunity of this meeting to
request the coöperation of the railroads in returning lost baggage
to soldiers. The baggage agents agreed to secure a complete report
from the whole United States of all military baggage on hand at
parcel rooms, express rooms, and baggage rooms. At the same time the
Transportation Service ordered the commanders of all the military camps
in the United States to send to Washington inventories of unclaimed
baggage at the camps. The next step was to find out what soldiers had
lost any baggage. Newspapers and service journals gave publicity to
the project of the Transportation Service, and the various welfare
societies added their assistance, with the result that the Service was
able to restore hundreds of pieces of lost baggage to their rightful
owners. Again the United States was saved a considerable sum of money
which otherwise it would have had to pay out in settlement of claims.
One task of the military authorities, similar to the restoration of
lost baggage, but much more delicate and requiring a high degree of
tact and sympathy in its administration, was that of returning to
bereaved relatives the baggage of soldiers who had been killed in
battle or who had died on foreign soil. This was so obviously a work of
its own kind, requiring men peculiarly adapted to the handling of it,
that it was placed in charge of a special service, both in France and
in the United States. In France the Effects Bureau, as the organization
was called, was part of the Quartermaster Department; in the United
States a bureau of the same name, and virtually the successor of the
overseas organization, was attached to the Transportation Service, and,
like the Lost Baggage Section, operated exclusively at Hoboken.
As long as the A. E. F. was in France in force the overseas Effects
Bureau handled most of this work. It set up headquarters at the
embarkation port at St. Nazaire, and there it checked up all the
baggage it could find which was the property of deceased soldiers and
forwarded it to the United States. Many of these effects were found in
the general search of France for lost baggage, but thousands of pieces
were stored at military hospitals and with troop organizations.
The work of restoring the effects to heirs in the United States and
elsewhere did not attain any great size until after the armistice, and
then it was handled almost entirely by the Effects Bureau at Hoboken.
In July and August, 1918, for instance, the shipments of deceased
soldiers’ effects received in the United States were fewer than one
hundred in number: in the month of May, 1919, alone, Hoboken received
more than 15,000 packages of such effects. By that date the work of
disposing of this property was engaging the attention of one of the
largest individual offices connected with the Port of Embarkation of
New York. All through the summer of 1919 the Effects Bureau handled a
correspondence that averaged 1,000 letters a day.
It was not enough for an officer in the Effects Bureau to be well
meaning and kindly intentioned--to fit his place, he had to possess a
rare tact, an instinctive knowledge of what to do in circumstances that
constantly varied. Early in the episode the Bureau witnessed a striking
example of how not to deal with a bereaved family. One of our aviators
had been killed in France when his plane crashed to the ground. At the
time he had in his pocket six 100-franc notes. These were badly charred
in the flames that had nearly incinerated the airman. The misguided
effects officer who took charge of the dead aviator’s baggage, thinking
he was doing a kindness, replaced the mutilated notes with six new
ones and forwarded these to the aviator’s family, telling in a letter
what he had done. The family promptly returned the new notes with the
request that the charred currency be sent instead, because they would
prize the burned money as a keepsake more highly than they would any
amount of new money.
This incident apprised the Effects Bureau, at the outset, of the
extraordinary value which the relatives of deceased soldiers were
likely to attach to the most apparently trifling possessions. The men
of the Bureau had to understand this fact. Moreover, they had to be men
of scrupulous honesty. In the effects of men who had died abroad was a
great deal of money in cash, and under the circumstances there could
be no check upon the people handling this cash. The opportunities of
pilfering from the dead were wide open. Consequently the Army picked
only men of the highest quality to serve in the Effects Bureau.
The Bureau at Hoboken was compelled to accept responsibility for many
unfortunate occurrences in which it was not at fault. The procedure
behind a letter telling relatives in this country of the existence
of property which they had inherited upon the death of a soldier was
approximately as follows: after the man died the officers of his
immediate organization made up an inventory of his property; and
this inventory, together with the baggage itself, eventually reached
the Effects Bureau. It was usually this original inventory which went
to the relatives. Often enough, however, the dead man’s property was
not all in his possession when he died. Perhaps he had been billeted
in villages where he had left souvenirs and other cherished but not
easily portable trinkets, intending to go back some time and secure
his property before he started back for the United States. He was
unlikely to have left among his effects any record of these articles;
and yet his relatives were quite likely to know of the existence of the
property from the soldier’s letters home. The baggage search in France
raked together a considerable quantity of this property, the ownership
of much of which could not be determined by any identifying marks.
Consequently, when relatives wrote to the Effects Bureau to reproach
that service with not having returned all of the deceased soldier’s
property the Bureau was often able to find the articles among the lost
baggage at Hoboken. Frequently, however, the Bureau had to confess
itself unable to locate the lost articles and to bear the brunt of any
displeasure that followed such an admission.
After the _Tuscania_ disaster the British authorities shipped to
Hoboken a miscellaneous collection of unidentified articles of value,
such as watches and finger rings taken from the bodies of drowned
American soldiers. It seemed to be an impossible task to restore these
trinkets to the relatives of the rightful owners, but the Effects
Bureau nevertheless made the attempt to do it. The Bureau wrote
letters to all the next of kin to the soldiers who went down with the
_Tuscania_, asking them to send in descriptions of any articles known
to have been in the possession of the soldiers when they boarded the
ship. The replies brought back duplicate prints of photographs carried
in watch cases, dimensions of finger rings, descriptions, and other
identifications, which enabled the Bureau to restore many of the
articles to the proper heirs in this country.
After an arrival of identified effects in Hoboken, the Effects Bureau
wrote letters to the immediate relatives or other heirs of the
deceased soldiers describing the property on hand. With each letter
went a legal form, to be filled out and executed before a notary
public, establishing the right of the proper heirs to receive the
effects. Upon the receipt of executed forms, the Bureau sent forward
the effects at the expense of the Government.
The effects piled up in the Hoboken pier contained many a pathetic
reminder of the invincible curiosity and enterprise of the American
boys in France and of their passion for souvenirs of the war. The
dead men had collected from almost every part of Europe thousands
of keepsakes of every description. In the baggage of one deceased
soldier was found a German machine gun which he had acquired in some
manner and had succeeded in identifying as his personal property.
Occasionally those going over the effects found the contraband loaded
shell and grenades. These were confiscated and destroyed, because of
their dangerousness, but all other property was reverently handled and
protected. Because of the complete lack of identification for some
thousands of parcels, it was impossible to make complete restoration
of the effects to the heirs of the American dead. Nevertheless, by the
end of 1919 the Effects Bureau had delivered more than 35,000 sets of
personal effects of deceased soldiers to their families.
In winding up the affairs of the American Expeditionary Forces in
France, there was a final, mournful task for the Quartermaster Service;
one of large proportions and unusual difficulty--that of disposing of
the soldier dead. During the fighting it had been taken for granted by
many that the Americans who fell would be interred in great American
cemeteries in France, to be maintained and kept beautiful forever by
the American Government; but after the armistice there developed in
this country, among those bereft of their sons and brothers, a powerful
feeling that the bodies of these boys should be returned to final
resting places within the United States. The country, or that part of
it immediately interested in the question, divided into two opposite
camps and attempted to force the War Department into a definite policy
one way or the other.
When the aviator Quentin Roosevelt was killed, his father, the late
Theodore Roosevelt, quoted the words of the rugged Old Testament
Preacher: “In the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be.”
This was perhaps the strong attitude, and a considerable number of
bereaved relatives of soldiers felt as did Roosevelt; but they were,
after all, the minority. Thousands of mothers, sisters, and sweethearts
on the farms and in the hamlets, towns, and cities of the United States
held rather with the poet, Theodore O’Hara:
“Your own proud land’s heroic soil
Shall be your fitter grave.”
In this contention the War Department took no sides. It did not adopt
the wishes of the majority as a government policy, nor yet those of the
minority; but it allowed each bereaved family to have its own way. If
the family asked for the return of the body, that the War Department
agreed to. If the family were willing to have the body remain buried in
France, the War Department guaranteed that the grave should always be a
hallowed and beautiful spot.
As soon as the A. E. F. began reaching France in force and its command
realized that American troops were to bear their full share of the
future fighting, the importance of identifying the slain and their
graves asserted itself as a major problem. The experiences of the
other armies had not been pleasant in this respect, and the command
of the expedition did not underestimate the difficulties. The British
Army, for instance, had lost the identification of fully 40 per cent
of its dead. This was not due to the lack of identification of the
dead at the time of burial so much as it was to the obliteration of
cemeteries by shell fire as the battle front surged back and forth
over many kilometers of ground. After the American Army reached the
front in force in the summer of 1918, it never knew a major retreating
action; its movement was always forward, and its cemeteries, always
in the rear, were never destroyed. The result was that the A. E. F.
maintained an extraordinarily high percentage of identification. Less
than 2 per cent of its graves, after all the evidence was in, housed
unknown dead.
The first step taken by the A. E. F. to accomplish this result was to
establish, in the summer of 1917, a Graves Registration Service in
the Quartermaster Department. The original plan was for this Service
to send out field units to take complete charge of the disposition of
remains--burying the dead on the battle fields and elsewhere, acquiring
land for cemeteries, keeping the records of burials, and maintaining
the cemeteries in the future. Sentiment among the troops themselves
brought about a change in this arrangement. As soon as the divisions
suffered their first casualties, the comrades of the dead men could
not bear to have their friends buried by strangers, even though the
strangers were Americans in the American uniform. Consequently G. H. Q.
modified the original order, saying that “the dead must necessarily
be buried by the units themselves. These units perform this duty as
tribute to their dead.” Thereafter the Graves Registration Service
merely recorded all burials and grave locations and looked after the
graves.
Such a system was maintained until the early autumn of 1918. Then the
fighting reached its most intense stage, and our advancing forces
could spare neither time nor energy for the proper burial of the
slain. At this juncture the field units of the Graves Registration
Service stepped in voluntarily, without waiting for special orders,
and assisted in searching the ground for dead men and in burying them,
enlisting such aid in the work as they could find on the spot. This
was the time of the heaviest American casualties, and the units of the
Graves Registration Service buried in all some 10,000 dead American
soldiers.
The work of the Graves Registration Service was rendered particularly
difficult by the width and the separation of the areas over which
the American troops fought. It was not as if the front had been a
continuous line. Some Americans had fallen in Belgium, others with the
British at the Franco-Belgium border, and still others at the southern
extremity of the line, where it entered Alsace-Lorraine; but most of
the American casualties had occurred in the Argonne when, during the
final weeks of the war, the A. E. F. had forced a passage of that
rough, forested, and traditionally impenetrable terrain.
In those last weeks in the Argonne the advancing troops had been too
exhausted to make any thorough search of the battle areas for the
bodies of their slain comrades. Consequently one of the first acts
of the command of the A. E. F. after the armistice was to order an
immediate, thorough search of all ground where our troops had been in
action. Large numbers of divisional soldiers were assigned to help
the Graves Registration Service in this work. Through the wreckage
and débris of the Argonne went the search parties, sometimes finding
unburied bodies and frequently bodies poorly and even only partially
buried. To these the Graves Registration Service gave proper interment,
marking all these temporary graves so that the identity of their
occupants would not be lost. While this was going on, similar searching
parties were at work in all the other battle areas in which American
troops had been in action, and still other units of the Service
followed up behind the Army of Occupation which was advancing through
Luxembourg to the Rhine, in order to discover and identify the graves
of any Americans who might have died, as prisoners or otherwise, behind
the former German front. And the searchers were not content with a
single examination of the ground: they went over every square yard of
it three times, the final search being a check of the accuracy of the
preceding two. Largely to the thoroughness of this work was due the
completeness of the identification of the A. E. F. dead.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
1. OVERFLOWED AMERICAN CEMETERY AT FLEVILLE]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
2. TWO MONTHS LATER--BODIES ALL REMOVED]
After the widely scattered graves were located, it was next the
task of the Graves Registration Service to concentrate the bodies
of the slain into as few cemeteries as possible. The American dead
had been buried in approximately two thousand principal places. The
concentration of the bodies was able to reduce the number of American
cemeteries to about seven hundred. Not only were the bodies in isolated
graves brought in to the concentration cemeteries, but sometimes
entire cemeteries were abandoned and all the bodies in them removed.
This was particularly true when the emergency cemeteries had been
poorly located. The Graves Registration Service would not allow even
the elements to be unkind to the bodies of our fallen soldiers. At
Fleville the divisional troops had buried a number of their comrades in
an emergency cemetery located between a small stream and an embanked
road. During the first winter of the armistice the stream overflowed
its banks and flooded the little cemetery, leaving only a few crosses
sticking up out of the water. The Graves Registration Service sent a
force of two hundred men to the place. In three weeks they had built
a dam around the entire cemetery and had pumped out the water, after
which the bodies of eighty-seven Americans were disinterred and removed
to a better burial ground.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
1. ROMAGNE CEMETERY, APRIL 10, 1919]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
2. ROMAGNE CEMETERY, MAY 30, 1919]
The sites of the American concentration cemeteries were carefully
selected by the French Government itself, which set up special
commissions for that work. Each commission included within its
membership various engineers and sanitary experts, as well as
officers of the American Graves Registration Service. The first of
the American concentration cemeteries was established soon after the
action at Château-Thierry. Most of them, however, were created after
the armistice. As soon as the site for a permanent cemetery had been
secured by the A. E. F. and a few of its sections plotted and marked
off, the Graves Registration Service set labor troops to work digging
rows of graves, each five feet deep, and at the same time started out
collection parties to bring in bodies. The concentration cemeteries
gathered bodies in from distances as great as fifty miles. While the
bodies were being brought in and reburied, engineers were at work
laying out roads in the cemetery, grading, and perfecting the drainage,
surveyors marked off new sections, and landscape gardeners planted
shrubbery and prepared lawns.
The work of gathering the bodies fell into a dreary routine. Each
collection party consisted of an officer and eight or nine men, and
its principal piece of equipment was a motor truck. From each cemetery
the collection parties ordinarily started out each morning before
daybreak,[5] each party taking half a dozen empty coffins on its
truck. The officer in command had with him cards showing the location
of the bodies to be disinterred and transferred. Sometimes the party
could obtain all six bodies from a single place, but more often it was
necessary to visit four, five, or even six places to get the whole
gruesome load. It was an experience common enough for a collection
party which had started out before daybreak not to get back to the
concentration cemetery until after midnight. In this way, 20,000
officers and enlisted men, operating 2,000 trucks, worked for months,
until at the end they had visited 40,000 graves, scattered over 90,000
square kilometers of ground, and had removed all the bodies to new
graves in concentration cemeteries.
The American concentration cemeteries designed to be permanent resting
places for the bodies of such American soldiers as are to remain where
they fell, are hundreds in number. The principal ones, their locations,
and the number of American soldiers buried in each (December 31, 1919),
are as follows:
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| _Name_ _Location_ _Number of burials_|
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Argonne Romagne 23,061 |
|St. Mihiel Thiaucourt 4,233 |
|Sedan Letanne 774 |
|Seringes-et-Nesles Seringes-et-Nesles (Aisne) 3,792 |
|Belleau Belleau (Aisne) 2,045 |
|Ploisy Ploisy (Aisne) 1,954 |
|Fismes Fismes (Aisne) 1,712 |
|Juvigny Juvigny (Aisne) 411 |
|Bony Bony (Aisne) 1,766 |
|Waereghem Waereghem (Belgium) 689 |
|Villers-Tournelle Villers-Tournelle (Somme) 549 |
|Bouvillers Bouvillers (Oise) 297 |
|Vaux-sur-Somme Vaux (Somme) 234 |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
In addition, 357 Americans were buried in the British military cemetery
at St. Souplet, Nord, and 122 others in the British military cemetery
at Poperinghe, Belgium.
All of the cemeteries named above were carefully located in the first
place and carefully planned thereafter, art aiding nature in making
them fit places for the permanent interment of American soldiers. In
addition to them there were hundreds of others, laid out on a smaller
scale, but no less carefully planned. When the concentration cemeteries
were filled, American soldier dead lay sleeping in many American
national cemeteries on foreign soil--in rugged Scotland, on the Irish
coast, in peaceful English villages, in sunny Italian fields, under the
snows of North Russia and of Siberia, in Germany and in Austria, and
along the whole battle front in France and Belgium.
In its search for bodies the Graves Registration Service came upon
one common grave at Cirey, a village which had been held by the
Germans. This grave was marked with a wooden cross bearing the legend
in German: “_15 tapfere Amerikaner_” (15 brave Americans). The French
inhabitants of Cirey swore under oath that these men had been prisoners
massacred in cold blood by machine-gun fire. A complete investigation,
however, made it seem likely that the villagers were merely repeating
rumors, and led to the conclusion that the Americans had been members
of a raiding party which, being surrounded, had preferred death to
surrender. After a long investigation the Graves Registration Service
succeeded in identifying all the bodies in the common grave. All
fifteen were given separate burials.
Upon the Graves Registration Service fell the duty of identifying the
unknown dead, and in this work it rendered one of its most valuable
services. The work was essentially detective work, the following up of
clues and the assembling of circumstantial evidence. The case of L----,
an aviator, demonstrates the methods used. The men of the Service found
behind the former German lines a grave containing a body which had
apparently been stripped of every identifying mark. The cross on the
grave designated the occupant thereof merely as “A brave American.”
The graves registration officers, examining the body minutely, found,
pushed up so high on one arm that it had evidently not been seen by
the Germans, a wrist watch engraved with the name L----. A subsequent
investigation showed that one L----, an American aviator, had fallen
to the ground within the German lines at about that spot; and thus the
identification was made certain.
A much more remarkable feat was the identification of the body of
Private Walter L----, a former member of one of the infantry regiments
of the First Division. Near the isolated grave of an unknown American
at Ploisy one of the graves registration men found on the ground an
old, faded, water-soaked, and nearly illegible letter addressed to
the single name “Walter” by one who was evidently a sister living in
California. The Graves Registration Service communicated with this
woman and learned that her brother was Private L----, of the ----
Infantry. The chaplain of that regiment offered evidence that L---- had
been killed in action near the place of the unknown grave. Thus another
grave was identified.
Second Lieutenant T----, an aviator, was killed in action early in
November, 1918. The Graves Registration Service found a lonely grave
in the commune of Letanne marked “Unknown First Lieutenant, A. S.,
U. S. A.” The body was examined. The uniform bore the mark of a
manufacturing tailor at Rochester, New York. A letter to this tailor
from the Graves Registration Service induced him to make an independent
investigation among the retailers who had sold his uniforms during the
war. About three hundred retail clothing establishments answered to his
enquiry. Several dealers, judging from the description of the dead man,
thought they might have sold him the uniform; but one retailer in Texas
said he had sold a uniform to a man answering the description, who was
then an aviation cadet in training. His name was T----. This seemed
to the Graves Registration Service to be a good clue. Pursuing the
line of enquiry in the Air Service, the Service established that T----
had been last seen alive flying toward Letanne, and, since he never
returned from that flight, he might have been shot down at Letanne.
This circumstantial evidence together with other corroboratory details,
justified the Graves Registration Service in identifying the unknown
dead man as T----.
Upon the Graves Registration Service fell the duty of communicating
with the kinsfolk of fallen American soldiers to learn their wishes as
to the final disposition of the remains. The Service sent out nearly
75,000 letters to the relatives of deceased soldiers. In reply 44,000
asked for the return of bodies to the United States; 19,000 expressed
willingness to leave the bodies in Europe; and some 300 others
requested the removal of bodies to cemeteries in countries other than
the United States. The rest did not reply.
On the first anniversary of the signing of the armistice a transport
reached New York bringing the bodies of 115 American soldiers who had
died on foreign soil. These bodies, the remains of men who had died in
northern Russia, were the first to come home. The French law prohibited
the disinterment and shipment of bodies until after the expiration
of a considerable period of time after burial, and for that reason
the return of remains to the United States did not begin immediately.
At present (1921) frequent shiploads of bodies are arriving in the
United States. They are received at New York and from there they are
transported under military guard to the cemeteries chosen for their
final resting places.
CHAPTER VII
SOLDIER WELFARE
The World War brought to America a new and enlightened discernment of
the Government’s responsibility toward the men whom it had called to
the uniform. In former wars the military hierarchies had, in effect,
regarded the individual soldier as a piece of cannon bait; and when he
was no longer able to serve this purpose, they were done with him. In
the World War the attitude of the Government toward its four million
soldiers was much less impersonal, much more paternalistic. Its first
solicitude was, to be sure, the soldier’s expertness as a soldier, but
after that came a real and helpful regard for his physical, mental,
moral, and economic well-being.
Particularly was this true after the armistice. Before that day the
various welfare activities conducted by the Army and its auxiliaries
had been mainly directed to the end that the soldier might be made
physically and morally fit as a fighter. After the armistice the
undertakings in soldier welfare began looking to the time when the
troops would resume their places in the workaday world once more.
When the fighting stopped, the American Expeditionary Forces faced a
long interval which was bound to elapse before the shipping of the
United States could possibly repatriate the two million Americans in
France. This might easily have been a period of stagnation for the
temporary exiles. Those in command, however, seized the opportunity to
establish within the A. E. F. a vast school system. Wherever American
soldiers were quartered in any numbers, classes were organized and
instruction proceeded, the curriculum including practically the
entire range of subjects taught in the public schools of the United
States, from the three elementary R’s to the Latin and algebra of
the high schools. Those who desired it could receive instruction in
trade and business subjects. As an auxiliary to this system the Young
Men’s Christian Association conducted at its huts courses similar to
those given by that organization in its buildings in this country. A
surprising amount of illiteracy was discovered among the troops raised
in 1917 and 1918, foreign-born soldiers being classed as illiterates if
they could not read and write the English language, even though they
might be proficient in reading and writing their own. It is estimated
that, during this period when the expedition was waiting for the ships
to take it home, 100,000 men of the A. E. F. were taught to read and
write English.
The public school system of the A. E. F., to call it that, was rounded
out by a great soldiers’ university established after the armistice
at Beaune. In the ranks of the expedition were thousands of young
men who, in order to join the Army, had interrupted their studies in
colleges and other institutions of higher education in America. For
these and for others to whom it was practicable to give such training,
the General Headquarters of the expedition organized the A. E. F.
University, occupying French army barracks, schools, and other public
and private buildings at the town of Beaune. A large faculty was
recruited almost entirely from the men in uniform, although a few
college professors came from the United States to assist in the work.
The faculty organized a curriculum which in scope would do credit
to any large university in the United States. About 10,000 soldiers
registered as students. Distinctions of rank ended at the classroom
doors, and it was not uncommon to see private soldiers conducting
classes in which sat officers of as high rank as lieutenant colonel.
The university’s brief career ended with the advent of the summer of
1919. Colonel Ira L. Reeves was president of the university.
Besides these educational advantages, the A. E. F. arranged for
scholarships for some of its men at various French and English
universities. Practically every university in France, including the
Sorbonne, admitted designated A. E. F. soldiers to its classes during
that winter and spring, as did also Oxford and other famous educational
institutions in England. Brigadier General Robert I. Rees was in charge
of all educational activities of the A. E. F.
Yet it was not all study and work and no play for the men of the
A. E. F. during the waiting time after the armistice. Athletics were
organized on a tremendous scale. Near Paris the expedition established
a great athletic field, called the Pershing Stadium. There, in the
spring of 1919, were held the military athletic championship contests,
to which the British, French, and other armies of the Allies sent
their competing teams. Military drilling after the armistice became
competitive in spirit, and out of such competition came the crack drill
regiment of the Third Army Corps, known as “Pershing’s Own Regiment,”
which paraded with the First Division in New York and Washington in
September, 1919. The drill regiment was organized and trained by
Colonel Conrad S. Babcock. Nearly every division in France conducted
a horse show after the armistice. The expedition numbered among its
members men of high talent in almost all callings, including that
of the stage. At Tours the A. E. F. organized an expert theatrical
producing company, the performances of which equaled in merit the
productions seen on the American stage. This central troupe also
conducted a training school for amateur actors of the expedition.
The various areas in which the American soldiers were concentrated
sent their local Thespians to Tours for training, after which they
returned to their stations to organize and produce plays. It was a
small community indeed which did not have its theatrical performances
at regular intervals. The taste of producers and audiences alike ran
strongly to musical comedies.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
COLONEL IRA L. REEVES, PRESIDENT OF BEAUNE UNIVERSITY]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
STUDENTS AT BEAUNE UNIVERSITY]
There was nothing which contributed more to the welfare of the men of
the American Expeditionary Forces, or to their spirit and morale, than
the _Stars and Stripes_, the service newspaper of the A. E. F. This
unique adjunct to a modern army originated in the ranks, was written,
edited, and published by men from the ranks, and to the end of its
famous existence was primarily and always the organ of the enlisted
man, with the enlisted man’s point of view. No other army in Europe
possessed an expeditionary newspaper, but it is unlikely that any great
American army of the future will ever be without one. The value of the
_Stars and Stripes_ was beyond dispute.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
ART STUDENTS IN A. E. F. TRAINING CENTER, PARIS]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
A. E. F. STUDENTS IN UNIVERSITY OF LYON]
Three men--Private Hudson Hawley, Field Clerk James A. Britt,
and Corporal John T. Winterich--were the founders of the _Stars
and Stripes_. All three had had training in the making of
newspapers--Winterich had been one of the editors of the Springfield
_Republican_. At Neufchâteau one winter night early in 1918 these three
foregathered to descant upon the growing American Expeditionary Forces
and--like the fraternity of reporters the world over--to talk shop; and
these men agreed that the chief need of the expedition was an agency
which might put the various American military elements in France in
touch with each other, tell every man what the expanding force was like
and what it was trying to do, and build homogeneity and singleness of
purpose within the expedition such as no other agency could evoke--in
short, the A. E. F. needed a newspaper. The idea was communicated to
General Pershing, who promptly approved it. Thus was the _Stars and
Stripes_ officially born.
The first number was published in Paris on February 8, 1918, and
regularly every Friday thereafter the paper appeared until June 13,
1919, when it was discontinued, and the editorial staff joined the
homeward migration. At its summit of popularity the _Stars and Stripes_
attained to a circulation of 526,000, which was close to the permitted
limit of one copy for every three soldiers in the expedition, a
stricture made necessary by the shortage of paper in Europe. This was
all paid circulation, obtained without direct solicitation other than
the advertising appearing in the paper itself. The _Stars and Stripes_
was printed in the Paris plant of the London _Daily Mail_. The total
net profit earned by the newspaper was about $700,000, a sum which went
to the credit of the Quartermaster Department. After the armistice
the collectors in America awoke to the historical value of this
publication and offered large sums for the few complete files which had
been saved.
At about the third issue of the _Stars and Stripes_ Private Harold
W. Ross, who had had an extensive experience as an executive in
newspaper offices of the Pacific coast, became the editor-in-chief.
The three originators of the newspaper were on its staff until the
end. Sergeant Alexander Woollcott, who before and after his army
experience was the dramatic critic of the New York _Times_, became the
battle correspondent of the paper. His accounts of the engagements in
which the American troops appeared were not excelled by those of any
correspondent with the Army. After the armistice Sergeant John W. Rixey
Smith joined the staff. These names all became well known to the men of
the A. E. F. Nor should the two artists, C. LeRoy Baldridge and A. B.
Wallgren, both private soldiers, be forgotten. Their work on the _Stars
and Stripes_ resulted in fame and fortune for both of them. The latter,
as “Wally,” made himself, with his whimsical nonsense, about the most
popular figure in the American Expeditionary Forces. Baldridge was the
possessor of a delicate and subtle talent. Practically unknown in his
own country before the war, he returned after it to take his place
among the foremost American illustrators.
These and other men connected with the publication were formally
organized as a unit of the A. E. F., bearing the name 1st Censor and
Press Company. The officers in charge were Major Mark Watson and
Captain Stephen T. Early, both of them experienced in newspaper work.
The military authorities granted an extraordinary editorial freedom
to the _Stars and Stripes_. At one time the paper was making a
satirical onslaught against the army practice of fencing off the rank
and file from the more desirable cafés and other gathering places
with the placard “Officers Only.” A high general of the expedition
took umbrage at this campaign and sent to the publication office a
peremptory order for the attack to cease. The editorial staff at once
appealed to General Pershing, who replied with a written order that
there was to be no interference with the editorial direction of the
_Stars and Stripes_. With such a charter the _Stars and Stripes_
threw itself whole-heartedly into various projects for the good of
the A. E. F. and its _personnel_. Its chief military contribution was
its “Berlin or Bust” campaign, undertaken in the summer and autumn of
1918. In this it directed its energies chiefly to the improvement of
the unloading efficiency at the American ports in France. By citing
publicly the labor units which made good records in the unloading of
vessels, the newspaper created, among the stevedore troops, a spirit
of competition which had a marked effect upon the efficiency of the
ports. The newspaper induced American troop units in France to “adopt”
for one year more than 3,000 orphans of deceased French soldiers, and
many of the units continued their guardianship after they returned to
America. In this campaign the _Stars and Stripes_ raised over 500,000
francs for the care of French war orphans, and most of this money was
contributed by men in the trenches. The newspaper also conducted a
service department in which it answered more than 500,000 enquiries
coming from American soldiers. After the armistice it coöperated in the
expedition’s educational enterprise.
In this volume, however, we are not so much interested in welfare
activities within the Army as we are with those which bore directly
upon the difficult business of demobilizing the troops without shock
to the economic organization of the country. The activities in
soldier welfare directly connected with demobilization were of two
classes--those benefiting the sick and wounded and those helpful to the
able-bodied.
To the officers and enlisted men of the Medical Corps in this country
the armistice meant only an increase of work. Therefore, in common
with the other military departments the _personnel_ of which after the
armistice could see no immediate prospects of discharge, the Medical
Department experienced a sharp drop in corps morale. Many of the
officers and enlisted men attempted to get out at once, and some of
them succeeded, but for the most part they were held in uniform; and
later, when the men realized how badly their services were needed and
what good they were accomplishing, they became contented and worked
with good spirit until the corps could be placed on its permanent peace
footing.
While the Army was expanding, the most noticeable work of the Medical
Corps in this country had been that of examining the men who sought
entrance to the training camps, sorting out the physically fit from
the unfit. The care of military patients did not become a predominant
medical activity in the United States until the late summer of 1918,
when, simultaneously, the A. E. F. began sending home its first
shiploads of wounded men and the influenza epidemic invaded the
training camps. Meanwhile the care of war’s disabled had taken on a new
meaning for the American military medical authorities. In former wars,
as soon as a sick man or a wounded man had gained strength enough to
travel, he was usually furloughed to his home, there to win his own way
back to health if he could. In the summer of 1918 the War Department
adopted the policy of not discharging disabled men from the Service
until they were as nearly rehabilitated physically as medical science
could make them; and even then a patient was not turned adrift, but
might seek the services of other governmental agencies for specialized
treatment and for reëducation that should enable him to take a place
in civilian life at least as useful as the one he had left in order to
join the military service. This policy had a marked effect upon the
layout of the machinery which conducted the demobilization of the Army.
It not only resulted in maintaining the Medical Corps, equipment and
_personnel_, at war strength for many months after the armistice, but
it also set up within the Government great new agencies for carrying
out the Government’s beneficent purposes toward the ex-service men.
On the day of the armistice there were 200,000 patients in the A. E. F.
hospitals in France. It was at once realized that the best interests
of these men demanded their prompt return to the United States; for
nowhere else could they secure the treatment most certain to restore
them to complete health. The Medical Corps at home was ready for them.
For months it had been constructing throughout the United States
a great chain of specialized hospitals in anticipation of a heavy
American casualty list in France.
Many of the 200,000 hospitalized members of the A. E. F. recovered
in time to recross the ocean as members of regular military units,
but more than half of them returned as patients needing more or less
extended treatment in the military hospitals in this country. The
policy in France was to move these men either in ambulances or in
hospital trains from the interior hospitals up to hospitals near
the ports of embarkation. There they were placed aboard the special
hospital ships or given accommodations on the regular transports.
Practically all of them debarked either at New York or at Newport News.
New York could accommodate 24,000 patients at once in its regular and
special debarkation hospitals. The two regular debarkation hospitals
in New York--one located in the Greenhut Building and the other in the
Grand Central Palace--each had beds for over 3,000 patients, and in
addition the Army could call upon thirteen additional hospitals in New
York in an emergency. At Newport News there was a regular and emergency
equipment of 10,000 hospital beds for incoming overseas patients.
Harbor hospital boats and ambulances distributed the patients from
the ships to the debarkation hospitals. There they were classified
according to the sort of treatment they required. There were eighty
interior hospitals which received overseas patients. The policy of
the Army was to send patients whenever practicable to the hospitals
nearest their homes. In the distribution of patients from the ports
to the interior hospitals, the Medical Corps operated four hospital
trains--three out of Hoboken and one out of Newport News--and twenty
unit cars, one of which, attached to a train of regular Pullman or
tourist sleepers, enabled such a train to serve as a moving hospital.
Each of the regular hospital trains was made up of seven hospital
cars, and carried comfortably 141 patients and 31 doctors, nurses, and
orderlies. The unit cars were equipped with diet kitchens, in which
could be cooked food enough for 250 patients. With this equipment
139,000 overseas patients were handled up to the end of the year
1919, and of these, 103,000 entered the country through the port of
New York. On the first anniversary of the armistice thirty-six of the
eighty general hospitals had been closed, an indication of the rate of
convalescence among the military patients.
[Illustration:
_Photo from Engineer Department_
AIR VIEW OF PERSHING STADIUM, PARIS]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
AMERICAN SOLDIERS AT UNIVERSITY OF GRENOBLE]
In its treatment of patients in the military hospitals, the Medical
Department of the Army went beyond the realm of pure surgery and
medication in order to reconstruct physically and mentally, when
necessary, the men left disabled by the war. To this end it enlarged
its Sanitary Corps to include persons skilled in physical and
occupational reconstruction. The plan permitted the employment by the
Corps of civilian women, who, after putting on the distinctive blue
uniform adopted for them, were known as reconstruction aides. These
women were skilled in two branches of therapy--occupational therapy
(the teaching of new occupations to invalids as a curative measure)
and physiotherapy (including baths of various sorts, massage, heat and
electric treatments, and gymnastics). Most of the general hospitals
were fitted with workshops, gymnasiums, physiotherapy departments, and
educational buildings. An elementary school system was inaugurated
at the general hospitals, and several thousand illiterate patients
were taught to read and write during their convalescence. Organized
recreational activities were conducted at each general hospital
engaging in reconstruction. Outdoor games, setting-up exercises and
other gymnastic exercises, military drills, and organized play of many
sorts vied with concerts, plays, boxing matches, and other amusements
for the interest of the convalescents. One important work of the
physiotherapists was to teach men with amputated limbs how to dress,
feed, and otherwise care for themselves, and how to use the artificial
legs or arms which the Government supplied to them. Nineteen former
training camps were converted into convalescent centers operated by the
Medical Department. To these places the general hospitals sent 50,000
convalescent soldiers to be finally hardened by curative work and
play for their reëntrance into civilian life.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
A. E. F. SOLDIERS AS COMEDIANS]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
JUDGING COMEDY HORSE AT 4TH ARMY HORSE SHOW]
After patients were finally discharged from the Army and from the
army hospitals, the Government by no means washed its hands of them.
Congress had set up three great new federal agencies looking to the
welfare of the discharged soldier. One of these was the Bureau of
War Risk Insurance, which, in addition to offering low-priced life
insurance policies of the standard sorts to all ex-service men,
determined, granted, and paid the monthly allowances given by the
Government to all Americans disabled by service in the uniform during
the World War. Then, too, Congress had greatly enlarged the function
of the old Public Health Service by making it responsible for the
medical care of all ex-service men discharged from the Army or Navy
and from the military hospitals but still needing attention on account
of disabilities incurred during the war. Finally, Congress established
by law the Federal Board for Vocational Education, an act which outdid
in gratitude and generosity anything which the American Government had
ever before offered to disabled war veterans.
After the Public Health Service began expanding its facilities for the
care of disabled veterans, the Medical Department adopted the policy
of discharging its patients rapidly and turning them over to the
Public Health Service. Not only were those two classes of war victims
requiring extended medical treatment--the mental and nervous cases and
those suffering with tuberculosis--so treated, but men still suffering
from wounds and sometimes requiring major operations and long periods
for convalescence thereafter were released from the Army and committed
to the ministrations of the Public Health Service. The immediate result
of such a transfer was to entitle the disabled soldier to receive
from the Government his disability allowance, which could be paid
only after a man’s discharge from the military service, and it often
allowed him to secure medical care in the vicinity of his own home.
Another important result was that, during 1920, although thousands of
the victims of the war still required constant medical attention,
the Medical Service of the Army rapidly contracted toward its prewar
proportions, with a consequent expansion of the branch of the Public
Health Service which dealt with disabled veterans.
There was not nearly so much tuberculosis in the Army as the medical
authorities had anticipated. In the expectation of a wide prevalence of
the disease resulting from the severity of field conditions in France,
the Medical Corps established nine tuberculosis hospitals in the United
States. Afterwards, although 100,000 of the 4,000,000 men were sent to
hospitals as tuberculosis suspects, the positive diagnosis of pulmonary
tuberculosis was confirmed in less than 15,000 cases. The result was
that at no time did the Army use more than seven of its tuberculosis
hospitals, and after it adopted the policy of discharging tubercular
patients on certificates of disability it maintained only two of these
hospitals. Discontent and homesickness are deterrents to the cure of
tuberculosis, and the Medical Corps generally allowed sufferers from
the disease to continue their own cures at home under instructions or
to enter the hospitals and sanitariums of the Public Health Service
near their own homes.
The other class of disabled ex-service men in need of extended medical
treatment were the nervous and mental cases. Such victims were turned
over to the Public Health Service, and they constituted the largest
class of cases treated by that agency after the armistice.
After a disabled man was discharged from the Service, he automatically
became eligible for vocational rehabilitation under the direction of
the Federal Board for Vocational Education. The only four conditions
were that the man must have been honorably discharged after April 7,
1917, that he must have a disability incurred in, aggravated by, or
traceable to, the military service, that the disability must be, in the
opinion of the Federal Board, an actual vocational handicap to him,
and, lastly, that vocational training was a feasible thing for him. In
other words--to clarify the final condition--the Vocational Board would
not give training to a lunatic or give training of any sort beyond
a man’s mental capabilities. Within these necessary restrictions,
however, there was practically no limit to which the Federal Board
could not go. Most of its beneficiaries, to be sure, received training
in the purely mechanical vocations in shops and factories; but the
Board could and did send men to colleges and even to the postgraduate
schools of universities. The objective of the Board was not only to
overcome by training the man’s physical handicap, but also to carry him
forward in training as long as his progress and his mentality warranted
it. More than one war veteran found that his disability brought to him
educational opportunities which might otherwise never have come his
way. The Board possessed funds to pay not only for tuition, textbooks,
and incidental expenses, but also for the maintenance of the student
and his family, if he had one, while he was in training. According
to the number of persons dependent upon the student, the Board was
authorized to pay for maintenance as much as $150 a month. At first the
disabled men were slow to make application for vocational training;
but, once they understood the advantages which were theirs for the
asking, there was a great rush to avail themselves of the opportunities
thus freely offered by the Government.
The three rehabilitation services, though interdependent in their
operation, were independent of each other in their management and
control. The Public Health Service conducted the physical examinations
on which the War Risk Bureau rated men for their disability allowances.
The War Risk Bureau certified men to the Public Health Service
for medical treatment, and for vocational training to the Federal
Board for Vocational Education. A man could not legally receive his
disability allowance from the War Risk Bureau while receiving a
training maintenance allowance from the Federal Board. While in effect,
therefore, conducting three branches in the single main enterprise of
caring for the men left disabled by the war, the three federal agencies
were independent in their executive managements. This anomalous
arrangement resulted in such distressing delays and stirred up so
much discontent among the ex-service men that in the spring of 1921,
upon the insistence largely of the American Legion, the veterans’ own
organization, the three services were brought together under a single
direction.
The agitation which led to the amalgamation of the three welfare
services undoubtedly created a wide impression that the Government had
neglected the ex-service men. Nothing could have been farther from the
truth. The complaint was not against the generosity of the Government,
but against the method of administering that generosity. It was often
difficult for the ex-service man to obtain the benefits which Congress
had provided for him. The lavishness of the hand of Congress is shown
by the fact that up to the present (June, 1921) its appropriations of
money for ex-service men have amounted in sum to about $800,000,000.
This is more money than the Government provided for veterans of the
Civil War during the first thirty years after the conclusion of that
conflict. The appropriations to date include the money for the physical
and vocational rehabilitation of disabled World War veterans, for death
claims paid by the Bureau of War Risk Insurance, and for allowances
paid by the War Risk Bureau to disabled ex-soldiers, but they do not
include the sixty-dollar bonus paid to all ex-service men in 1919.
This bonus accounted for about $200,000,000 of the Government’s money.
Altogether, therefore, the Government has either paid out or obligated
itself to pay out about one billion dollars for the benefit of men who
served in the American forces during the World War.
So much for the post-armistice care of the wounded and otherwise
disabled. The other principal phase of welfare work for the Army after
the armistice had to do with the able-bodied soldiers; and, concretely,
it meant getting jobs for them. The War Department did not regard a
soldier as completely demobilized until he was once more placed in an
occupation in civilian life. The Department could exercise no authority
over the veteran once he had received his discharge, but it could and
did exercise a friendly solicitude as to his economic future. Therefore
the War Department led a nation-wide movement under the slogan, “Jobs
for Soldiers”--and that meant jobs for approximately 4,000,000 men
thrown suddenly into the labor market just at the time when industry
was going through the critical transition from war to peace.
In demobilizing the men of the Army, the War Department adopted a
policy the diametric opposite of the British policy of discharging
soldiers by trades as they were needed in industry. With our enormous
and varied industry, we had everything in our favor to make a success
of the industrial plan of troop demobilization; but, nevertheless, the
War Department settled upon the questionable policy of discharging
the troops by military units, regardless of the effect such a policy
might have upon general industrial conditions. As it was, the United
States faced an economic crisis in the transition of its war industry,
and to inundate the country with unemployed ex-soldiers was only to
add to the difficulties of those who were trying to bring industry
safely through the readjustment. Later on, the War Department modified
its policy by providing that any soldier who faced unemployment after
discharge might, upon his own request, be held in the service for a
reasonable time while he tried to locate a job for himself in civilian
life, and that, on the other hand, if work were waiting for any man not
yet in line for immediate discharge, such a man might, upon submitting
proper proof that there was a civilian demand for his services, receive
his discharge forthwith. The Department permitted officers to take
thirty-day leaves of absence with pay while they sought work.
There was, of course, danger that the wholesale outpouring of
ex-soldiers upon an industrial field already complaining of a labor
surplus would precipitate a business crisis; yet it seemed certain
that a wise guidance of the internal affairs of the nation could avert
such a calamity. The world was short of almost everything which man
consumes, and it seemed evident that it would take several years of
brisk production in every field to build up the reserves wasted by war
and overtake industrially the demands of the consuming public. It was
evident, in short, that there was plenty of work for all, if business
did not become hysterical in the face of a difficult transition. The
part for the Government to play was to conduct a skillful graduation of
war industry into the pursuits of peace and at the same time to take
the lead with its own agencies in infiltrating the demobilized troops
into the ranks of trade and industry.
Fortunately, for this latter purpose, the Government possessed an
agency at hand--the United States Employment Service, a branch of
the Department of Labor. The war had built up this organization to
great size and usefulness. Its branches covered the United States.
Before the armistice it had been instrumental in staffing some of the
more important war industrial establishments, particularly the new
shipyards and the government powder plants. This agency would have
been competent alone to secure employment for all discharged soldiers,
but for the circumstance that, in the spring of 1919, there came into
office a Congress of a political complexion the opposite to that of the
administration. This Congress at once adopted a program of economy, but
it was a spurious economy to the extent (which was considerable) that
it arbitrarily cut down appropriations needed for important projects.
The United States Employment Service received a scant $5,000,000 with
which to finance the work of securing civilian employment for 4,000,000
men, when twice that sum would not have been overabundant. The result
was that in this final scene of the war the Government was forced to
call upon outside and volunteer aid in the conduct of an essential war
activity.
At this point the semi-governmental Council of National Defense stepped
into the breach. Shorn of most of its purely industrial functions, the
Council of National Defense had become largely an organ consolidating
and directing all volunteer civilian effort in aid of the Government
in its war and demobilization problems. It had built up a field
service covering the entire United States, consisting principally of
the state and local councils of national defense. Meanwhile, with the
expansion of the United States Employment Service restricted by lack
of money, the Secretary of War made plans to use some of the emergency
war funds in the soldier-employment project and called to Washington
Colonel Arthur Woods, the former police commissioner of New York City,
making him an assistant to the Secretary of War in charge of all war
department activities in reëstablishing service men in civil life. The
Director of the Council of National Defense created, in March, 1919,
its emergency committee on employment of soldiers and sailors, with
Colonel Woods as chairman. The membership of the committee linked up
the United States Employment Service and other interested governmental
bodies in an emergency organization for Colonel Woods to command. The
committee also tied in all state and municipal employment agencies,
welfare societies everywhere that were taking part in the solution of
the employment problem, and also the thousands of community councils
of national defense. Thus was evolved in brief time a fairly efficient
employment service of national scope.
The success of the project was beyond question. The so-called
bureaus for discharged soldiers, sailors, and marines were set up in
practically every community in the United States. Since the work was
so largely voluntary work, no strict system of reports was ever put in
force, but the figures from 500 principal American cities and towns
showed that when the year 1919 ended, 1,326,000 discharged service men
had applied to the employment agencies, and more than 927,000 had been
placed in jobs by the organization. A general survey in the autumn of
1919 disclosed only about 20,000 ex-service men out of work.
The men of the A. E. F. came in contact with the Government’s
employment organization before they left foreign soil. The United
States Employment Service sent several representatives to France
soon after the armistice. These advance agents carried cards, which
were distributed to the troops of the expedition as they came to the
embarkation ports in France. With the cards went the Government’s
assurance that it would use every effort to restore every soldier to a
useful place in civil life. Any soldier who desired to avail himself
of these good offices was instructed to fill in a card during his
voyage home, telling his qualifications, what sort of job he desired,
and where he wished to be employed. Hundreds of thousands of these
cards were collected by the federal employment agents at the ports of
debarkation in this country. The cards were sorted and sent to the
proper local employment bureaus throughout the United States. Thousands
of men were engaged for work before they received their discharges. The
fact that jobs were waiting for them undoubtedly helped to avert the
congregating of idle service men in cities after they had been turned
off at the demobilization centers.
The overseas soldier had been serving his country for a dollar a day
while others had stayed at home in bomb-proof jobs and drawn the
highest wages ever paid in America. The returning veteran often felt,
and felt justly, that it was his turn now to reap some of the financial
rewards. Travel had broadened these boys; the harsh experiences of
war had sobered them and often quickened their ambition. Such men
were not content to go back to the jobs they had left in 1917 and
1918. They demanded something better, and often they got it, because
employers were prone to accept their point of view. Events justified
this attitude, too, as was testified to in hundreds of letters received
by the employment bureaus from satisfied employers, who wrote that the
demobilized soldiers were better and more ambitious workmen for their
war experiences.
[Illustration:
_Photo from Federal Board for Vocational Education_
DISABLED VETERANS TAKING FEDERAL TRAINING]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
EDITORIAL CONFERENCE OF _STARS AND STRIPES_]
The success of the reëmployment campaign was largely an achievement for
publicity. The publicity was directed both to the soldier and to the
employer. For reaching the soldier one of the most valuable devices
proved to be a booklet entitled _Where Do We Go from Here?_, written by
Major William Brown Meloney. This pamphlet was filled with good advice
for the demobilized soldier. It took into account his stirred ambition,
but showed how impossible it was for every man to get the place in
civil life he desired, and therefore urged each man to take what job he
could get and make the most of it. The War Camp Community Service
printed and distributed 3,000,000 copies of this booklet.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
POSTER USED IN REËMPLOYMENT CAMPAIGN]
[Illustration:
_Felix J. Koch Photo_
EMPLOYMENT OFFICE AT CAMP SHERMAN]
The American Red Cross sponsored a poster by Dan Smith, the artist,
bearing to employers the slogan: “Put Fighting Blood in your Business!”
A file of helmeted Yanks obliquely below a shield on which were
inscribed the names of the principal engagements in which the A. E. F.
participated; below that, the lines: “Here’s his record. Does he get a
job?”--such was the display.
Publications of every sort, motion picture theatres, ministers in
their pulpits, and school-teachers in their classrooms joined in the
effort to make the whole United States think of its obligations to the
returning troops. The War Department conferred a so-called citation
upon employers who agreed to take back all of their former employees
who had joined the Army or Navy. The leading business organizations of
the country worked with their members to secure a complete reëmployment
of former service men. The thoroughness of the effort accounts for the
large degree of its success.
At the same time the War Department constituted itself an employment
agency for placing soldiers with technical training in the best
positions that could be obtained for them. Such soldiers were usually
commissioned officers. The Department asked these men to send to
Washington statements of their qualifications and their wishes as to
employment. The Department then circularized some 25,000 business firms
of the United States as to their needs for men with technical training.
By this method about 8,000 men were placed in responsible positions at
good salaries.
The employment organization encountered and overcame an abuse of the
army uniform that was particularly flagrant for the first few months
after the armistice. On the streets of most large cities were men in
uniform, wearing the red chevron indicating their honorable discharge
from the service, selling cheap or worthless articles or begging
outright. There may have been a shadow of excuse for this during the
early weeks of the winter of 1918–1919; but as industry recovered and
revived it became possible for every ex-service man who desired a
respectable job to secure one. Street solicitation, however, was highly
profitable, and many professional beggars and sharpers, who had never
been in the Service at all, secured uniforms and posed as discharged
soldiers. The American Legion instituted a campaign against these men,
urging the public not to give money to them. The reëmployment forces
persuaded local authorities to refuse peddling licenses to men in
uniform. Thus the evil was largely stamped out after a few months.
Not even the assurance of an immediate job and the other official
inducements which made the road home the path of least resistance
could always induce the discharged soldier to go home directly,
particularly if he left the demobilization camp with his pockets full
of money. Around some of the demobilization centers ranged bands of
thieves and outlaws who, having evaded military service, now during the
demobilization wore the army uniform and posed as discharged soldiers
in order to prey upon the ex-service men. If a soldier leaving the camp
listened to their fraternal “Hello, Buddy!” and fell in with them, he
usually later found himself fleeced to his last penny. To offset this
evil the American Red Cross established a chain of soldiers’ banks at
the principal demobilization centers. In these banks the discharged men
could deposit their money, drawing it out by check after they reached
their homes. The deposits in the camp banks passed $4,000,000 in amount.
In one respect only was the reëmployment campaign unsuccessful. The War
Department had hoped to use the demobilization of troops as an offset
to some extent to the steady drift of population from American farms to
the cities. In pursuance of this ambition the Government distributed
among the troops at the demobilization centers nearly 1,000,000 copies
of a booklet entitled _Forward to the Farm! Why Not?_ Yet, although
most country boys in the Army were willing to return to the farms, the
Government could not induce the city dwellers to take up country life.
However, it is noteworthy that in June, 1919, when the Kansas wheat
crop was in danger for want of labor to harvest it, the reëmployment
organization was able to send nearly 50,000 ex-service men into the
Kansas wheat country during the harvest at wages of $5 to $7 a day,
lodging and board thrown in.
CHAPTER VIII
WAR CONTRACTS
Of all the business activities of the American Government in the
World War, none aroused in the business men of America more interest
or more concern than the Government’s employment of its function of
making contracts with industry for the production and delivery of war
supplies. There is little danger of putting too much emphasis upon
the importance of the war contract. After the declaration of war, the
Government rapidly assumed unprecedented powers over business, until
in the heavy productive months of 1918 it occupied a supreme position.
The War Industries Board had virtually commandeered all important raw
materials and was distributing them at fixed prices. The Government
had become the sole dealer in wool; it was closely regulating the
prices of, and determining priorities in the use of, such commodities
as copper and steel; through the United States Fuel Administration it
was in full control of the production, distribution, and use of fuels;
and its position was equally monopolistic toward all other important
basic materials. Of the labor, the machinery, and the processes which
normally manufactured these materials into the commodities of American
commerce, the Government had become almost the only employer; only now
it had woven these facilities, the industrial facilities of the largest
of industrial nations, into the intricate texture of an arsenal.
Mechanical industry for private enterprise had almost disappeared.
On the day of the armistice the factories of the United States were
working practically as a unit in the production of munitions. While
the Navy, the United States Shipping Board, and the military missions
of the principal Allies were also prosecuting extensive war industrial
projects in America, the War Department alone had entered into some
30,000 contracts directly with builders and producers, these contracts
upon their consummation obligating the Government to pay out a sum in
excess of $7,500,000,000. Of this production, less than half (reckoning
it in money value) had been completed on the day of the armistice.
It follows that the instrument which commanded and set in motion all
this effort--the war contract--must have been a thing exceedingly
important to America. The 30,000 war department contracts, as a body,
constituted in themselves the charter under which the preponderant
part of American industry existed for nearly two years. As wisdom or
unwisdom appeared written into the provisions of the war contracts,
so fared well or badly not only the half of the population directly
associated with industry, but the other half as well, and the
Government, too. As an example, it was charged with some degree of
justice that one great class of war department contracts, the so-called
cost-plus contracts, was the chief factor in the rapidly mounting
cost of living during the war. In other ways also these writings,
which defined the terms of existence for American industry, profoundly
affected every person in the United States. We may leave to lawyers and
economists the discussion of the academic legal questions involved in
the war contracts and still find in them plenty of interest common to
all.
When an individual person goes out to buy anything, he normally
procures it by paying the price fixed by the seller. Business houses,
too, commonly follow this custom in procuring their usual supplies. If,
however, the individual person or business house is going into some
relatively large operation in which he will require goods and services
in extensive quantity, then it is customary to ask for bids from those
in a position to supply the needs, and to contract thereafter with
the concern which offers to supply the goods and services at the best
price. The law requires the Government to follow this procedure in
procuring practically all its supplies. Each federal department must
advertise its needs publicly, giving complete specifications, must call
publicly for bids to supply the materials specified, and must allot
the business to the one tendering the best bid; provided only that the
bidder is responsible and is known to have the ability to produce goods
of the quality desired. The courts have held that a contract written
under any other conditions is void.
The law, however, permits certain exceptions. The War Department,
for instance, is permitted by law to increase the size of a contract
already properly made. It can deal directly, without advertising, with
a manufacturer who is a sole source of supply, provided that previous
advertising has elicited no bids. These exceptions are the reflection
of experience in governing, exceptions granted by Congress to the end
that the Government’s necessary business may not be impeded by the
operation of the legal checks and balances.
Now there was to the federal contracting rule one other exception
which was, for our purposes here, the most important of all. The
law authorized the Secretary of War to enter into contracts without
the formality of advertising and soliciting bids, _in the event
of a national emergency_. We had not yet been a week at war with
Germany when the Secretary of War issued proclamation declaring such
an emergency to exist. His signature to this document swept away
the most serious legal restrictions which circumscribed the War
Department’s contracting powers. The hand of the Department had been
further strengthened by the National Defense Act (passed in 1916),
which empowered the Secretary of War, “in time of war, or when war
is imminent,” to command a manufacturer to produce supplies for the
United States at prices fixed by the War Department itself; and if
the producer refused this arrangement, then the Act empowered the
Secretary to commandeer and take over the producer’s business, paying
the producer, however, a fair and just compensation.
Competition for the Government’s contracts under the normal procedure
would have been fatal to both speed and secrecy in the procurement of
war supplies, and therefore the law wisely permitted the War Department
to abandon competition in the emergency of war. But, with the safeguard
of the competitive bid abandoned, it is reasonable to suppose that the
officers of the War Department, if they were faithful servants of the
public, would seek to protect the Government against the extortioner
by the substitution of other devices not open to the objection either
of delaying the war manufacturing program or of betraying its nature
and extent. And so they did. And although the methods of applying the
protection were numerous, the essence of it was that the contractor
was required by the terms of his contract to produce war supplies at
cost, plus a profit for himself, the profit being reckoned in various
ways. A contract of this sort was known as a cost-plus contract.
Contracts of the normal, older sort, in which the Government dealt with
the lowest bidder or with a producer with whom the law empowered the
federal purchasers to deal directly without competition, were known as
fixed-price or lump-sum contracts.
The cost-plus contract was not entirely unknown to American business
before the war, but it had been employed only sparingly. The war
brought the form into great prominence, since much of the most
important war business was conducted on the cost-plus plan. It is
noteworthy that the form has persisted to some extent in American
private business, and particularly in the building industry, since the
armistice.
Although under the circumstances the cost-plus contract was a necessity
and its advantages were many, nevertheless the form was endowed with an
inherent weakness (from the Government’s standpoint) most difficult to
overcome. In a lump-sum contract the profit of the contractor increased
according as he was able to keep down his costs. If his costs ran too
high, he faced actual loss. In the cost-plus contract of the simplest
form--cost of production, plus a percentage of the cost as profit--it
was just the other way. The higher a producer’s costs, the greater his
profit; and though a producer might not deliberately seek to augment
his costs, yet if he were relieved of the necessity of maintaining
a normal business wariness, bargaining for his raw materials, and
resisting wage advances, the best interests of the Government might not
be served. There is no question that the elementary form of cost-plus
war contract in the early months of the war added considerable impetus
to the procession of higher costs of living, higher wages, and higher
costs again in the vicious circle. It was to retard this tendency, to
add an inducement to the producer to control and keep down his costs,
that the Government evolved the many modifications and refinements of
the cost-plus contract.
At several points in these narratives we have called attention to the
train of evils which followed the attempt of the War Department in
1917 to conduct its enterprise in the production of munitions with
an organization feudal in character and, one might almost say, in
antiquity. Five virtually independent bureaus--the Ordnance Department,
the Quartermaster Department, the Corps of Engineers, the Signal
Corps, and the Medical Department--and, later, after the creation of
the Construction Division, the Air Service, and the Chemical Warfare
Service, eight, set forth to procure their own war supplies as
competitors, each determined to attain its own ends at the expense,
if necessary, of the others. This plan of operation soon drew up near
the edge of disaster, as factories and the more accessible industrial
districts were overloaded with war contracts by the undirected
distribution of the Government’s business, and transportation both on
rail and ocean was nearly throttled by the congestions of freight at
various seaboard and inland terminals.
Here again, in considering the war contracts, we stumble once more
across the trail of this faulty organization. The war contracts
were practically as diverse in their provisions and types as the
Government’s contracting agencies were numerous; and here it should be
noted that some of the main procurement bureaus were in turn subdivided
into smaller purchasing agencies, each of which drew its war contracts
according to its own lights. About all the early war contracts had in
common were the legal provisions protecting the Government against
fraud and graft. There was no such thing as a standard contract, and no
uniformity anywhere. The Government was being obligated in contracts
to the tune of billions by contracting officers almost out of touch
with the responsible heads of the administration.
The Government was soon forced to take cognizance of this state of
affairs. In the spring of 1917 the Secretary of Commerce convened
the so-called Interdepartmental Conference to consider the war
contracts--the first attempt to bring harmony into the confused
business situation. To the conference came the representatives of
the various departments, boards, and administrations interested in
contracts, and to the sessions of the conference also the opponents of
the cost-plus contract brought their objections to it. There were those
who held it almost solely responsible for the great increase in costs
of all sorts during 1917.
It was soon evident to the conferees, however, that the cost-plus
contract had come to stay in the war business, regardless of its
obvious dangers and disadvantages. If an evil, it was a necessary one.
True, the Government could still go into fixed-price contracts for the
procurement of many important war supplies. These were such supplies as
food, clothing, and tools--commodities essentially like those produced
and consumed in time of peace. The producers of these commodities were
not perplexed by costs; their facilities and processes were ready to
begin production; and therefore the War Department could, and did
until the end of hostilities (except when shortages made it necessary
to deal with single responsible manufacturers in order to gain early
deliveries), procure such supplies on fixed-price contracts let after
competitive bidding. But such supplies, although they bulked large
in the cash balance, contributed little to the solution of the main
munitions problem. It was in the production of artillery, of airplanes
and airplane engines, of ammunition, of explosives, even of buildings
in which to house the war department enterprises, that the cost-plus
contract had become a necessity.
There was no way of telling in advance what would be the costs of
producing these more important supplies. Many of them were of types and
designs entirely new to American manufacturing experience. It was hard
enough for the government agents to induce manufacturers to undertake
these contracts even on a cost-plus basis. Had the War Department
attempted to advertise the specifications of such a mechanism as the
French hydropneumatic recuperator, it would never have received a bid.
The only possible terms on which any sane manufacturer would take such
a contract would be the payment of his costs, plus a profit.
Many of the contracts for the more difficult sorts of supplies were
bound to continue over an extended period before all the deliveries
could be made. It was often impossible for such contractors to make
commitments in advance for all their raw materials. Therefore they
faced a rising market and prices which they could not predetermine.
They also faced almost certain increases in the wages paid to their
employees; yet here again they could not anticipate what these
increases would be. The costs of a maker of optical instruments for
the Army depended partially upon what he should have to pay for
optical glass, but the glass was to come from a new war industry
which had not yet begun production and therefore could not estimate
what it would charge for glass. With its designs for war implements
the War Department did the best it could, founding its specifications
upon the latest and best information at its command. Yet so rapid
was the evolution of war materials resulting from their intensive
use that sometimes the Department found a design obsolete before its
production was fairly begun. Its designers therefore made changes in
the specifications at the factory, and these changes involved heavy
manufacturing costs. Every contractor knew that his work was to be
subject to such changes in the specifications; yet no one could
foretell whether changes would be made or what they would cost.
These purely manufacturing considerations were enough in themselves
to explain the prevalence of the cost-plus contracts. Another element
was the time required to prepare specifications and advertise for
bids--time not to be spared in war. But there was still another reason
to account for the cost-plus contract, a reason in war finance,
even more cogent. The successful prosecution of the war meant that
practically the entire industrial equipment of the United States would
have to be devoted to the production of war supplies. Before the war
only large concerns with great financial resources were able to put
through great government projects in which the delivery dates were
far removed from the dates of starting the work. A war contract often
involved a tremendous preliminary expenditure of money in factory
expansion and in commitments for raw materials. The Government’s
practice was to pay for supplies only upon their delivery. Under such
conditions the small manufacturer could not work for the Government. In
normal times, perhaps, the possession of a government contract might
have enabled him to finance his operation through the banks in the
usual way, but with every manufacturer needing special financing, the
effect upon the banks was to make them less liberal in their commercial
loans. The banks had their own solvency to look out for first.
The cost-plus contract proved to be one of the solutions of this
problem. Most of the cost-plus contracts provided that the War
Department could pay the manufacturing costs as they accrued, in
installments. Thus, by securing partial advance payments from the
Government, the small producers, and the large, too, were able to
finance their projects and even to take advantage of the cash discounts
in their purchases of raw materials. Naturally, the War Department was
careful to make such arrangements only with contractors of recognized
probity, men who were deserving of confidence, but who often lacked
working capital to enable them to become successful producers of war
supplies.[6]
The Interdepartmental Conference, far from disapproving or attempting
to abolish the cost-plus contract, recognized its necessity, but
registered a preference for forms of it which best protected the
interests of the people and of the Government. The elemental cost-plus
contract obligated the Government to pay manufacturing costs, plus
an agreed-upon percentage of the costs as profit. Costs included not
only the charges for labor and materials, but also certain overhead
and depreciation charges. This contract form was vicious in principle,
and the Conference did not approve it. Meanwhile various contracting
officers of the Government had been improving the cost-plus contract
with provisions which either removed the tendency for the contractor
to increase his costs or added inducements to him to keep his costs
down. One of these improvements was a cost-plus form providing for a
fixed profit to the contractor, regardless of what his costs might be.
This form removed the incentive to increase costs. A still further
refinement made it of material advantage to a contractor to keep down
his costs and penalized the man who was careless about costs. In this
form the Government agreed to pay all costs and a fixed profit, but the
contract also fixed in advance an estimated unit price for the product,
this price being known as “bogey,” a term borrowed from the ancient
and honorable game of golf. If the contractor succeeded in holding his
costs, plus his fixed profit, under the unit bogey price, he was paid
a share of the saving. If, however, his costs and profits ran above
bogey, then he was penalized a percentage of the excess, the penalty
being subtracted from his fixed profit when the War Department came
to pay for the supplies. This form not only put a premium upon plant
efficiency, but it stimulated the speed of production; for the briefer
the factory processes, the smaller the costs, as a rule, and the sooner
the contractor would get his money. The Interdepartmental Conference
approved both these forms.
This was not yet the desideratum of standardization in contracts, but
it was a step in that direction and perhaps as much as could be done
in an organization as ill-articulated as that of the War Department
then was. The Interdepartmental Conference possessed only advisory
powers, but it was able to establish a policy for the Government in
its contracting function. By pointing to the more desirable forms of
contracts, its report was at least a moral force in securing greater
uniformity in war contracts. It must be remembered, too, that most of
the contracting officers were men of considerable business experience
and ability. Many of the leading business men of the country were
serving the United States either in uniform or as officers of such
agencies as the Council of National Defense and the War Industries
Board, and the procurement bureaus had the benefit of their study and
advice in the making of contracts.
Under such conditions a great volume of war department business was
placed in the latter part of 1917 and during the early months of 1918.
Then the conditions of war industry finally forced a reorganization of
the War Department, bringing all of its supply activities (with one or
two important exceptions) under the single direction of the Division
of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic, of the General Staff. The Division
of P., S., and T., as it was called, was created early in 1918. One
of the first acts of its director was to appoint a committee to study
the various forms of war department contracts in use and to recommend
standard forms which should keep errors at a minimum and make the War
Department certain at all times as to its rights under its contracts.
Simultaneously the new Division was assuming a centralized control of
war department contracts. Early in June the Secretary of War appointed
a Surveyor of Contracts, who in turn appointed a board of contract
review within each procurement bureau. A bureau board was to pass
upon all proposed contracts drawn by contracting officers, except the
few contracts which involved the Government for trivial amounts of
money. This system, with the Surveyor of Contracts dictating policies
and passing them on down through the bureau boards, was effective
control of the contracting function under a single direction; but in
late July the Secretary of War still further strengthened the scheme
by appointing the Superior Board of Contract Review. The Director of
Purchases and Supplies and the Surveyor of Contracts were the general
members of this Board, and each procurement bureau sent to it a
member, who was either the chief procurement officer of the bureau or
a member of the bureau’s board of contract review. This Superior Board
of Contract Review became the great policy-forming agency of the War
Department in respect of its contracting activities.
Note, however, that not yet had there been any standardization of
contracts. In early August the committee appointed by the Director of
Purchase, Storage, and Traffic to study war contracts and recommend
standards, made its report. The Superior Board of Contract Review
received this report, and early in September promulgated, on the basis
of the report, a series of twenty-four standard contract provisions,
nineteen of them to be included in all war department fixed-price and
cost-plus contracts, and five particular provisions pertaining either
to cost-plus or fixed-price contracts, but not to both. Most of the
standard provisions, except perhaps in their phraseology, were not new,
but had been used in substance variously by the contracting officers.
The importance of standardization was that it required the use of all
of them in the war contracts and also dictated the phraseology. One or
two of the standard clauses, particularly those which anticipated the
end of the war and the termination of the war industry, were new and
most important.
The first six provisions dealt with the Government’s obligations to
furnish raw materials and component parts to the manufacturer, with the
packing and marking of supplies, with the changing of specifications
and the Government’s assumption of increased costs or savings wrought
thereby, with inspection, with the storage of finished products at
plants, and with extensions of the time of the contract under certain
conditions.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
SENDING OUT THE _STARS AND STRIPES_]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
GRADUATE A. E. F. STUDENTS AT EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY]
The seventh provision anticipated the end of the war by providing
for the cancellation of contracts under certain circumstances, one of
which was if the public interest required it. This was a new thing in
war contracts. The provision set forth the reimbursements which the
contractor should receive in the event of cancellation.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Howard E. Coffin_
REVIEW OF “PERSHING’S OWN REGIMENT” AT COBLENZ]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
GAMES IN LE MANS EMBARKATION AREA]
The eighth forbade contractors receiving advance payments from
the Government to mortgage or otherwise pledge articles partially
completed. Thus, if the contract were canceled, the Government could
take over the unfinished work without involving itself in a mesh of
legal complications. The next provision dealt with protection of war
plants. The next was the statutory one forbidding the transfer of
contracts.
The eleventh provision dealt with subcontractors, normally not of any
interest to the Government, but in war of vital interest, since the
failure of a subcontractor might greatly delay an entire project, and
since also a cost-plus contract offered an opportunity to a prime
contractor to conspire with a subcontractor to increase costs. The
provision gave the Government full control over the subcontracting and
extended to the subcontractors the Government’s rights of cancellation.
The twelfth was the statutory one forbidding any member of Congress
from sharing in the benefits of a contract, except that a congressman
was permitted to own stock in a corporation accepting war contracts.
The next provision wiped out the horde of fly-by-night commission
brokers who had flocked to Washington to grow rich on commissions
paid by gullible producers who accepted the theory that it took pull
and influence to secure a war contract. Since these commissions went
into the manufacturer’s costs and therefore were paid eventually by
the Government, the Attorney General had issued a ruling forbidding
the government departments to pay manufacturing costs that included
brokers’ commissions. Established selling agencies, however, were
exempted from this rule. The thirteenth standard contract provision
wrote this prohibition into the contracts themselves.
The next provision dealt with indemnifications for the invasion of
patent rights. The fifteenth provided for the settlement of disputes
and claims arising out of questions of performance or nonperformance
under contracts. Later the Board of Contract Adjustment was organized
to fulfill this function. The next three provisions dealt with hours
of labor, the settlement of wage disputes, and the conditions of labor
at war plants. Then came a provision requiring the producer to make
periodic reports of the progress of his work, one defining what costs
would be allowed in a cost-plus contract, one allowing the contractor
to appeal to the Board of Contract Adjustment in the event that a
contracting officer of the Department disallowed costs in excess of
$5,000, one providing for uniformity in contractors’ cost accounting,
one forbidding the payment of wages above current local rates, and a
final provision vesting in the United States the title to all materials
in course of manufacture under a cost-plus contract.
Such were the standard contract provisions, protective and fair to the
Government and the producers alike. They were not adopted until the end
of the summer of 1918, and therefore no important amount of government
business was placed on their identical terms. As stated, however,
most of their requirements in substance had been written into the war
department contracts previously drawn.
The cost-plus contract under which the immense building
construction program of the War Department was carried through
was of a peculiar form, not used elsewhere. It was known as the
cost-plus-with-sliding-scale-and-fixed-maximum-fee contract. The
distinguishing feature of it was that each contractor was paid a
percentage of the cost as profit up to the extent of a fixed maximum
profit, and he could not be paid more than this profit whatever the
cost of the job. The profit percentage diminished on a sliding scale
as the cost mounted. In its latest form this contract paid a profit of
7 per cent to contractors on jobs costing less than $100,000, and the
profit declined gradually in percentage until it reached the low mark
of 2½ per cent paid as profit for work costing more than $9,650,000. No
building contractor, however, could be paid more than $250,000 profit
on a job, whatever its cost; and out of his “profit” he still had to
pay his overhead operating expenses.
In its building program the War Department became one of the largest
employers of labor in the country, and its building contract was
roundly attacked as a chief element in the swift rise in wages. To meet
this attack the Department convened a board of construction engineers
and other experts to study the contract. Instead of condemning the
form of contract, the report of this board endorsed it in unqualified
terms and declared that, if anything, the contract tended to check
extravagances in the work.
While the tendency was all toward the cost-plus-fixed-profit form of
contract, when it came to the production of materials entirely new
and strange to our industry the War Department could not escape the
cost-plus-percentage form. The Government’s powder-bag-loading plants
were operating on the basis of the payment of operating costs, plus 14
per cent. Several of the shell-loading plants worked under contracts
providing for the payment of costs, plus 10 per cent. Silk cartridge
cloth was manufactured at cost, plus 10 per cent as profit. This
profit, as the skill of the cloth weavers increased, was gradually
stepped down to 3 per cent. The Modified Enfield rifles were made at
cost, plus 10 per cent. When the War Department commandeered plants, it
engaged operating companies to run them on a basis of costs paid, plus
a fixed monthly remuneration. Certain patriotic contractors built large
munitions plants for the Government at cost, plus the statutory $1 as
profit.
Then there was the combination contract, adopted for work new to our
industrial experience--a cost-plus form graduating into a fixed-profit
form as the actual work developed what the costs would be. The Browning
machine guns were produced under contracts of this sort.
Contracts for the production of aircraft were not brought under the
centralized administration of war department contracts. The aircraft
contracts provided for the payment of costs by the Government, plus
fixed profits, with bonuses for the producers if they kept under the
estimated costs.
CHAPTER IX
THE SETTLEMENT OF THE WAR CONTRACTS
In the preceding chapter we have been discussing chiefly the written,
formal contract, the tangible, visible document, duly signed and
witnessed, which could be submitted to any court as prima-facie
evidence of the obligations of both the producer and the Government.
If, however, the impression has been given that all the war business
was conducted under the authority of such instruments, let it now be
dispelled; because thousands of manufacturers did war work for the
Government, and the Government itself became involved for hundreds of
millions of dollars, under another set of arrangements, which became
known, after the armistice, as the informal, or “Bevo,” contracts.
These agreements, while embodying the same terms as those of the formal
contracts, were drawn with no such attention to the niceties of federal
procedure, without which the law says that a government contract is not
enforcible. The informal contracts were a product of the hurry and rush
to get things done. There were several sorts of them, some being formal
in type but defective in detail, others existing in written records,
such as correspondence, but not in formal contracts, and still others
being merely oral agreements between the producers and the agents of
the Government as to what work had to be done.
The law, in theory, assumes that the Secretary of War himself makes and
signs contracts for the production of army supplies. He is permitted
by law, however, to delegate his contracting function to accredited
deputies, who are called contracting officers. In normal times these
contracting officers are able to make all the necessary contracts; but
during the war, with all industry aligning itself in the munitions
organization, it became physically impossible for the regular
contracting officers to handle all the business, and they in turn
appointed deputies or proxies, and conferred on them (quite illegally,
as it afterwards appeared) the right to sign contracts. Then, in the
urgency of the occasion, the procurement officers, who were frequently
business men commissioned in the military service, adopted the common
business expedient of allowing correspondence to stand as evidence of
contractual engagements, expecting to follow up this correspondence
with formal contracts when the ponderous executive machinery of the
Department could get around to it. Sometimes the producer did not even
have the protection of correspondence, but, after coming to an oral
understanding with the contracting officer as to what was to be done
and on what terms, hurried back to his factory to spend, it might
be, hundreds of thousands of dollars in preparation for some large
manufacturing effort, without a scrap of writing to secure him in these
investments. Finally, there was an extensive class of contracts which
lacked correct form. New officers, unfamiliar with the restrictions
which hedge about the governmental administrative acts, restrictions
which the public calls red tape, took the short cut of making out
direct purchase orders, which stipulated quality, quantity, price,
method of payment, time of delivery, and so on; and the producers
accepted such orders in good faith as binding agreements.
All went well with this informal procedure until the armistice brought
the necessity of terminating the war business. The question was, How
might the oral and other informal contracts be settled? And then the
Comptroller of the Treasury rendered the absolutely stunning decision
that all these informal arrangements, including the formal contracts
which had been signed by proxies of the constituted contracting
officers, were illegal and without standing before the Treasury, and
that not a penny of government money could be paid out in settlement of
the obligations of the Government under the terms of these agreements,
except that the Government could pay for goods actually delivered.
At that time the outstanding contracts and agreements of all sorts
involved the Government in the sum of approximately $7,500,000,000. The
informal contracts, thus declared void, accounted for $1,500,000,000
of this sum. The Government, if it chose, could refuse to reimburse
a dollar of hundreds of millions expended freely by patriotic
manufacturers, careless of their own interests in their eagerness to
give their utmost service to the prosecution of the war.
Of course, repudiation of these agreements was unthinkable, if only
for the reason that such action would have brought on an unprecedented
business panic and sent many concerns crashing down into bankruptcy.
Yet the only remedy was legislation to permit the Government to settle
up its obligations under these contracts just as if they had been
properly drawn in the first place. Such legislation, known as the Dent
Act, was eventually passed by Congress, the law being approved by
the President on March 2, 1919. In the interim between the armistice
and that date, the holders of informal and irregular contracts were
subjected to an unavoidable injustice, the nature of which will be
plain when we have somewhat examined the War Department’s method of
terminating its war industry.
The modern contract is the foundation stone of industry and commerce.
If the integrity of that foundation be impaired, we come into a
condition of anarchy of which Anglo-Saxon civilization knows nothing.
The man who breaches a contract can be held in court to indemnify
the other party to it, and the Government itself cannot escape such
liability. On the first day of the armistice there were 30,000
outstanding war department contracts. Three thousand of these,
involving a government expenditure of over $1,500,000,000, either
were so near completion or called for the production of materials
so necessary to the maintenance of the demobilizing Army or for the
future preparedness of the United States that they were allowed to go
through undisturbed. The other 27,000 contracts bore a face value of
$6,000,000,000. Under many of them there had been extensive deliveries
of finished supplies to the Government, these deliveries (including
the deliveries made while the industries were tapering off their
production and adjusting themselves to peace conditions) amounting
to approximately $2,000,000,000 in value. Thus there was left to the
War Department a contractual obligation amounting to $4,000,000,000,
which huge sum would go to pay for a great mass of materials for which
the Government could have no possible use. It was highly desirable to
terminate the unfulfilled portions of these contracts; yet few of the
contracts contained termination clauses. It will be remembered that
the standard termination clause did not appear as a common feature of
the war contracts until the final six weeks of hostilities. Thus the
majority of the 27,000 contractors possessed the plain legal right to
go through with the performance of their contracts, even though the war
had ended, and thereafter to hold the Government to the full payment of
the face value of the contracts. The sum of such determination, had it
been unanimous, would have cost the United States $4,000,000,000 with
nothing to show for it except a great collection of useless munitions
which could be sold to the junk dealers.
Upon the administration of the War Department rested the responsibility
to save for the people as much of this sum as could be saved. Not all
of it could be saved. Millions had been spent by the contractors for
machinery and other equipment, for materials, and to pay manufacturing
costs during the early stages of production. These millions the
Government was bound to reimburse in any event, together with a
reasonable profit upon work already done. The closer the administration
could come to paying these legitimate costs and nothing else, the more
successful would be its conduct of the industrial demobilization. The
question was, what procedure to adopt.
To be sure, the departmental heads might have adopted the policy of
canceling the contracts outright; but such a course would have meant
ruin for many manufacturers, it would have thrown into the courts a
mass of litigation that would have congested them for the next two
generations, and it would have shattered the faith of business in the
Government and rendered difficult all governmental contracting in the
future. Instead of that, the war department heads adopted the shrewd
measure of requesting the producers to suspend work on their contracts.
They made termination a voluntary act on the part of the contractor. It
is obvious that it was fully as much to the interest of the producers
as to that of the Government to liquidate the war business amicably
and, it may be said, inexpensively, since these very men would be the
ones called upon to contribute most heavily in taxes to the payment of
the war debt. Nevertheless, it was greatly to the credit of American
business men that their response to the general request to terminate
war contracts was nearly unanimous. There was scarcely one who stood on
his full legal rights. The business of industrial demobilization was
largely that of negotiating with the individual producers as to the
terms under which they would consent to terminate their contracts. When
the terms were adopted, they were written into the original contracts
as supplemental agreements and thus given legal force. The decision
which resulted in this procedure was one of the great administrative
acts of the War Government. It saved billions of dollars to the
Government and it sent the war producers away fairly well content with
the treatment they had received.
The preliminary steps in industrial demobilization were taken before
the armistice. For one thing, in those final days when it was apparent
that the end was close at hand, the War Department adopted the policy
of terminating the war contracts by agreement. For that purpose, the
war department administration added to the standard contract provisions
already adopted standard forms of supplemental agreements, to the end
that the liquidation of war industry might be carried out uniformly.
On November 9 all production bureaus of the Department were notified
to be ready to enforce the termination clauses of contracts when the
fighting ended. This order, of course, applied only to those contracts
containing termination clauses; but at the same time provision was made
for the suspension of war work when the public interest required it.
This suspension was to be preliminary to the adoption of arrangements
whereby war industry could be gradually stopped down and readjusted
by easy stages. On this date, too, the Department adopted a policy
from which it never afterwards deviated: not to pay to a producer any
profits on prospective production under his contract, but to allow a
profit as high as 10 per cent of the cost on work that had actually
been done but from which no actual production might have resulted. Thus
from the very first the Government showed a spirit of conciliation that
promised well for the producers of war supplies.
On the morning of November 11, after the receipt of the official news
of the armistice, the Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Navy,
and the Director of the United States Shipping Board announced after
a conference that all Sunday work and overtime work on government
contracts would cease at once, and that war industry would be
tapered off by the various procurement agencies in consultation with
the Department of Labor and the War Industries Board. These two
organizations, the one in contact with employers and the other with
labor, were in a position to guard the interests both of labor and of
industry. Meanwhile the procurement bureaus of the War Department,
following the recent instructions, had sent out generally requests to
suspend the manufacture of munitions. These orders were soon modified
to allow production to continue at most of the war plants, but the
brief interim of idleness gave the procurement officers time to survey
the situation and also served as a notice to the manufacturers that
the war was over and that they were to incur no further obligations in
pursuance of their contracts.
Simultaneously with issuing the suspension requests, the procurement
bureaus in Washington began making out what were known as termination
schedules. These were detailed statements of proposed reductions in war
work compiled by individual contracts, by manufacturing projects, by
entire commodities that were being consumed by the Army, and by entire
production programs. These schedules were first sent for approval to
the Director of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic, who also secured the
approval of the War Industries Board and the Department of Labor.
The approved schedules were then sent back to the bureaus for action,
except that the bureaus were instructed to terminate the production
gradually so as not to disturb industry in any particular localities.
The terminations, of course, were made by agreement with the producers,
the agreements embodying the terms under which the manufacturing ceased.
So expeditiously was this work started that the first termination
schedules reached the Director of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic on
November 12, and the schedules poured in upon him every day thereafter.
Within a few days the prepared schedules involved the termination
of a billion dollars’ worth of work. Each schedule was the product
of a comprehensive study of the industries affected, made by the
production bureaus, which were in intimate touch with those industries.
On December 5 the terminations and reductions reached a total of
$2,500,000,000. A large part of the war industry had been reduced or
terminated without serious detriment to the condition of business and
employment. Consequently, it was decided that no such precautions as
were being taken were longer necessary, and a change in the liquidation
system went into effect. Thereafter the stoppage of war industry was
placed entirely in the hands of the district production officers of
the War Department. These men were to consult with the local officers
of the Department of Labor as to the effect of terminations upon
employment, and were also to make frequent regular reports to the
Director of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic. For the rest, they were
free to act according to their own best judgment.
The various supply bureaus were well organized to conduct the
demobilization in this way. Before 1917 the bureaus had administered
the production of supplies directly from their headquarters in
Washington. After the war came, the volume of business grew beyond
the capacity of such a system to handle it efficiently; and the
principal production bureaus thereupon divided the country into
manufacturing districts and placed district organizations, subsidiary
to the bureau headquarters in Washington, in charge of them. The
bureaus in Washington continued to execute contracts, but the work
of superintending manufacture, inspecting products, and paying for
supplies was placed in the hands of the district organizations. The
Ordnance Department, for instance, established twelve manufacturing
districts in the United States and one in Canada. The Director of
Purchase, in charge of the production of quartermaster supplies,
established fourteen such districts, which were called zones. The Air
Service had eight districts and the Chemical Warfare Service four. All
production for the Signal Corps, Engineers, Construction Division, and
Medical Department was administered directly from Washington.
This decentralization of the field administration of war industry
had a marked effect upon its efficiency. The administrative officers
in charge of a manufacturing district were men of high standing in
the business and industry of their respective regions. They knew
the manufacturers in those regions. They were always right at the
spot when difficulties arose in securing raw materials and fuel and
shipping priorities. Even more important, each district organization
had within it a representative of the Finance Service of the Army. The
War Department was empowered to make advance payments on contracts up
to a considerable percentage of the value of work done or supplies
actually delivered. These advances, as we have said before, enabled
the munitions producers to finance their projects. The district
organizations, maintaining finance officers in the field as they did,
enabled the producers to obtain these advances in a minimum of time.
Frequently the chief executive officers of the manufacturing districts
were civilians. Each district board maintained a strong legal
department and also numerous technical assistants, not the least among
which were the cost accountants. Since a great portion of the war
supplies were produced on the cost-plus plan, the war brought the cost
accountant into great prominence, during both the period of production
and the period of liquidation afterwards.
These district organizations, in immediate contact as they were with
the producers, comprised an organization ready built for the delicate
work of terminating war industry. Washington might fix policies and
specify the classes of supplies the production of which was to be
stopped and the sorts which were to be produced after the armistice in
full or curtailed quantities. It was for the district administrations
to say how the terminations and reductions should be carried out.
Consequently, after the armistice the organizations in charge of the
manufacturing districts were changed over into what were variously
known as district claims boards and district boards of review. Whatever
they were called by the bureaus creating them, their duties were
essentially the same--to terminate contracts by mutual consent, to
agree with the producers upon the terms of settlement, to take over
in the name of the War Department such finished products, raw and
semi-finished materials, machinery, buildings, and other equipment as
became government property under the terms of the settlements, and
to dispose of the materials thus taken over, some being selected for
permanent retention among the nation’s war assets, some being turned
over to other branches of the Government which could make use of them,
and others being disposed of by sale. To assist it in this work, each
district board maintained a subsidiary organization known as the
district salvage board, which collected the government property and
disposed of it.
To supervise this field activity, each procurement bureau of the War
Department established at headquarters in Washington a superior board
known as the bureau claims board. Each of these supervisory boards, in
turn, created as an adjunct to itself a bureau salvage board, which
maintained executive control over the district salvage boards. For
several weeks there was no specific executive agency to direct the
work of this organization, except that all the bureau and district
boards were under the general authority of the Director of Purchase,
Storage, and Traffic. He unified and controlled their work through
what were known as supply circulars, a medium of administration which
had come into great importance after the creation of the Division
of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic. Through the supply circulars the
administration of war industry issued its general and class directions
to the production bureaus. The standard contract provisions, for
instance, had been brought to the attention of the contracting officers
by publication in the supply circulars. The series of supply circulars
thus came to be the code of unified army supply.
The Director of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic, however, had many
duties other than those of directing the demobilization, though none
more important. It was realized that the system needed a controlling
head, the sole function of which would be to administer the entire
liquidation of war industry. Therefore, late in January, 1919, the
Secretary of War created the War Department Claims Board, into which
were to focus, through the bureau boards, all the field activities in
industrial demobilization. The Assistant Secretary of War became the
president of this board. Mr. G. H. Dorr, who was also the assistant
Director of Munitions, and Brigadier General (later Major General)
George W. Burr, who had succeeded General G. W. Goethals as Director of
Purchase, Storage, and Traffic, were the first regular members of the
War Department Claims Board. There were also three special members and
a recorder, and as time went on the Board was expanded by the creation
of subcommittees of experts in various legal and industrial subjects.
The process of liquidation, therefore, originated with the district
boards. In settling with a contractor, the district board appraised all
the articles completed under the contract. It examined the expenditures
which the contractor had made and the obligations he had incurred
looking toward the finished production. Under the demobilization policy
adopted, the Government was responsible for both of these costs. It
paid for completed supplies (the price including the contractor’s
profit), for raw materials purchased for the contract but not used,
for semi-finished materials, for the contractor’s obligations to his
subcontractors (including the costs of canceling the subcontracts),
and, finally, for all general operating costs, including the
contractor’s “overhead” expenses, factory and machine depreciation
costs, and the amortization of new facilities built at the Government’s
behest. To the most important production costs (but not including
depreciation or amortization costs or interest on money invested in
materials) the claims boards were authorized to add 10 per cent of the
sum as the contractor’s profit. The Government paid no prospective
profits, but only a fair remuneration for work actually done.
This was the proposition extended to the manufacturer when the
Government proposed to him the voluntary termination of his contract.
Most of the contractors received the terms favorably: they did not
wish to collect money for work not done, even though theirs was the
technically legal right to do so. If any producer balked at the
policy, he always had the remedy of seeking his full pound of flesh
in the Court of Claims. However, the slowness of procedure in the
Court of Claims made this a weak remedy; and even if the Court of
Claims finally granted him his exactions, then he must wait for his
money until Congress passed an act appropriating it from the Treasury.
Only recently Congress passed a bill to reimburse the estate of a
long-deceased individual who was wrongfully deprived of a horse during
the Civil War. Such was the prospect which faced the contractor
unwilling to accept the War Department’s terms of settlement. With this
coercive potentiality in the Government’s position, the Government
itself fixed the terms of settlement, at least in broad outline; but
the terms were, in the main, fair to all concerned.
The district boards proved to be able to liquidate most of the
contracts without dispute. From these boards the settlement agreements
went up for approval first to the bureau claims boards and finally to
the War Department Claims Board, with certain exceptions to be noted
later. If agreements could not be reached by the district boards,
appeals could be taken to the bureau boards and, after them, to the
War Department Claims Board. The last-named body designated one of its
members to sit with each bureau board and to exercise the authority of
the War Department Claims Board in approving all settlements after
action by the bureau board. The approval of the special member, acting
in the name of the Secretary of War, constituted the final step in the
settlement, which then passed to the finance officers for payment.
Thus only a few of the 27,000 suspended contracts reached the War
Department Claims Board for detailed consideration. Nearly all of them
came up to the highest authority as agreed-upon settlements, needing
only the approval of the proper special member of the War Department
Claims Board before being embodied within the original contracts as
supplementary agreements. Occasionally questions of fact arose as
to the fidelity of a contractor’s performance under the terms of
his contract. Such questions were carried by appeal, not to the War
Department Claims Board, but to the Department’s Board of Contract
Adjustment, which, it will be remembered, was, by inference, set up as
arbiter of such questions by one of the standard contract provisions.
The Board of Contract Adjustment had other and more important duties in
connection with the industrial liquidation, as will be shown later.
Now this settlement system was able to render an important service to
American industry during the demobilization. Many of the contractors
had gone to the limit of their resources in procuring buildings,
machinery, materials, and work in the prosecution of their contracts.
As long as production was continuing, the Government could finance the
expansion by making advance payments to the cost-plus contractors and
by advancing money to others through the War Credits Board. But when
the contracts were terminated, the Government could no longer follow
this financing system, and the contractors faced a period of months
or even years before they could conclude their settlements with the
Government. During all that time their invested money would be tied
up. Some of the more deeply involved--and large concerns they were,
too--were perilously near actual bankruptcy as a result.
For the relief of such producers the War Department continued in
demobilization its plan of advance payments, with, of course, a
difference. Before the armistice the Government, in making advance
payments, paid a percentage of the cost of work actually done. After
the armistice no work to speak of was being done; yet in practically
all the settlements there were numerous items of cost admittedly
legitimate and about which there was no dispute. These were such items
as materials in sight, appraised, and invoiced to the War Department,
and such items as the contractor’s obligations to his subcontractors.
The War Department adopted the policy of making payments in advance of
final settlement up to 75 per cent of its admitted obligations. These
payments, amounting in all to more than $143,000,000, enabled the
producers to tide over the period between the termination of work and
the final settlement with the Government. The practice of maintaining
officers of the Finance Service as members of the district claims
boards facilitated the prompt payment of these advances. In the final
settlements, of course, the Government subtracted from the amounts due
from it to the producers all advances made to them.
From this outline it will be seen that the War Department, in striking
a balance with war industry, set up within itself what was essentially
a system of courts, with a regular procedure and process of appeal
and--for such the decisions of the War Department Claims Board came to
be--a body of laws and precedents. The court system, however, had the
advantage of flexibility, simplicity, and rapidity of action, being
hampered by none of the rules and customs that circumscribe the regular
courts. The war department courts, if we may call the claims boards
that, were courts of conciliation. The claimants partook of their
benefits voluntarily. They might, under certain conditions, at any
time appeal to the regular federal courts; but there they faced years
of litigation before they could reach final settlement. This gave the
war department system a great advantage, which the Department utilized
to obtain advantageous terms for itself; yet it must be said that the
entire liquidation was conducted in a spirit of desire to make the
contractors whole for all their expenditures.
We are now in a position to understand the unavoidable injury done
to the holders of the informal contracts during the first months
after the armistice. When the Comptroller of the Treasury ruled
that the informal contracts were invalid, he foreclosed the War
Department from making any advance settlement payments to these victims
of patriotism and haste. Many of them were as heavily obligated
financially as the holders of the valid contracts, and their solvency
was equally precarious. Yet not a dollar of government money could
they receive until the wheels of legislation had ground out authority
for the settlement of their claims. Some of their circumstances were
particularly distressing.
Early in October, 1918, one of the war department bureaus ordered a
certain manufacturer to produce 5,000 frames for army trucks on the
security that “formal contract will follow.” He was awaiting the
arrival of this document to justify him in making commitments for
materials when he received an urgent message from Washington beseeching
him to make early delivery of the frames. He yielded, and without
waiting for the formal contract spent over $500,000 for machinery and
materials. The armistice was signed before his formal contract was
executed, and then, with his production stopped, he was unable to
collect a penny of the money due him. Another man spent $400,000 in the
prosecution of a contract, only to find after the armistice that his
apparently valid contract had been improperly signed and therefore was
classed among the invalid contracts.
The Dent Law gave all such claims a legal footing, but that act
was not in force until March 2, 1919. Meanwhile, however, the War
Department’s liquidation machinery had taken up the settlement of the
informal contracts along with the others. The district boards had
determined for many of them what part of the work had been completed,
what amounts the Government should pay for materials delivered, what
reimbursements the producers should receive for expenditures made in
preparation for production, and in many instances had reached complete
agreements as to final lump-sum settlements. When the Dent Law went
on the statute books, these agreements needed only final approval to
become operative; and therefore the settlement of the informal claims
proceeded with great rapidity after the passage of the enabling act.
The Dent Law conferred upon the Secretary of War power to adjust the
informal contracts on equitable terms, with the proviso (already
adopted as policy in the settlement of the valid contracts) that
no prospective profits should be paid. This power the Secretary
delegated to the War Department Claims Board, with two exceptions.
Invalid contracts made with Canadian producers were to be adjusted
by the Imperial Munitions Board, a branch of the British Ministry
of Munitions, which had acted as the agent of the War Department in
procuring army supplies in Canada. All contracts with other foreign
producers--they were principally French and British producers--were to
be settled by various foreign agencies and representatives of the War
Department.
The informal contracts with American producers were of two sorts--those
of which there was written evidence and those of which there was
no written evidence. The former were known as Class A contracts
and the latter as Class B. The Class A contracts were contracts
apparently formal but improperly executed, or procurement orders, or
correspondence setting forth the contract terms. The Class B contracts
were agreements wholly or in part oral. The Class A contracts presented
no difficulty to the War Department Claims Board, and they were put
through to settlement by the regular procedure. It required the taking
of testimony to establish the terms of Class B contracts, and the War
Department Claims Board, with its subsidiary boards, had its hands too
full with the regular routine of liquidation to add to its business
this new, voluminous work; and therefore it in turn delegated the duty
of establishing the terms of the Class B contracts to the Board of
Contract Adjustment, the creation of which was noted above.
The Board of Contract Adjustment heard witnesses and then rendered
a decision as to the terms of a Class B contract. After that it did
one of two things: it referred the now established contract to the
proper district board for settlement, or else it determined itself
the financial obligation of the Government and issued an award to the
producer. In addition to this work the War Department Board of Contract
Adjustment, as a convenient agency, also settled contracts of all sorts
made by such presidential agencies as the War Industries Board and the
United States Food Administration.
After the Dent Act was in operation, the War Department extended to the
informal contractors also the privilege of receiving partial payments
in advance of final settlement.
Such, in outline, was the system which liquidated the war industry
and struck the balance between the War Department and the munitions
producers. A few details of organization should be noted. The War
Department Claims Board greatly expanded its own organization during
the episode by creating various subsidiary bodies. One of these was
its Standing Committee (composed of members of the Board), which did
most of the actual work for the Board and presented its acts for the
consideration of the entire Board in the form of resolutions. These
resolutions in time became a body of precedents to standardize the
whole procedure. To handle engineering and other technical questions,
the War Department Claims Board created its Technical Section, which,
in turn, established within itself its Plant Valuation Group, made up
of men specially qualified to appraise the contemporary value of plants
erected for the War Department by producers with the understanding that
the Department would pay for these plants, or an agreed-upon portion of
their cost. The Special Auditing Committee of the Board also conducted
a work of great importance. During the war numerous manufacturers held
contracts with two or more production bureaus of the War Department.
After the armistice they filed separate claims for the settlement of
such contracts. There was always danger that in these claims there
would be duplicate items of such costs as overhead expense and plant
deterioration. The Auditing Committee consolidated the claims of
individual producers and thus enabled the War Department Claims Board
to strike out duplicate items of cost. Numerous contractors followed
the old peace-time procedure of filing claims with the auditor of the
War Department. So many claims originated from this source that the
War Department Claims Board established in the office of the Director
of Finance a Classification Board to separate all claims coming to the
auditor and to refer them to the proper bureau boards.
This system had nothing to do with the settlement of claims arising
out of the War Department’s operations in real estate during the war.
There were thousands of claims for damage done to property incidental
to the training of the Army. To settle such claims the Secretary of
War utilized the existing War Department Board of Appraisers, which
had been created to establish the values of commandeered property. The
commanders of military posts investigated the validity of real estate
claims and recommended awards. These, after approval by the Board of
Appraisers and the Secretary of War, were paid by the auditor of the
War Department. Numerous real estate claims arose under informal and
invalid agreements, and the condition of such claimants was usually
particularly helpless. When the War Department started to build its
great trinitrotoluol plant at Racine, Wisconsin, a large number
of persons, home owners and renters, moved off the site without
the formality of written contracts. Many of these individuals sold
their farm animals and household goods. The armistice cut short the
construction of the plant, and then the property owners discovered that
they were without legal standing before the Government. The Dent Law
enabled the Department to settle these and other real estate claims
arising under informal contracts, and the Board of Appraisers made the
settlements.
The Canadian contracts, both formal and informal, were adjusted by
the Imperial Munitions Board, acting in conjunction with two American
officers called assessors, one of whom was a special member of the War
Department Claims Board. Mr. D. C. Jackling, the director of United
States Government Explosives Plants, adjusted all the outstanding
contracts and orders in connection with the construction of the Nitro
(West Virginia) Powder Plant. More than 3,200 firms and individuals
had received orders for materials for the plant, and a fire at the
plant immediately after the armistice destroyed the records of all open
orders. The terms of these orders were reëstablished by correspondence
with the contractors. A special settlement board within the Ordnance
Department adjusted the terminated contracts for the construction
of nitrogen fixation plants authorized as a war measure. The Spruce
Production Corporation of the Air Service terminated and settled its
own contracts with the spruce lumber interests in the Northwest.
On July 1, 1920, the War Department Claims Board, which had conducted
the liquidation of the Department’s war business (with the small
exceptions noted above) ended its work and disbanded, turning over to
the regular military organization of the War Department the residue
and remnant of work still left. Of the 27,000 war contracts, 26,000
had been terminated and settled by the Department. There were still
995 claims pending, or less than 4 per cent of the original number;
but more than half the auditing and other preliminary work on these
995 claims was done. The liquidation was therefore more than 98 per
cent complete, and this in little more than a year and a half after
the Government halted the mightiest industrial undertaking upon which
any people ever embarked. The promptness and wisdom shown in that
settlement had allowed war industry to taper off and stop without shock
to the economic structure of the country, had stabilized business,
relieved the banks of the country of a vast load of debt which they
were carrying for the war producers, and thus had brought the nation
safely and easily through what might otherwise have been the sharpest
business crisis it had ever known. Concretely, in dollars and cents,
this work was of great material benefit to the Government and people of
the United States. The rate of liquidation of the unfinished portions
of the war contracts averaged fourteen cents to the dollar--that
is, the payment of fourteen cents by the Government satisfied and
wiped out a contractual obligation of one dollar. At this ratio, the
settlements effected by the War Department Claims Board saved the
people of this country from having to pay out well over $3,300,000,000.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Harris & Ewing_
THE WAR DEPARTMENT CLAIMS BOARD]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
CONVALESCENT READING _STARS AND STRIPES_]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
HOSPITAL TRAIN IN UNITED STATES]
CHAPTER X
ORDNANCE DEMOBILIZATION
When the average man speaks of munitions, he means ordnance and, even
more specifically, guns and ammunition. In this he is nearly half
right. Technically, the word “munitions” includes army supplies of
all sorts, even to candy and cigarettes, and in this sense the word
is used in these volumes; but of the total war business transacted
for the Army, the procurement of ordnance supplies constituted 42 per
cent. Ordnance was by far the largest class of munitions. Four thousand
American manufacturing plants worked on ordnance contracts during the
war. Nearly 3,000,000 men labored in these mills.
The mere size of the war ordnance industry would have made the problem
of its demobilization a great one, but it was also complicated with
peculiar difficulties. The production of most ordnance materials
differed radically from that of any articles known in normal American
industry. The Quartermaster Department procured for the Army food,
clothing, shoes, hand tools, and many other supplies which, though
they were frequently of special design, nevertheless were not much
unlike the sorts of commodities with which the contractors were already
familiar. The Engineer Corps used many materials commonly employed in
the peaceful pursuits. Outside of ordnance, the manufacture of aircraft
alone took our industries into virgin fields of endeavor.
Therefore, those factories which were making for the Army products
essentially similar to products consumed by the civilian population,
were ready after the armistice to resume their places in normal
commerce with slight internal adjustment. But the ordnance
factories--they were a different story. In ordnance production the
war had witnessed some factory conversions of the most violent sort.
Manufacturers of printing presses built gun carriages of new and
difficult design; makers of sewing machines and automobiles undertook
the difficult task of producing hydropneumatic recuperators for
absorbing the recoil of field guns; producers of typewriters and water
meters manufactured time fuses for shell; women’s cloak factories sewed
silk powder bags; a phonograph maker produced aërial bomb sights; and
one producer turned from the modern business of making corsets and took
up the ancient occupation of tentmaker. For nearly all these factories
the ordnance contracts virtually implied the physical reëquipment of
their plants for quite different manufacturing processes. For them,
too, demobilization meant a not less severe dislocation of equipment
and processes in changing back again to their former work.
It was the problem of the Ordnance Department after the armistice to
manage the liquidation of its great war business--to halt the work, to
dispose of raw materials and materials left half completed when the
wheels stopped, to do something with the special factories and even
the complete towns built by the Government or for the Government in
the prosecution of the war enterprise, to recoup the millions advanced
to finance the ordnance producers, and finally to settle with cash
the obligations of the Government to the producers incurred when the
contracts were terminated.
Although in size and intricacy this problem was appalling, there was no
hesitation in setting about solving it, no period when the enterprise
hung in neutral, going neither forward nor backward. Ordnance work
was reaching new peaks of production when the Ordnance Department in
Washington took the first steps toward its dismemberment. In late
October, 1918, when the Argonne-Meuse offensive was striking home and
it was becoming evident that the curtain might at any time fall in
the theatre of war, the chief ordnance officers held a secret meeting
one Sunday afternoon in Washington and for the first time considered
the possible demobilization. At this meeting the Chief of Ordnance
appointed a commission to make a rapid study of the organization of the
Ordnance Department to determine whether that organization was fitted
to turn without change to the stoppage of work and the restoration of
the industry to its former basis. This same commission later became
the Ordnance Claims Board, the agency which supervised the entire
demobilization of ordnance industry. It was, of course, like all the
other bureau claims boards, subsidiary to the War Department Claims
Board. The Ordnance Claims Board was formally created by order on
November 2, and thus had been in existence for nine days when the
armistice was signed. Its chief was Brigadier General W. S. Peirce.
Its members were Colonel R. P. Lamont, who was president of the
American Steel Foundries Corporation before and after his military
service in the World War; Colonel G. H. Stewart, an ordnance officer
of the Regular Army; Lieutenant Colonel M. F. Briggs, counselor at
law, New York; Lieutenant Colonel F. R. Ayer, recorder of the Eastern
Manufacturing Company, of Bangor, Maine; and Mr. Waldo H. Marshall,
president of the American Locomotive Company, New York.
This board found an existing organization--the field administrations
of the thirteen ordnance manufacturing districts--admirably adapted to
the work of closing up the war business. The district organizations had
been created to give the Ordnance Department a mechanism by which it
could keep in immediate contact with the process of manufacture without
congesting the headquarters in Washington to the point where competent
management became impossible. They had been likened roughly to the fire
exits of a theatre, distributed to prevent crowding at the front doors.
In the district organizations were employed 33,000 civilians, uniformed
officers, and enlisted men, and through this great force the office in
Washington kept in as intimate touch with the work, the trials, and
the accomplishments of its producers as if it had been employing the
services of but a single factory. The ordnance field men knew the war
factories as they knew their own offices. They were acquainted with the
contractors, with the subcontractors, with the shop superintendents and
foremen, and often with the workmen themselves. Obviously they were
qualified to judge at what rate production could be stopped without
injury to the industry or its workmen and to determine the settlement
adjustments that would be fair to both sides.
It is worth while pausing a moment to examine the thirteen ordnance
districts and to note their headquarters cities, their extent, the
characteristic sorts of ordnance supplies produced in each, and the
chief production officer of each.
_Toronto._ Embraced the whole of Canada. Produced principally shell
machined and ready for loading, particularly 75-millimeter shell. As
noted in the preceding chapter, all industrial demobilization in Canada
was carried out by the Imperial Munitions Board, two of the members of
which were special representatives of the War Department Claims Board,
sent to Canada after the armistice for this purpose.
_Bridgeport._ Included Connecticut and four Massachusetts counties.
Primarily the small-arms district, producing all the pistols and
revolvers, all the bayonets, all the automatic rifles, more than a
million of the service rifles, most of the heavy machine guns, and
almost all the small-arms ammunition delivered under war contracts. Mr.
Waldo C. Bryant of Bridgeport was chief of the district.
_Boston._ Included the rest of New England. The chief producer of
soldiers’ belts, haversacks, mess kits, and other personal ordnance
equipment; produced small-arms ammunition heavily, and produced also
boosters and adapters (for shell) and carriages for 155-millimeter
howitzers. Mr. Levi H. Greenwood, chief of district.
_New York._ Included New York City, Long Island, and nine other
New York and twelve New Jersey counties. The prime producer of
trench-warfare ordnance. Produced much toluol and was a finisher of
shell, fuses, and cartridge cases. Loaded more than one-third of all
artillery ammunition shipped abroad. Chief, Mr. George J. Roberts,
vice-president of the Public Service Corporation of New Jersey.
_Philadelphia._ Included eastern Pennsylvania, part of New Jersey, and
all of Delaware. The chief service-rifle producer and a chief producer
of high explosives. Immense shell-loading activities. Chief, Mr. John
C. Jones, president of the Harrison Safety Boiler Works.
_Baltimore._ Included all of Maryland but two western counties, and
all of the District of Columbia and the states of Virginia and North
and South Carolina. The leading shrapnel-loading district and a great
shell-loading area. Contained the largest of the ammonium nitrate
plants. Produced all the 37-millimeter guns. Chief, Lieutenant Colonel
A. V. Barnes, formerly president of the American Book Company.
_Rochester._ Embraced all the state of New York not in the New York
City district. Chief production was in Lewis machine guns, Enfield
rifles, 75-millimeter field guns, shrapnel, picric acid, and optical
glass. Chief, Mr. Frank S. Noble, executive officer of the Eastman
Kodak Company.
_Cleveland._ Northern Ohio and three northwestern counties of
Pennsylvania. Produced completed big guns, shell fuses, 75-millimeter
gun carriages, mounts for railway artillery, and 6-ton tanks. Chief,
Mr. Samuel Scovil, former president of the Cleveland Electric
Illuminating Company.
_Detroit._ Included the state of Michigan. Produced gun recoil
recuperators, artillery vehicles, large-caliber shell, and
trench-mortar shell. Chief, Mr. Fred J. Robinson, president of the
Lowery-Robinson Lumber Company.
_Chicago._ Included northern Illinois and the band of states to the
northwest as far as Montana. Produced caterpillar traction for the
tanks and artillery, guns, carriages, recuperators, projectiles,
and grenades; the district was also saturated with contracts for
machinery for the eastern munitions plants. Chief, Mr. E. A. Russell,
vice-president of the Otis Elevator Company.
_Pittsburg._ Included western Pennsylvania except three counties,
two counties of western Maryland, two counties of Ohio, and all of
West Virginia. The prime subcontract district for the production of
raw steel and steel forgings. Herein was located the Neville Island
ordnance plant project. Produced optical glass in quantity. Chief, Mr.
Ralph M. Dravo, of Dravo Brothers, contractors, Pittsburg.
_Cincinnati._ Southern Ohio, Indiana, and the South. Was the chief
nitrogen-fixation district and the chief producer of smokeless powder.
Included Dayton, with 200 factories exclusively engaged in munitions
production. Produced tanks, shell, fuses, optical instruments, and
machine tools for war factories. District chief, Mr. C. L. Harrison, a
Cincinnati capitalist.
_St. Louis._ Included southern Indiana and sixteen western states.
Produced black walnut, toluol, and picric acid. Chief, Mr. Marvin E.
Singleton, former president of the East St. Louis Cotton Oil Company.
After the armistice the manufacturing committees in charge of the
twelve American ordnance districts became, without essential change in
their organization, the ordnance district claims boards. Each board
consisted of seven members--business men and at least one lawyer--with
such technical assistants as they needed. The first executive act in
demobilization for these boards to make was to determine what war
contracts were to be terminated immediately, what ones were to be
tapered off with a minimum expense to the Government and a minimum
disturbance to industry and labor, and what ones were to be carried
through to completion.
It was often advantageous to allow the contractors to proceed
undisturbed. Some of these ordnance supplies, which would be valuable
and essential items of our military equipment for years to come, were
only just reaching the stage of production in the factories, after many
months of costly experiment and preparation. It was obviously unwise
to interrupt these projects with nothing to show for them except heavy
bills of expenses. Then, too, it was sometimes of financial advantage
to the Government to allow a contract to go through to completion. A
contractor in the Chicago district, for example, had nearly completed
the manufacture of several large machines for installation in an
eastern munitions plant. To cancel the contract would have cost the
Government $90,000 in a settlement and left on its hands a quantity
of semi-finished materials having only junk value. The Government
no longer had use for the finished machines; yet it would cost only
$14,000 more to go on and complete them. This was done, and the
Ordnance Department was later able to sell the machines to a private
buyer for more than $100,000, thus recovering practically all the money
it paid to the contractor.
To provide a basis of fact for all such acts of administration in the
demobilization, the district boards first took a rapid but thorough
inventory of the ordnance industrial situation. This they did by means
of questionnaires sent to all the contractors. Each questionnaire, when
returned to the district board, showed the status of the contract at
the time and how the contractor’s business and his employees would be
affected by a termination. The general ordnance policy was to permit
contractors (after the first emergency suspension which, it will be
remembered, had been requested immediately after the armistice was
signed) to continue their work on a diminishing scale for a few weeks,
while they made their arrangements to engage once more in commercial
work. Some of the contracts, including all the late, standardized
ones, provided for the termination of work upon thirty days’ notice.
If, however, the enforcement of this provision would create any
considerable amount of unemployment, the district boards allowed such
contractors to complete an average thirty days’ production, but to
spread out the work over a longer period of time.
There were variations of the general policy when it was applied
to special classes of ordnance industry. For instance, the many
contractors who were machine-finishing the artillery shell were
permitted to keep their plants in full operation until January
31, 1919, when the work had to cease abruptly. All source
industries--industries, that is, producing rough forgings and other raw
and semi-finished materials for ordnance manufacture--were taken from
war work forthwith. Then, too, as noted, in various classes of large
ordnance, or ordnance of exceedingly difficult manufacture, the orders
were greatly reduced and the contractors permitted to go ahead and
complete the residue, no matter how long it might take. Such ordnance
included gun carriages, recuperators, tanks, optical instruments, and
other supplies of the sort. This reduced production continued for more
than a year after the general stoppage of war industry. Some of the
Mark VIII tanks (the Anglo-American design) were delivered to the Army
as late as June 1, 1920.
So expeditiously was the work of termination carried on in the other
classes of manufacture (and these made up the greater part of the
ordnance industry) that by January 1, 1919, nearly all war ordnance
production had either been terminated altogether or was dwindling to
the vanishing point under specific agreements. After February 1 the
only war ordnance factories in operation were the exceptional plants
noted in the preceding paragraph.
Even as the ordnance industry was being stopped, the Government was
coming to an understanding with the ordnance contractors as to the
settlement of their claims. To this end, in most of the manufacturing
districts the board members traveled from city to city, addressing
large meetings of the contractors and explaining to them the general
liquidation policy adopted by the War Department. In its broad
outlines, this policy was as follows: The Government would take off
the contractor’s hands at cost all materials which he had specifically
purchased for his contract, but which he had not used. The Government
would reimburse him for all work done on his contract, for all
materials used, for all money paid out in wages, and for all legitimate
overhead expense, the Government in return taking over all materials in
the various stages of their completion. Further, the Government would
regard as proper costs whatever it cost the contractor to terminate
and settle his subcontracts, and would pay these costs. Finally, in
specific instances the Government would pay money in amortization of
the cost of machinery and tools bought especially for war use, the sum
to be proportioned to the amount of work completed. And whatever else
the contractor was out of pocket legitimately, the Government would
pay. When the various costs were brought together as a lump, to this
sum the Government would add 10 per cent as profit. It would, moreover,
allow 6 per cent interest on money which the contractor had invested
in materials, reckoning from the average time of purchase to the date
of the settlement; but it would not allow 10 per cent profit on this
investment in addition.
These terms received widespread acceptance, although they allowed
no prospective profits, and thereupon the various districts became
scenes of great activity as the ordnance officers worked with the
contractors to expedite the presentation of settlement claims by the
latter. Inspectors and agents employed by the district boards checked
manufacturers’ inventories, and boxed and set aside materials to
be delivered to the Government, while district accountants audited
the costs statements. Each field agent of a district board was made
responsible for a few specific claims. He stood at the contractor’s
elbow and helped him rough out his claim into proper form. A spirit of
amiability prevailed. For many reasons the contractor wished to make
his settlement as quickly as possible, and the district agent was there
to tell him what items in his claim were indisputable, and what ones
were likely to be contested, thereby holding up the final settlement.
When the district agent and the contractor had agreed as to a claim,
they submitted it informally to one of the members of the district
claims board for his opinion. If he thought his board would be unlikely
to allow certain items, the contractor could usually be persuaded to
omit such items. Claims prepared under such conditions presented little
difficulty to the various claims boards, and most of them went through
to settlement without a hitch in the proceedings.
Most contractors were willing to forego their technical rights in order
to save the Government from paying for useless production, but a few
were obdurate. One man, working under a contract with a thirty-day
termination clause, deliberately increased his rate of production
five times in order to collect a maximum amount from the Government.
When the Ordnance Department discovered his plan, it breached the
contract outright and allowed the producer to take his grievance, if he
continued to nurse one, into the courts. A rare instance of this sort,
however, is cited only to show by contrast the prevalent attitude of
industrial coöperation with the Government. Numerous producers omitted
from their claims many items the validity of which could probably have
been sustained in the future negotiations, but which were, however,
subject to close scrutiny and therefore a factor of delay in the
settlements.
The wheels of war industry had not ceased to turn before the Government
began to make advance payments in settlement of the industrial claims.
If the contractors were generous, so was the Government. The first
settlement made illustrated the War Department’s attitude right
through. A New York contractor had submitted a claim for about $15,000.
On January 20, 1919, he informed the New York District Claims Board
that two days later he had to meet a note for $10,000, a debt incurred
in prosecution of his war contract. A member of the New York Claims
Board took this claim in person to Washington and next day secured its
approval by the Ordnance Claims Board, together with an authorization
to advance $10,000 to the contractor pending the final approval and
settlement by the War Department Claims Board. The New York district
finance officer paid over the $10,000 in time to save the note from
going to protest.
As the weeks went on the New York manufacturer’s plight was duplicated
over and over again. The producers of ordnance supplies, after the
termination of their contracts, faced enormous financial obligations
which they would have to meet long before the machinery of liquidation
could act upon their claims. To such producers the system of advance
partial payments afforded great relief. The policy of advance payments
not only saved numerous concerns from financial ruin, but it
stimulated the general commercial reconstruction and resumption of
normal business by releasing large sums of money and putting it again
into circulation. And, it should not be forgotten, the system greatly
aided the Government to secure favorable settlement terms from the
contractors by offering the reward of early payments to those whose war
business was quickly liquidated.
Since the prime contractors’ subcontract settlements were acknowledged
costs which the Government was bound to pay in the prime settlements,
it was vitally important that the Ordnance Department intervene to
obtain for the prime contractors the most favorable terms possible
in the settlement of their subcontracts. Every subcontractor, of
course, had the legal right to insist upon the full performance of his
contract, and he was not to be coerced by the bogey of the Court of
Claims and its long-drawn-out procedure. He could go into the state
courts and enforce his rights within reasonable time. Therefore,
it is indicative of the spirit of war industry that the ordnance
district claims boards found little difficulty in settling with the
subcontractors on favorable terms. The prime contractors had no such
interest in these terms as did the Government, since, whatever the
subcontract settlement costs might be, the Government would have
to pay them. The agents of the district boards readily persuaded
the subcontractors, as a sporting proposition, to surrender their
prospective profits voluntarily and accept the profit of 10 per cent on
work actually done, even as the prime contractors, who had assumed the
chief risk in the first place, had been willing to do. The efforts of
the ordnance field agents in this direction saved the Government many
millions.
The first complete claim received by the Ordnance Claims Board came
from the Detroit district on January 10, 1919. The first claim to go
through to final settlement by the Ordnance Claims Board was passed on
February 20. The district claims boards sent the bulky and valuable
settlement papers to Washington by courier rather than entrust them
to the mails. When the system settled into its routine the Ordnance
Claims Board passed upon the average claim within a week after
its arrival in Washington. On the average the Government paid in
the settlement of ordnance contractors’ claims an amount equal to
about 12 per cent of the face value of the uncompleted portions of
the contracts. The average ordnance contract entailed a government
obligation somewhere between $100,000 and $250,000 in amount, but
many were much larger. The Marlin-Rockwell Corporation of New Haven,
Connecticut, one of the chief producers of machine guns and small
arms, presented a claim for nearly $14,000,000. One of the largest
war contracts was that with the American Car & Foundry Company, of a
face value of over $100,000,000. In contrast, the New York Ordnance
District Claims Board, which settled that contract, settled another (a
subcontract) for $1.50. The claim of the DuPont Powder Company against
the Ordnance Department was for about $3,280,000--this in settlement of
contracts with a value of $50,000,000. The New York Air Brake Company
presented to the Rochester Ordnance Claims Board claims aggregating
$9,000,000. The New York District board settled 206 claims for $1.00
each, the contractors voluntarily refraining from presenting any claims
above the statutory dollar which had to be paid to make the settlement
legal.
Many were the interesting episodes which occurred during the ordnance
liquidation. The St. Louis district was the chief source of black
walnut timber secured during the war. Walnut was used in making
gunstocks and airplane propellers. In hunting for walnut in this
district we discovered that we were gleaning where Germany had reaped
before us. The former solid stands of walnut in this district had been
cleaned out in recent years, much of the timber having been shipped to
Germany _via_ the Gulf ports. Yet our gleaning was successful. Walnut
trees, growing as individuals or in small groups, were still to be
found along the country lanes, in farm lots, at the edges of orchards,
and shading the grounds of the farmsteads. Nowhere were more than
thirty trees in a group discovered. Consequently an adequate supply of
walnut for the munitions plants depended upon a foot-by-foot search
of the entire American countryside in the walnut regions. In this
work the Government was assisted by tens of thousands of volunteers
aroused to the need by the widespread publicity. The Boy Scouts turned
their hikes into walnut-hunting expeditions. The country doctor, the
circuit-riding clergyman, the bee hunter, and the muskrat trapper all
made it their business to locate and report stands of walnut timber.
As a result unexpectedly ample quantities of the wood were secured
from regions supposedly denuded of it. On the day of the armistice the
timber dealers found themselves stocked up with enough black walnut to
meet all commercial demands for five years ahead.
One of the Ordnance Department’s timber cruisers located a grove of
black walnut trees shading the farm home of a woman living in Missouri.
She hated to sacrifice her trees, but listened to the appeal of
patriotism and accepted an offer of $1,100 for them. Then, when the
agent had left with her signed agreement in his pocket, she repented
of her bargain and grieved so much at her forthcoming loss that the
village minister suggested a remedy. He told her that the anticipated
proceeds of the sale would pay for an automobile in which she could
ride about the country and, amid the pleasant rural scenes, forget
about the devastation soon to be staged in her own front yard. She
acted on this suggestion, bought a car for $1,080, and in payment gave
a note which she agreed to lift when the Government took the trees
and paid her the money. The armistice intervened before the timber
cutters appeared, and the Ordnance Department canceled the contract
with the timber dealer. That left the woman with a half-used car, a
note maturing in the bank to meet which she had no funds, and a clump
of walnut trees for which the Government had no use. The St. Louis
District Claims Board could not relieve her distress, but a member
of the board brought the case to the attention of a meeting of war
contractors; and it was arranged for the Missouri lady to keep both her
automobile and her walnut trees.
The New York District Claims Board settled for $275,000 the claim of
the Wah Chang Trading Corporation, of China, which supplied a large
amount of antimony used in making shrapnel bullets. In the New York
district also there had been a contract with the Japan Paper Company
to supply paper parachutes for carrying floating signal lights. The
contract was not a large one; yet in its settlement it was disclosed
that there were about 10,000 subcontractors--individual Japanese
families working in their own homes in Japan. Under the circumstances
the board waived the usual rule that with every prime contract claim
must be filed statements of settlement certified by every subcontractor.
Each of the district claims boards maintained in its quarters a
progress chart which showed graphically each day the amount of
industrial liquidation accomplished and the amount remaining to
be done. In eleven of the districts this chart took the form of a
thermometer, the rising mercury showing the amount of completed work.
In the twelfth--at Cleveland--the chart was a representation of a
bottle containing a celebrated beverage that does duty in these dry
days for beer, and the task of the board was to empty this container.
On the first anniversary of the armistice the Ordnance Department’s
system of industrial demobilization had cleared up a large part of
the war business. The district boards had passed upon 94 per cent
of all contractors’ claims presented, and the Ordnance Claims Board
in Washington had disposed of 73 per cent of the ordnance claims.
The settlements at this time had cost the United States nearly
$131,000,000, but that sum had settled uncompleted portions of
contracts to the value of approximately $1,000,000,000; and, in finding
the net cost of the liquidation to the United States, from the sum
paid out in these settlements there was still to be subtracted the
receipts from the sale of materials taken over in the settlements.
By the end of 1919 the district boards had passed 97 per cent of all
claims and the Ordnance Claims Board 81 per cent. By that time the
total amount approved for payment in adjusting the claims was more than
$166,000,000.
In the latter part of 1919, however, a different system of settlement
went into effect. By that time about three-fourths of the ordnance
claims had been settled, in a spirit essentially of bargain and
compromise, the Government yielding points and the contractors yielding
them in order to reach swift agreements. Those who did the bargaining
for the Government were for the most part the original members of the
district organizations, the men who had been in touch with the industry
from the start. As the unfinished business diminished in quantity,
however, the members of the district claims boards one by one left the
government service and returned to their own affairs, until by the
autumn of 1919 the boards were made up largely of new members, most of
them uniformed army officers who bore no such intimate relationship to
the contractors. Within the Government, too, there was a growing spirit
of criticism of the bargaining method of settling the contracts, even
though the bargains had been highly advantageous to the Government. It
was felt that more conventional methods should be employed. The result
was a marked slowing down in the rate of industrial demobilization in
the Ordnance Department.
It seems fitting here to say a word for the men who manufactured our
ordnance during the war. The popular picture of a war contractor is
that of a man swollen with new wealth and spending his money in riotous
extravagances. This indictment, at any rate, cannot hold against the
ordnance maker. Instead of profiting, the average ordnance contractor
was glad enough to get out of the enterprise with a whole financial
skin. Many were not so fortunate. An impartial investigation made by
the Ordnance Department over its entire war manufacturing field showed
that not more than one contractor in three or four, when the business
was closed up, had anything to show for his war experience except the
self-satisfying sense of having served his country.
In the light of the fact that so few of them profited at all and so
many incurred actual loss, it is remarkable that they were not more
grasping in the demobilization settlements; but the eternal fact
remains that they were inclined to ask for less, rather than more,
than was coming to them under their legal rights. This attitude was
consistent with their whole attitude during the war. In the history
of American industry there is no chapter more creditable to it than
that of the attitude and accomplishments of the producers of ordnance
during the World War. These men entered the undertaking with a zeal
unsurpassed in any other part of the war organization. Working under an
urgency such as American industry had never before experienced, they
accepted the handicaps that had been placed upon the nation by its
own peace-loving traditions and worked together as a unit to overcome
the handicaps. They transformed their manufacturing plants with never
a thought for the business they would one day have to resume. They
undertook to produce, in quantities never before even projected,
intricate materials of warfare the very names of which were unfamiliar
to them. Despite the mounting costs of materials and labor, they
managed to hammer down the prices of rifles, machine guns, explosives,
shrapnel, and other important commodities, delivering to the Government
not only a superior product, but a product costing the Government less
than other nations at war paid for the same things. To accomplish this
result they threw their normal rivalries on the scrap heap, opened up
their trade secrets to each other, and virtually became partners in
the single enterprise of supplying the American troops with the best
munitions which American industry could produce.
As a rule, the profit-making war contractor was one who supplied
commodities essentially like those produced in normal times. But
supplies of this sort were almost unknown in the whole range of
ordnance. The typical thing was to find on the day of the armistice the
ordnance plant which had not yet come into full production under the
original contract. This was because of the difficulties encountered in
producing the more important items of ordnance. The months of the war
had been marked by the heavy expenditure of money in the expansion of
plants and the development of processes, and the armistice cut off the
development before it had reached the profitable stage.
The producers did not attempt to recoup in the business liquidation
that followed. These sentences are not intended to give a clean bill
of health to the whole body of ordnance producers--some few of them
sought to get more than they were morally entitled to get; some few,
like the country horse trader, adopted the age-old procedure of barter
by asking more than they expected to get. But where one man held out
for the last penny of his rights, there could be found half a dozen
others who put in no claims at all for money to which they were justly
entitled. The great steel-producing industry, in particular, showed an
aristocratic contempt of requiring its full due. Many steel producers
pocketed their losses without a word: in fact, the Government settled
a surprising number of ordnance contracts for the statutory one dollar
apiece and thus saved itself millions for which it was legally liable.
When the curious ordnance officers asked some of these contractors why
they did not claim their full rights, they responded that the victory
over Germany was compensation enough for them. As one of them expressed
it, the achievements of the American boys in France had given him his
run for his money.
In the Pittsburg district two steel producers had been engaged on
contracts for essentially the same sort of material and on about the
same scale. One was a small concern which had been kept at its wits’
end most of the time to finance its war enterprise. The other was one
of the largest corporations in the United States, with ample financial
resources. Into the Ordnance Claims Board came two claims terminating
contracts of approximately identical characteristics. One of the claims
was several times larger than the other, and naturally the Washington
authorities questioned the larger claim. They found that the latter
was a just claim in every particular. The discovery was made that the
smaller of the two claims had asked for an amount in settlement much
below what the producer was entitled to receive. The larger claim had
been submitted by the producer whose finances could not stand any
loss; the smaller by the great corporation referred to above. Both were
allowed in full.
Of the 317 large ordnance contracts in the Pittsburg district, the
Government settled 149, involving a total obligation of more than
$23,000,000, for $1.00 each. In this and other districts thousands of
subcontractors forgave the prime contractors their legal obligations
without the transfer of a penny. In the Philadelphia district the
prime contractors cleared up thousands of their subcontracts and said
nothing about them in their liquidation claims. These instances of
generosity were discovered only when the Ordnance Department checked
up to find out why the final settlement costs were so much lower than
the preliminary estimate of those costs, made in the first hurried days
after the armistice.
The record of American ordnance production was not a flawless one--it
was too large to be that--but in view of the general attitude of the
producers, it is submitted that to have participated in that war
industry was a distinguished honor.
CHAPTER XI
ARTILLERY
There was a great deal more to the demobilization of the war ordnance
industry than the mere office operation of settling with the
contractors. It included an immense field activity of utmost practical
interest both to the War Department and to the public. The armistice
found the United States in a state of industrial preparation for war
that would have been unattainable under any other circumstances. The
world situation had forced us to turn American industry into a vast
munitions plant which, at the cessation of hostilities, was just
beginning to get into production with some of the most essential
materials of warfare. That plant had been acquired only at the cost of
heavy mortgage (in the form of government war bonds) placed upon the
future, and hence it would have been folly to close out the business
entirely with nothing to show for the whole effort but debts and the
realization that the existence of the business had had a psychological
effect in winning the war and protecting the United States. The
sensible thing to do was to save out of the dismantling of war industry
a material equipment which should afford national military insurance
for years to come; and that was what the Ordnance Department did.
In building up this equipment the Ordnance Department was confronted
with the three major questions of (1) what quantities of materials to
allow the industry to go on and produce before closing down finally,
(2) what to do with the buildings and machinery which the Government
had provided for the enterprise, and (3) what disposition to make of
surpluses of both materials and facilities beyond the Government’s
future needs.
Artillery constitutes the most important of all war supplies. Upon the
production of artillery and its ammunition the Government expended
more money than upon any other single class of materials. From a
manufacturing standpoint, a unit of artillery consists of three
principal parts--the gun tube itself, the recuperator (or recoil
mechanism), and the carriage with its attending caissons. Each of
these manufacturing phases called into existence during 1917–1918 huge
industries. On the day of the armistice nineteen mills, built new from
the ground up, were turning out gun and howitzer tubes at the rate of
nearly 800 a month, a figure that may be contrasted with the annual
American production of seventy-five guns before 1917. Five great
plants, built new at a cost of many millions, were engaged in building
recuperators of French design, and other producers were manufacturing
American- and British-type recoil mechanisms. The carriages, limbers,
and caissons, being, after all, wheeled vehicles, offered no particular
manufacturing problem, and it was therefore unnecessary to create a
new industry to produce them. Nevertheless, the carriage contracts
engaged a large section of the car- and truck-building industries
of the United States. Yet, for the reason that the vehicle builders
could come quickly into the production of artillery carriages, the
physical demobilization of this branch of the industry offered little
difficulty, the chief problems centering around the termination of
the production of gun tubes and recuperators. These problems involved
questions of reserves to be produced before the industries were
dissolved and the storage afterwards of the manufacturing facilities
to give the United States a potential producing capacity that could be
quickly utilized in the event of another war.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Howard E. Coffin_
HAVOC WROUGHT BY GERMAN GUNS AT FORT NEAR RHEIMS]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Howard E. Coffin_
“WIPERS” READY FOR TOURISTS]
Several important considerations influenced the responses to these
questions. In the first place our whole artillery manufacturing project
had been aimed at the year 1919, and in the interim the American
Expeditionary Forces purchased heavy quantities of artillery in France
and England--in all, nearly 5,500 field guns of the latest and best
designs. Including captured _matériel_, the A. E. F. sent back to
the United States after the armistice about 6,000 guns, with their full
equipment of limbers, caissons, and supply vehicles. This in itself
was a quantity sufficient to arm a large field force; and, on the face
of it, this reserve seemed to make unnecessary any post-armistice
production at all from our own ordnance plants. As a counterbalance,
however, there was the industrial situation. The gun plants were heavy
employers of labor. To close them all down forthwith might have created
a serious amount of unemployment, to the detriment of the national
prosperity. Then, too, it was good business to order the completion
of _matériel_ almost complete on the day of the armistice, and this
procedure was adopted as a general policy.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Howard E. Coffin_
FRENCH AND GERMAN AIRPLANE ENGINES AFTER COMBAT]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Howard E. Coffin_
RUINED TANKS NEAR CAMBRAI]
General rules and policies could at best serve the field men of the
Ordnance Department only as rough guides. Each of the nineteen gun
factories supplied its own special problems in demobilization. The
process of closing down the factories may be shown by the example
of what went on after the armistice at the plant of the Bullard
Engineering Works at Bridgeport, Connecticut.
This was a plant producing 155-millimeter guns--the tubes only. The
155, a French weapon, was the highest-powered fieldpiece used by the
A. E. F., the railroad guns not being considered to be field guns.
The supply of the useful 155 was never equal to the demand. The
French factories could not deliver as many as the A. E. F. needed;
and, because of the difficulty of producing the recuperator, our own
industry did not succeed in turning out a single completely assembled
unit before the armistice, although all parts had been successfully
produced ready for assembling. Here, then, was an important class of
artillery in which a shortage existed, and therefore the Ordnance
Department was liberal in allowing production after the armistice.
The Bullard Engineering Works held contracts calling for the production
of 1,400 155-millimeter gun tubes. On the first day of the armistice
it had delivered forty-five finished tubes, and 500 others were
progressing through the plant in various stages of completion. Many
of these incomplete units had passed through the difficult shrinking
process. Guns are built up in layers of steel, each one heated,
superimposed upon the adjoining one, and then shrunk on in various
cooling processes, thus putting into the steel strata a compression
that enables the gun to sustain tremendous interior pressures without
distortion. The ordnance officers looked at the status of work at the
Bullard plant and ordered the completion of the 500 units in process,
terminating the rest of the great contract.
This action was taken on the eleventh day of the armistice. The company
expected to be able to complete the remaining 500 guns in six months, a
course that would enable the manufacture to taper off and the gunmakers
to find other employment. Two months later it was found that other
industry was readily absorbing the excess labor of the gun plant, and
therefore another cut was made in the contemplated production, the
number of completions ordered being reduced to 262 in number. These
were to be finished by April 15, 1919, after which war work at the
plant was to cease entirely.
Note, now, the measures adopted in terminating the work. It is
evident that the post-armistice operation was going to deliver to
the Government 262 finished guns and 238 unfinished ones. The latter
would stand for a government expenditure of millions of dollars. As
an industrial commodity these unfinished tubes would have value only
as scrap steel, to be melted up and made into other things. Yet to
the Government they possessed a real military value. In the event
of another war occurring before the present-day types of artillery
become obsolete, the Army would need not only reserves of guns ready
for use, but also another great gunmaking industry, to produce for
an indefinitely expanding field force. Therefore proper war reserves
should consist not only of guns, but also of reserve facilities
for manufacturing guns--machinery and tools, designs, plans, and
instructions, and, especially, the rough forgings of gun elements,
so that, the moment a new gun factory was organized and equipped, it
could start working, without having to wait weeks and months until
the raw materials came up from the forging plants. The Bullard
Works were instructed to stop work on the incompleted units at such
points as would enable future gunmakers, if necessary, to resume
the work without difficulty. All incomplete units, however, were to
be carried through the shrinking process before being dropped. The
various hoops and jackets which are shrunk upon gun tubes are machined
to a precision expressed in thousandths of an inch. In heavy metal
working, such exactness is ordinarily unknown. It is evident that
only a little rusting would destroy the fit of the contact surfaces
and ruin the unassembled jackets and hoops, and therefore the company
was instructed to assemble these otherwise perishable elements before
stopping the work. After the shrinking, all uncompleted pieces were
slushed in grease, packed for protection, and stored away, to be used,
according to the plan, in the manufacture which will be necessary in
the peace-time maintenance of the artillery equipment. Some of the
incomplete Bullard tubes of the 155’s were later transferred to the
Watervliet Arsenal and finished with the machinery there. The arsenal
completed 300 guns of this size after the armistice.
This, essentially, so far as the partially finished units were
concerned, was the procedure followed by the Ordnance Department in all
nineteen emergency gun plants. Although the mills turning out rough
forgings for the gun plants were taken from this branch of war work
immediately after the armistice, the Ordnance Department reserved and
stored a supply of forgings in order to keep the future gun plants in
operation until new forging mills can come into production.
Seventeen of the emergency gun plants were closed out altogether after
the armistice. Two remain among the war assets of the United States,
held “in ordinary,” as the phrase goes, meaning that they are closed,
but ready with machinery and materials in all stages of completion to
start up in full operation as soon as the workmen can be recruited
and the fires started. These two additions to our arsenal system were
named the Rochester Gun Plant and the Erie Howitzer Plant; and at these
two plants and at the government arsenals the Ordnance Department
concentrated the great equipment of machinery, tools, plans, and
materials left on its hands after the dissolution of the gunmaking
industry created by the war, all stored so systematically that the War
Department, at any time for years to come, can, in theory, at any rate,
quickly reëstablish a gun industry on the scale known in 1918. Recently
it has been proposed to transfer the facilities at Rochester to some
other place.
The existence of this manufacturing equipment in the possession of
the Ordnance Department gives the United States a stronger military
potentiality than the nation ever possessed before. For the first time
in our history the Government itself during peace is in possession of
extensive facilities for the manufacture of light and medium-heavy
artillery. Before the war the Army procured all its field guns (and
those only in negligible quantities) principally from private makers.
Its two gunmaking arsenals, Watertown and Watervliet, turned out
principally large guns for fixed mounting at the coastal forts. Before
showing what was done at the Rochester and Erie plants, it is worth
while pausing to note the legacy received from the war industry of
1917–1918 by the two established gunmaking arsenals.
The Watertown Arsenal is to-day the War Department’s chief permanent
establishment for the production of gun forgings. Watervliet is the
great gun-finishing plant. At a cost of many millions these two
institutions were built up and expanded on a vast scale during the
war. After the armistice these two arsenals received the reserve
supply of machinery and materials used in making the heavier
field guns--principally 155-millimeter guns and 240-millimeter
howitzers--forging machinery at Watertown, finishing machinery at
Watervliet. For the manufacture of lighter guns, the machinery has been
stored principally at the new Rochester and Erie plants.
With the new equipment installed at the Watervliet Arsenal during
the war, that institution reached a productive capacity of sixty
155-millimeter guns a month and sixty 240-millimeter howitzers.
These facilities to-day are set up and ready for immediate operation.
But in addition to the arsenal’s own proper plant, the Ordnance
Department has stored at Watervliet reserve machinery sufficient to
manufacture fifty-two 155-millimeter howitzers, seventeen 4.7-inch
guns, and forty-nine 75-millimeter guns every month. This machinery,
in the event of another war, is to be shipped to emergency war plants
and set up in them. Besides this, all the war-time equipment for
producing anti-aircraft guns has been stored at Watervliet. One of
the later inventive developments of the World War was to increase
the power of the already powerful 155-millimeter gun by increasing
its caliber to 194 millimeters and adding to its length, making an
entirely new weapon, but one of the same type as the 155. None of
these guns was actually built during the war, but machinery able to
produce twenty of them every month is included within the equipment at
Watervliet, one-third of this machinery set up and needing only slight
rearrangement and modification to be ready for immediate operation.
All this equipment at Watervliet for the production of medium-weight
field guns is idle and probably will remain so as long as the great
reserve of finished artillery accumulated during the war continues to
have military value. Unless another great war comes to upset the plans,
the only production of light field artillery in this country for many
years henceforth will be that resulting from the operation of a small
experimental gun plant at Watervliet, to be maintained in operation to
the sole end that the United States may keep pace with the progress of
artillery manufacture. Whenever improvements are devised, the necessary
changes will, if Congress provides the funds and present ambitions are
realized, be made in the reserve machinery to enable it to turn out the
improved models from the start of operation.
Meanwhile Watervliet and Watertown will continue to be what they were
before 1917--the main reliance of the Army for its guns of the largest
calibers for use at the coastal forts and on railway mounts. At best,
the production of such weapons is a slow and intricate process, and
the only way to procure a supply of them is to keep producing them all
the time. Watertown makes the forgings for these guns, and Watervliet,
with its own great equipment augmented by machinery from the dismantled
war plants, can now manufacture guns up to 16 inches in caliber and
howitzers from 12 to 16 inches. At Watervliet, too, has been stored
some of the machinery from the American Ordnance Base Depot in France
for relining big guns and restoring them to use.
Now let us look at the two chief auxiliaries to the two gunmaking
arsenals, the Rochester Gun Plant and the Erie Howitzer Plant, which
are now “stand-by” factories for the production of field artillery of
the smaller sizes--75-millimeter and 4.7-inch guns and 155-millimeter
howitzers. The Rochester Gun Plant, with its own war tools and with the
equipment concentrated there during the demobilization, is now equipped
to turn out 360 75-millimeter guns every month. Its equipment includes
not only the elaborate finishing machinery, but also a shop capable of
heat-treating and rough-machining 200 sets of black forgings for the
gun every month. This plant alone can produce 75’s to keep pace with
the needs of a great army, including its battle wastage, until a new
gun industry can come into existence. All the buildings are new steel
and concrete structures. The plant was built on twelve and a half
acres of ground at Rochester during the war by the Symington-Anderson
Company for the Government. This site is now leased by the Government.
Its purchase would guarantee the continued existence of this important
military asset.
The Rochester plant is held entirely in ordinary: machinery slushed in
grease and boxed, and materials at hand in every department ready for
machining, but watchmen the only occupants of the buildings. Not the
least important part of the plant’s equipment is a book containing a
detailed mechanical description of every one of the 521 manufacturing
operations in the production of a 75-millimeter gun, and including
even a chart showing the correct organization of the working forces
at the plant. Even such complete plans, however, cannot be made to
include the small kinks and short cuts of shop practice, which must be
developed and learned by actual experience at the machines. Any future
force of plant operatives, therefore, would have to learn the obscure
secrets of manufacture before the plant could reach great efficiency.
At the Erie Howitzer Plant a similar procedure was followed. Here,
on eleven acres of what had been vacant ground in August, 1917, the
American Brake Shoe & Foundry Company six months later turned out
finished 155-millimeter howitzers and reached a productive capacity of
twelve howitzers daily before the armistice. The plant stands to-day
as a complete gun factory, although all its equipment is greased and
housed up, and its bays echo only to the steps of watchmen. While
it was selected chiefly to be the stand-by plant for the production
of 155-millimeter howitzers, at the shop has been concentrated the
machinery and tooling used by the Northwestern Ordnance Company to
produce 4.7-inch guns at its war plant at Madison, Wisconsin. This
machinery had a capacity of four such guns daily. The howitzer shop and
the gun shop occupy separate buildings. In the third building has been
installed machinery for producing shell for 155-millimeter guns.
The machinery set up at Erie is designed to allow for increases in
the powers of the two weapons to be made there. The howitzer can be
increased in length (thereby increasing its range), and the 4.7-inch
gun can be increased to 5 inches in caliber, without requiring
fundamental changes in the machinery.
The present industrial position of the United States with respect to
the manufacture of mobile field artillery may be seen in the following
tabular summing up of the preceding paragraphs:
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| _Place of _Monthly Production|
| Manufacture_ _Type of Weapon_ Capacity_ |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
|Rochester Gun Plant 75-millimeter gun 360 |
|Watervliet Arsenal 75-millimeter gun 49 |
|Erie Howitzer Plant 4.7-inch gun 100 |
|Watervliet Arsenal 4.7-inch gun 17 |
|Erie Howitzer Plant 155-millimeter howitzer 200 |
|Watervliet Arsenal 155-millimeter howitzer 52 |
|Watervliet Arsenal 155-millimeter gun 60 |
|Watervliet Arsenal 240-millimeter howitzer 60 |
| --- |
| Total monthly gunmaking capacity 898 |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
These fine weapons, all but one of which were designed by the French,
the builders of the finest field artillery known, and manufactured only
in France before the war, would be useless without recuperators, the
recoil-absorbing mechanisms which make modern quick firing possible.
Along with the guns there came to us the designs for the four French
hydropneumatic recuperators. The French hesitated in the beginning
about giving us their recuperator plans--not because they did not
desire us to have the best in artillery, but because they thought,
with much justification, that we should never be able to build them
in time to be of service in the World War, although it was possible
that after the war, by long and determined effort, we might be able to
train mechanics who could make them. Only the sudden termination of
the war, however, kept American-built French recuperators from serving
at the front, for every one was successfully produced in this country
before the armistice, including a single specimen of the perplexing
75-millimeter recuperator. Three immense, specially equipped plants and
two government arsenals produced them.
Millions of dollars were spent in preparing to build French
recuperators. The Singer Manufacturing Company built a great plant at
Elizabethport, New Jersey, to make 75-millimeter recuperators. The Rock
Island Arsenal equipped a new department to build this same mechanism.
Dodge Brothers spent $11,000,000 on an immense plant at Detroit for
the manufacture of the recuperators for 155-millimeter guns and
howitzers, separate designs, and separate manufacturing propositions.
The fourth type, the 240, was put in production at a plant equipped for
the purpose at Chicago by the Otis Elevator Company. Only one of the
mechanisms, the 155-millimeter howitzer recuperator, reached the stage
of quantity production before the armistice. For the millions spent on
the others the Government had only the experience and a quantity of
forgings and semi-finished recuperators possessing only scrap value
as they existed on the day of the armistice. Therefore the Ordnance
Department did not stop this vital production at once after the
armistice.
The Singer Company was working on orders for 2,500 75-millimeter
recuperators. Although it had not succeeded in turning out a single
acceptable recuperator by November 11, 1918, its processes had been
refined almost to the point where they could begin producing these
beautiful pieces of metallic sculpture in quantity. The Willys-Overland
Company had built about 300 carriages for the French 75 by the date of
the armistice, and it was decided to allow the Singer Company to build
recuperators for these carriages and an additional 450 as a reserve.
Considerations of economy later held the Singer Company to a total
production of 247 recuperators, resulting in a shortage as compared
with the carriages.
Meanwhile, be it remembered, the Rock Island Arsenal was working on
75-millimeter recuperators. It was decided to retain the recuperator
department as an active branch of the arsenal. The arsenal was a little
ahead of the Singer Company in the development, for it had actually
produced an acceptable recuperator before the armistice; and it had
542 others in process in the shop. The arsenal’s production proper
was therefore limited to this number, but the incomplete units from
Elizabethport were later transferred to Rock Island, and the arsenal
eventually completed 555 75-millimeter recuperators before closing down
the department. These were pronounced to be in every way the equal of
the French product.
The War Department provided no arsenal facilities for the production
of recuperators for the 155-millimeter guns and howitzers, but
centered its entire program for both mechanisms in the Dodge plant at
Detroit. After the armistice it was first decided to retain the Dodge
factory as a stand-by recuperator plant. All machinery and materials
were protected against deterioration, and the plant, under guard,
was added to the arsenal system, ranking as a subsidiary to the Rock
Island Arsenal. Later the Dodge plant was sold, and nearly half of its
machinery was moved to Rock Island.
The plan of artillery demobilization and industrial preparedness in
this direction is now evident. Watertown Arsenal is the development
center for the raw materials of artillery manufacture. Watervliet
Arsenal, with its stand-by plants at Rochester and Erie, is the
gun-producing center. Rock Island Arsenal is the center for gun
carriages and recuperators.
One exception to this scheme is to be noted. The war-time producers of
the 240-millimeter recuperators were two--the Otis Elevator Company at
Chicago and the Watertown Arsenal. The Otis plant, originally having
orders for 1,000 recuperators, was ordered to finish 250 of them
after the armistice. Thereafter some of its machinery was transferred
and stored at the Watertown Arsenal, which thus remains as the
manufacturing center for this heavy mechanism.
There was no need for the Ordnance Department during the demobilization
to exercise so much care looking to the future production of artillery
carriages, and for the reason mentioned, that the manufacture of
carriages was easier than the manufacture of guns and recuperators.
Carriages can be produced with machinery essentially the same as that
used in making motor trucks, street cars, and other heavy vehicles.
Consequently, the War Department contented itself with reserving enough
machinery to equip at Rock Island Arsenal a model carriage-building
department large enough to maintain the existing reserves of artillery
and to experiment with new designs. This plant can now manufacture
every month one hundred carriages for the lighter field artillery--for
the 75’s, the 4.7’s, and the 155’s, both howitzers and guns. In
addition, at Rock Island have been concentrated jigs, fixtures,
gauges, and special tools used by the war factories, this equipment
being boxed, catalogued, and ready for instant shipment to commercial
factories that may be called upon to build artillery carriages in a
hurry. No machine tools used in carriage building, however, have been
retained.
The same economic, military, and business reasons that influenced the
post-armistice production of guns and recuperators, controlled also
the closing down of the carriage plants. There was a considerable
production of field artillery carriages after the immediate military
need for them had passed.
The artillery war orders called for the production of about 20,000
complete units, a unit being a gun, recuperator, carriage, and
accompanying limbers and caissons. The total production attributable
to the war was 6,663 complete units, produced about half before the
armistice and half afterwards. The value of this _matériel_, together
with the semi-finished components retained, was about $300,000,000.
After the armistice the General Staff adopted the policy that in the
demobilization sufficient mobile field artillery should be retained
to equip an army of twenty divisions--800,000 men--with reserves to
take care of battle wastage over a period of six months, during which
interval a new artillery industry would be brought into existence. It
is interesting to note how completely the Ordnance Department met this
policy. Including the 6,000 field guns brought back by the American
Expeditionary Forces (this figure not including captured _matériel_),
the Army now has an equipment of about 10,000 artillery units.[7] The
staff plan indicates 2,583 as the proper number of 75-millimeter guns
to be in reserve: the Army actually possesses 6,000. The projected
army of twenty divisions needs 986 155-millimeter howitzers: the
War Department owns 2,171. The projected force should have 976
155-millimeter guns: the Army to-day owns 993. These liberal margins
obtain throughout the range of mobile field guns.
On the theory (and it is a correct theory) that all the money put into
artillery before the armistice should be charged off as part of the
cost of victory, the post-armistice production of field artillery was
a prudent transaction for the War Department. By spending $6,000,000
on the completion of 75-millimeter _matériel_ after the armistice,
the Government obtained property worth over $14,500,000. By spending
$11,000,000 in the 155-millimeter gun project after the armistice, the
Government secured artillery worth $18,000,000. By spending $9,000,000
for 155-millimeter howitzers after the armistice, the Government
obtained _matériel_ valued at $15,000,000.
The storage of the vast reserves of field artillery presented a special
problem to the Ordnance Department after the armistice. Not only the
guns themselves, but also the accessory vehicles, had to be stored,
and the latter outnumbered the guns several times. For example, the
American factories built 18,000 caissons and 20,000 caisson limbers for
75-millimeter guns alone, and accessory vehicles in like proportions
were brought back from France by the A. E. F. It required about
5,000,000 square feet of storage space to house all the _matériel_.
The Rock Island Arsenal was selected as the storage center for field
artillery, augmented by storage facilities created at the Savanna
Proving Ground in Illinois, the Erie Proving Ground in Ohio, and the
Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. Some of the artillery was stored
at Raritan Arsenal in New Jersey and at Fort D. A. Russell in Wyoming.
For storing the artillery the Ordnance Department used brick warehouses
and also portable steel storehouses built originally to protect the
reserve American artillery in France. The Ordnance Department retained
a complete engineering collection of the captured enemy artillery,
one example of every type, and this has been set up as an exhibit at
Aberdeen. The collection includes a complete unit of the famous German
42-centimeter howitzer used against the fortifications of Liège and
Verdun.
In demobilizing the industry which was producing our railway
artillery, the Ordnance Department again availed itself of the
opportunity to provide for the future defense of the United States;
and in this branch of war industry, too, we find the same tapering-off
process after the armistice, the completion of some materials which
were nearing completion at the time of the armistice, and the retention
of machinery to provide for a possible future industry. As a result
of these measures, the Atlantic seaboard is now defended by a system
of powerful guns mounted on railway cars and capable of being moved
on the regular railroad tracks, supplemented by new tracks laid both
during and since the war by the Coast Artillery Corps, to any point
which may be in need of defense. Before 1917 all our coast-defense
guns were mounted on fixed emplacements at the forts. Camp Abraham
Eustis, which sprang into existence during the war as the embarkation
camp for artillery at Newport News, has been turned over permanently
to the Coast Artillery Corps and is now the headquarters for the Coast
Artillery Railway Brigade. Fortunately the railway units nearest
completion on the day of the armistice were those best suited for use
along the seacoast.
The project to build railway artillery, it should be understood,
was one of producing mounts for guns most of which were already in
existence. These guns came principally from the fixed mounts in the
coastal defenses, but some of them from the Navy and other sources.
The guns ranged in size from the 7-inch rifles, procured from the
Navy, to 16-inch howitzers, one of which had been built experimentally
by the Ordnance Department before 1917. Two or three of the railway
projects--such as that of the 7-inch navy guns and that of the three
12-inch guns originally manufactured for Chile, but commandeered
at the gun plant by the United States--were complete on the day
of the armistice. When the Ordnance Department faced the task of
terminating the industry, there were eight incomplete projects in
railway artillery. Two were canceled outright; in three others partial
production after the armistice was permitted; and the final three were
carried through completely.
One of the projects completed after the armistice was that providing
for railway mounts for forty-seven 8-inch, 35 calibers, seacoast
rifles. The two contractors--the Morgan Engineering Company of
Alliance, Ohio, and the Harrisburg Manufacturing & Boiler Company
of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania--had built eighteen complete units,
each consisting of a gun car and numerous accessory ammunition and
repair cars, a whole train in itself, and had manufactured all the
parts for the rest. These parts were ordered assembled. This purely
American mount possesses the advantage of permitting the gun to fire
at any angle, the mount revolving upon a barbette carriage, and the
disadvantage that in traveling on narrow-gauge track (such as is being
laid at isolated places along the coast) its gun must be transferred
to a special gun car--a transfer, however, quickly effected by the
machinery which the gun train itself carries. Seventy-seven ammunition
cars for these guns, built as they were for operation in French railway
trains and therefore useless in this country, were sold to the French
Government for about $250,000, a price which covered every cent spent
in their production.
A second project completed after the armistice placed twelve 12-inch
guns on French Batignolle railway mounts. This mount absorbs the gun
recoil in an enormous hydropneumatic recuperator, permitting rapid fire
and the fastening of the gun car to the track to avoid any retrograde
movement. (Several of the railway mounts slid backward and had to be
restored to aim after each shot.) The 12-inch mount, however, permits
only a small traverse swing to the gun, which, for correct aiming, has,
therefore, to run upon curved tracks, or epis, as they are called.
These mounts were built by the Marion Steam Shovel Company with
machinery partly the property of the Government. At the completion of
the work this machinery was shipped to the Watertown Arsenal.
The final completed project was the mounting of ninety 12-inch mortars
(seacoast weapons) upon railway cars. The Morgan Engineering Company
built a special plant costing $3,500,000 for this one job, providing
mount-building capacity twelve times that of the Watertown Arsenal
before 1917--and that arsenal had been the Army’s sole source of
big-gun mounts. On November 11, 1918, this plant had manufactured all
the parts for all ninety mounts, and the assembling of these mounts
was therefore ordered. About 100 ammunition cars of French design were
sold to the French Government for about $350,000, thus returning most
of the money put into them. The Alliance plant itself was too large and
expensive to maintain as a stand-by plant; and, after shipping most of
the special-purpose machinery to the Watertown Arsenal, the Ordnance
Department disposed of the building to a private buyer.[8]
The armistice cut short the joint Franco-American project to mount
thirty-six American seacoast 10-inch guns upon the Schneider railway
mount, a French design, America to produce the parts for the mounts and
France to assemble them. Four complete sets of parts had been sent to
France before the armistice. The contractors were three: the Harrisburg
Manufacturing & Boiler Company (mounts), the Pullman Car Company
(trucks for the gun cars), and the American Car & Foundry Company
(ammunition cars). The weapon is not ideal for coastal defense, because
the mount allows no traverse aiming, and the car therefore must be used
on curved track. The contractors were permitted to finish eighteen of
these mounts in all.
A gigantic piece of ordnance was the 16-inch howitzer mounted on a
railway truck during the war. In a project to build sixty-one such
weapons by the year 1920 the Government spent $6,000,000 on a special
plant at the mill of the Midvale Steel Company near Philadelphia. The
whole project was abandoned after the armistice, but one building had
been erected and the structural steel for the rest of the plant was on
the ground. Meanwhile the toolmakers of the country were working on the
vast projected manufacturing equipment for this plant; and a small
amount of this machinery was completed after the armistice and sent to
Watervliet and Watertown arsenals.
The Neville Island Gun Plant was projected in 1918 as a source of
supply for guns of the largest size for mounting upon railway cars. The
plant, which was to cost $150,000,000, a sum which would have made it
by far the largest gun plant in the world, was expected to manufacture
over 450 guns of the biggest sizes during 1919 and 1920--more railway
guns than the Germans owned altogether. The enterprise, which was
entirely abandoned after the armistice, cost the Government about
$9,000,000. Every ordnance officer, however, believes that the mere
project, actively started, had its effect in ending the war by
depressing the enemy morale. The war cost us about $50,000,000 a day.
If, therefore, the Neville project shortened the war by as much as
three days, it wrote off its entire estimated cost.
The project, immature though it was when terminated, placed in the war
reserves certain steel-working machinery of the heaviest sort. One
6,500-ton forging press, costing $500,000, was completed and turned
over to the Navy Department for installation in the navy gun-forging
plant at Charleston, West Virginia. Certain costly shell-making
machinery was completed after the armistice and either sold to private
buyers (at favorable prices, as compared with what the Ordnance
Department could have obtained for the unfinished machines) or else
stored at the Watertown Arsenal.
Watertown has thus become the producing center for railway artillery of
the future. The liquidation of war industry enormously expanded that
institution. Before 1917 the government investment in the Watertown
Arsenal was less than $4,000,000. After the concentration there of
the special-purpose gunmaking machinery acquired by the Government
during the war, the arsenal was worth, at a conservative valuation,
$20,000,000.
CHAPTER XII
AMMUNITION AND OTHER ORDNANCE
The armistice found in the United States an enormous industry devoted
to the production of ammunition for the artillery. Including its
powder-making plants and its plants for the production of the raw
materials of powder, its scores of shell-making factories, and its
loading establishments, this industry overshadowed, in money invested
and operatives employed, even the artillery-manufacturing project.
The demobilization of this vast enterprise, therefore, afforded the
Ordnance Department one of its major problems after the armistice.
The production of powders, both high-explosive and propellant, in which
about 70,000 persons were engaged at the time of the armistice, was
terminated in a remarkably brief time. When the armistice was six weeks
old all manufacture of high explosives on war contracts had ceased, and
two weeks after that the last of the war-time propellant (smokeless)
powder was made. This termination left on the hands of the Ordnance
Department a considerable amount of special-purpose machinery which had
little or no market value. This machinery was therefore retained and
stored at various arsenals, particularly at the Frankford and Picatinny
arsenals, the permanent army ammunition production centers.
For a while the Old Hickory Powder Plant at Nashville, Tennessee,--its
daily capacity of 900,000 pounds of smokeless powder making it the
largest powder factory in the world,--was retained as a stand-by
plant, but later it was sold. The Nitro (West Virginia) Powder Plant,
another government institution nearly as large as Old Hickory, was
sold after the armistice, with the result that a new industrial city
is developing on its site. The War Department’s enormous ammonium
nitrate plant at Perryville, Maryland (ammonium nitrate being used
in the manufacture of the widely used war explosive amatol), the
equipment of which included several hundred model dwellings, was, after
the armistice, turned over to the Public Health Service to be used
as a hospital for ex-service men. The three government picric acid
plants--at Little Rock, Arkansas, Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Savannah,
Georgia--were sold. Briggs & Turivas, Chicago steel manufacturers,
bought the plant built by the Government at Senter, Michigan, for the
production of tetryl, an explosive used as the charge in boosters in
high-explosive shell. The Ordnance Department also closed out and sold
the facilities provided at Bound Brook, New Jersey, for the production
of tetranitroaniline, another booster charge.
In general, plants and machinery used in making powder could be used
also to some extent to make the commodities of peaceful commerce, and
therefore the Ordnance Department had little difficulty in disposing of
these surplus facilities at good prices. The powder-making facilities
created during the war by the DuPont Powder Company near Wilmington,
for instance, almost at once after the armistice turned to the
manufacture of dyestuffs. Another war powder plant, with practically
the same machinery, is to-day producing artificial silk, a cellulose
commodity similar in chemical composition to smokeless powder. A third
is making celluloid and artificial ivory; a fourth, paper.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Howard E. Coffin_
AMERICAN FIELD GUNS ON THE RHINE]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Howard E. Coffin_
AMERICAN GUN ON EHRENBREITSTEIN, COBLENZ]
Since trinitrotoluol (T. N. T.) was the most widely used of all
war explosives, the Ordnance Department was forced to go into the
production of the basic toluol itself as well as into the manufacture
of its nitrated compound. One war source of toluol was coal gas, and
to secure the chemical from this source the Ordnance Department set up
stripping plants in the gas works of thirteen American cities. Nine of
the gas companies bought this equipment after the armistice. The other
four plants were sold on the market, the machinery eventually finding
its way into the new industry which is taking gasoline from natural
gas. The Government sold out completely its two T. N. T. plants, which
were located respectively at Racine, Wisconsin, and Giant, California.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
DESTROYING CAPTURED GERMAN AMMUNITION]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
A CAPTURED AMMUNITION DUMP]
One of the most notable enterprises in all the liquidation of war
industry was that of closing up the war project for the fixation
of atmospheric nitrogen and the placing of that undertaking upon
a permanent peace footing. In order to conduct this enterprise
intelligently the Secretary of War selected certain scientists and
men of business experience to study every phase of the subject of the
military and commercial fixation of nitrogen and to recommend to the
War Department what disposition to make of the war fixation plants.
This board was known as the Fixed Nitrogen Administration.
In 1916 the United States, almost entirely dependent upon foreign
sources for its supply of commercial nitrogen, took the first step
toward independence by appropriating $20,000,000 for the work of
developing a domestic fixation industry. With this money the Corps of
Engineers began, about the time we declared war against Germany, the
construction of a great dam to arrest the power of the Tennessee River
at Muscle Shoals, Alabama. This project, including a hydroelectric
power house, was set for completion in 1923. The head of water at
Muscle Shoals is expected to provide from 100,000 to 200,000 horsepower
continuously, and during nine months of the year high water will
produce a secondary power almost as great.
Aware that this development would in all probability not come
through in time to serve the war explosives program, soon after the
declaration of war the Government entered upon an enormous project to
fix atmospheric nitrogen with power developed from coal. Five fixation
plants of this sort were from first to last authorized. Three of these
were completely built, and the other two were partially constructed
before their projects were canceled.
In the fall of 1917 the War Department began the construction of a
nitrogen plant at Sheffield, Alabama, and in 1918 completed it, at a
cost of about $13,000,000. This plant produced usable nitrogen in
the form of ammonium nitrate, a product used with trinitrotoluol in
the production of the important shell-explosive amatol. It used the
modified German Haber process, combining hydrogen and nitrogen to
form ammonia, which is oxidized into nitric acid, which in turn is
combined with ammonia to form ammonium nitrate. This plant produced
its first ammonia in September, 1918, and its first ammonium nitrate
on the second day of the armistice. The process, however, was never
satisfactorily developed in this plant.
The second fixation-plant project was inaugurated in the autumn of
1917 about the time the Interallied Ordnance Agreement put upon the
United States the burden of producing most of the powder and explosives
used by the Allies, thus tremendously increasing our need of nitrogen.
It was no time to be experimenting with processes. The one fixation
process of proved success known in the United States was the cyanamid
process, used by the American Cyanamid Company at its plant at Niagara
Falls. The Government therefore engaged this concern to build an
enormous fixation plant at Muscle Shoals, a plant which was to use
steam power until the hydroelectric power from the river should become
available. On the day of the armistice this plant, known as the No. 2
Nitrate Plant, was nearly complete: it turned out its first ammonium
nitrate within two weeks thereafter. It cost $70,000,000 and had a
capacity of 110,000 tons of ammonium nitrate a year. The test runs
indicated that the plant could fix nitrogen at a cost commercially
practicable.
Two other plants, both to use the cyanamid process, were projected
in 1918, and the Government began the construction of both of them.
One was at Toledo, Ohio, and the other at Cincinnati. Their combined
capacity was to equal the capacity of the Muscle Shoals plant. At the
armistice the construction of these plants was well under way, but the
Government terminated both projects, at a net cost of $12,000,000.
The fifth plant was built by the Bureau of Mines for the Chemical
Warfare Service at Saltville, Virginia. It used the Bucher process,
producing fixed atmospheric nitrogen in the form of sodium cyanide,
a chemical used in the manufacture of toxic war gases. It was about
complete at the time of the armistice, having cost the Government
$2,500,000. A test run indicated that the Bucher process was too costly
to be practicable in normal times.
The Fixed Nitrogen Administration, in its report, recommended that
the Saltville plant be abandoned, but that the plant at Sheffield and
the one at Muscle Shoals be retained permanently, the modified Haber
process at the No. 1 Plant to be developed by further research. No.
2 Plant at Muscle Shoals was designated as the principal peace-time
source of nitrates within the United States, and the report advised
the United States to remain in the nitrates business as a commercial
producer of fertilizer material, the Government to operate through a
corporation similar to that which operates the Panama Railroad and its
related steamship line. This report was based upon research which sent
a commission of experts to Europe to study fixation processes there,
and which even cultivated experimental farms in the United States to
determine by practical tests upon growing crops the fertilizing value
of various forms of fixed atmospheric nitrogen.
The armistice found dozens upon dozens of American factories and
machine shops, both large and small, engaged exclusively in producing
the metallic shell used by the field artillery. This in itself was
an industry of great size. The industry had not yet attained its
production peak, but it was rapidly nearing that point; so nearly so
that, during the tapering-off process, the factories working only
eight hours of each twenty-four (as compared with the pre-armistice
three-shift, twenty-four-hour day), the output was enormous. Take, as
an example, the 75-millimeter size alone. In sixteen months before the
armistice the mills, working continuously twenty-four hours a day,
produced about 10,000,000 forgings for 75-millimeter shell. The same
mills after the armistice, working now only eight hours each day and
tapering off their work as rapidly as possible, in the two months
before the wheels stopped, produced 5,000,000 additional forgings.
The total production of the metallic elements of artillery shell, both
before and after the armistice, recorded some totals of fantastic
size. It should be remembered that for the most part our war shell
were of the European nose-fuse type and therefore unlike any shell
which the War Department had ever produced before. An apparently simple
manufacturing proposition turned out to be a most difficult one,
particularly in the production of two small but important elements
of the nose-fuse shell, the booster, which accelerates the rate of
explosion, and the adapter, which holds the booster in place. It was
months before our manufacturers could produce boosters and adapters
successfully, but then the effort came along with a rush. When
production ceased the Ordnance Department had 26,000,000 boosters and
adapters to dispose of. Other surpluses for salvage were 60,000,000
shell forgings, 60,000,000 shell machinings, 60,000,000 cannon
cartridge cases, nearly 70,000,000 metal parts for grenades, and over
6,000,000 metal parts for trench mortar shell.
The demobilization policy was to store reserves of shell sufficient to
meet the consumption of an army of 1,000,000 men during six months of
active field service. In the 75-millimeter size, for instance, such
a reserve meant 2,500,000 shell. Since we had produced 15,000,000
75-millimeter shell, it is evident that the Ordnance Department found
on its hands 12,500,000 such shell to be disposed of in some way.
Surpluses in other sizes were also large. The steel strike of the
autumn of 1919 occurred opportunely for those disposing of the excess
shell, for it enabled the surplus metal to be sold at good prices
as melting scrap. A brisk demand for shell and cartridge cases as
souvenirs also absorbed a surprisingly large quantity of the excess
materials.
As in the demobilization of the artillery industry, here in the
shell-making industry we see at work the same preparedness policy of
designating established arsenals and retained stand-by plants to be a
manufacturing reserve against some future war emergency. Frankford and
Picatinny arsenals were selected to inherit the shell-making facilities
created in private plants during the war. At Frankford Arsenal was
concentrated an equipment able to manufacture daily 6,000 shell,
ranging from 75 millimeters to 240 millimeters. The Frankford shell
plant was made a complete unit, capable of taking billet steel, forging
out the shell blanks, machining them, and turning out shell ready for
loading. At Picatinny Arsenal was created an experimental shell plant
with a daily capacity of 300 shell of all sizes.
As an addition to the two arsenals, but as a subsidiary to the
Frankford Arsenal, the Ordnance Department retained the 155-millimeter
shell factory of the Symington-Anderson Company at Chicago and equipped
it as an enormous stand-by shell factory with facilities for producing
simultaneously 155-millimeter and 240-millimeter shell. This plant has
been named the Chicago Storage Depot. Here was concentrated most of
the special-purpose shell-making machinery acquired by the Ordnance
Department during the war. It consists to-day of two departments. The
active manufacturing department exists in ordinary, all machinery
ready for immediate operation. In the storage department exists
special machinery with a capacity for producing nearly 70,000 shell
daily. This machinery is catalogued and assembled in factory layouts,
virtually complete except for the ordinary commercial machinery used
in the manufacturing processes, so that on short notice the Ordnance
Department can ship from the depot shell-making units up to whatever
capacity any future war contractor may wish to undertake. The installed
equipment of the active manufacturing department has a daily capacity
of 12,000 shell. In 1917 the shell-making capacity of the United
States was small, and it was a year before facilities could be created
and production started on a quantity basis. The reserve industrial
equipment to-day gives us a daily manufacturing capacity of nearly
90,000 shell, a sufficient supply for a field army of 1,000,000 men
until a new shell-making industry can come into existence.
Powder and shell after manufacture went to the various sorts of loading
plants, the propellant powder to be loaded into cartridge cases (for
field guns of smaller calibers) or bags (for the bigger guns) and
the high explosive to be poured or packed into the shell, boosters,
or fuses. In carrying on this enterprise the Government either built
or fostered the creation of seventeen great loading plants, eight
of them--employing 35,000 persons, most of whom were women--being
owned entirely by the Government. These had cost from $5,000,000
to $12,000,000 apiece. A few of these government institutions were
retained by the War Department after the armistice. The shell-loading
plant at Amatol, New Jersey, was added to the arsenal system under
the name of the Amatol Arsenal, but the machinery was condemned for
salvage. The Amatol Arsenal is being used principally as a depot for
the storage of reserve shell-loading machinery acquired during the war.
A fire in October, 1918, destroyed the government shell-loading plant
at Morgan, New Jersey, and a temporary storage depot was erected on the
site. The two bag-loading plants at Woodbury, New Jersey, and Seven
Pines, Virginia, were disposed of after the armistice; but the third,
at Tullytown, Pennsylvania, as the Tullytown Arsenal, was retained
as an ammunition storage depot. Four other shell-loading plants were
retained as storage depots, and at these several points exist the great
reserves of loaded ammunition and of ammunition components left by the
war.
Nearly all the loading machinery was concentrated at Amatol and
Picatinny arsenals. At Picatinny also was set up an experimental plant
for the development of processes in loading powder and explosives. This
plant also contains machinery for loaded pyrotechnics in rockets, star
shell, and signal-pistol cartridges. One piece of equipment is a dark
tunnel in which the candle power of field illuminants can be tested.
The plant includes facilities for loading grenades, fuses, and boosters.
The American Expeditionary Forces after the armistice had on their
hands some 65,000 tons of field ammunition, mostly of French
manufacture, besides several thousand tons of German ammunition taken
in the advance to the Rhine under the terms of the armistice agreement.
At first it was thought that the French ammunition, shipped to the
United States, would be a military asset for several years to come;
but as the months went on it became evident that, instead of being
an asset, this ammunition was an embarrassment and a liability, and
finally the War Department was glad enough to pay various foreign
governments to take it off its hands.
Gas shell, for instance, it was thought, could not be stored, because
the contained chemicals would soon destroy the metal, and the shell
would begin to leak their lethal contents. Later experience, however,
showed that there was no sound basis for such an apprehension. In the
advance through Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, Luxemburg, and the German
Rhine country, the American forces collected about 7,000 tons of
German ammunition, none of which would fit our own guns and much of
which consisted of gas shell. The gas shell could not be destroyed
in dumps because of the danger to civilians in the neighborhood. The
only safe method of destruction was to transport it to sea and sink it
in deep water; but the A. E. F. had no labor to spare for this work,
and, besides, the French Government refused to allow the gas shell to
be shipped on the French railroads. Finally, for a price, the French
themselves undertook to dispose of this German gas ammunition.
In Belgium we had 6,000 tons of captured German ammunition. The
Belgians could not use it, forbade its destruction in dumps because
these dumps were in territory which had not been devastated by the
war, and would not permit it to be moved by rail to the devastated
districts, because of the supposed danger from the gas shell. The
A. E. F. therefore had 6,000 tons of ammunition which it could not use,
give away, destroy, or move. Finally, by agreeing to give the Belgians
a large quantity of German engineering and construction material found
in this area, the American authorities induced the Belgian Government
to accept responsibility for this ammunition.
The German ammunition found in Germany was sold to German contractors,
and, under the eyes of American inspectors, changed into useful
commercial products.
As to the A. E. F.’s own 65,000 tons of loaded shell, it was decided
to destroy all gas shell and all explosive shell and cartridges loaded
with explosives of doubtful stability and to return the rest to the
United States. The work of shipping the serviceable ammunition home
actually started, but it went on slowly because of the lack both of
labor and of ammunition ships. A fire destroyed one of the three
collection dumps in the Château-Thierry area. As the ships repatriated
the A. E. F. at a faster and faster rate, the various army areas were
evacuated one by one, but it was necessary to leave guards behind at
the various ammunition dumps. Then the War Department began studying
the problem with a practical eye. Nearly all this ammunition was
“war quality”: good enough for rapid consumption on the field, but
made hurriedly by inexperienced labor under conditions that made its
permanent stability questionable. It was found to be impossible to
separate the better ammunition from that of doubtful stability. It was
conceded that under ideal conditions this ammunition might be stored
safely for five years. Some of it had already been stored for eighteen
months; it would take at least a year to transport it all to the United
States; and therefore in this country it would be good for only a
brief time. Accordingly the A. E. F. authorities negotiated with the
French to assume liability for the ammunition, and it all went into
the general settlement of 1919 with the French, but as an American
liability reducing the financial liability of the French under the
agreement.
The chief permanent benefits accruing to the United States from its
extensive war industry engaged in the manufacture of instruments for
sighting and controlling the fire of field guns were (1) a reserve
of optical instruments of the most advanced types, some of which had
previously been produced only by the French, (2) a large collection of
machinery for making these and similar instruments, and (3) an optical
glass industry more than sufficient to the normal needs of the country.
Before 1914 little, if any, optical glass had been produced in the
United States. In demobilizing this industry, the Ordnance Department
took care that all these military assets were properly fitted into the
preparedness plan.
Again we see at work the policy of centering future production in
an arsenal. Frankford Arsenal was designated as the military center
for fire-control instruments, and here were brought the reserves of
materials and tools acquired by the Government in the course of the
enterprise.
The production of some of the artillery sights proved to be almost
beyond the mechanical ability of American workmen. It took three
skilled organizations to produce the panoramic sights. Warner &
Swasey, of Cleveland, built these sights, but had to turn to the
J. A. Brashear Company, of Pittsburg, for the optical-glass prisms
to go into them. That company, in turn, did not have a skilled force
large enough to correct the roof angles of all the prisms required.
The Ordnance Department found a man who understood the correction of
optical plane surfaces in the person of Dr. G. W. Ritchey of the Mt.
Wilson Observatory, Pasadena, California. He trained a number of men
in this recondite craft, and they staffed an important department of
the extensive optical shop which the Carnegie Institution built at
government expense at Pasadena.
An extensive production of military optical instruments was permitted
after the armistice and before the contracts were terminated. The
work of producing some of these instruments was long and difficult,
the instruments themselves would not deteriorate in storage, and the
evolution and improvement of such instruments is slow. Moreover, the
labor cost is by far the greatest cost in making optical instruments.
The value of the unfinished components as scrap, even from an industry
as large as that created in 1917–1918, with its eighty-three factories
at work on contracts of a value of $50,000,000, was almost negligible.
As a result of this permission to proceed, the industry reached its
peak of production late in January, 1919. The only contracts terminated
were those under which no production had begun before the armistice,
those the holders of which asked for termination, and those which had
already produced undue excesses of easily made articles.
The largest producer of army optical instruments, the Bausch & Lomb
Optical Company, of Rochester, held contracts amounting to more than
$6,000,000 in value and produced before the armistice materials worth
over $3,000,000. The War Department obtained no machinery from this
plant when the contracts were terminated, but it received and shipped
to Frankford Arsenal large quantities of finished parts of instruments.
The present optical shop at Frankford was largely equipped with
machinery originally procured by the Recording & Computing Machines
Company of Dayton. This company, which had never built optical
instruments before the war, took contracts worth $4,000,000, built
and equipped a complete optical plant, and became a producer, among
other things developing a mechanical method of milling glass for
prisms. Similar methods of demobilization were followed at all the
war factories making sights and fire-control instruments: desirable
machinery and unfinished components were collected at Frankford
Arsenal, and the excess materials were sold. This plan put thousands
of instruments into the war reserves, enough of some sorts to maintain
the military establishment for years to come. Of certain important
classes of instruments the quantities obtained from the war industry
are deficient.
Between the year 1914, when war broke out, shutting off the export
of optical glass from Germany, and 1917, when the United States went
into the war, five American organizations--the Bureau of Standards,
the Pittsburg Plate Glass Company, Keuffel & Esser, the Spencer Lens
Company, and Bausch & Lomb--developed the manufacture of optical glass
on a small scale, but in quality the glass was not up to the European
standard. In the spring of 1917, scientists of the Carnegie Institution
of Washington stepped in to help the manufacturers with their glass
problems, and complete coöperation all along the line resulted in a
successful industry before many months had gone by. The four commercial
producers eventually turned out optical glass more rapidly than both
the Army and Navy could use it. Some of this glass was the equal of
any ever made in Germany, and much of it, though of “war quality,”
was still good enough for many uses. The army ordnance contracts were
entirely with Bausch & Lomb and the Pittsburg Plate Glass Company
at its Charleroi (Pennsylvania) plant. The production of glass on
the war contracts was terminated immediately after the armistice. A
large quantity of glass not yet formed into sets of optics was stored
at Frankford. The Pittsburg Plate Glass Company did not resume any
production, but Bausch & Lomb continued to make optical glass for their
own uses.
Those who assume that, because we created an ample optical glass
industry during the war, the United States is to be forever free of
dependence upon foreign sources of this commodity, probably are too
optimistic. There are numerous reasons why an optical glass industry
is not likely to survive in the United States, at least on any
large scale. The total normal American consumption of optical glass
amounts to less than $1,000,000 a year--not enough to support many
glass-making establishments. Secondly, nearly all the Allies developed
war glass industries of their own, and the result is that the world
has a large surplus of optical glass, which, if of good quality,
does not deteriorate in storage. Thirdly, the war expansion of the
world industry has created facilities above the present normal world
requirements. In the fourth place, the industry is a precarious one,
subject to heavy losses from carelessness or ineptitude in the mill.
In the fifth, there is no tariff protection for American glass, the
law permitting the free importation of precision optics for scientific
purposes. Finally, there is a long-standing prejudice in favor of
European-made scientific instruments, a prejudice against which an
American industry would have to fight. Three American producers,
however, are said to be making optical glass for their trade.
In anticipation of a possible collapse of the industry, the Bureau of
Standards has brought to Washington the glass-making facilities which
it set up in a special war plant at Pittsburg. This plant can make two
tons of optical glass a month. It is to be operated by the Government
with the view both of improving processes and of creating within the
Government an expert knowledge of this vital war industry.
The United States carried further than any other nation in the war the
substitution of mechanical power for the power of draft animals in the
movement of field artillery. Nothing in our army equipment in France
did the French, themselves the premier artillerists of the world,
admire more than our motorization of artillery. The total contracts
for ordnance vehicles represented an expenditure of $400,000,000. The
program actually delivered 13,000 vehicles to the A. E. F., produced
before the armistice an equal number ready for shipment abroad, and
had 60,000 other vehicles under construction when the halt came. The
Maxwell-Chalmers plant at Detroit and the Reo plant at Lansing, working
in coöperation, were producing 1,100 5-ton tractors a month, and this
production represented the military power of 12,000 draft animals and
4,000 men.
The demobilization of this industry was accomplished rapidly. Orders
were cut to the bone, merely enough post-armistice production being
allowed to enable the plants to dovetail their war business into the
resumption of their commercial businesses. Since little special-purpose
machinery was required in producing war tractors, the Ordnance
Department created no manufacturing center after the armistice as a
source of future supply. The war left the Army, however, with a number
of engineers who had gained experience in adapting mechanical power to
military uses in the field, and these men are continuing a development
which, doubtless, will in time eliminate the horse from our artillery
regiments.
One of the innovations of the war was the motor-driven mobile repair
shop for repairing artillery in the field. Each shop consisted of
two sections, with fifteen trucks and fourteen trailers in each
section--nearly sixty vehicles to the entire shop. On the trailers were
installed the heavy machine tools, and one trailer of each section was
equipped with an electric generator for light and power. When the shop
was set up for business it presented the spectacle of two rings of
vehicles ranged around the two power plants and hooked up with electric
cables. The manufacturing program, both before and after the armistice,
produced sixteen such shops, consisting of 600 vehicles. Six of these
shops have been stored; ten are in use by the permanent establishments.
In addition, in terminating the contracts the Ordnance Department came
into possession of the unassembled but finished components of eight
additional shops. Thousands of jigs, fixtures, and small tools used in
this manufacturing project have been stored away and catalogued.
Tank production was drastically curtailed immediately after the
armistice. The tank contracts involved the expenditure of $175,000,000.
The total production of 6-ton Renault tanks was limited to 950, of
which sixty-four were produced before the armistice. The contracts with
the Ford Motor Company to build 15,000 3-ton tanks were terminated at
once after the armistice, production being limited to the fifteen trial
machines produced before November 11, 1918. Of the great 36-ton tanks,
Anglo-American design, the Ordnance Department built 100 at Rock Island
Arsenal after the armistice, procuring from the British for the purpose
the hulls and guns. The tank assembly plant at Châteauroux, France,
went to the French Government in the general settlement of 1919 and is
now being used as a car repair shop.
No considerations of future reserves of finished materials affected the
demobilization of the extensive war industry which was manufacturing
our rifles, machine guns, pistols, and the ammunition for them. The
production of these articles had been so successful that the moment
the war ended the supplies on hand were sufficient for the permanent
Army for years to come, with reserve supplies heavy enough to arm
a large field force. The interests of the Army, considered alone,
therefore, demanded the immediate cessation after the armistice of
all this manufacture; but economic considerations and the dictates of
good business practice made it expedient to taper off this production
gradually, even at the cost of producing more materials than the War
Department could possibly use.
Special problems arose in the liquidation of this great industry. In
the first place, the factories which made rifles and machine guns were
sharply specialized for just this work, making it difficult for them
to turn to any commercial production with the same equipment. Several
of these plants were specially created for the war work, and therefore
had no prewar occupation to which they could turn. It was necessary
for them either to close out entirely (as the Eddystone rifle plant of
the Midvale Steel & Ordnance Company near Philadelphia actually did
do) or to develop some new product. Two of the small-arms plants after
the armistice added departments for the manufacture of ball bearings,
one went into the production of automobile accessories and sporting
arms, and a fourth (which had made bayonets) took up the manufacture of
cutlery. It was necessary to give these concerns time to work out these
conversions, if an acute problem in unemployment were to be avoided.
The sharp centralization of the small-arms industry in the East was
another factor which influenced the Government to permit an unwelcome
production after the armistice. Most of the rifles, for instance, were
manufactured within a small area in the state of Connecticut. The
Winchester plant at New Haven employed 20,000 operatives, the Remington
plant at Bridgeport 12,000, and there were several others of this size.
To close them all up forthwith would have created a bad industrial
situation in this busy and prosperous section of New England.
The policy adopted, therefore, was to taper off the production of such
materials. Upon the signing of the armistice ten American plants were
engaged exclusively in the production of automatic arms. They employed
20,000 persons. They had reached a daily output of more than 1,100
machine guns and automatic rifles on contracts calling for the delivery
of 650,000 such weapons, at a projected cost of $193,000,000, of which
465,000 guns were as yet undelivered. The final cancellations stopped
the production of 382,000 guns, making the total war production 268,000
guns. In the various plants the Government had invested $11,000,000 in
machinery.
By January 15, 1919, the rate of producing machine guns had been cut
in two. By June 28, all production of machine guns had stopped. The
Springfield and Rock Island arsenals, always the Army’s development
and manufacturing centers for small arms, were selected to receive the
reserve manufacturing equipment acquired by the Ordnance Department
in the prosecution of the machine-gun project. One unit of machinery
sufficient for the daily manufacture of 100 Browning heavy machine
guns, and another unit for the daily manufacture of 200 Browning
automatic rifles were stored at Rock Island Arsenal. This reserve
machinery was worth about $4,275,000.
Similar measures were taken in the demobilization of the war rifle
industry. Production was curtailed gradually, ceasing entirely in
March, 1919. Three great private plants and two government factories
(Springfield Armory and Rock Island Arsenal) built our war rifles.
The War Department invested over $22,000,000 in machinery. With this
machinery the rifle-making departments of the Springfield Armory and
the Rock Island Arsenal were practically reëquipped to produce the
Model of 1903 (Springfield) rifle. The Springfield Armory (the chief
future manufacturing center for this arm) was equipped to make 1,000
of these rifles in an 8-hour day, and Rock Island, 600. Working at
full speed, both centers can produce 3,500 Springfield rifles every
twenty-four hours. In addition special small tools, jigs, and fixtures
sufficient for the production of 1,000 Model of 1917 (Enfield)
rifles daily were stored at the Springfield Armory, and a unit of
manufacturing equipment for producing 500 automatic pistols daily was
also stored at Springfield.
Four-fifths of the outstanding orders for 5,250,000,000 rounds of
rifle and pistol cartridges were terminated after the armistice. The
policy adopted was to permit the small-arms ammunition factories
to operate until September 1, 1919, if they so elected; but their
production in that time could not exceed a quantity equal to what they
might have produced if they had operated twenty-four hours a day from
the armistice to February 1, 1919. This policy enabled the factories
to dispense with their war labor slowly. About 1,600,000,000 rounds
of small-arms ammunition were stored as a future reserve. The War
Department had purchased machinery with a total producing capacity
of about 3,000,000 rounds of ammunition in an 8-hour day. All the
single-purpose special machinery and all special tools, jigs, and
fixtures were retained, and with them the Frankford Arsenal was built
up as a great center for the manufacture of small-arms ammunition.
Before 1917 the annual productive capacity of the arsenal was not
more than 100,000,000 rounds of rifle and pistol ammunition. The
Ordnance Department has increased this capacity to 750,000 rounds in
an 8-hour day. Immense quantities of bandoleers, cartridge clips,
cartridge cases, metal, and other ammunition components acquired in the
liquidation have been stored for future use.
CHAPTER XIII
AIRCRAFT
Next to the manufacture of ordnance, the production of airplanes and
balloons and their accessories was the largest war enterprise of
American industry. A hundred thousand workmen toiled in the aircraft
factories, the business of which was represented by over 5,000 war
contracts with a face value of several hundred million dollars. For
the airplanes themselves, the contracts involved the War Department
in the sum of $196,000,000, but this branch of the industry was but
a small part of the entire air program. Merely for motor trucks the
Air Service entered upon commitments reaching a value of $45,000,000.
The investment in flying fields, balloon schools, and other physical
installations erected during the war in the United States was, on
November 11, 1918, approximately $75,000,000. Nearly 20,000 men had
been trained to fly, and the Air Service numbered all its officers
and men at 175,000--an organization larger than the regular army
establishment in 1916. On Armistice Day the Air Service had spent
$43,000,000 in the production of spruce for our own airplane factories
and those of the Allies. For this investment it had to show a great
logging equipment, including sawmills, three railroad systems (with 130
miles of trackage), hotels, and the housing for thousands of woodsmen.
It was heavily involved also in plans for the production of other raw
materials used in the manufacture of airplanes--$30,000,000 invested
or obligated in the development of a chain of chemical plants for
producing “dope,” the varnish that stretches and waterproofs the fabric
of airplane wings; and $8,000,000 tied up in the fabric itself or in
raw cotton for weaving into fabric. The Service spent over $25,000,000
for gasoline and oil. The largest enterprise of all was the production
of airplane engines, the contracts for which reached a total value of
$450,000,000.
These figures are cited to show the enormous size of our air project,
to show, also, how small a part of a balanced air program is the
manufacture of the airplanes themselves, and, finally, to controvert
and refute the widespread, the almost universal, impression to-day that
the whole air program of America in the war was a failure, a scandal,
and a blot on the fair name of our war industry.
The average American, if he has not examined the record of our war
aircraft program, probably holds the opinion that a billion dollars
or more appropriated for aircraft vanished into thin air during the
war, and that all we had to show for the enormous expenditure was a
few hundred airplanes of inferior design. To this day such statements
are still being made by irresponsible journalists and other careless
critics of the conduct of the war. Against such assertions we oppose
the statement that the production of aëronautical materials during the
war was as successful as any other great branch of war industry, that
we got value received for our money--“war value,” that is--and that the
losses incurred were the natural and inevitable losses to be expected
by any nation unprepared for war. The general charge of shocking waste
and failure reposes upon nothing more substantial than rumor and muddy
impression. Behind the rejoinder we are able to marshal the facts,
which are, with the demobilization of the industry virtually complete,
now to be evaluated as a whole.
[Illustration:
_Photo from Packard Motor Car Co._
PREPARING LIBERTY ENGINES FOR STORAGE]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
ASSEMBLING PLANT AT ROMORANTIN]
In the first place, how much money did we actually spend in the
prosecution of the great aircraft program? A billion and a half? A
billion? Not at all. The war appropriations for the air were widely
advertised; the acts of Congress covering back into the Treasury the
unexpended balances, the transfers of air service funds to other
purposes, and the recoveries and reimbursements from the sales of
surplus materials were not so well advertised. The well-advertised
appropriations came to a total of $1,691,854,758. But the greater part
of these appropriations was made when the Air Service was a branch of
the Signal Corps, and a considerable sum went for the procurement
of signaling materials not connected with aircraft at all. Moreover,
when the armistice came, several hundred million dollars of these
authorizations were as yet untouched by those procuring the aircraft,
and Congress revoked all such appropriations. When the subtractions are
made on account of the Signal Corps’ proper business and on account of
revoked appropriations, we find that the net appropriation on account
of the air program was $1,158,070,773.
[Illustration:
_Signal Corps Photo from drawing by J. André Smith_
FLYING FIELD AT ISSOUDUN]
[Illustration:
_Signal Corps Photo from drawing by J. André Smith_
LAME DUCKS]
But this vast sum is still far above the sum actually spent. On the day
of the armistice there were great unexpended balances in practically
all the appropriations granted to the Air Service, and these balances
remained great after the liquidation of the industry. Since the
unexpended balances eventually will be recovered into the general funds
of the Treasury, it is proper to subtract them here; and by making the
subtraction, we find that the war expenditure for the aircraft program
was approximately $868,000,000. Yet even this was not net expenditure.
From this amount there is still to be subtracted the millions received
from the sale and transfer of surplus materials, the reimbursements
on account of overpayments to contractors, and other items. The full
subtraction of these credits leaves us with a net war expenditure for
aircraft of approximately $720,000,000.
This figure, indeed, is an estimate; but it is a close estimate. It
is an estimate because, at the time this is written (July, 1921), the
liquidation of the war aircraft industry is not yet quite complete.
Four contractors’ claims are still unsettled, and surplus worth less
than $18,000,000 remains unsold. Therefore, even if the estimated
cost of settling the claims and the estimated recovery from the sale
of surplus are grossly inaccurate, such errors cannot greatly affect
the total estimate. The last official financial statement on the war
business of the Air Service, dated April 23, 1921, showed that the net
cost then was $738,133,972.28, leaving in the Treasury at that time an
unexpended balance of $419,936,801.20, and this cost was still to be
reduced by recoveries from the sale of surplus and by reimbursements
of overpayments made to contractors in the settlements.
Thus we have, as the cost of the war air program, the figure
$720,000,000--not half the billion and a half alleged by the critics
to have been wasted. But what happened to the $720,000,000? Was it
wasted? What did we get for it? The answers to these questions may be a
revelation to those who have accepted the common misstatement that the
whole project ended in a colossal failure.
First, airplanes. For the money spent the Army received, not a few
hundred airplanes, but approximately 19,000. When the money was
appropriated, those in charge of the air program, and the public,
too, expected these funds to produce airplanes in numbers sufficient
to darken the skies. Well, here was the sky-darkening cloud of
them--19,000 planes, produced and delivered to the Army. And at least
half this number consisted of “service” planes, as distinguished from
training machines. The average value of an airplane without engine may
be conservatively placed at $6,000. Thus, the planes delivered on the
war orders were worth $114,000,000, a sum which accounts for nearly
one-sixth of the total war expenditure made by the Air Service. In
round numbers, the American industry produced 12,000 of these planes
before the armistice, and afterwards, during the termination of the
work, completed production on 1,500 that were unfinished. The remaining
5,500 were purchased from the French, British, and Italian industries.
Those who criticize the administration of this branch of our war
industry commonly lose sight of the fact that all the foreign airplanes
procured by us were bought with the funds appropriated for the Air
Service.
Planes, however, are a small item compared with some of the other
materials procured with the $720,000,000. The American industry
produced 30,000 aviation engines before the armistice and more
than 11,000 afterwards on war orders during the termination of the
industry--the exact figure, representing the total war production,
being 41,590. Of these, 20,478 were Liberty engines, 15,572 of
which were produced before November 30, 1918. The Liberty engines
alone represented over 8,000,000 horsepower. In addition, from the
$720,000,000 spent, we bought several thousand aviation engines in
Europe. In all we received approximately 45,000 engines for our money.
At $6,000 apiece--a fair average price--this procurement accounted for
$270,000,000 of the money. Planes and engines together accounted for
$384,000,000, or more than half the total expenditure.
This was all value received. But we have still to consider many
important items of expense necessary to the prosecution of an air
project such as ours was. It took, for instance, $190,000,000 to
maintain the Air Service of the American Expeditionary Forces. The
appropriation procured 1,100 balloons both before and after the
armistice, at a cost, say, of $11,000,000. As we have noted above,
$75,000,000 went into buildings for the Air Service in this country,
another great sum into motor trucks, still another into fuel and
lubricating oils, and upwards of $80,000,000 into the development of
raw materials for airplane manufacture--spruce, dope, and fabric.
This last was a necessary and justifiable expenditure, in that it
sustained the airplane industry, not only of the United States, but of
the principal Allies as well. Too, the development of raw materials
was on a scale which anticipated great expansion of the manufacture of
airplanes in 1919 and 1920. And so we can go, item by item, through
the list of sub-enterprises in the aviation project and find that we
received great value for our money and that almost the only wastes
were the to-be-expected war wastes, largely due to our unpreparedness
for war. These wastes were represented in the high prices paid for
materials produced in such a hurry on such a scale. These high unit
prices, of course, took care of the cost of creating almost the whole
manufacturing equipment of the industry. However, we secured the
materials.
We may pause here, too, to correct another misapprehension which has
had some currency: namely, that not only was a billion shamefully
wasted on aircraft but it was wasted by the so-called dollar-a-year men
called to Washington and placed in charge of the aircraft program. The
only dollar-a-year men connected with that program in a conspicuous
capacity were the civilian members of the Aircraft Board--Mr. Howard
E. Coffin, chairman, and Messrs. Richard F. Howe and Harry B. Thayer,
the other two members. But the Aircraft Board was advisory only in
function and possessed absolutely no administrative or executive
powers. It acted as a clearing house in the effort to coördinate the
aircraft production of the War and Navy departments. The actual work
of procuring aircraft--designing, contracting for, inspecting, and
receiving materials--was always in the hands of the uniformed services.
The Aircraft Board had no control of the spending of appropriations,
except that of the relatively insignificant appropriation of $100,000
granted to it by Congress to cover its office expenses.
The industry which wrote the records of aircraft production was
attaining great momentum when the armistice was signed, although it
had not yet reached capacity production. It had, however, in the
final thirty-one days of active hostilities, produced 1,582 airplanes
(1,081 of which were De Haviland service planes for use in France),
5,177 engines (of which 3,034 were Liberty engines), and 249 kite
balloons. The business of terminating this industry was difficult.
The liquidation plan adopted was essentially like that used by the
Ordnance Department. Before the armistice the production branch of
the Air Service was organized into eight manufacturing districts,
with headquarters respectively at Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Dayton,
Detroit, New York, Pittsburg, and San Francisco. Five thousand persons
were employed by the district organizations. After the armistice the
district production boards became district claims boards for the Air
Service, and they conducted most of the actual work of terminating
production and arranging settlements with the contractors. Their
settlements went up for approval, first, to the Air Service Claims
Board and, finally, to the War Department Claims Board.
The air service contracts outstanding on the first day of the armistice
obligated the Government to accept completed materials to the value
of $767,423,308.50. Completed materials and raw and semi-finished
materials accepted by the Government in the settlement with the
contractors after the armistice reached a value of $259,733,874.30.
Thus the contracts and parts of contracts terminated in the liquidation
accounted for a cancellation of work to the value of $509,689,434.20.
In addition to accepting and paying for the materials, the Government
paid in cash to the producers in settlement of their claims the sum of
$94,013,776.51. Hundreds of contractors accepted the statutory $1.00
and relieved the Government of all financial obligation.
For the sole or leading purpose of creating reserves for future use by
the Army, there was little or no production of air supplies after the
armistice. Leaving aside all questions of the obsolescence of design,
no major class of military supplies is less durable in storage than
aircraft materials. Like an egg, an airplane or a balloon cannot be
slightly bad and still be usable. It must be 100-per-cent perfect,
or it is dangerous. The life of rubber is short even under the most
favorable conditions. The rubber in balloon fabric does not escape
this swift impairment. The rubber tires of airplanes deteriorate with
equal rapidity. The laminated and glued joints of the wooden wing
beams of airplanes expand, contract, and work loose in the varying
humidity of the surrounding air and are soon weakened below the safety
point. Propellers are also highly sensitive to changes in humidity and
temperature. Storage batteries, when stacked together in storage, wear
out in a few months, each cell apparently working upon and adversely
affecting its neighbors. Bolted wing cloth, when left folded, becomes
weak along the creases. Of all aviation supplies, engines are the least
susceptible to deterioration in storage.
In view of these considerations, such production of aircraft and
aviation supplies as was permitted after the armistice was undertaken
almost solely in the interest of the contractors and their employees.
Most of the factories were allowed to continue in operation under
war contracts only until they had used up materials in process of
manufacture when the armistice was signed. Even this operation was
conducted at a reduced rate. The airplane contracts had called for a
delivery of 27,000 planes in all. The production under these contracts,
in exact figures, amounted to 11,754 planes before the armistice and
1,732 afterwards, a total of 13,486 airplanes produced by the American
factories. Contract terminations canceled the production of about an
equal number.
The post-armistice production of airplane engines was somewhat greater,
both proportionately and in numbers of units delivered. This was due
partly to the greater momentum acquired by the engine project, partly
to the fact that engines could be stored safely and would retain good
military value for years to come, and partly to the necessity of
keeping the engine makers at work while their factories were turning to
normal production. The total American production of aviation engines
on the war contracts was as follows: deliveries to October 31, 1918,
28,509; deliveries thereafter, 13,081; total war production, 41,590. Of
these engines 20,493 were Liberty engines, of which about 5,000 were
produced after the armistice.
About 300 observation balloons were produced after the armistice before
the manufacture could be terminated.
In one important particular the policy adopted in the demobilization
of the war aircraft industry was exactly the opposite of that used
in demobilizing the ordnance industry. In working back to a peace
footing, it was the policy of the Ordnance Department to reserve
complete manufacturing equipments and to set up stand-by plants for the
manufacture of some of the most important materials in ordnance supply.
On the other hand, in demobilizing the airplane industry it was the
policy for the Government not to retain any manufacturing facilities
whatsoever. There were strong strategic reasons behind both these
policies. For field guns, for recuperators, for shell, and for other
important ordnance, there is little or no normal commercial demand;
and the only way the Ordnance Department could guarantee the future
existence of facilities for producing these materials was to retain
the equipment created during the war. But there is, or can be, some
commercial demand for airplanes, and some day there will undoubtedly
be a great commercial demand for them. It is important to the military
welfare of the United States that this country take a foremost place
in the improvement of designs and in the production of flying machines
for commercial use. Only through the development of a great independent
aircraft industry in this country can the Government be assured of the
existence of facilities upon which it can rely to give this nation
great power in the air. As conditions now are, the Government itself
must be the chief customer of the airplane industry, and on the
government orders the industry must live until commercial flying begins
to develop on a scale comparable at least to the early development of
railway transportation in the United States. If the Air Service were to
have retained the war manufacturing facilities as government producing
and stand-by plants, that act would have dealt a staggering blow to
the infant commercial industry in the most uncertain period of its
existence.
Only one exception was made. During the war the Wright-Martin Aircraft
Corporation developed a plant in Long Island City for the production of
Hispano-Suiza engines. This plant was purchased by the War Department
and is being retained as a stand-by plant under the name of the United
States Aëronautical Engine Plant. The future of this establishment,
however, is uncertain.
Although it ruthlessly dispensed with the war manufacturing facilities,
the Air Service retained in the demobilization a considerable part of
the physical plant created for it during the war. Of the twenty-six
flying fields used in the training of the war aviators, six have been
retained as flying fields. These are the Bolling, Langley, Mather, and
Kelly flying fields and the Carlstrom and March pilot training fields.
The present equipment also includes three balloon schools, three
balloon fields, one mechanics school (Chanute Field), one observation
school, various stations for the defense of our island possessions and
for the patrol of the Mexican border, nineteen supply, storage, and
repair depots, and various other stations.
The storage of reserve supplies retained by the Air Service afforded
some interesting problems, since nearly every class of supplies
required special treatment in storage. Engines, for instance, were
thoroughly covered inside and out with a heavy rust-preventing grease
compound before being stored away in dry, cool concrete warehouses.
Reserve balloons were dusted with talc, rolled carefully so as to put
as little weight as possible on creases and folds, enclosed in sealed
rubber envelopes, packed in wooden chests, which were then sealed up
so as to be practically waterproof and air-tight, and then stacked in
dry rooms in which air at a medium temperature circulates constantly
among the chests. Even so, no long life for the balloons is expected.
Wing fabric, both cotton and linen, was unbolted, rolled upon cardboard
tubes, wrapped in paper, and suspended on racks in rooms heated in
winter. Aviators’ fur and woolen clothing was stored in fly-proof and
moth-proof tar-paper-lined rooms, the floors of which were thickly
covered with naphthaline. Fabric was stripped from airplane wings
before storage in order to permit the free ventilation of the wood;
glued joints were given an extra coat of varnish; all metal parts were
painted with red lead or white lead; and the wings were stored in racks
designed to keep their edges straight. Thousands of propellers were
stored at the aviation supply depot at Middletown, Pennsylvania, in
a room in which moisture sprayers maintain a constant humidity and a
thermostat a constant temperature.
The aircraft contractors’ claims proved to be fairly easy to adjust
except one, the so-called castor bean case. This proved to be one
of the most vexing settlements which came before the War Department
Claims Board. From its humble position as an unwelcome medicament
of the nursery, castor oil jumped during the war to the eminence
of being an indispensable lubricant for the rotary engines used in
driving airplanes. The prospective demand in 1918 for castor oil
far outstripped the world supply. We needed 6,000,000 gallons by
July, 1919. The Air Service therefore took the unprecedented step of
attempting to grow castor beans in America, although castor beans, in
merchantable quantities, had never been grown here before. Still, in
the Southern States we had the correct climate, and no obstacle seemed
to stand in the way of a successful crop.
Accordingly, through twenty-three prime contractors, the Air Service
arranged with some 12,000 southern farmers to plant castor beans in
100,000 acres of land. Glittering prospects were held forth: thirty
bushels an acre was only an average yield, and the Government would
pay handsomely for the beans. Thus castor beans won 100,000 acres
of good American soil away from rice, cotton, and corn, even at the
war prices of these commodities. About planting-time in 1918 all was
ready--fields, husbandmen, and tools--all except seed. After all, the
farmers had to have seed; and to get seed the Government seized a cargo
of castor beans from India, originally committed to a more sinister
purpose. These beans the Government distributed among the 12,000
prospective producers, who planted them; and then, as the cartoonist so
aptly says, the fun began.
Certain of the growers, like suburban gardeners, watched for bean
shoots that never appeared. Some of these alien beans seemed to derive
a sort of floral madness from the heady gulf loam and sent up veritable
trunks twenty, thirty, and forty feet in air. But never a bean pod
crowned such luxuriant growth. Whether because of the growers’ lack
of experience, unfavorable climate, or, more likely, defective seed,
there has seldom been an American crop failure more nearly total than
this. By gleaning every bean, the producers managed to gather 181,000
bushels, or 1.8 bushels to the acre.
As soon as the fell result was known, 12,000 angry farmers besieged the
Government with demands for reparation. The claims aggregated millions.
Not only did the farmers hold the Government responsible for the crop
loss, but they also, dozens of them, put in claims for property damage
and restoration costs, maintaining that in clearing their lands after
the bean crop they had had to use stump pullers and dynamite to rout
out the enormous stalks. One farmer sarcastically credited the War
Department with his winter’s supply of firewood, which he said he
had been able to cut from his bean patch. The War Department finally
settled the claims for a total of $1,540,638, which was at the rate of
$8.50 a bushel for the beans received. Thus ended the first lesson in
the American cultivation of the castor bean. It will be some time yet
before the Department of Agriculture will have to create a branch to
gather statistics on the domestic castor bean crop.
The work of demobilizing the Air Service of the American Expeditionary
Forces ramified into several main branches: the cancellation of
our foreign contracts and the settlement of our accounts with the
governments of the Allies arising from the mutual purchases of
materials; the sale of the installations and surplus movable property
acquired by the Service during the war; the salvaging of worn-out
equipment; and the shipment to the United States of airplanes and
other equipment retained by the Air Service for future use. Most of
the surplus property of the Air Service abroad went to France in the
bulk sale of all surplus A. E. F. property, although some was taken
by other governments in Europe in smaller purchases. These sales were
consummated by the United States Liquidation Commission, which also
concluded the financial settlements of our air service accounts with
the Allied governments. These transactions are to be explained in some
detail in a later chapter. The disposition of all aircraft materials
retained by the A. E. F. was accomplished by the Air Service itself.
The A. E. F.’s production center before the armistice had been at the
great flying field at Romorantin, near Tours. Here all new airplanes
acquired by the A. E. F., either from the American industry or from
the factories in Europe, had been received, assembled, equipped, and
dispatched to the front. It had taken more than 10,000 officers and
enlisted men to do this work. After the armistice Romorantin was made
the concentration depot for all American air service supplies in
France, and here all materials for return to the United States were
boxed and forwarded to the ports. About 1,000 airplane engines were
shipped to the United States and 2,097 planes, of which 347 were
German, 1,139 British and French, and 611 American De Havilands.
Merely the packing of this equipment was a work of great size. It
required, for instance, 7,500,000 board feet of seasoned lumber for the
crates, besides large quantities of nails, bolts, clamps, wire cable,
paint, and roofing paper, and also tools for the packers. A lumber mill
employing 195 operatives was set up merely to resaw, tongue, and groove
the lumber for boxes and crates.
The 2,000 airplanes returned to the United States represented
practically all of the great aërial equipment of the A. E. F. which
was saved for use after the war. The sales of our used airplanes
abroad after the armistice, to either governments or individuals,
were practically nothing. The remaining thousands of airplanes which
had once borne the American insignia aloft were stripped of their
salvageable materials and burned in great bonfires, the pyres of
original investments running up into millions of dollars. This seeming
profligacy was harshly criticized by those in this country who did
not understand the conditions; but, when those responsible for the
destruction had put in their defense, the criticism ceased.
The life of airplanes in use or in storage is short at best. Thousands
of the A. E. F. planes had given considerable service, either at the
training fields or at the front. The average life expectancy of these
ships was probably less than three months. There was no sale for
them abroad--France already owned many more airplanes than she could
possibly use up, and the attempts of the Air Service to sell used
planes to individuals ended in complete failure. To knock down these
machines, box them, subject them once more to the deteriorating effects
of the salt humidity of a transatlantic voyage, and to reassemble
them in the United States, would still further impair their condition
and still further abbreviate their average life. There was also to be
considered the expense of maintaining soldiers in France to protect
this _matériel_ for several months, the expense of preparing it for
shipment, and finally,--the chief cost,--the expense of transporting it
to the United States. The question was whether it was good business
to spend all this money for the sake of returning to the United States
materials which at best would have a useful life of only a few weeks,
and which, because of the surpluses of new or little used airplanes
already on hand, might never be used at all. The War Department did
not hesitate in its answer. It ordered the sale or destruction of
all A. E. F. airplanes of this class; and, since sale proved to be
impossible, the order meant their destruction.
Those in charge of the work, realizing that criticism would be likely
to follow, proceeded most carefully. Only the newest, least used,
and best conditioned planes were reserved for shipment home. The air
squadrons with the Army of Occupation were given a plentiful supply
of airplanes. The rest, destined for destruction, were given several
inspections by different committees and boards of survey, in order that
the Chief of the Air Service might have a plentitude of expert opinion
on which to base his condemnation orders.
The Class D material, as this condemned property was called, was
concentrated in three centers--Romorantin, Issoudun (where the
A. E. F. had operated the largest flying school in the world), and
Colombey-les-Belles (the demobilization depot for the zone of advance).
Here were conducted the final inspections. Many of the condemned planes
presented, to the unpracticed eye, a perfect appearance. Storage space
in the zone of advance after the armistice had always been short,
and these apparently good machines had suffered from exposure to the
weather. They were water-soaked; glued joints had given away, wooden
parts were warped, and so on. They would have had to be completely
rebuilt to be safe. Others had broken struts and cross braces and other
damaged parts. All such machines were set aside for salvage.
[Illustration:
_Photo from Air Service_
AMERICAN AIRPLANE WRECKAGE]
[Illustration:
_Photo from Air Service_
FUEL FOR THE BONFIRE]
The condemned airplanes then passed from crew to crew, who dismantled
them. All miscellaneous metal parts were stripped out and sent to the
quartermaster depots for sale as junk metal. Engines were removed and
saved, as were also propellers, landing gears, wheels, tires, axles,
cowls, gas tanks and oil tanks, controls, instruments, radio apparatus,
machine guns, bomb racks, and many other serviceable articles. Even
complete wings, when in good condition, were removed and packed for
shipment to the United States. The remaining débris, consisting of
little more than the highly inflammable wooden construction members and
dope-covered wing fabric, was piled in great heaps and burned. More
than 2,300 airplanes were thus disposed of.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
GERMAN LOCOMOTIVE TAKEN OVER BY A. E. F. ENGINEERS]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
ENGINEERS CONSTRUCTING BEAUNE UNIVERSITY]
One hundred observation balloons were ripped up and used for
tarpaulins, wagon covers, and the like. The rest of the A. E. F.
balloons were returned to the United States.
Airdromes on leased lands, occupied by small aviation units of the
A. E. F., were turned back to the owners of the property after troops
had dismantled all the war structures. With the exception of these,
the entire plant equipment of the Air Service in France, consisting
of training stations, observation schools, supply depots, and the
like, was taken over by the French Government. The American surplus of
aircraft in England was disposed of by the British Government, acting
as agent for the United States.
CHAPTER XIV
TECHNICAL SUPPLIES
The demobilization problem of the Corps of Engineers was a two-branched
one in that, while the Engineers had purchased heavily of supplies
in the United States, they had used those supplies principally in
France, where also they had placed contracts for the delivery of large
quantities of engineering materials which it was not expedient to ship
to the A. E. F. from the United States. When the armistice came, it
found great engineering production projects well advanced both in this
country and abroad, large surpluses of materials on hand on both sides
of the ocean, and in France an enormous activity in the construction of
buildings and other more or less permanently installed facilities for
the expedition. In France the Engineer Corps was charged with the duty
of building docks, port terminal facilities, storage depots, hospitals,
barracks, railroads, and other equipment for the Army, as well as that
of building roads and bridges, tunneling out mines, and stringing
wire for the troops at the front. It was the job of the Engineers
after the armistice to terminate this whole vast business, closing out
the contracts, settling with the contractors, disposing of surplus
supplies, and storing reserves for possible use by a future army of
large size.
At the time of the armistice the Engineers were engaged on more
than 600 separate construction projects in France. The work on
246 of these was stopped immediately, and the only permitted
post-armistice construction was that of facilities to be used during
the demobilization of the A. E. F. These cancellations accounted for
a saving of $135,000,000. The cancellations included projects for the
construction of 450 miles of railroad. Contracts with French producers
of engineering materials were canceled to the value of $30,000,000. In
settling with the contractors the Engineers followed the principle
that the American Government would compensate the foreign producers for
all losses sustained by them, but would pay no anticipated profits.
Eventually the French contractors’ claims were settled by the payment
of less than $1,500,000. Purchase orders placed with French producers,
calling for the delivery of materials worth about $13,000,000, were
canceled and settled for less than $90,000, of which sum about $60,000
was paid for supplies accepted in the settlement.
The Engineers in France found considerable constructive work to do
after the armistice. There were camps to be built at the American ports
of embarkation in France, nearly 10,000 miles of roads to be repaired,
and schools, theatres, and athletic fields, including the Pershing
Stadium near Paris, to be constructed. These, and the installations
put in before the armistice, constituted for the A. E. F. a physical
equipment on which the American Government had spent hundreds of
millions of dollars; yet after the return of the Expeditionary
Forces, the physical installation in France, taken as a whole, was
more of an embarrassment to the United States than an asset. Some of
the railroads, docks, and other great pieces of construction work
undoubtedly possessed great inherent future value to the French, and
we could expect to be well paid for turning them over to the French
Government; but as an offset there were scores of installations of no
peace-time value at all--roads, military railroads, and vast camps
of flimsy construction built upon fertile farm lands. The obligation
was upon the A. E. F. to restore these occupied French lands to their
original condition; but there were approximately 50,000 acres of French
farms so occupied, and to have restored this land would have taken the
time of 30,000 men for several years.
The great reserves of engineering supplies in France, as contrasted
with permanent installations, were indeed an asset, but not so much
of an asset as one would think. In the first place, to sell them to
private buyers in the European markets would have been a work of
several years, during which time the American Government would have had
to maintain in France a force of perhaps 5,000 men. Moreover, all that
time the engineering stores would have been constantly deteriorating,
so that their average value would not have been nearly so great as
their value at the time of the armistice.
These were the considerations which led to the decision to dispose
of all American engineering facilities in France, both supplies and
permanent or semi-permanent installations, in one blanket, lump-sum
deal with the French Government. The installations went to the French
at a price difficult to fix exactly, because in this same bargain was
included all other A. E. F. property not returned to the United States
and not sold to other foreign countries, the French paying the flat
price of $400,000,000 for the whole lot. It is estimated that the
American army installations in France accounted for $32,000,000 of
the total sum paid. If we accept that figure, then we must call it a
good bargain; for the French Government also assumed our obligations
to the French property owners, thus relieving us of the work of
restoring their farms to usable condition, ripping out the plumbing
and other modern conveniences with which we had profaned some of their
most ancient chateaux and monasteries, and doing a thousand similar
tasks, or, in lieu of such work, paying to the owners the cost of the
restoration in cash.
The few engineering supplies accumulated by the Americans in England
were sold to individual buyers. Enemy engineering _matériel_ captured
in France by the A. E. F. went to France in the lump-sum sale. In
Belgium the captured _matériel_ consisted principally of lumber and
sawmill equipment, worth about $250,000, and this went to Belgium to
pay that country for assuming the liability for the German ammunition
captured by our forces in Belgium.
It was the policy, because of the scarcity of shipping, to return no
heavy engineering supplies to the United States, but to bring back
such light technical equipment as searchlights, flash-ranging and
sound-ranging devices, instruments, and the like. It was, however,
expedient to return large quantities of steel rails and beams, because
these could serve as ballast in ships; and the Government also ordered
the return of a large quantity of road-building machinery for the use
of the Bureau of Public Roads. The Engineers saw to it that samples of
most of the engineering equipment used by other armies in the World War
were shipped to the United States for study here.
The property bargain with France disposed of everything except two
large claims against the United States: one for the American use of
the French railroads, and the other for the damage wrought by the
A. E. F.’s lumbering operations in the French forests. The railroad
claim was most intricate and complicated because of the inaccuracy
of the records and for other reasons, but it was finally settled in
full by allowing the French Government a credit of about $61,000,000
(435,000,000 francs valued at seven to the dollar). The forestry claim
was settled by allowing the French a credit of $10,000,000.
The claims of French contractors who had supplied us with engineering
materials were settled, along with nearly all other French contractors’
claims, by the United States Liquidation Commission in a blanket
negotiation with the French Government. One engineering claim,
however, remained unsettled. The contractor had agreed to supply 6,000
demountable barracks to the A. E. F., but he had delivered no buildings
by the beginning of the armistice and had made little progress in his
contract. Nevertheless, he presented a claim for damages amounting to
$600,000. The Liquidation Commission offered him $1,200, and he refused
it. His itemized costs included purchases of liquors, ladies’ dressing
tables, and oriental rugs, and he even admitted orally that one of his
“costs” was a mysterious payment of $4,000 to a French interpreter in
the office of the American engineer purchasing officer in France.
On the first day of the armistice there were nearly 200,000 tons
of engineering war materials produced and on hand in the United
States and awaiting shipment to France. This accumulation was worth
$31,000,000. It included hundreds of locomotives, thousands of cars,
and tens of thousands of tons of track materials, building materials,
general machinery, and tools. Meanwhile the American contracts for
the production of such supplies had reached a value of upwards of
$365,000,000, and production had reached such rates as 300 locomotives
and 1,800 railway cars a month. This business was terminated with the
utmost rapidity which was consistent with the manufacturer’s need
to convert his factory to other work without undue disturbance to
his labor force, and with the Government’s need to acquire adequate
military reserves of such supplies and to realize most on the money
which it had invested in the enterprise.
When the war industry came to an end, the War Department thus found
on its hands great quantities of engineering supplies. Some of these
supplies, such as cranes and road-building supplies, were turned over
to other departments of the Government for use in public works. Up to
May 15, 1920, engineering equipment and supplies had been sold on the
market with a gross cash return of over $110,000,000. Since the cost
of these materials had been about $128,000,000, the sales return was
about 85 per cent of the cost, an extraordinarily high recovery rate.
Foreign governments were heavy purchasers, particularly of railroad
locomotives and cars. The Engineers reserved from sale and stored in
various interior depots an immense reserve of supplies for possible
future military use. The principal items in this reserve are as follows:
[9]197 Consolidation-type locomotives.
[9]12,750 Cars, including gondolas, flat, box, tank, and dump cars.
736 Track-miles of standard-gauge railway materials.
353 Track-miles of light railway materials.
35 Divisions of heavy ponton bridge equipment.
6 Divisions of light ponton bridge equipment.
[10]67 Divisions of unit equipment.
81 60-inch open-type searchlight units (Cadillac trucks).
154 36-inch barrel-type searchlight units (Mack trucks).
1 Sound-ranging set.
10 Bull-Tucker recording sets.
25 Flash-ranging sets.
35 Ground-ranging sets.
The financial liquidation of the American war business of the
Engineers was unusually satisfactory, both because of the celerity
with which it was carried out and because of the low cost of its
termination to the Government. Shortly before the armistice many
of the most important purchasing activities of the Engineers were
transferred to the Director of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic, except
that the Chief of Engineers continued to buy railroad equipment and
several other sorts of heavy materials and also searchlights and
ranging apparatus. After the armistice the engineering contracts were
consequently terminated and settled by two agencies--the Engineers
themselves and the Division of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic. The
Engineer Claims Board was created to liquidate the war engineering
industry for the Corps of Engineers, acting, however, as subsidiary to
the War Department Claims Board. By May 15, 1920, the Engineer Claims
Board had settled up finally 168 of its total of 171 war claims. These
claims accounted for a total war business amounting to $238,000,000.
Production after the armistice resulted in the delivery of supplies
worth $17,000,000, which the War Department paid for at the contract
prices. The terminations equaled $218,500,000 in amount, and for this
termination the Government had to pay in cancellation costs only a
little more than $1,850,000, or less than 1 per cent of the original
obligation.
The orders for engineering supplies taken over by the Director of
Purchase, Storage, and Traffic amounted to $138,000,000. A considerable
part of this production was allowed to go through to completion,
and some of the business was transferred to other branches of the
War Department for settlement. The Director of Purchase and Storage
terminated entirely business amounting to $29,600,000 and paid in
termination charges $2,800,000--about 9 per cent of the original
obligation.
One engineer contractor, a builder of locomotives, whose contracts were
$55,000,000 in amount, canceled the entire business without cost to the
Government.
CHEMICAL WARFARE MATERIALS
The armistice and the order to begin demobilization played havoc for a
time with the Chemical Warfare Service, for the first assumption was
that the use of poisonous gases in warfare had originated and been
developed in, and would end with, the World War. On November 29, 1918,
the Director of the Chemical Warfare Service received an official
notice that “the amount of such [chemical warfare] equipment for the
needs of the Army after the passing of the present emergency will be
zero.” The gas-mask production division of the Chemical Warfare Service
was a highly organized and highly efficient body, and so rapidly did
it work after the armistice that it succeeded in dismantling its
gas-mask manufacturing plants and selling almost all the machinery
before Congress blocked the plan and, with new legislation, made the
Chemical Warfare Service a permanent branch of the regular military
establishment. The gas production division of the Service, however, was
not so precipitate, and it retained the facilities acquired during the
war for the production of poison gases and chemicals.
The Gas Defense Division, which produced the gas masks and other
defensive equipment, largely did its own manufacturing; but it
contracted extensively for the materials used in the manufacture.
On the day of the armistice its outstanding contracts amounted to
$5,000,000. By the end of the year 1918, or less than eight weeks
later, these contracts had been reduced by terminations to about
$150,000. The sales of surplus materials brought in about $8,000,000.
The termination of the production of gas masks at the two great plants
on Long Island was guided entirely by the best interests of the
thousands of employees, not one of whom was discharged until one of the
official employment agencies had found a place for him in commercial
life. In six months the demobilization of this branch of the Chemical
Warfare Service was complete.
So far as the employees were concerned, the demobilization of the
gas-making industry was not a difficult problem. All the plants were
owned by the Government, and most of the operatives were enlisted men
in uniform. Moreover, for nearly a month before the armistice there
had been almost a complete suspension of the manufacture of war gas,
due to a shortage of shell to be filled with gas.
The War Department’s equipment for making gas consisted of the Edgewood
Arsenal and a number of subsidiary plants located in various parts of
the country. The Edgewood Arsenal was retained, at first in stand-by
condition, with all machinery cleaned and oiled, all outdoor equipment
housed in safe storage, and all surfaces subject to deterioration
painted. The subsidiary plants, buildings, and equipment, were sold,
principally to manufacturers of chemicals and dyes. The sales were
conducted by the auction method, and the Government received good
prices.
Even some of the experts in the Chemical Warfare Service accepted the
common, but, as it proved, erroneous, opinion after the armistice that
the great quantities of war gases accumulated by this nation and others
during the war would be a dangerous menace as long as they were in
storage, and that they would have to be destroyed, presumably by being
dumped into the sea. These poisons were supposed to be so corrosive in
their action that no metal containers would hold them long. Since large
quantities of the war gases on hand after the armistice were loaded
into steel shell, it was assumed that these shell and their contents
would be a dead loss, except, perhaps, for some slight salvage value.
Events after the armistice seemed to strengthen this impression.
Leakage, for instance, was undoubtedly occurring in the gas shell
stored in our shell dumps in France; and it was dangerous for unmasked
men to work around some of these dumps. An even more convincing
demonstration of the instability of loaded gas projectiles was given
accidentally at Edgewood Arsenal after the armistice. Among the war
stocks there declared surplus was one consignment of 500,000 hand
grenades loaded with stannic chloride, a smoke-producing chemical.
These had been returned from France, and they were undoubtedly in
poor condition. On the voyage from France the chemical had begun to
eat holes through the metal of the grenades, and several thousand
of the grenades had had to be thrown overboard. The Chemical Warfare
Service sold these grenades to a chemical company. When a locomotive
backed down to couple to the cars containing the grenades, the slight
jar exploded fully half the missiles, and nobody could go near that
sidetrack for two or three days.
This incident apparently showed the impermanency of war gases. Actually
it demonstrated the impermanency only of stannic chloride, which is
highly corrosive to metal; and stannic chloride, in the quantities
produced, was a relatively unimportant war chemical. Nevertheless, in
the fear that other more highly toxic gases would also corrode and eat
through their containers, the Chemical Warfare Service dumped into the
ocean some twenty tons of phosgene and a large quantity of mustard-gas
shell. This was probably sheer waste, as it proved, because subsequent
experimentation established the fact that the most deadly of the war
gases could be safely stored for years if all water moisture were
driven from the chemicals themselves and all air exhausted from the
containers, leaving only the pure chemicals in contact with the metal
of the containers. Corrosion was found to be due to the presence of
moisture within the containers.
Nearly 1,400 tons of phosgene, chlorpicrin, mustard, and other deadly
gases made during the war are now stored at Edgewood; and to-day,
nearly three years after the armistice, their containers are still
in almost perfect condition. It is estimated that they will not
deteriorate in storage for at least ten years, a fact indicating that
poison gases are as durable in storage as smokeless powder. There
are also stored at Edgewood large quantities of loaded gas shell
manufactured during the war. These are frequently inspected and tested,
and the tests show that they are keeping well. The experts now estimate
that loaded gas shell will exist in good condition as long as a
battleship can give service, from the time of commissioning the ship to
the time when it is declared obsolete.
Other reserves of chemical warfare equipment now stored at Edgewood
include 51,000 Livens projectors, 88 trench mortars, 3,000,000
unfilled gas shell, and 700,000 unfilled hand grenades. There
are also in storage over 2,000,000 gas masks and 1,000 tons of
activated charcoal for use as a gas absorbent in the mask canisters.
The masks are stored in hermetically sealed boxes, a method of
preservation which, it is hoped, will protect the rubberized fabric
from deterioration for years to come. Other stored supplies include
protective suits, protective ointment, and gas alarm devices.
Such chemicals as the Chemical Warfare Service did sell after the
armistice brought good prices. The prices of many chemicals went
up after the armistice, and the Chemical Warfare Service profited
accordingly. The Service made a profit of 100 per cent on the phosgene
it sold and also found a good market for its chlorine.
Among the reserves stored at Edgewood was a considerable quantity of
the felt which was developed by Americans as a protection against
arsenical smoke, a deadly chemical never given a trial in the field
of battle, but regarded as an inevitable development in the expected
campaign in 1919. The production of toxic smoke was one of the most
interesting phases of the history of chemical warfare in the World War.
The candles which projected this smoke were perhaps the most appalling
weapon devised by any of the belligerents during the conflict, and
the armistice interrupted an Anglo-American project, well under way,
to asphyxiate the Germany Army with them in the spring of 1919. This
development was one of the deepest military secrets both in England and
the United States. Except for the French, not even the other Allies
were admitted to the secret.
The smoke candles employed an arsenical compound known as
diphenolchlorarsine. In the laboratory this was not a new substance--in
fact, none of the war gases actually used in the field was a new
development; and of projected poisons, so far as is known, only the
deadly Lewisite, the invention of Captain W. Lee Lewis in the Chemical
Warfare Service’s laboratory in Washington, was a new chemical creation
evolved specifically for use in war.[11] The other war gases had all
been known to organic chemistry, some of them for many years. So with
diphenolchlorarsine. It was first produced in Germany in the last
century, and the Germans also originated its use as a military weapon.
The Germans produced and used diphenolchlorarsine as a solid. The
substance was put into glass bottles, which, in turn, were inserted in
the T. N. T. filler of shell. The explosion pulverized the chemical
into a fog which had the advantage of being able to pass through the
cotton baffles in the canister of an ordinary gas mask. This fog was
highly irritating to the membrane of the nose and throat and caused
sneezing, which prevented a soldier gassed with it from putting on
his mask, so that he was left a victim to more lethal gases fired
simultaneously.
The British secured “dud” shell containing diphenolchlorarsine and
at once recognized this chemical as potentially much the most fatal
substance yet brought out in chemical warfare. But it was evident that
the German was not using it properly, in such a way as to release its
full toxic effect. The question was how to atomize diphenolchlorarsine
much more finely. British chemists and mechanical engineers eventually
succeeded in producing the substance in candles which burned and cast
out dense smoke. This smoke was diphenolchlorarsine so finely divided
that the American gas mask, the most effective mask of all, was utterly
powerless against it. The smoke particles passed freely through the
baffles; and, since the particles were minute solids and not true gas
at all, they were unaffected by the gas-absorbing charcoal and lime of
the mask canister.
Every masked experimenter gassed by this smoke declared that a mask
was worse than no protection at all. It is notable, too, that every
one gassed, without knowing that he was merely reiterating what others
before him had said, declared that, if he had not been able to escape
quickly from the concentration, he would have shot himself rather than
endure the agony longer. As to the persistence and diffusibility of
the smoke, at one demonstration when two candles were burned in a
desolate spot in England, civilians were slightly gassed in a village
several miles away.
So much for the substance which outdid any of the horrors of the
most horrible of all wars. But the weapon was useless unless
protection against it could also be developed. America invented
the protection--thick felt which was a textile triumph in that it
absolutely caught and held the smoke particles, yet permitted fairly
easy breathing through itself. The plan was to issue this felt in
small pieces which the soldiers could wrap around their canisters, in
order that all inhalation should be through the felt. The felt-wrapped
canister would then be placed back in its knapsack. In the joint
project, we were to produce the protective felt and the British
the candles. The British had ordered several million of these and
were actually producing them in large quantities at the time of the
armistice. By that date the American mills were turning out the felt by
thousands of yards, and our Chemical Warfare Service was also planning
a factory in which to produce diphenolchlorarsine candles. All this
activity was an intense secret in both countries. The program was being
directed at a certain week in the spring of 1919, when, at a favorable
hour, the troops on our side having quietly been protected against the
smoke, it was proposed to fire the candles everywhere along the front.
The gas warfare organizations of Great Britain and America confidently
expected that when that lethal infusion had disappeared, the German
Army would practically have ceased to exist, and the war would be over.
There is reason to believe that the German also realized the
inefficiency of diphenolchlorarsine when fired in shell and had
followed an independent line of development which led him to the
production of candles. It is asserted that such candles were made in
Germany before the armistice. It is doubtful, however, whether the
German succeeded in developing a protection against the smoke.
After the armistice our Chemical Warfare Service continued an
independent development of arsenical smoke. The problem was a
mechanical one. The chemical is driven off as smoke by means of heat.
If the heat is too great, the substance will burn and be changed into
non-toxic compounds. If the heat is too mild, the smoke will not be
thrown off efficiently. This problem we have solved.
Mention should be made also of that other chemical secret of the war,
Lewisite. In one sense Lewisite can be termed a development of mustard
gas, for the laboratory process of making mustard suggested to Captain
Lewis certain analogous chemical reactions, out of one of which came
the hitherto unknown liquid which was named after him. Like mustard,
Lewisite is a so-called vesicant, a substance which blisters the skin,
but it is much more powerful; for, whereas mustard gas merely burns,
Lewisite is absorbed through the skin into the system. Three drops of
this chemical placed on the belly of a rat will kill the animal in two
or three hours, and it is believed that this would be the effect of a
similar quantity sprinkled on the skin of a man. Like mustard, too,
Lewisite gives off fumes slowly, and these fumes have a burning, deadly
effect.
Before and since the armistice there have been other developments of
war gases in this country, and for some of these, as well as for some
of the better known gases, there is, or can be, civilian use. Believing
that chemical warfare has come to stay as long as there shall be wars,
the Chemical Warfare Service has sought since the armistice to develop
peace-time uses for war gases in order that there may be a continuous
production of them, with a simultaneous training of chemists on whom
the Government can rely in time of war. A new tear gas which has
been developed is called chloracetophenone. The presence of a minute
quantity of this gas in the air has a blinding lachrymatory effect
upon the eyes of one caught in it; yet the gas is non-toxic. Various
metropolitan police forces are experimenting with this gas to determine
its effect in dispersing mobs. Another distressing, but not dangerous,
gas bears the staggering chemical name of diphenylaminechlorarsine.
It is temporarily blinding and causes nausea and vomiting, but it is
not regarded as a lethal gas. It is proposed to use this in protecting
vaults in which valuables are stored. Phosgene is used in making
brilliant dyes, and it can also be used to exterminate rats. Chlorine
is a widely used disinfectant. With other war gases it is proposed
to exterminate numerous sorts of weevil and other insect pests which
annually cause great damage to American crops.[12]
SIGNAL SUPPLIES
Signal corps contracts on the day of the armistice were 1,244 in
number. They contemplated a production of supplies worth upwards of
$45,000,000. Telephones, telegraph equipment, radio, field glasses,
photographic cameras, pigeons, wrist watches--these were the sorts of
things the Signal Corps procured.
The termination of this industry was guided almost solely by industrial
conditions. With most signaling supplies it was impracticable to
build up large war reserves. There is perhaps no branch of modern
mechanical development to which applied science pays more attention
than it does to perfecting the means of communication. Progress is
rapid, and therefore any large reserves of supplies set aside by the
Signal Corps were likely to become obsolete and without value after
a few years. Moreover, although the war industry of the Signal Corps
scored its greatest production records with such common things as
telephone and telegraph instruments and wire, all this equipment was
of special design unknown in ordinary commercial use and therefore
without value to it. Consequently there was not the usual good business
reason to continue production under the well-advanced signal corps
contracts--namely, that a greater cash recovery could be obtained from
the sale of finished products than from the junk sale of semi-finished
materials. Finally, many of the signal corps supplies--and this applies
particularly to radio--were heavily protected by valid patents.
These patents the Government made free with during the war, but the
existence of the patents virtually precluded the Government from
selling its excess radio equipment after the war. For these and other
reasons the signal corps war business was terminated at precisely the
rate at which the manufacturing equipment and its operatives could be
diverted to other work.
Unlike the Ordnance Department and the Air Service, the Signal Corps
was not organized before the armistice by manufacturing districts, but
conducted all its business from the central office in Washington. The
Washington headquarters, however, maintained intimate contact with the
contractors through its so-called flying squadron, an organization
of officers who visited the war factories, inspected their work, and
coöperated with the producers in the solution of their shop problems.
This same organization after the armistice conducted the field work of
the industrial liquidation, acting under the direction of the Signal
Corps Board of Contract Termination, which, in turn, was subsidiary to
the War Department Claims Board.
The new and unused materials acquired before the industry could be
terminated were disposed of in various ways. Adequate war reserves of
supplies were placed in safe storage. During the war the Signal Corps
had built up a large training school at Camp Alfred Vail in New Jersey.
This camp has been retained as a permanent adjunct to the Signal
Corps. To the warehouses of Camp Vail were sent large quantities of
surplus signal corps supplies, both finished articles and partially
manufactured apparatus, there to be studied and developed in the
laboratories of the camp. The Post Office Department took a certain
amount of radio telephone and telegraph apparatus for use on its mail
planes. The Forest Service took radio and also some of the homing
pigeons for use in its fire-protection service in the national forests.
Other supplies were sold to the public.
The Signal Corps, as one of its duties, created and compiled a
photographic history of America’s participation in the World War, both
in motion pictures and in “still” views. The hundreds of thousands
of negatives in this history were collected in Washington after the
armistice and stored in a specially constructed building which is not
only fireproof, but which provides air of uniform temperature and
dryness, to prevent rapid deterioration of the negatives. A complete
catalogue of views was prepared, and the sale of duplicates to the
public was authorized. Many of the illustrations in these volumes are
taken from that collection.
The disposal of surplus A. E. F. signaling equipment was notable in
that it included a large sale to the French Government of equipment not
embraced by the general bulk sale of 1919. When the armistice came the
A. E. F. was provided with hundreds of miles of main-line telephone
and telegraph cables, hooking up a complete net of branch lines,
wires, and exchanges, all of it American-made and American-operated.
The question was whether to rip it all out, after which it would be
represented by some thousands of tons of junk, or to sell it intact as
it was; and there was but one possible customer, the French Government,
which monopolizes telegraph and telephone communication in France.
Signal corps officers in France took up with the French Government,
directly after the armistice, the question of the sale of these
installations to France, and the negotiations were so well advanced
in the spring of 1919, when the United States Liquidation Commission
(which conducted the blanket sale) arrived, that the signal corps sale
was specifically exempted from the bulk sale. France paid $6,400,000
for the installations. France and England jointly paid $130,000 for
the American cross-Channel cable, laid with great difficulty (and
at an approximate cost of $238,000) between Cackmere, England, and
Cap d’Antifer, France.[13] Negotiations were also under way for the
purchase by the French Government of a large quantity of American
wire-system construction material, but this was finally included in the
supplies delivered under the terms of the bulk sale. Sales to other
governments and to individuals were small.
MOTOR VEHICLES
All of the A. E. F.’s surplus motor vehicles (a classification
including bicycles and trailers as well as trucks, automobiles,
motorcycles, and sidecars), as this surplus existed in August, 1919,
went to the French Government under the terms of the bulk sale.
The sale value of these vehicles was estimated by our appraisers
at $100,000,000, an estimate arrived at as follows: the original
purchase cost had been $310,000,000. Wear and tear, however, had
reduced the usable value to the Army to $220,000,000. A second-hand
machine, however, must be sold at a second-hand price, which will not
represent the value of the machine to the owner disposing of it. A fair
second-hand sale value of this equipment (assuming that the vehicles
would be sold to private purchasers) was estimated at $132,000,000. But
sale in bulk to the French Government relieved the United States of
the cost of disposing of the vehicles in various sized lots to private
purchasers. It was estimated that the overhead expense of selling the
vehicles to individuals would be approximately $32,000,000. As one item
in this sales expense, it would require the services of 3,000 troops
for one year to take care of the unsold vehicles. In that interval
there would be a further depreciation in the value of the vehicles.
Therefore, the A. E. F. was willing to throw off $32,000,000 and make
to the French Government a flat price of $100,000,000 for the equipment.
Before this sale, however, there had been sales to others, both
governments and speculators. The Poles and some of the new Slavic
nations bought nearly 3,000 vehicles from the A. E. F. American
motor vehicles in England (they were not many) were sold at auction.
The Italian Government bought about 200 trucks, ambulances, and
motorcycles. As our troops were demobilized from the Army of Occupation
in Germany, they left a surplus of over 14,000 motor vehicles. These
were sold to a British syndicate for $25,000,000. Over 1,200 trucks of
German make, acquired by the A. E. F. under the armistice terms, were
sold to a German dealer.
[Illustration:
_Photo from Engineer Department_
AIR VIEW OF A. E. F. ORDNANCE DOCKS]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Air Service_
A GAS DEMONSTRATION]
The war orders for motor vehicles (including bicycles and trailers)
of all sorts from American factories called for the production of
434,000 of them. Of this number approximately 110,000 were bicycles and
trailers, the rest being motor vehicles proper. The war industry had
produced great numbers of these vehicles before the armistice, 118,000
having been shipped to the A. E. F., while thousands of others were
either in use by the Army within the United States or were awaiting
shipment overseas on the day of the armistice. By the fourth day of the
armistice, termination requests had stopped the production of 178,000
vehicles under the war orders. The rest were allowed to go through
to completion. Adding to the reserves on hand at the signing of the
armistice the production after the armistice, we find that the results
of the war industry were to provide the Army in this country with
138,000 motor vehicles, none of which had crossed the ocean.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
MOTOR TRANSPORT IN FRANCE]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
PART OF A. E. F.’S SURPLUS MOTOR EQUIPMENT]
The continuation of production after the armistice was allowed for
numerous reasons. A motor truck is an article readily salable at a good
price. Its fabricated parts, however, have little value other than
that of scrap metal. Moreover, to permit the completion of contracts
saved the Government from the payment of cancellation charges. For
example, as a result of these business considerations one order for
8,000 Standard B trucks, under which order production had started about
November 1, 1918, was allowed to go through to completion. The Standard
B truck was an assemblage of standard parts. Many factories made the
parts, and a few, under contract with the Government, assembled the
parts and turned out the completed chassis. To have terminated the
contracts would have left on the Government’s hands a mass of parts
of doubtful sales value and an obligation to pay heavy cancellation
charges besides. The completed trucks could be sold for nearly all, if
not all, the money the Government had put into them. The same was true
of some of the other standardized trucks.
Production was continued in some instances to place in the Army’s
hands certain sorts of trucks of which the Army was short even after
the great production ending with the armistice. Finally, many of the
truck factories were working exclusively on government contracts, and
to have ended this work forthwith would have thrown tens of thousands
of men out of work. It is notable, however, that two of the largest
contractors, the Ford Motor Company and the Dodge Motor Company, both
of Detroit, agreed to accept termination of all work uncompleted on
November 16, 1918, at no cost to the Government except the cost of
uncompleted materials which they would be unable to use in their
commercial enterprises.
The whole vast war business of building motor vehicles for the Army was
terminated at a cost of $12,300,000 to the Government. As an offset to
this cost, the Government took in materials worth $4,100,000, making
the net cost of termination about $8,200,000.
MEDICAL SUPPLIES
The armistice turned what had been an insufficient quantity of medical
supplies for the expanding, fighting American Army into an enormous
surplus for the demobilizing Army and the future permanent military
establishment. The total purchases by the Medical Corps had reached
a value of nearly $250,000,000. Of these purchases, supplies to the
value of about $11,000,000 had been procured in Europe, principally in
France. The supplies on hand on the day of the armistice and delivered
on contract afterwards were worth $110,000,000.
With the warehouses filled with hospital equipment, medicines,
ambulances, and the other articles which the military surgeons used,
the war industry producing these things was terminated expeditiously
after the armistice. In the United States over 1,400 contracts
and purchase orders, calling for the production of supplies worth
$60,000,000, were terminated at a net cancellation cost of $3,000,000.
Deliveries after the armistice from American factories gave to the
Medical Corps supplies worth $32,000,000. In France and England
the contract cancellations saved $3,500,000. These cancellations
terminated, among other things, a project which would in time have
delivered to the A. E. F. twenty-nine complete ambulance trains, each
with sixteen coaches. Nineteen such trains had been delivered to the
A. E. F. before the armistice.
In the general bulk sale of A. E. F. property to the French Government
went American medical supplies worth $34,000,000. The Medical Corps
turned over to the American Red Cross in France supplies worth
$9,000,000 for use in the relief of the stricken populations of
Europe. To other governments the A. E. F. sold medical supplies worth
$6,000,000. The rest of the medical supplies in Europe were returned to
the United States. In this country the surplus medical supplies were
distributed in various ways--to the Public Health Service, into the
army reserves, and (by sale) to the public.
CHAPTER XV
QUARTERMASTER SUPPLIES
The quartermaster does not loom large against the heroic background of
war. The Army’s victualer and clothier collects few _croix de guerre_,
and his interest in the Congressional Medal of Honor is impersonal. So
long as his work is going well, you hear little about him; but let him
once supply some tainted beef to the troops in the field or fail to
deliver on time the Army’s winter underwear, and then the country takes
notice of the quartermaster.
God nowadays is on the side of the army with the best business
organization, as even Napoleon himself might admit if he were to look
over the cash balances of the late war. By that token the Quartermaster
Service was the chief factor in the victory, because that organization
became approximately the business office of the Army. For purely
the creature comforts--food, clothing, and shelter--the Army spent
far more money than it did for its weapons and ammunition; but the
activities of the army quartermasters embraced a much wider range
of supplies than these. Theorize as you will about the evolution of
the Army’s purchasing offices during the war until they were brought
together into a single centralized purchasing agency, the fact remains
that the ultimate purchasing agency was essentially the Quartermaster
Service, magnified and expanded in power. General George W. Goethals
was Quartermaster General when the General Staff Division of Purchase,
Storage, and Traffic (which unified all army buying and brought
order into the supply situation) was built around his personality
and ability, and thereafter his chief assistant bore the title of
“Quartermaster General, Director of Purchase and Storage.” The new
Division retained all the duties of buying quartermaster supplies and
assumed also the duty of buying all other supplies except the strictly
technical ones. And even these were purchased by the older supply
bureaus under the complete supervision of the Division of Purchase,
Storage, and Traffic.
When we approach the subject of the demobilization of the war industry
which produced quartermaster supplies, we confront what was, measured
in tons and in dollars and cents, the greatest business undertaking of
the war. These pages have been filled by the story of the spectacular
contest of American industrial genius with the inanimate resources
which it fabricated into airplanes, artillery, and ammunition; but
what filled the freight trains and the holds of the transatlantic
cargo transports and the fleets of roaring trucks on the roads of
France was not arms and the machinery of destruction to the degree that
it was eatables and wearables, tentage, stoves and ranges, pots and
pans--quartermaster supplies. There was the main weight and bulk; into
them went the most money.
The war business of the Director of Purchase was represented by
nearly 16,000 contracts. The total face value of these contracts
came to nearly $8,000,000,000. They represented all food procured by
the Army during the war and afterwards, all forage for the Army’s
animals, all clothing, all textile supplies of every sort, all shoes,
harness, and other leather goods, all animals purchased, all motor
vehicles, all wagons of every sort, all carts hand-drawn, engineering
supplies of many kinds, all coal, oil, gasoline, paints, hospital
equipment, medical and surgical supplies, hardware of all sorts, tools,
tentage and other camp equipment, rope, office supplies, and many
less conspicuous things. Several of these classes, it will be noted,
consisted of munitions formerly procured by the separate technical
supply bureaus, but the mass of them were the traditional quartermaster
supplies.
To get a comprehensive and clear-cut picture of the demobilization of
this branch of war industry, let us start in France and follow back the
home-bound expedition after it had closed up its business abroad.
In the first place, the A. E. F. became a heavy purchaser of
quartermaster supplies abroad. The purchasing office of the expedition
became a great business organization. It bought supplies in almost
every accessible country of Europe, and its agents even went to Africa
and made purchases in Algeria and Morocco. These supplies were bought,
not because America could not furnish them, but for the familiar sake
of saving the use of the precious ocean tonnage. And a great deal of
tonnage was saved by these foreign purchases. The Quartermaster Corps
with the A. E. F. purchased 400,000 tons of miscellaneous supplies, but
chiefly food and clothing, at the cost of $150,000,000. In addition,
many horses were procured in Europe. The greatest tonnage saving of
all, however, was brought about by the arrangement which permitted the
A. E. F. to purchase coal at the Welsh mines. The cross-Channel fleet
freighted more than 1,000,000 tons of coal from England. This not only
relieved the transatlantic fleet of the necessity of lifting that
amount of cargo, but it also permitted the employment in the Channel
of vessels not well adapted to the transoceanic convoying. It is a
moderate estimate that the American quartermaster purchases abroad
saved the transatlantic shipment of 1,500,000 tons of cargo, a lading
that would fill 300 large ships.
Naturally the armistice found France, principally, and the other
nations of western Europe to a slighter extent, liberally sprinkled
with A. E. F. contracts for the production of quartermaster supplies.
Sixty-six French factories, for instance, were working exclusively
for the Americans in producing bread, biscuits, macaroni, and candy.
The question immediately arose as to the best method of stopping all
European production for the A. E. F. The expedition’s warehouses and
depots were crammed to their capacities, and additional supplies were
on the ocean in transports bound for France. A month, even a week,
earlier it had not seemed possible that the industries of America and
Europe put together, could produce an oversupply of these munitions,
for the A. E. F. was looking forward to a strength of 4,500,000 men in
1919. But with the sudden armistice the expedition found itself with a
stock of supplies on hand which it could not possibly consume.
For that reason its European war industry was terminated abruptly.
There was little of the tapering-off of production that was
characteristic of the demobilization in the United States. The military
authorities were not nearly so considerate of the welfare of their
foreign contractors as they were of those at home. The American
business abroad was so small, compared with the whole war industry
of the countries of the Allies, that the outright abrogation of the
American contracts could not cause a general industrial slump. But
there were other considerations. The War Department could make use of
much of the domestic post-armistice production, either as war reserves
or as goods for sale. In Europe every pound of quartermaster supplies
produced after the armistice was likely to prove a dead loss to the
United States. Such supplies were not needed for military reserves, of
which there was an abundance already within the United States. They
could not be sold advantageously abroad, because there was no market
for them, with the Allied armies dumping their enormous surpluses on
that same market. They could not be shipped in reasonable time to
the United States for sale, because of the lack of ocean tonnage.
Consequently, whereas it was the policy within the United States
to terminate war industry gradually, the keynote of our industrial
demobilization abroad was outright cancellation. It was cheaper to
pay cancellation indemnities than to accept the supplies that would
otherwise have been produced; and this was the general policy adopted
in terminating all our foreign contracts, with such exceptions, notably
in some of the airplane and artillery contracts, as are noted elsewhere
in this volume.
To investigate claims and negotiate settlements with the European
contractors the A. E. F. created its Board of Contracts and
Adjustments, which for several months served as the liquidating agency
for the war business. Later the unsettled cases were turned over for
final disposal by the United States Liquidation Commission.
The termination of the foreign production for the A. E. F. was not
nearly so puzzling a problem as the disposition of the excess military
stores with the expedition. We had shipped from the United States
to the A. E. F. over 6,000,000 tons of military supplies, and those
shipments now crowded the warehouses in the American areas. After the
armistice the first step looking to the disposition of these stocks
was a rough, but fairly comprehensive, inventory of all military
property stored in our bases and depots. This inventory gave basis for
an estimate of a surplus valued at $1,500,000,000 over and above what
the diminishing forces abroad could possibly use. Nearly half these
excess stores were quartermaster supplies, therefore goods more or
less perishable. Long before the American cargo ships could transport
these supplies back to America they would have lost value to the amount
of untold millions of dollars. The Government faced an enormous loss.
Whatever was to be done about it had to be done quickly. The one way
out was to sell the surplus in Europe, but it was a grave question
whether that could be done successfully at all.
In the first place, all our army supplies had been placed in France
without the payment of any import duties. So long as these supplies
were being consumed by the American soldiers, well and good; but,
when it was proposed to sell them to private purchasers outside the
A. E. F., the French Government insisted upon its right to collect
import taxes upon such supplies as were to be sold. When the United
States was not ready to concede this point, then the French Government
offered the alternative of permitting the United States to sell its
surplus in France without payment of import duties, provided the sales
were made exclusively to the French Government itself. The United
States felt obliged to accept this condition.
Thus, in selling our surplus in France we were limited to a single
customer; and when you can sell your product to only one buyer you
must prepare to accept the buyer’s scale of prices. Of course,
the inhibition upon sales did not apply to sales to other foreign
governments; for in that event the American goods were regarded as
being in France in bond, and it was not incumbent upon the United
States to pay the French import duties upon them. On the other hand,
a physical reason operated against the sale of stores to European
countries outside France--the run-down and almost wrecked condition
of the French railroads. The delivery of locomotives and cars by the
Germans under the armistice terms virtually rehabilitated the rolling
stock of the French railways, but the trackage had deteriorated during
the war, and the incursions of military conscription had left the
operating _personnel_ poor in quality and deficient in quantity. It
was next to impossible to ship anything out of France. During the
early months after the armistice America sold surplus supplies to
various countries of Europe outside France--particularly to Belgium
and the liberated nations of southeastern Europe--to the value of many
millions; but, up to August 1, 1919, it had been able to deliver less
than one-fifth of these supplies.
Another advantage accruing to France as the principal buyer of the
American surplus was that the A. E. F. was making what amounted to a
forced sale. If anything was evident in the attitude of the French
people after the armistice, it was that they earnestly desired to speed
their departing military guests out of France. The American troops
no less ardently wished to go, and it was the policy of the American
Government to repatriate them as rapidly as the shipping could be
provided. The disposal of the supplies was a secondary consideration.
If the Americans had attempted to hold out for favorable markets and
good prices for their surpluses in piecemeal sales, they would have
had to keep from 20,000 to 30,000 troops in France for several years
to guard the unsold stocks. The alternative of hiring civilian guards
was out of the question, from the standpoint of expense alone. There
was nothing else to do except sell out quickly for the best prices
obtainable under the circumstances.
These obvious advantages to the French in striking a bargain price
for the bulk of the American surplus property in France was largely
counterbalanced by the fact that, of the American quartermaster
stores for sale, nearly half consisted of food supplies, and the
highest-quality food then in Europe. There was no oversupply of food
in Europe, but the very contrary. England had surplus army property
estimated to be worth more than $3,000,000,000; France herself had
almost as much to dispose of; and Italy was to be a heavy seller;
but the food stocks in all these Allied surpluses were not enough to
satisfy the hunger of the undernourished or actually famine-stricken
populations of Europe. The much-desired food was used by the American
authorities to induce the French not only to pay good prices for
materials they did not need, and of which indeed they had surpluses
of their own, but also to accept responsibility for such liabilities
as the American stores of unstable and dangerous ammunition and our
accumulations of junk.
Such were some of the conditions surrounding the bulk sale of A. E. F.
surplus property to the French Government in the summer of 1919. This
sale, as we have said, was consummated by the United States Liquidation
Commission, the activities of which are to be discussed in greater
detail farther on. Meanwhile a sporadic and piecemeal sale of A. E. F.
property in Europe had been going on under the direction of the General
Sales Agent and General Sales Board of the A. E. F. The General Sales
Agent took up his work on January 1, 1919. He was assisted by the
General Sales Board, which was made up of representatives of all the
army organizations that had anything to sell. Under this organization
the sales of surplus materials reached a total of approximately
$175,000,000 by the end of July, 1919, just before the general bulk
sale was closed. Of these receipts the sales of quartermaster supplies
accounted for $122,000,000. The supplies were sold almost exclusively
to governments and relief and welfare commissions. The sales to
commercial firms and individuals were insignificant.
Almost as soon as the armistice was signed the needy nations of Europe
opened negotiations for the purchase of excess quartermaster supplies
of the A. E. F., particularly food. Semi-starvation was chronic in
most of the newly liberated countries of southeastern Europe. The Poles
were still fighting and needed supplies for their soldiers. Belgium and
northern France were impoverished by the German occupation. Austria
was in the grip of actual famine, and the hungry mobs were rioting in
Vienna. In fact, some of the first surplus A. E. F. food to be sold
was shipped into Austria. It was a situation which demanded scientific
study, since, no matter how much the American officials individually
might sympathize with the European civilians, their first duty was to
safeguard the interests of the taxpayers of the United States; and that
meant to discover what ones of the needy were willing and able to pay
the best prices. Consequently the General Sales Board of the A. E. F.
created its information bureau, which investigated the conditions
throughout Europe and reported to the Board. These investigations
enabled the A. E. F. to distribute its surpluses intelligently.
Before the general sales organization took hold, the Quartermaster
Corps itself in France had been disposing of surplus stores during the
first weeks of the armistice. Many of these early sales were made to
Mr. Herbert Hoover for the Belgian Relief Commission. When, in January,
1919, Congress appropriated $100,000,000 for the relief of starving
Europe, Mr. Hoover, who had the spending of the money, was urged to
make use of the excess A. E. F. supplies as much as possible. The
largest single sale of A. E. F. surplus food was made to the Belgian
Relief Commission. About $30,000,000 changed hands in the transaction,
and the food sold included such items as 60,000,000 pounds of army
issue bacon, 122,000,000 pounds of flour, 6,000,000 pounds of rice, and
600,000,000 cans of evaporated milk. All this time, too, the General
Sales Board was selling directly to the Belgian Government; and the
Relief Commission coöperated with the Army to make sure that Belgium,
through these two channels of supply, did not receive an undue portion
of the army stores. There was always danger that Belgian speculators
might acquire stocks of such surplus products as fats and soap and
sell them into Germany at famine prices. Twice this coöperation was
able to checkmate the plans of cold-blooded profiteers. Next to making
advantageous sales, the chief concern of the General Sales Board was to
distribute its products fairly among the countries in direst need.
The Government of Portugal bought a large number of American army
shoes. Czecho-Slovakia took 10,000 army overcoats, much other
clothing, and several hundred tons of food supplies. The Polish Relief
Corporation bought quartermaster supplies to the value of $1,500,000.
Roumania took a consignment of food and clothing at $7,150,000.
Portugal took a shipload of potatoes f. o. b. Ireland. These nations,
Serbia, Esthonia, and several others, were constantly in the market for
American supplies. Esthonia bought 3,000 tons of army bacon. The French
Government, too, was a large purchaser during this piecemeal selling,
on one occasion buying American suspenders to the value of $22,000, as
well as large quantities of food and clothing.
For the most part the United States accepted debentures rather than
cash in payment for these supplies. It was obviously impossible to
secure cash, for the small nations did not have any, and even France
was skipping the interest payments on her five-billion-dollar debt to
the United States. The American Government accepted treasury notes or
other official securities at par, payable in three to five years with
interest at 5 per cent. And, although such credits would have been
heavily discounted in commercial centers, nevertheless America did
not try to cover by charging high prices for the surplus stores or by
exacting profits of any sort. The greater part of our supplies were
sold at the cost of manufacture in the United States plus the cost of
transportation to Europe, and plus nothing else. Consequently the sales
proved to be a great stroke of advertising for the fair name of the
United States.
Trainload after trainload of supplies sold in this fashion left the
American depots during the spring and early summer of 1919; but still,
when the bulk sale to France went through, these shipments had seemed
to make scarcely any impression upon the mass of the surplus, so
great had been the reserves created in France by American industry.
The utilization value of the surplus army property in France was
estimated at $1,000,000,000. Of this quantity, quartermaster stocks
(not including animals) were valued at $670,000,000. Of this surplus
an amount worth $87,000,000 (consisting principally of new clothing)
was returned to the United States, and the rest, except what had
been disposed of by individual sale, was turned over to the French
Government, the final delivery being made on November 15, 1919.
None of these sales included the used supplies repaired and restored
in the army salvage shops in France. Salvage was a new note amid the
age-old wastefulness of war. After the great battles of the Civil War
the countryside was littered with the débris of warfare. The bodies
of men and animals were buried, and the soldiers did what they could
to clean up by burning the refuse they could collect; but for the
most part the disposition of muskets, sabers, cannon, harness, and
clothing was left to the souvenir hunter and to the slow action of the
elements. After our battles in the World War far more materials were
left abandoned on the field than after any conflict of the Civil War,
but these materials were picked up and reclaimed for such value as the
Army could still get out of them. And the Army found that it could
make valuable use of salvaged materials, and particularly of salvaged
clothing. The savings wrought by salvage ran close to $150,000,000 in
cash value, besides representing a great economy in the use of shipping
space in the ocean transports.
Whereas, before the armistice, many of the recovered supplies went into
the army stores for reissue, in 1919, when the A. E. F. was rapidly
dwindling in size, the salvaged articles were sold, and principally to
the French. All through France one could see peasants of both sexes
wearing articles once of American army issue. Paris might dictate
women’s styles to America; but Paris, Kentucky, where dwelt some of
the seamstresses doing home work for the great army shirt factory at
Jeffersonville, Indiana, had something to say about what French women
wore. The French peasant woman wearing an American army shirt, with a
bit of ribbon for a collar, was a common enough sight in some of the
former American areas. Another familiar makeshift was the skirt made of
an ex-army blanket. Even the dumps, on which were thrown materials of
which the salvage shops could make no use, were carefully sorted over
by the peasants, who sometimes trudged for miles with their carts in
order to avail themselves of these opportunities.
Extensive commercial sales of salvaged materials were also made.
Crushed tin cans sold by the ton as metal scrap. Rags went to the
French paper makers and waste wool to the English textile mills.
Grease, damaged oats, damaged flour, and worn rubber tires also went
by sale. The Polish Army bought reclaimed American harness by weight.
A large number of outer uniforms, having shrunk in sterilization so as
to be too small for reissue, were dyed black and sold to the Belgian
Relief Commission for wear by destitute civilians. Germans paid record
prices for grease and other kitchen waste products. The salvage sales
in 1919 brought in more than $4,000,000.
The horses and mules used by the A. E. F. were not included in the bulk
sale of property to the French Government. The disposition of them (for
few, if any, A. E. F. animals were returned to the United States) was a
separate transaction, conducted almost entirely by the Remount Service
of the A. E. F., a branch of the Quartermaster Corps. The A. E. F.
acquired in all some 243,000 animals at a cost of $82,500,000. More
than two-thirds of them were purchased abroad by the Americans. The
mules numbered 61,000, and of these approximately half came from the
United States, the rest principally from southern France and Spain.
About 64,000 animals died in the service, and the rest were sold in
Europe either to various governments or to civilians, the recovery
from these sales being slightly more than $33,000,000. Thus the net
war cost of the animals used by our forces in Europe was approximately
$50,000,000.
With Americans the horse is (or is supposed to be) a single-purpose
animal, used exclusively for his power of motivity, whether that power
be exerted for speed or for pulling a load. To many Europeans he also
possesses gastronomic value, and this fact enabled the Remount Service
to get good prices for condemned horses from the expeditionary corrals.
About 11,000 horses, broken down by service, were sold by the A. E. F.
to French and German butchers, at an average price of $50 a head.
Because of the dearth of farm animals in France, the French Government
offered no objection to the sale of the surplus horses and mules
directly to private buyers. The chief condition made was that the
animals must first be offered (at auction) to farmers whose horses
had been requisitioned during the war. If these men would not offer
satisfactory prices, then anyone was to be allowed to bid. Then the
French Government arranged to take over 15,000 A. E. F. animals and
dispose of them for the expedition. The prices obtained from the French
Government under this arrangement were so much below what the A. E. F.
was obtaining from its auctions that the United States Liquidation
Commission sought and received authority to dispose of all the animals
at auction. Because of the high taxes and auctioneers’ commissions,
even the auction sale was not satisfactory; and the Remount Service
asked permission to sell animals at private sale. This permission was
never formally granted, but nevertheless the Remount Service went ahead
and sold thousands of animals directly to buyers. The average price
received from the French Government was $77.58 a head, whereas from
the auction and direct sales to private purchasers the average price
received was $201.65.
The French Government itself, by direct purchases from the A. E. F.,
took 50,000 animals at an average price of $190.21 a head. Thousands
of surplus animals at good prices went to the governments of Belgium,
Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, and Bavaria. To civilians in France and
Germany went 85,000 A. E. F. animals. Approximately the last of the
original 243,000 had been sold when the final troops of the A. E. F.
departed for the United States in the late summer of 1919.
Although we sent to France some of the finest mules in America (and,
therefore, in the world), there was at first some difficulty in
disposing of them to the French buyers. The farmers of southern France
knew the mule and justly valued it, and during the early months of
the demobilization a constant stream of American army mules went
into that region for sale. Finally the southern French mule market
became glutted, and then it became necessary to “sell” the mule to the
farmers in the American areas in northern France. The French peasants
did not hold the mule’s clouded ancestry against him, but what their
thriftiness did object to was his dearth of hope of posterity. However,
after a few of the peasants had bought and worked the army mules, the
good qualities of the animal became widely advertised, and thousands of
them thereafter were bought at good prices.
After the armistice the first step in the liquidation of the
quartermaster war business and of the other enterprises conducted by
the Director of Purchase in the United States was to terminate the
industry and to settle with the contractors, of whom, as is indicated
above, there were approximately 15,900--parties to agreements which
committed the United States to purchase supplies to the value of more
than $7,800,000,000. A large part of these were quartermaster supplies,
but they also included motor vehicles and engineering, medical, signal
corps, and general supplies, the procurement of which, under the
reorganization of the War Department, was placed in the hands of the
Director of Purchase.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
A. E. F. SUPPLY TRAIN ON WAY TO RATION DUMP]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
A. E. F. FLOUR ON WAY TO STARVING AUSTRIA]
The immediate result of the armistice was to silence the activity in
these thousands of factories. The Director of Purchase sent broadcast
by telegraph a general request to suspend all production while the War
Department could estimate its position. After a few days the mills
were permitted to resume production. Subsequently about 5,000 of the
contracts were allowed to go through to completion. The remaining
11,000 were terminated either abruptly, as with those under which no
production had started, or by graduation, when that was advantageous
either to the Government or to the industrial situation.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
A. E. F. HORSES TO BE SOLD]
[Illustration:
_Photo from Quartermaster Department_
STORAGE WAREHOUSES AT JEFFERSONVILLE DEPOT]
Like the Ordnance Department and the Air Service, the Quartermaster
Corps decentralized the supervision of its war industry into
manufacturing districts--thirteen of them--which were called zones.
When most of the purchasing activities of the War Department were
brought together under the Director of Purchase, these zones came
along with the transferred organization, as did also seven procurement
divisions taken over from the other supply bureaus. During the
demobilization, claims boards were established in all the zones and
procurement divisions. These twenty primary boards were subsidiary to
the general Purchase Claims Board, which in turn was responsible to the
War Department Claims Board through the representative of the latter
attached to the Purchase Claims Board. This was the organization which
settled the vast war business conducted under the Director of Purchase.
The general policies, the application of which to the termination
of the ordnance contracts we have already described, were followed
in closing out the industry which manufactured our quartermaster
supplies. The Government paid no prospective profits, but stood all
the legitimate expenses which the manufacturer had incurred looking to
future production of finished supplies.
But it was not all termination and no buying for the Director of
Purchase after the armistice. There was still an enormous army in the
field and camps which had to be sustained; and, while great surpluses
existed in some branches of supply, in others, such as immediately
perishable supplies, the stocks on hand were sufficient for only a
few weeks ahead. The purchases between the date of the armistice and
January 24, 1920, by which date the demobilization of troops was about
complete, came to $611,000,000, of which food purchases accounted for
$420,000,000.
One national inheritance from the war experience in buying
quartermaster supplies has been the creation at Chicago of a permanent
subsistence school to which the Army sends officers and enlisted men
for training as inspectors and buyers of food supplies. Another is
the creation within the War Department of a division which studies
the sources and supplies of the raw materials used by war industry
and also determines the priority of access to these materials by the
various consuming branches of the War Department. When the war came,
the United States was sadly lacking in the very knowledge which these
studies will develop. During the war the development of raw materials
and the determination of priorities were administered by the Council
of National Defense and, later and more successfully, by the War
Industries Board, which became perhaps the most powerful and important
of all the emergency war organizations. The War Department is thus
retaining a nucleus around which another such organization might be
built in a future emergency.
No outline of the demobilization of the quartermaster war enterprises
portrays an adequate picture of what happened unless it tells something
about the termination of the Government’s wool business. To protect
its war interests the Government requisitioned all the raw wool in
the United States in 1917 and 1918. Uncle Sam himself became the wool
trade, the sole dealer, the sole market. Although the Navy and several
other government branches used wool, the control over the commodity
was exercised by the War Department through its Wool Administrator at
Boston, who reported to the Quartermaster General in Washington.
On the first day of the armistice the Government had on its hands, or
was obligated to accept delivery of, about 525,000,000 pounds of wool,
a quantity which may be visualized by comparing it with the total
annual American production of wool, which is less than 300,000,000
pounds. About one-fifth of this quantity was Australasian wool which
had been purchased by the Foreign Mission of the War Industries Board.
About 100,000 bales (33,000,000 pounds) of the Australasian wool had
been shipped to the United States. We were left, therefore, with a
binding contract to accept 200,000 bales from the Antipodes, this
to come piling in on top of an accumulation which comprised a huge
surplus over and above the normal national consumption. By some clever
business jockeying (the British having various American contracts which
they also wished to terminate) the British Government was induced to
cancel the unfulfilled portion of the wool contract.
Even with this deduction, the Wool Administrator had, in the late
autumn of 1918, about 460,000,000 pounds of wool to dispose of. The
normal textile industry had never before been called upon to absorb
such a visible supply, and there was some question if it would be
able to do so. The manufacturers naturally began at once to urge
the Government to dump its wool on the market. The 700,000 American
wool growers, on the other hand, who had been receiving a high and
stable price for wool (the price adopted on July 30, 1917) urged the
Government to stay in the business for another year at least and take
the 1919 clip at the war price.
The decision in Washington was to sell the wool and get out of the
wool business at once. This was displeasing to the farmers; but, to
prevent any drastic slump in wool prices, the War Department decided to
sell its wool in auction sales, in which the Government itself would
set minimum prices below which no wool would be sold. This action
guaranteed that the growers would get a fair price for the 1919 clip.
Within approximately a month after the armistice the wool auctions
began--first at Boston, where in three days (December 18, 19, and
20, 1918) the buyers bid in over 10,000,000 pounds of wool, out of
17,000,000 pounds offered for sale. The unsold offerings, of course,
were lots for which no buyers bid up to the minimum fixed prices.
Although prices were fixed, only in a sense were they sustained
artificially. For each sort of wool the Government fixed a minimum
price which equaled what it would cost to import the same quantity
and grade of wool and deliver it to the American market. Thus the
world prices actually prevailed, except that the huge American surplus
was artificially kept from being a depressing factor in the world
price. To sustain prices higher than these would have attracted large
importations and thus injured the growers. To allow prices to go lower
than the importation prices would also have worked injury to the wool
growers of the United States.
As a further concession to the farmers, the Government announced that
it would stay out of the wool market when the 1919 American clip began
reaching the market in quantities sufficient to supply the mills. In
accordance with this promise, the government wool sales ceased on July
1, 1919, and did not resume again until the following November.
When the auctions suspended on July 1, more than 316,000,000 pounds
of the Government’s wool had been sold. Auctions had been held twice
a month in Boston and once a month in Philadelphia, and three sales
had been conducted at Portland, Oregon, for the benefit of the western
woolen mills. Upon the resumption of the sales in November the wool
continued to sell well, with the result that by the end of 1919 the
sales had disposed of 365,000,000 pounds, and the success of the
complete liquidation was assured. The sale of this wool was a triumph
of merchandizing. The wool trade had never known such sales before, not
even in England, the world center of wool, nor had the American trade
ever before absorbed such a quantity of wool in such a short time.
Like the storied mill which ground salt until it swamped the ship of
the thieving merchant, the mill producing quartermaster supplies before
the armistice was hard to stop afterwards, and its output embarrassed
the War Department for want of space in which to store the excess
supplies. As long as the home Army and the A. E. F. were expanding in
size and the convoys grew in size and frequency, there was no critical
backing-up of supplies. Immediately after the armistice, however, the
order came to ship no more freight to France, except food and other
necessaries specifically requested. At the time of the armistice there
were 600,000 tons of supplies on the docks in this country and 400,000
other tons moving toward the seaboard. Since the mills kept right
on producing more, the flood of new materials inundated the supply
service in this country. In December, 1918, the Storage Service was
operating 65,000,000 square feet of warehouse space in the United
States. A year later it was occupying nearly 400,000,000 square feet,
three-fourths of which was leased. A large quantity of this space
was open storage, unprotected from the elements. These figures are
exclusive of the quantities of warehousing and open storage occupied
by the various technical bureaus, such as the Ordnance Department, the
Air Service, and the Signal Corps. The operation of the general storage
facilities was the charge of the Director of Storage, one of the chief
functionaries of the Division of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic.
An even greater problem than storage was the disposition of the
enormous surpluses of goods which accumulated after the armistice. The
first concern of the War Department in approaching this question was
the military future of the United States. In 1914 much was made of the
thoroughness of German military preparation, which had been such that,
when the fatal hour struck and the conscripts by hundreds of thousands
left their homes and poured into the German barracks, for every man
there was waiting ready a uniform, shoes, a helmet, underclothing, and
everything needed to prepare him immediately for service in the field.
What Germany had been able to accomplish by premeditated, long, and
expensive effort, the United States now derives as a by-product of the
war Germany forced it to fight. America, too, is now prepared in these
minute details. Before any of the surplus quartermaster stocks were set
aside for sale or other disposition, a complete and balanced selection
of uniforms, overcoats, underclothing, socks, caps, shoes, and other
nonperishable articles in the individual equipment of troops, in
quantities sufficient to outfit an army of approximately 1,000,000 men,
was set aside and placed in indefinite storage. In addition, stores of
such supplies were retained for the future consumption of the regular
standing Army, of the National Guard, and of the Reserve Officers’
Training Corps.
The war construction provided for the War Department three enormous
interior reserve depots located respectively at Schenectady, New York,
New Cumberland, Pennsylvania, and Columbus, Ohio. In these many of
the reserve quartermaster supplies are stored. These installations
are all of permanent and spacious construction. The warehouses are
nearly all one story high, built of hollow tile and concrete, and
divided into sections by fire walls. For additional storage the War
Department is also using numerous wooden warehouses built at the
retained cantonments. These buildings, though well constructed, are not
fireproof and have to be guarded carefully to prevent their destruction.
It was found further that various branches of the Government could make
good use of supplies originally procured for the Army. Many of the
army hospitals were turned over to the Public Health Service, and with
the hospitals the War Department delivered large quantities of medical
supplies. Incidentally it may be noted here that the Army has retained
and stored sufficient field medical equipment for an army of 1,000,000
men. Large lots of such general supplies as hardware, tools, rope,
brushes, and office furniture went to the Bureau of Public Roads, the
Interior Department, the Panama Canal, and other federal agencies.
Then, several foreign governments were allowed to purchase from our
excess supplies. Clothing, textiles, medical equipment, and other
supplies, all to the value of $20,000,000, went to various Russian
societies. The French Government took machine tools and other machinery
originally built for the Engineers, to the value of $25,000,000.
Belgium bought a large quantity of construction materials.
In selling surplus materials to consumers in the United States, the
preference went to charitable and welfare organizations. Hospital
equipment, for instance, was offered first to state and municipal
hospitals, free clinics, and similar institutions. Prices for medical
supplies were fixed far below the prevailing market prices; and yet the
Government had manufactured this equipment at such low cost that the
financial recovery from the sales represented practically every penny
which the War Department had put into the supplies. General supplies
were offered first to welfare organizations, the Young Men’s Christian
Association, the Boy Scouts, hospitals, sanitariums, and relief
societies.
After that came the public. Private dealers were permitted to bid on
lots of supplies. Regular days were set apart for the sale of various
classes of commodities: Monday, textiles and leather goods; Tuesday,
raw materials, machinery, and engineering supplies; Wednesday, general
supplies; Thursday, medical supplies and motor vehicles; Friday,
clothing; and Saturday, food supplies. These bidding sales were widely
advertised, in advance, and bids could be submitted either to the War
Department in Washington or to any of the zone, or district, supply
offices. The private consumer could buy army food, clothing, textiles,
tools, and other commodities of household utility either by parcel post
(through the coöperation of the Post Office Department) or at any of
the Army’s retail stores, a great chain of which was set up throughout
the country.
By sales and transfers the Army, at the end of the first year
of effort, had disposed of supplies originally procured under
the administration of the Director of Purchase to the value of
$357,000,000. The transfers and sales brought back to the War
Department more than seventy-seven cents of every dollar originally
expended in the production of these goods. The story of the ingenuity
displayed by the Government’s officers in selling these and other
surplus supplies (particularly the surpluses in the hands of the
Ordnance Department and the Air Service after the armistice) is left
for another chapter.
Before dropping the subject of the demobilization of the quartermaster
war business, however, we should not overlook the disposition of the
horses and mules acquired by the Army, but not shipped to France.
The Remount Service purchased about 308,000 animals during the war.
It started the war with about 90,000 animals on hand. The war losses
amounted to 33,000 animals. Approximately 68,000 were shipped to
France. Thus, at the time of the armistice the Remount Service had in
its stables and corrals nearly 300,000 horses and mules. About 215,000
of these were declared surplus and sold, and the rest were retained for
the permanent Army.
The decision of the Remount Service to sell 200,000 animals on
the market as rapidly as the market could absorb them was roundly
criticized by horsemen, who pointed out that normally the American
market had never absorbed more than 60,000 horses and mules in a year.
The result would be, the critics declared, that the Government would
get fair prices for the first 50,000 or 60,000 animals offered, and
after that the surplus animals would be a drag on the market, not
only forcing the Government to stand a great financial loss, but so
depressing prices that dealers everywhere would suffer. On the other
hand, it was costing the Government a dollar a day to feed and care for
each of these animals. By retarding the sales the Government might be
able to get better prices, but the gain would be more than absorbed by
the cost of maintaining the establishment in the meantime.
And so it worked out. The market, indeed, proved itself to be able to
absorb the surplus animals, and prices even grew better as the sales
progressed. The average price paid was $111 a head, or about 57 per
cent of the original average cost of $192. On the other hand, the
Government escaped paying heavy maintenance charges.
All the animals were sold at public auctions, 189 of which were held
at thirty-nine different places. Great crowds of buyers attended
the sales, most of which were held at camps where the animals were
quartered. The local post exchanges sold sandwiches and other
refreshments to the buyers. Although the Government guaranteed no
animals, all of them were carefully examined for blemishes and defects
before the sales, and their demerits were noted in the lists read by
the auctioneers. The Government could not afford to gain a David Harum
reputation as a horse trader, for it had too many animals to sell. If
dissatisfaction arose from the earlier sales, it would adversely affect
the later ones. Only five complaints from buyers were made after the
sales. These were referred to the Purchase Claims Board for settlement.
The Government invested $74,000,000 in animals bought in America during
the war. Its net loss on animals sold was $22,000,000, and on animals
that died, $6,000,000. The best of the animals on hand after the
armistice were retained for use by the permanent Army.
CHAPTER XVI
BUILDINGS AND LANDS
One of the major industrial activities conducted in the United States
during the war was the construction of buildings for the Army. The
Army’s physical plant, as it existed on the day war was declared, was
entirely inadequate for the forces to be mobilized--so inadequate as
to be of almost no use at all. Even the old headquarters of the War
Department in Washington, which formerly had housed practically all the
administrative offices, were none too large to accommodate merely the
office staffs of the Secretary of War and his principal assistants,
so great was the expansion of the central administration; and as for
the tens of thousands of officers, clerks, stenographers, messengers,
and other _personnel_ employed by the great producing and operating
bureaus, they occupied literally miles of flimsy, unsightly “war
buildings,” which spread out like a defacing rash over the fair open
spaces of the capital city.
An even greater expansion of plant was to be observed throughout the
country. The plant set up for the Army mobilized against Germany was
a practically new creation, specialized for exactly the sort of war
in which we were engaged. It was a war in which land transportation
had to be linked to ocean transportation, and therefore the plant
included vast facilities for the embarkation of troops and a string
of mighty export terminals, or bases, strung out along the coast in
order to make difficult any blockade of our overseas supply line.
It was a war essentially industrial in type, with unusual emphasis
laid upon the development of special industrial products, such as
powder and explosives; and therefore the plant included dozens of new
mills and factories, several of them industrial centers so large as
to be virtually small cities in themselves, with housing and modern
municipal conveniences for their employees. It was a war in which
new and hitherto unknown forms of combat had sprung into existence,
and therefore the plant included equipped fields for the training
of soldiers in such arts as flying and the employment of poisons
as weapons. Above all, it was a war which called upon the ultimate
resources of American man power; and, as it turned out, the plant had
to be adequate to house, school, amuse, care for, and maintain at least
two million men, with all that that implies in barracks, drill grounds,
parks for vehicles, water and sewer systems, lighting systems, roads,
hospitals, and (in the maintenance line) depots and warehouses for
supplies.
It was all fresh creation, new construction. The building industry of
the United States--and it is one of the largest and strongest of our
industries--had never before been called upon to provide such expansion
in an equal time. It follows that the entire building industry must
have been engaged in the construction enterprise, that every available
man who could drive a nail or lay a brick must have been employed
upon government work. If he was not, he should have been; for those
in charge of the construction, unable to secure sufficient labor from
the entire building industry of the United States, sent ships to Porto
Rico and the Bahamas and brought back thousands of workmen to help out.
The Construction Division, the war-begotten organization which was in
charge of this activity, with 427,000 men on its contractors’ pay rolls
at the peak of its industriousness, yielded only to the United States
Railroad Administration the title of greatest employer of war labor.
It engaged in 581 separate construction projects, which called for an
expenditure of over $1,100,000,000; and it completed most of them.
Miles of docks, hundreds of acres of covered storage, hundreds of
power plants and complete water systems, thousands of miles of roads,
railroads, water mains, and sewer lines--the list grows monotonous
simply because of the size of its items, which are not to be visualized
by stating them in terms of acres and miles. The activity was at its
height at the signing of the armistice, when it became incumbent upon
the Construction Division to terminate the work.
Four hundred and fifty army construction projects were under way on the
day of the armistice. One hundred and thirty-one stood completed. The
incomplete projects included some of the largest and costliest ones.
But the salvage value of buildings is small unless they can be sold to
purchasers able to make use of them as and where they stand. Few war
buildings were adapted to civilian use. They were highly specialized
for a purely war use, and they were not often located where they could
be of economic benefit to the country. A large part of their cost
represented the evanescent element of labor, a value entirely destroyed
when buildings are wrecked for the sake of salvaging their materials.
The war plant, even incomplete, represented an immense investment,
but one which would be almost altogether lost if the plant were to
be knocked down for salvage. Therefore it was of advantage to the
Government to carry on a surprisingly large amount of war construction
after the armistice for the sake of getting the use-value from its
investment by occupying these installations with the permanent Army.
But there were other reasons for continuing work. Among the largest
and costliest of the construction projects were those which provided
the ocean terminal bases at Boston, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Norfolk,
Charleston, and New Orleans. These installations were all of durable,
fireproof construction; and, with their piers, their great warehouses
equipped with labor-saving machinery, trackage, and the like, they were
the last word of modern constructional science in developments of this
sort. In appropriating the money for these port works, Congress had
stipulated that after the war they should be used in the development
of American foreign trade. Consequently the Construction Division went
ahead after the armistice and finished up these buildings.
The port works alone were enough to account for a large portion of the
money expended on construction after the armistice, but in addition
other great unfinished projects were carried through. As we have shown,
the storage problem became acute only after the armistice, when the
wasteful field consumption of supplies ceased and the materials coming
from the war factories banked up in this country. Every warehouse and
depot project incomplete on the day of the armistice was pressed to
completion thereafter in order to provide shelter for valuable and
perishable materials. This was another great branch of post-armistice
construction. Add to these the continued construction of hospitals
(which had to be prepared to receive the thousands of wounded men
in France on the day of the armistice), and it becomes evident why
thousands of the war builders were kept on the job after the war itself
had come to an end.
The fate of every incomplete army construction project on the day of
the armistice was submitted to the Operations Division of the General
Staff, which looked at the percentage of completion, noted whether
the Government owned the ground on which the construction was going
forward, studied the availability of the building for commercial
use, and determined whether it was needed in the military plans, and
then recommended that the construction be abandoned, curtailed, or
completed. In general, the projects abandoned were those providing
additional facilities for the assembling and training of troops and
those providing plants for the production of destructive munitions,
such as toxic gas, powder, and loaded shell. Of the 450 projects
incomplete on the day of the armistice, 182 were abandoned and 268
carried through.
The completion of so large a quantity of the war construction after
the armistice enabled the Construction Division to go through the
demobilization of its industry without accumulating large stores of
surplus materials. Although in form, at any rate, the Division dealt
directly only with contractors who took the various jobs, actually the
Division itself procured the lumber, cement, brick, structural steel,
roofing, hardware, and the like, for the builders. The demand of the
war construction upon the supplies of building materials was so great
that nothing less than a centralized stimulation and control of the
entire market could have procured the materials in the quantities
needed. The Construction Division’s Procurement Division located the
supplies and then arranged each building contractor’s deals for them,
even stipulating the producers, quantities, and the prices which
must be paid for materials. This last was important, because the
war builders worked under a sharply safeguarded cost-plus contract
form, and therefore the Government was keenly interested in what the
materials cost. In addition to procuring supplies for the contractors,
the Procurement Division also purchased equipment for the war
buildings--heating, ventilating, and power plants, fire extinguishers,
refrigeration equipment, boilers, engines, and machinery of many sorts.
Its purchases ran at the rate of $2,000,000 a day in the early autumn
of 1918.
After the armistice and after the temporary suspension of effort
requested in order to give the Construction Division time in which
to take stock of its position, the production of building materials
and supplies of which the Government would be able to make no use was
rapidly terminated. The Procurement Division was made up of experts in
all branches of building construction, and therefore this Division was
made over after the armistice into the Construction Division Claims
Board for liquidating its war business under the direction of the War
Department Claims Board. In six months practically all the terminated
contracts had been finally settled by this organization, at an average
cancellation cost of 5 per cent of the face value of the contracts.
The termination of supply contracts and of contracts with constructors
of buildings not needed by the War Department after the armistice,
left the Construction Division with large quantities of supplies on
its hands. But these were by no means surplus supplies. The completion
of a large quantity of war construction after the armistice saved the
Construction Division from having to solve the problem of disposing of
much surplus. Supplies accumulated for the terminated jobs were simply
diverted to those ordered completed and thus utilized.
But although the Division had no large quantity of building supplies
to sell, it was charged, after the armistice, with the duty of
disposing of the facilities at the 182 construction projects which
were terminated. Many of these projects were large ones, those in this
category being for the most part training camps for troops. There
was a camp shortage in 1918, and the Construction Division was doing
everything in its power to overcome it. We were sending men overseas
at the rate of 300,000 a month; and, since it was desirable to give
every overseas soldier at least six months’ training, that implied
camp accommodations for 1,800,000 men in the United States. The actual
accommodations provided were for less than 1,370,000 troops. In 1918,
after the augmented rate of embarkation became a fact, new training
camp projects were consequently inaugurated at frequent intervals. Only
a few days before the armistice the Construction Division began the
construction of an enormous new camp which was to specialize in the
training of infantry. All the national guard camps (sixteen of them)
and most of the special-purpose camps, whether completely built or not,
were condemned after the armistice for salvage. Most of these were
veritable cities, some of them large enough to accommodate 40,000 men
each, comfortably--with the adverb accented, for the comfort was based
on such substantial (and costly) installations as water and sanitation
systems, electric lighting, pavements, sidewalks, and even stores,
theatres, and gymnasiums. It was the task of the Construction Division
to dispose of these cities to such members of the public as cared to
buy.
A city, however, is something more than an accumulation of buildings
and other tangible facilities. Quite as much as upon foundations of
rock, a city rests upon logic--the logic of its location. Naturally the
Government built its camps upon cheap land, therefore upon land not
in demand by the population, therefore upon land not so located as to
make it a logical place for a city. And so, although it was thought at
first that perhaps some of these camps might prove to be the nuclei of
permanent civilian communities, that notion soon had to be abandoned
for the reason that few civilian movements arose to occupy permanently
the former war buildings. An attempt was made, and still is being made,
to use the former Nitro Powder Plant as a permanent civilian industrial
city, and one or two training camps in the South have been held
together by their purchasers with the idea of establishing communities
on their sites. The others, however, in which the Government had sunk
hundreds of millions of dollars, were sold out to the wreckers, who
bought them for the sake of salvaging the building materials.
Now, there is nothing quite so second-hand as second-hand building
materials. Boards are full of nail holes and sometimes covered with
faded paint or disfiguring marks. Bricks are soiled, chipped, and worn,
and conglomerated with stonelike mortar. Hardware and metallic fixtures
are corroded and rusty. Such materials are not only wreckage and
junk, but not even valuable junk. The chief cost in the construction
of a training camp was the labor which laid the brick, installed the
underground piping, smoothed, squared, and nailed up the lumber, and
soldered the joints in the plumbing. All that labor value was lost when
camps were salvaged for their materials.
Yet this was not the only loss which the Government was forced to
sustain. Practically all the camps were originally located on leased
ground; and this fact implied that in razing the camps the Government
was bound to restore the land to its original condition, or, in
lieu of that, to pay to the owners the costs of restoration. These
questions of property damage greatly complicated the demobilization
of the training camps, because the amounts of damage were so hard to
ascertain. Concrete roads had been laid across what were originally
pastures; fertile corn lands were crisscrossed with clay ridges thrown
up above the water and sewer trenches. On the other hand, some of the
camp improvements had drained former swamps and reclaimed them for
cultivation, and such benefits would offset damages in other places. It
was out of the question for the Government to attempt to settle these
thousands of cases individually, because of the time it would take;
and therefore it was stipulated that the purchasers of the camps must
assume all liabilities for property damage and hold the Government
harmless from claims that might later be pressed in the Court of
Claims. Naturally the purchasers made allowances for these damages in
their bids, and wide allowances, too, since the extent of the damages
was largely conjecture. This consideration further depressed the prices
paid by the purchasers.
The result was that the salvage of abandoned army camps brought back
to the Government only a small fraction of the money put into them.
Actually in scores of instances it would have been cheaper for the
Government to abandon the improvements to the landowners in return for
quit-claims for the property damage. Public policy, however, prohibited
such a short-cut method. Some of the leased sites had been donated to
the Government before the armistice at the nominal rental of $1.00 a
year or some other slight sum; but afterwards the chambers of commerce
and other civic agencies which had made these concessions, for the
sake of securing camps near their communities, refused to renew the
arrangements, and the War Department was forced to pay regular rentals.
Here was a consideration to force the sale of the camps on any terms
possible. The chief lesson learned from the war construction enterprise
was that the Government should buy and not lease a site when the value
of the improvements is to exceed the value of the site itself. Only
by holding such property for permanent use or gradual sale can the
Government get value received for its investment.
In general, the salvage recovery from camps and other installations
sold after the armistice amounted to about 15 per cent of the money
invested in the original building materials. All labor values were
lost. All wastage of materials in construction and demolition was loss.
Many materials such as cement and concrete, road material, roofing,
wood-stave piping, sewer piping, and so on, were a complete loss. The
attention of the reader is invited to some typical shrinkages in value.
+----------------------------------------------------+
| _Project_ _Original Cost_ _Salvage Recovery_|
+----------------------------------------------------+
|Camp Beauregard $4,300,000 $ 43,000 |
|Camp Bowie 3,400,000 110,000 |
|Camp Hancock 6,000,000 75,000 |
|Camp Logan 3,300,000 137,000 |
|Camp Wadsworth 4,000,000 95,000 |
|Camp Wheeler 3,200,000 144,000 |
+----------------------------------------------------+
Note, however, that in disposing of these camps, the Government
retained practically all the storage and hospital facilities.
During the year following the armistice the Construction Division
disposed of fourteen national guard camps, three embarkation camps,
sixteen special and regular training camps, four flying fields, four
hospitals, and many small groups of buildings. For these the Government
received about $4,215,000. In addition, parts of many other camps were
sold; also construction materials of practically every sort.
The most spectacular accomplishment of the Construction Division
before the armistice was the building of the cantonments, the primary
training camps which housed the soldiers summoned into the military
service by the Selective Service Law. These were much more substantial
installations than the national guard camps, the salvaging of six
of which was noted in the tabular statement above. The national
guard camps provided only tentage for the shelter of troops, whereas
the cantonments housed their inhabitants in stanch wooden barrack
buildings. A cantonment cost from two to three times as much as a
national guard camp. Yet, on three months’ notice, at the beginning
of which not even the sites had yet been selected and acquired, the
Construction Division prepared sixteen cantonments ready to receive the
first inductives called to the colors.
The cantonments originally were all built upon leased ground. It was
evident that, if the Government were forced to vacate the ground to the
owners, the cantonments, salvaged for their building materials, would
bring no greater recovery percentage of their cost than did the tentage
camps. The Government’s loss, in such an event, on each cantonment
would be twice or three times what it proved to be on the national
guard camps. Before the end of the war was in sight the Construction
Division had anticipated demobilization by presenting a plan to the
Secretary of War for the purchase of the sites of the cantonments.
Purchase would accomplish several desirable ends. As long as the
cantonments were in use it would save the payment of rents. After the
war was over, if the cantonments were retained by the Army, it would
give the cantonments their full use-value, which was every penny they
had cost. If, on the other hand, the decision was to dispose of them
after the advent of peace, then ownership of the sites would permit the
Government (1) to market the materials gradually and avoid beating down
prices by glutting the market; or (2) to sell buildings intact, with
the land on which they stood; or (3) to sell entire cantonments as they
stood, together with title to the lands. Any one of these methods of
disposition would bring a far greater salvage return than the forced
sale of the materials and the payment of property damages.
In March, 1919, the Assistant Secretary of War directed that the leased
sites of fourteen of the cantonments--namely, Camps Custer, Devens,
Dix, Dodge, Gordon, Grant, Lee, Jackson, Meade, Pike, Sherman, Taylor,
Travis, and Upton--be acquired by purchase. The investment in these
cantonments was approximately $155,000,000. By continuing to use the
cantonments, the War Department could get full value received for the
money expended. By salvaging them after the manner of disposing of the
national guard camps, the Government might recover $4,000,000 at the
outside estimate. By selling the materials gradually or the buildings
intact with lands, the recovery could be expected to run as high as
$48,000,000. The business logic of the proposition was irresistible.
The purchase of this vast quantity of land was undertaken by the
Construction Division. After the commanding officers at the cantonments
had indicated what boundaries should be included, the Division sent
out its field forces--on April 21, 1919. First to go to work were
engineers and surveyors to fix accurate boundaries and secure complete
metes-and-bounds descriptions of the properties. Contracts were drawn
with various responsible title companies to make search of the land
titles and to guarantee them with title insurance. Next followed
acquisition officers who closed sale contracts with the private owners.
The sale contracts were finally signed in behalf of the Government by
competent officers. With the acquisition officers traveled disbursing
officers of the Finance Service who stood ready to pay spot cash for
the lands the moment the sale contracts were signed. So rapidly was
this work carried on that in two months the Government had acquired
ownership to more than half the area on which the fourteen cantonments
stood. A year later about 55,000 acres had passed in fee simple to
the United States at a price of $6,762,000. Considerable property was
yet unacquired; but, although it had been estimated that the sites
would cost ultimately $9,657,000, the indications then were that the
Government would secure them for not more than $8,115,000.
It was found to be impossible, however, to secure all the property so
simply and easily. Some owners would not sell at reasonable prices;
other owners could not be found; still others were under legal
disabilities which prevented them from selling. In such instances the
recourse of the Government was condemnation of the lands. Proceedings
were instituted eventually to condemn some 22,000 acres for government
use. The condemnation proceedings were conducted by the Department of
Justice, which found this work to be one of great magnitude.
One of the interesting war developments in the United States was the
change in the attitude of the War Department toward real estate.
Before the war the various bureaus and other agencies of the War
Department acquired their own real estate by lease or purchase as
they needed it and as they could secure authority to procure it.
The war itself resulted in an intense demand for real estate by the
War Department as sites for its war buildings or as quarters to be
occupied under lease. Real estate, therefore, came to be regarded as
a commodity in the supply of the Army; just as much a commodity as
food or ammunition. And, as the procurement of other commodities was
eventually administered and controlled by a centralized agency, so the
centralized procurement of real estate was placed in the hands of a new
organization called the Real Estate Service.
The Real Estate Service acted as the Army’s real estate agent. The
various bureaus still originated the projects for the acquisition of
property, and then the Real Estate Service acquired the property as
agent for the bureaus. The Service was composed of experts who saw to
it that deeds and leases were correctly drawn and that the Government
made good bargains.
The armistice, if anything, meant increased effort for the Real Estate
Service, since the problem of the storage of surplus supplies was to
be solved only by the acquisition of space. It was also necessary to
dispense with high-priced locations, essential as they had been during
the actual hostilities, and to substitute more economical facilities.
Many of the War Department’s war factories had been built on leased
sites, and it was necessary to purchase these sites wherever it was
expedient for the Department to retain the factory as a preparedness
asset or where it was good business to buy the land in order to sell
the factory advantageously.
Although few obstacles had been thrown in the way of the War Department
in purchasing property, it was discovered after the armistice that,
because of existing and obsolete laws, it was most difficult to sell
any. Up to the declaration of war the law which controlled this
function provided that war department lands useless for military
purposes should be sold _by the Secretary of the Interior_. When this
law was enacted (1884) most of the lands occupied by the Army had come
from the public domain, and it was logical to turn them back to that
source when the War Department was through with them. In May, 1917,
Congress authorized the War Department itself to sell national guard
target ranges. In July, 1918, Congress authorized the President to
sell, _through the head of any Executive Department_, lands acquired
after the declaration of war against Germany to be the sites of war
factories. In July, 1919, Congress authorized the sale under identical
conditions of lands acquired for storage purposes. These, however, were
the only exceptions granted to the original rule. In fact, when the War
Department went about the purchase of the fourteen cantonment sites
for the possible purpose of selling these lands later and thus getting
better prices for the buildings on them, it did so with the knowledge
that it would take a special act of Congress to authorize such a sale.
Congress, without warning, attached a rider to the appropriation
bill which was approved on July 11, 1919, forbidding the expenditure
of any more money at all in the purchase of real estate by the Army
except at the national guard camps or at the cantonments in use before
November 11, 1918, and also except where the purchase of sites of
industrial plants was necessary to protect the Government’s interests.
The Secretary of War ruled that the fourteen cantonments then being
purchased were exempt from this inhibition, but the law abruptly put an
end to projects of the Real Estate Service to buy some 300,000 acres
at a cost of $8,000,000. At that time the Service was buying 115,000
acres of land at Columbus, Georgia, to serve as an infantry school of
arms, 120,000 acres at Fayetteville, North Carolina, to be an artillery
range, and several other large acreages for various military purposes.
The project to acquire Camp Humphreys, the Engineers’ camp in Virginia
near the city of Washington, about 4,000 acres, was allowed to go
through.
[Illustration:
_Photo from Construction Division_
WEST INDIAN LABORERS EMBARKING FOR HOME]
[Illustration:
_Photo from Construction Division_
VIEW OF CAMP SHERMAN]
On the first day of the armistice the War Department was a party to
leases obligating it to pay $13,000,000 in rentals annually. By the
end of December, 1919, the Real Estate Service had made a large net
reduction in the number of leases, and the annual rent bill had dropped
to approximately $5,000,000, although in that interval the Service had
acquired by lease hundreds of millions of square feet of new storage
space.
[Illustration:
_Photo from Quartermaster Department_
IN AN ARMY RETAIL STORE]
[Illustration:
_Photo from Quartermaster Department_
CUSTOMERS AT OPENING OF ARMY RETAIL STORE]
CHAPTER XVII
SELLING THE SURPLUS
In our earlier chapters, frequent and more or less extended references
have been made to the disposition of surplus property acquired by the
various branches of the Army during the World War. In so far as these
references have been to surpluses with the American Expeditionary
Forces, we have aimed to make the statements complete; but the
references to sales of the surplus military property accumulated
within the United States have been only incidental, inserted merely
to make plain to the reader the extent of the tasks of the various
production bureaus after the armistice. This may have seemed haphazard
and confusing treatment of what was one of the most interesting
and important phases of the demobilization of war industry. We are
therefore taking occasion in this chapter to consider this phase--the
disposal of the domestic surpluses of war materials--as a whole and in
such detail as may be expedient.
That same tendency toward centralization which succeeded in placing
under one direction the procurement of all war supplies and, after the
armistice, the liquidation of the Government’s business engagements,
also brought about a unified control of the sale of the surplus
materials. Shortly after the armistice there was set up in the Division
of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic a Sales Branch under an officer
called the Director of Sales. Just as, after the formation of the
“overhead” business organization known as the Division of Purchase,
Storage, and Traffic, the various production bureaus still continued
to procure most of their own supplies, but now under the control and
authority of the Director of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic, so after
the armistice these same bureaus sold and otherwise disposed of the
surpluses they had acquired, but under the supervision of the Director
of Sales. With the exception of a few sales made directly with various
foreign governments and companies (property valued at $63,450,000 going
in these transactions), the Sales Branch itself engaged in no selling,
but merely directed the selling activities of the operating bureaus.
It is impossible here even to give an estimate of the value of the
surplus materials left on the hands of the War Department after the
termination of the war industry, for the reason that the War Department
itself has never been able to arrive at an estimate. The subject has
been so vast, so intricate, and so complicated by the changing of
_personnel_ and the evolution of organization, that it has seemed to be
a hopeless task to attempt an inventory of the surplus property sold
and for sale. We can, however, gain some idea of the quantities of
it. It is estimated that the armistice found the Army with a surplus
of war supplies on hand of a value of $2,000,000,000. This investment
represented goods actually produced by American industry up to November
11, 1918, in the maintenance of a force of 4,000,000 men and in
anticipation of a force of nearly 5,000,000 in 1919. But this, mind
you, was surplus within the United States. On the same date--the day
of the armistice--the A. E. F., through importations from the United
States and through its own foreign purchases, had built up a surplus
of supplies worth $1,330,000,000 over and above what it would return
to the war reserves at home and outside of what it would consume while
resting on European soil during demobilization. Thus we have the figure
$3,330,000,000 as representing the value of the surplus supplies,
munitions, on hand when the active fighting ceased.
But this is only the beginning of the complete inventory; this was
merely the surplus existing on November 11, 1918. War industry, under
the policy of terminating it by graduating a declining production,
still had weeks and months to go on producing goods, for most of which
there was no war use. This dwindling manufacture by thousands of
factories with millions of employees added to the surpluses materials
worth many hundreds of millions. And still the tale is not told. War
industry had been fostered by huge federal investments in buildings and
machinery. These facilities, too, existed as surplus when the industry
ended. This great accumulation was largely augmented by the machinery
and other manufacturing facilities taken over by the Government in
the settlement with the war contractors. The Government had purchased
heavily of raw materials of various sorts, quantities of which remained
as surplus after the armistice. In liquidating the war industry it
added further to its stores of raw materials and took over, besides,
a great mass of semi-finished materials in all stages of completion.
When upon this heap we pile a great part of all the war building
construction, and on that the additional surpluses automatically
created when polity in Congress and in the executive offices made cut
after cut in the size of the permanent Army, then we are approximating
the total of the surplus.
This was all wealth, the true substance of the nation, its resources
fabricated by its labor for the special purposes of war; and, with the
war over, with little or no demand or use for these special materials,
they could be disposed of only at a shocking sacrifice. Again, we
cannot estimate the extent of the shrinkage, but we can indicate
it. Up to March 1, 1920, the War Department had disposed of surplus
property which had cost it $2,600,000,000. For this it had received
$1,633,000,000. The recovery, therefore, was 64 per cent of the cost;
the loss, 36 per cent. The shrinkage in values is one of the wastes
which any nation must contemplate and accept when it sets forth to wage
war on the modern scale. The nation can get value received for the cost
of its munitions only by using them in war.
The largest of American companies, the United States Steel Corporation,
in 1918, its busiest year, did a gross business of $1,745,000,000. The
value of the surplus munitions produced before the armistice was nearly
twice as great as that. The Steel Corporation, however, produced only
a few dozen or few score sorts of products. The sorts of goods and
materials to be disposed of by the Sales Branch were in number about
250,000, and this range embraced goods known in many branches of trade.
The Steel Corporation and other great companies usually sell to a
relatively small group of customers, who take the products in wholesale
quantities. The market which the Sales Branch entered consisted of the
entire United States, with 110,000,000 possible buyers; for part of
the problem was to dispose of surplus materials by retail sale to the
public. All in all, this may be regarded as the greatest merchandizing
enterprise ever undertaken in America.
The 250,000 catalogue items in the sales list were divided roughly into
seven commodity groups, as follows: (1) railway and building materials
and contractors’ equipment; (2) manufacturing plants and plant sites;
(3) machine tools; (4) vehicles and airplanes, including spare engines
and parts; (5) quartermaster stores; (6) ordnance and technical
equipment, including office equipment; and (7) raw materials, scrap
metal, and waste materials.
It was recognized at the outset that to throw on the market vast
quantities of supplies and materials in all these seven categories was
to court disaster to the industrial situation. Business and industry
immediately after the armistice were in a ticklish position. They faced
the complete transition from the war to the peace basis, an uncharted
region through which it seemed likely that they could go safely only
under the wisest of guidance. If, in addition to its inevitable
troubles of reconstruction, industry were to have to face cutthroat
competition with the surpluses of the very goods its own mills had
created during the war, it was evident that the difficulties of the
transition might be doubled.
To safeguard business as much as possible and still dispose of
the surplus materials, the War Department adopted certain general
principles or policies. The first of these was that the general
Government, through its several departments and in the public work
which the departments were doing, should utilize all the surplus war
materials they could absorb. The second and more important was to
sell all general commodities to the public through the medium of the
industries which had produced these commodities and thus to avoid
disastrous breaks in market prices--even, sometimes, to sustain prices.
There was widespread disapproval of this latter policy. The public
for months had been stung and irritated by prices which many regarded
as the exactions of profiteers; and now at last, with huge stocks of
supplies on hand which had to be sold or lost, the people anticipated a
dumping which would smash down prices and bring about the discomfiture
of those who had seemingly victimized them. But this was not to be. The
Government adopted the view that it was better to have the high (but
normally declining) prices and to keep the wheels of industry turning
than to risk a collapse of prices that might bring with it general
unemployment and business stagnation.
Later on, when it had become evident that business was making a safe
passage through the reconstruction period, large stocks of clothing and
food supplies were sold directly to consumers at prices considerably
below the market averages.
Particularly in raw materials the policy of sale through, or in
coöperation with, the industry affected by the sale worked as the
Government had expected it to work. The War Department found itself
after the armistice with a surplus of 125,000,000 board feet of soft
lumber over and above what it would need in completing the various
unterminated construction projects. This was lumber enough to build
5,000 houses. To have dumped this on the market would have paralyzed a
large part of the lumbering industry until the market had absorbed the
army lumber. Accordingly the War Department entered into a contract
with the authorized representatives of the lumber industry whereby it
was agreed that the lumber should be marketed gradually and at prices
fixed by agreement between the Government and the industry. Under
this arrangement the surplus was all sold without disturbance to the
industry and at prices which brought a good return to the Government.
In the spring of 1919 the Government had on hand a surplus of something
more than 100,000,000 pounds of copper. The copper industry was in a
serious plight. The producers had on hand a surplus of 1,000,000,000
pounds, but still they were keeping the mines, smelters, and refineries
running to prevent unemployment and in the expectation that the
resumption of normal business would soon create a demand for copper.
Any dumping of the war department surplus most certainly would have
closed the mines. Instead of that, the Government sold the entire
surplus back to the producers. The industry continued in operation, and
the Government received an average of seventeen cents a pound for its
copper, a fair recovery.
The War Department’s surplus of 161,000,000 pounds of sulphur was
sold through the industry. At the armistice the Government had on
hand some 600,000 tons of nitrate of soda imported from Chile for the
powder factories. About half of this was retained as a war reserve.
The Department of Agriculture disposed of 125,000 tons of it to
farmers for use as fertilizer. About 142,000 tons was sold for the War
Department at market prices by the nitrate importers who had supplied
the commodity to the Government in the first place. A stock of 59,000
tons of nitrate in Chile, the property of the American Government,
was brought to the United States and sold by the importers on the
same terms. Approximately 730,000 bales of cotton linters in the war
department surplus are being used by the commercial powder industry on
such terms as will return to the Government from one-third to one-half
the original cost of the linters. A surplus of 66,000,000 pounds of
ammonium nitrate was sold at prices which reimbursed the War Department
to the extent of about one-third its war-time cost.
It should be borne in mind that all these sales were actually
consummated by the production bureaus in whose hands the supplies
remained as surplus after the armistice, the Sales Branch merely
coördinating the sales and approving the terms. It will be
impracticable here to go into the details of the salvage and sales
activities of all the bureaus, but enough can be told to illustrate
the ingenuity and business enterprise employed in disposing of the
great war surpluses. As the occasion demanded, the government salesmen
had to be merchants, barterers, auctioneers, and even partners with
commercial organizations.
The production bureaus were organized for their salvage operations
precisely as they had been for manufacturing the supplies and, later,
for liquidating the business arrangements with the contractors. Those
which had created manufacturing districts before the armistice,
afterwards established district salvage boards to take over and
dispose of the surpluses accumulated by the district claims boards
in their settlements with the contractors. These district salvage
boards, in turn, were subsidiary to the main bureau salvage boards,
which, in turn, reported to the Sales Branch of the Division of
Purchase, Storage, and Traffic. The surpluses of ordnance materials,
for instance, were handled by the Ordnance Salvage Board through its
district salvage boards, and the same system obtained in the Air
Service and under the Director of Purchase. The other bureaus disposed
of their surpluses through central salvage boards in Washington.
Perhaps the chief challenge to the ingenuity of the government salesman
was that offered by the ordnance surpluses, for these were probably
the most highly specialized of all military supplies; yet it was
often the task of the Ordnance Salvage Board to find civilian needs
to which these supplies could be adapted. Great commercial successes
have sometimes been scored by those able to develop new uses, and
therefore new markets, for the goods they manufactured. In like fashion
the ordnance salvers, by taking thought, could sometimes convert what
had been regarded as junk into merchandise for which there was a brisk
demand at good prices.
These activities took the salesmen far afield. They disposed of lumber
to the Panama Canal operators, sold nitrate to the Government of
Holland, converted the great ammonium nitrate plant at Perryville into
a hospital operated by the Public Health Service for the benefit of
disabled ex-service men, transferred tin to the Navy Department, and
demonstrated to the Department of Agriculture that the containers in
which it had been intended to ship trench mortar shell could serve
equally well as containers of dehydrated vegetables. They disposed of
rope to the Department of Agriculture. They sold a thousand revolvers
to the police force of Washington. To the federal road-builders they
turned over trucks and smokeless powder and trinitrotoluol to be used
as blasting explosive.
One of the largest single undertakings in ordnance salvage was the
disposal of manufacturing plants either built outright or equipped
with machinery by the Government. There were some 300 of these, and
the Government’s investment in them was practically $525,000,000. The
array included cannon and gun-carriage plants, shell-loading plants,
powder works, chemical and acid plants, toluol plants, small-arms
factories, ammunition factories, nitrate-fixation plants, and numerous
shell-making plants. In the liquidation of the ordnance industry large
additional quantities of ordnance production machinery, both new and
used, fell into the hands of the Government. All of it, beyond the
selections retained in the military reserves, had to be sold. During
the first year after the armistice the sales of ordnance plants and
machinery brought in a return of over $70,000,000. (Manufacturing
facilities worth double that amount had either been stored or installed
at the various arsenals, or else had been turned over to other
departments of the Government.) In the spring of 1920 half the vast
accumulation of ordnance plants and machinery had been disposed of.
The most spectacular sale accomplished in this branch of ordnance
salvage was that of the smokeless powder plant at Nitro, West Virginia.
This plant was a self-contained town, with three square miles of
land in its site, with houses for 20,000 people, theatres, schools,
churches, stores, electric lights, paved streets, gas, a telephone
system, water, and other modern improvements. The Director of Sales
himself conducted the negotiations whereby the entire establishment
was sold _en bloc_ to a development corporation, which planned to
resell the establishment piecemeal to manufacturers and thus create a
permanent industrial city at Nitro. The corporation paid a flat price
to the Government for the Nitro plant and in addition admitted the
Government as a partner in the profits. Several companies have already
occupied factory buildings there. The Ordnance Salvage Board maintained
representatives at Nitro to approve the resales as they were made.
The Ordnance Department took over from the producers after the
armistice large quantities of steel in process of being made into
artillery shell. A great deal of this steel consisted of finished
and semi-finished parts for shell. No matter how much labor had been
expended on these shell parts, their only value commercially was as
melting stock. The users of steel evidently expected to be able to pick
up the Government’s surplus stock of it after the armistice for a song:
the highest bids for the first offerings of it on the market were only
about $12 a ton. The ordnance salvers cannily decided not to sell at
such prices and, except for some trifling, but advantageous, sales, did
nothing about it until the summer of 1919. By that time the commercial
revival began to make itself felt in the demand for steel, the prices
of which were further enhanced by an impending strike in the steel
industry. Then it was that the wisdom of holding on to the steel stocks
became evident. The sale of shell steel was handled directly by the
Ordnance Salvage Board, which, after the prices rose, dealt only with
heavy purchasers. The average price paid to the Government for this
steel was about $30 a ton. The Salvage Board handled about 1,000,000
tons of it.
There were also large surpluses of nonferrous metals,--copper, zinc,
lead, tin, antimony, and nickel,--the stocks including nearly 20,000
ounces of platinum, which sold, it may be noted, for an average price
of $105 an ounce--just about what it had cost. The copper, as we have
seen, went back to the producers at a fair price. The Board sold
65,000,000 pounds of zinc at an average of eight cents a pound. The
surplus of brass amounted to 135,000,000 pounds, and this has been
selling at good prices. During the year following the armistice the
salvers disposed of nonferrous metals worth $40,000,000.
The salvers had to use their ingenuity in order to dispose of the
surplus cupro-nickel advantageously. Cupro-nickel is an alloy of
copper and nickel which is used in making jackets for small-arms
bullets, but the metal has no commercial use. The Government was
able to secure not a single bid for any of its large surplus of
cupro-nickel. The alloy is too tough for ordinary metal-working
machinery. The ordnance salvers first proposed that this metal be
used at the Mint in making five-cent pieces, but the surplus of it
was so large that it would have taken many years to consume it all in
this use. The experimenters then took hold and found that, by melting
cupro-nickel and further alloying it with zinc, they could produce
German silver, a commodity for which there is extensive industrial use.
This fact was demonstrated to the market, and the first result was a
bid for 5,000,000 pounds of cupro-nickel at a favorable price.
An even more conspicuous example of resourcefulness on the part of the
ordnance salvage forces was the sale of the so-called cartridge cloth.
The Ordnance Department was an extensive war consumer of textiles of
many kinds. Silk, cotton, wool, felt, and linen are used in numerous
forms in the production of ordnance supplies. The quantities acquired
during the war may be estimated from the fact that the surpluses
left after the armistice brought on sale close to $25,000,000. In
the surplus of textile goods was a considerable yardage of what was
called cartridge cloth; and it must be said that at the outset none of
the excess ordnance supplies seemed to be so hopeless as a salvaging
proposition, so certain to account for a large loss of investment, as
this stock of cartridge cloth.
The cartridge cloth was used during the war to make bags to be filled
with the smokeless powder used as the propelling charges for guns of
the larger calibers. The cloth was made of silk, for the reason that
silk alone among fabrics burns perfectly and leaves no ash to smut the
barrel of a gun. Cotton, in contrast, or any other fabric, is likely
to leave charred pieces of itself smouldering in the breech of a gun
after a shot; and these smouldering pieces may touch off the new powder
charge prematurely and kill or maim the men serving the gun. Moreover,
silk alone does not cause a flash at the muzzle of the gun when the
shot is fired. Such flashes at night betray the gun’s position to the
enemy.
But though cartridge cloth was made of pure silk, what a silk it was!
Naturally, to keep down its cost, it was woven of the cheapest silk
materials possible to obtain. It was made of what were practically
the by-products of silk-weaving--noils and waste silk. Noils are cut
cocoons, immature cocoons, and combings from the outsides of cocoons.
The woof of cartridge cloth was made from silk noils and the warp
from waste silk. All raw silk is filled with a natural gum, which in
commercial processes is boiled out before the silk is woven. Since
this gum did not impair the fabric for use in guns (the gum gave
perfect combustion and left no ash), it was left in the raw material
in order to keep down the cost of the fabric. In order to facilitate
the manufacture of cloth from noils, the noils were carded, combed, and
spun in oil, oil not being objectionable in the cloth. The result was a
greasy, dark colored, rough cloth, looking like oily gunny sacking, a
fabric about as unalluring as any that could be imagined. And it cost
the Government on the average seventy-two cents a yard. At the time
of the armistice the Ordnance Department had on hand about 22,000,000
yards of it. Most of this quantity was set aside as a war reserve.
The rest was offered for sale. The best offer for it was twelve and
one-half cents a yard. The Government, therefore, faced a considerable
loss.
The ordnance salvers were not content to swallow this loss. The Salvage
Board obtained $20,000 with which to experiment with the silk. An
expert silk maker in the Sales Branch then tried boiling out the gum
and oil and otherwise processing the fabric, after which he bleached,
dyed, printed, and napped it. The result was a beautiful fabric,
suitable for outer garments for both men and women, and for millinery,
drapery, and upholstery. Beautiful color effects were obtained with it
by certain silk-finishing companies. With this demonstration before the
trade, the Salvage Board again asked for bids, and this time received
a number of them, offering prices ranging from thirty-one cents a yard
to forty. This still was not enough for the salvage salesmen, who went
out and negotiated a contract with two companies--the Bush Terminal
Company of New York and the McLane Silk Company of Turners Falls,
Massachusetts--which netted the Government eighty-five and a half cents
a yard, plus half the profits received from the sale of the fabric. A
considerable quantity of the silk was sold under this arrangement.
The expenses of the Ordnance Salvage Board were less than 6 per cent of
the money received from sales and transfers. This sales cost compares
favorably with similar costs in the mercantile world.
The fact that a large part of the money spent by the Air Service during
the war was represented after the armistice by finished airplanes and
airplane engines precluded any considerable recoupment of the war
expenditures from sales of surplus materials afterwards, since, at
present, planes and engines have small commercial utility. Aviation
engines are too light and too powerful for ordinary tasks, and no
real market for airplanes has yet existed in the United States.
Consequently, the sales of air service surplus were virtually limited
to commodities having commercial use, such as tires, photographic
equipment, linen fabric, fur used in making aviators’ clothing, and the
like. Some of these surplus commodities, however, went at good prices.
One New York concern bought 372,500 Chinese dogskins for approximately
$700,000. Nearly 5,000,000 board feet of surplus mahogany, used in
making propellers, sold for $150 a thousand feet. Great quantities of
small tools from the airplane factories, millions of yards of cotton
fabric, and nearly 4,000,000 pounds of long-staple cotton sold at good
prices. The Government realized $700,000 from the sale of 20,000,000
feet of spruce, fir, and other soft woods used in the manufacture of
airplanes. One large sale of airplanes and engines was recorded. For
$380,000 the Nebraska Aircraft Corporation of Lincoln, Nebraska, bought
280 Standard J-1 training planes without engines and 280 Hispano-Suiza
engines to drive them.
To sell its surplus in the United States the Air Service set up field
disposal agencies at Boston, New York, Buffalo, Chicago, Detroit, and
Dayton. The property declared surplus was valued at approximately
$115,000,000. Up to the present (July, 1921) goods to the value of
$97,000,000 have been sold from this surplus, and there is an unsold
residue valued at $18,000,000. The average recovery has been 62 per
cent of the cost.
The disposition of the property acquired by the United States Spruce
Production Corporation in the forests of the Pacific Northwest was
delayed by the congressional investigation of the affairs of that
official organization. The cost value of all salvageable property
was calculated at approximately $19,000,000, of which $7,000,000
represented the cost of three railroads for hauling logs. The rest of
the investment was represented by sawmills, roads, hotels and barracks
for woodsmen, hoisting engines, drying kilns, and nearly 100,000 other
items, among which were 22,000,000 feet of lumber produced and on hand.
The lumber of commercial grades was promptly sold, and the Air Service
arranged to take over the 3,088,000 feet of airplane lumber stock, for
a consideration of approximately $1,000,000. The sale of the remaining
property has gone on slowly, and the recovery has been low in ratio to
the original cost.
The sale of surplus engineering materials brought to the Government
the unusually high average recoupment of 87 per cent of the cost
of manufacturing the supplies. The reason is that the largest and
most valuable part of the surplus consisted of railroad construction
materials and rolling stock. The railroads of the world, and
particularly those of Europe, had been neglected during the war, and
their rejuvenation had become a necessity even paramount to that of
reconstructing general industry. Such governments as those of France
and Poland were glad of the chance to secure American locomotives,
cars, and cranes at the cost of their manufacture. The largest single
sale of engineer supplies was made to the French Government, which paid
approximately $63,000,000 for 485 freight locomotives and nearly 20,000
freight cars. By the spring of 1920 surplus engineering supplies which
had cost $128,000,000 had been sold for about $110,000,000. Large
quantities of excavating machinery and other contractors’ equipment
were transferred to the Bureau of Public Roads.
Surplus chemical warfare materials, on the other hand, proved to have
low salvage value. After the armistice the Chemical Warfare Service
found itself with some 1,000 carloads of surplus materials on its
hands. These materials had cost $11,000,000. Of the surplus, obsolete
gas masks and other accumulations valuable to no one and therefore
unsalable, accounted for $2,000,000. The rest consisted principally of
raw materials and machinery. Certain of its raw chemicals the Service
was able to dispose of to the artificial dye industry at a profit. The
outside gas-making plants attached to the Edgewood Arsenal were sold by
auction to manufacturers of chemicals.
Though the sales of surplus factories, machinery, raw materials, and
scrap and junk were of intense interest and concern to industry and
business generally, the great masses of people in this country knew
little or nothing about them. The wage earners, the millions drawing
salaries of moderate range, were not beneficiaries--not immediate
beneficiaries, at any rate--of the bargains the Government was
offering. The trade journals were filled with advertising and reading
matter about the sales of the war surpluses, but the newspapers seldom
had anything to say about them. No doubt there were hundreds of
thousands of Americans who, immediately after the armistice, reading
about the excess stores which were overflowing the Government’s
enormous warehouses, expected to benefit personally and at once by
the situation. It was the opportunity of a lifetime to pick up a new
stock of kitchen utensils for a song, or a lawn mower, or a new Dodge
car at a knock-down price, or, at least, new supplies of underclothing
and other garments, or of food at figures which would make the corner
grocer squirm. But as the weeks and months went by and none of these
opportunities ever presented themselves, it became obvious to any
thinking person that the Government itself must be in league with
the profiteers and must be holding out its stocks in order to let the
gouging go on without hindrance.
Those who jumped to such a conclusion were not aware of the
restrictions which their own representatives, the men in Congress,
had thrown about the sale of government property. Just as the law
forbade (with certain exceptions and qualifications already noted in
this volume) the government executives to buy supplies except from
the best bidder in a competition for the business, so it forbade them
to sell supplies except to the best bidder. The buyers therefore had
to compete with each other for the surplus stocks, either in auction
sales or by sealed bids submitted after goods had been duly described
and advertised. And since the Government had its own sales expenses to
consider and therefore could not hold auctions to dispose of single
cans of tomatoes or advertise for bids for individual hams, the
ultimate consumer, unless he were prepared to purchase by the carload,
was as much out of it as if the supplies were stored on the moon.
Not until July 29, 1919, did Congress come to the relief of the
ultimate consumer by passing an act authorizing the War Department to
sell food, clothing, and household supplies at retail. Within ten days
the Surplus Property Division (of the Division of Purchase, Storage,
and Traffic, which had charge of all food, clothing, and general
supplies) inaugurated a plan of direct selling by parcel post. Price
lists and order blanks were sent to the 58,000 post offices of the
United States, and the postmasters were instructed to receive orders
and cash and send consolidated requisitions and payments to the Surplus
Property Division. This plan was not a success, thanks principally to
the postmasters’ unfamiliarity with such work; and a few weeks later it
was abandoned altogether in favor of the army retail stores. Through
these stores the masses of consumers at last came into direct touch
with the surplus war supplies.
The store system was established on September 25, 1919. At the stores
a consumer might buy food and other supplies over the counter in such
quantities as he chose; or, if he lived too far away to visit the
store, he might order from it goods to be delivered by parcel post,
postage prepaid and goods insured at government expense. At first
the Army established twenty-five stores, and these did so well that
additional stores and branches were added, until by the late winter
of 1919–1920 there were seventy-seven places where consumers might go
and buy, at reduced prices, the goods which their tax payments and
bond purchases had enabled the Government to procure. The stores were
operated under the supervision of the fourteen zone supply officers.
In selling directly to the consumer, the War Department adopted the
policy of pricing goods at four-fifths of the prevalent retail market
prices. Since the cost of living had begun to decline in late 1919 and
the early part of 1920, this policy meant a loss to the Government,
which had paid war prices for the supplies; but it was not a large
loss. On the average, the retail sales brought back nearly 80 per cent
of the original cost of the goods sold. The sales expenses came to
about 10 per cent of the money received.
The War Department did everything in its power to make the stores
attractive to the public. It stocked them with a wide range of articles
and advertised them heavily. A press bureau was established in
Washington, and the newspapers devoted acres of space to the publicity.
In spite of the propaganda, however, the response of the public was
not so unrestrained as the outcry against the costs of necessaries
might have led one to expect. (To be sure, the Government, naturally,
could not set up its stores in the high-rent districts--the districts
most convenient to the retail customers.) The army retail stores did
business at the rate of approximately $5,000,000 a month--not much
for 110,000,000 potential customers. As the sales went on it became
evident that, although the protest against high prices was practically
universal, only the thrifty minority was willing to step across the
line of convenience and custom in order to secure lower ones. The rest
preferred to grumble and follow their lines of least resistance.
Yet it is probably true that the retail stores benefited all, since
the continued sale of great quantities of surplus military supplies
at reduced prices doubtless had an effect in bringing down commercial
prices. Although only some 350 items in the Army’s supply list were
applicable to retail selling, this range, after all, was considerable.
In the subsistence list it ran from Apples, Evaporated, to Vinegar, and
in general supplies from Arctics, Cloth Top, to Whips, Artillery. The
Surplus Property Division even sold a few motorcycles at the stores.
Far overshadowing the retail sales in quantities of goods moved were
the sales to jobbers, dealers, and speculators, by informal bids on
advertised lists of supplies. The sales headquarters in Washington and
the zone offices became busy markets for months after the armistice
as the War Department got rid of the surplus supplies procured by
the Director of Purchase. As stated, there were regular commodity
days--textiles were sold on Mondays, raw materials on Tuesdays, and so
on. At the Monday sales the Surplus Property Division had taken in, by
February 20, 1920, nearly $66,000,000 paid for clothing and equipage
alone. These sales benefited the general public in that they usually
resulted in the goods being sold at retail by salvage companies or by
regular mercantile houses at reduced prices.
The fluctuations of markets sometimes made it possible for the
Government to sell surplus to bidders at a profit. For instance, a ton
or more of camphor, acquired originally for the Medical Department,
brought a profit of 84 per cent, due to a post-armistice increase in
the price of camphor. Medical supplies generally, although they were
sold principally to public institutions, brought a 99-per-cent recovery
of their war cost. General supplies--including hardware, kitchen
utensils, brushes and brooms, rope, paper, office furniture, musical
instruments, and athletic goods--sold at prices which brought back to
the Government more than 72 per cent of their war cost.
Apparently useless supplies--useless to civilians, that is--were
purchased by bidders who had found unique uses for them. The
nonbreakable eyepieces of gas masks were found to manufacture well
into motorists’ goggles. The anti-dim paste used to keep the gas-mask
eyepieces from fogging from the wearers’ breath had a practical use
upon the windshields of automobiles during rainstorms. Trench fans were
bought and used as aprons for cannery workers.
Surplus leather was sold in auctions held in Philadelphia, Chicago, San
Francisco, Boston, and elsewhere; and the cash recoveries generally
were large, ranging from 71 per cent to 100 per cent of the war cost,
and even, in instances, returning a profit. Harness did not sell well,
because much of it was made of russet leather, which does not attract
the commercial buyer, or else because the harnesses were of special
designs not used by teamsters.
The demands of other departments of the Government for surplus army
motor trucks were so great that only a few were sold as surplus, and
those few were neither new nor in good condition. Automobile tires,
however, were placed on sale in the retail stores.
The total sale of surplus materials acquired by the Division of
Purchase, Storage, and Traffic amounted to $357,000,000 between the
date of the armistice and January 31, 1920. The recovery was 77.57 per
cent of the original cost.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE FOREIGN LIQUIDATION
Although as these words are written it is more than two and a half
years since the armistice of November 11, 1918, was signed, it is
still impossible to give a clean-cut and definitive statement of the
accomplishments of the industrial demobilization. It may never be
possible to do so. Although in the main it was possible to terminate
the war contracts with supplementary agreements fixing the Government’s
liability to the penny, the consolidation of these agreements would
not give the full cost of the termination. A few claimants are
stubborn and insist upon the ultimate legal redress guaranteed them
by the terms of their contracts. The administration in Washington has
changed, and some few of the claims once settled--as it was believed,
finally--are being reopened. And then, on the credit side of the war
ledger there is the same indefiniteness. Surpluses of war supplies are
indeterminate--expanding or contracting as policies change, as the
military establishment finds need of materials once declared surplus,
as war reserves deteriorate. Thus it is impossible to draw a line and
say that all transactions on the one side should be entered in the war
account and all on the other in the account of the permanent Army.
But in one important branch of our war industry there was a complete,
definite liquidation. The red line was drawn and the balance struck.
This was the branch in which the Allies and other foreign nations
were participants, as either buyers or sellers. The promptness with
which this transaction was consummated, and the completeness of
it--down to the last dollar due, down to the last pound of materials
exchanged--mark it as one of the outstanding accomplishments in the
whole industrial record of the war. Its benefits to the countries
affected are not to be read entirely in the footings of the columns
of debits and offsets: rather, they are political and economic--the
prestige of the United States enhanced, international good will
sustained, irritation and ill feeling, which might easily have been
aroused among the late Allies and their associates in the settlement of
their business arrangements, avoided.
It is evident that these war transactions fell into two classes: one
class in which the Allies dealt (through the American Government) with
American industry for the production of supplies; the other in which
the United States was the customer, and the industries of the Allies
(and to a slight extent the industries of certain neutral nations) the
source of supply. And, as the business of terminating the arrangements
was thus a double-barreled proposition, the War Department found it
convenient to attack it with two agencies: the so-called Cuthell Board
(which, officially speaking, was the “Special Representative of the
Secretary of War” and his assistants) and the United States Liquidation
Commission.
Mr. Chester W. Cuthell was the Special Representative of the Secretary
of War. His Board consisted of lawyers and accountants whom he chose
and appointed. The duties of Mr. Cuthell and his Board were to
terminate and settle up the war business of the Allies in the United
States under those arrangements in which the War Department had been
a participant, whether as agent, producer, or partner. The Board was
therefore essentially the agency for liquidating the international
business on this side of the Atlantic. The United States Liquidation
Commission, on the other hand, was the agency created to liquidate
America’s war industry abroad; and this was much the greater of the
two tasks. The United States Liquidation Commission was charged, also,
with an added duty: that of disposing of all American surplus military
property on foreign soil.
We must think of both these activities in international demobilization
as going on simultaneously, as they did. The two agencies were created
almost at the same time: Mr. Cuthell was appointed on January 22,
1919, and the United States Liquidation Commission was created on the
following February 11. Also it was necessary that they both work in the
closest contact and coöperation with each other, since the arrangements
of both would have to come together in the final settlements, the
American claims against the Allies, as substantiated by the Board,
going to offset the Allied claims against us, as acknowledged by
the Liquidation Commission. This liaison and harmony existed. The
coöperation, too, extended to the adoption of certain broad policies
which were to be followed by both in liquidating the business. One
of these, and perhaps the most important one, was that, in the
negotiations that were to follow, no nation should expect to profit at
the expense of any of the others. The settlements should be made on the
basis of actual cost. A second policy was that international agreements
and understandings, even though they had never been committed formally
to writing, were to have the binding force of formal contracts. In
other words, the business would be settled as among partners and
friends, no one of whom wished to take advantage of the others.
Upon both liquidating agencies bore the need for haste in terminating
the business. Armies were demobilizing, _personnel_ familiar with the
subjects in negotiation melting away. If the discussions were to be
long protracted they would take on the aspect of contentions, with
evidence and affidavits to be secured, inventories and audits taken,
hearings conducted, examination and cross-examination of witnesses,
causes perhaps finally going into international tribunals or before
commissions of arbitration. Nothing but ill feeling could result from
such an outcome. The international business relations had become
enormously intricate during the war. It was obviously an impractical
thing to go into details, as a creditor might attack the schedules of
a bankrupt corporation. Such procedure would drag along for years. It
was to the advantage of every party to the transactions, the parties
being sovereign nations having regard for their international contacts,
to give and take in rough bargaining, accepting estimates and lump sums
rather than insisting upon items and particulars, and finally to agree
to totals which at the best would be only approximations. The important
thing was to get the business over with justice done to all.
That was the spirit in which both boards worked.
Mr. Cuthell, upon his appointment, found in the Division of Purchase,
Storage, and Traffic a consolidated and condensed record of every
claim held by the War Department against the governments associated
with us in the war. This showed him the field. He discovered, however,
that none of the war missions maintained by the Allies in the United
States was vested with power to adjust and settle these claims, many
of which were disputed. Therefore, while his hastily gathered force of
experts was preparing the claims for presentation, Mr. Cuthell himself
(in April, 1919) was sent to Europe to ask the foreign governments
concerned to create liquidating agencies competent to deal with the
United States and, further, to retain in their respective services,
until the liquidation should be effected, the officers familiar with
the American transactions.
It should be noted here that this was a wide departure from
international precedent. Ordinarily, financial claims between nations
are settled by the slow and cumbersome processes of diplomatic
interchange, or else by arbitration. To have allowed the war claims to
go into this channel would possibly have meant the end of the amity
between the Allies and the United States. Our liquidation agencies
proposed direct dealing through business plenipotentiaries, with
restrictions even less exacting than would be drawn by two private
corporations.
In Paris Mr. Cuthell found representatives of Italy prepared to discuss
the American claims against Italy. Soon after the conferences started,
however, President Wilson made public at the Peace Conference his
attitude toward the Italian occupation of the Adriatic port of Fiume;
and the Italian delegation, including those ready to negotiate a
business settlement with us, withdrew from Paris.
Mr. Cuthell thereupon went to London to negotiate with the British.
The British Government appointed and empowered a special commission,
headed by Lord Inverforth, then the British Minister of Munitions, and
including several eminent representatives of the British Government,
among them Mr. W. T. Layton, a man of unusual ability and the one who
took the actual lead for the British in the subsequent negotiations,
to deal with the American claims. Meanwhile Mr. Cuthell’s principal
assistants had arrived from the United States, bringing with them the
now formulated statements analyzing the British war business in America
and setting forth what our negotiators regarded as the proper charges
for the British to pay in settlement. These assistants were Mr. Ralph
W. Gwinn, who was to present the Liberty engine case; Mr. Miller D.
Steever, in charge of the airplane lumber claim; and Mr. F. C. Weems,
who had prepared the smokeless powder and cotton linters cases. The
conferences began immediately, and such was the progress made that
within ten days a complete agreement was reached, and the British war
business in the United States was definitely terminated. The so-called
Cuthell-Inverforth Agreement, which embodied the terms of settlement,
was dated May 10, 1919.
The agreement, reached so speedily and with such complete mutual
accord, terminated a vast business within the United States. From the
United States as dealer, Great Britain had procured smokeless powder,
picric acid, airplane lumber, and Liberty engines. As a partner of
the United States, Great Britain participated in the pool of cotton
linters which cornered the entire American supply for the benefit of
the powder mills. England was also a partner with us in the project
to build a chain of chemical factories in America to produce acetone,
used in making dope for airplane wings. These factories never came
into production, and the project was closed out with a loss of over
$6,000,000, half of which loss the British were bound to share. We
participated with England in the purchase of Australasian wool. The
terms under which the wool contract was closed out were noted in a
previous chapter of this volume.
The celerity with which these complicated war transactions were
terminated was a distinct triumph in international negotiation. The
British, when they entered the conferences, probably had no idea
that they were to be rushed through to any such speedy conclusion.
The conferences, in fact, began as if they were to drag along for an
extended time. On the first day Mr. Gwinn gave a careful and clear
exposition of the Liberty engine case, setting forth in detail just
what we had done and to what extent the British ought to participate
in the costs. Although, whenever any of his figures were challenged,
the American delegation proceeded then and there to make adjustments
apparently to the satisfaction of the British commissioners, yet when
Mr. Gwinn had concluded, the Americans were unable to gain from the
British any expression of opinion as to whether the total would be
accepted, at least tentatively, as the British obligation. It was
evident that the British expected to prepare and, later on, press an
argument against the American statement. If this procedure were to be
followed throughout the negotiations, it would be many weeks before the
conferees could reach any final agreement.
This outcome of the first day’s negotiation was a disappointment to the
Americans, but they determined to try again next day. The next morning
Mr. Steever took up the airplane lumber case, and talked for nearly
four hours. He went into a description of the picturesque phases of the
northwestern lumbering enterprise--the felling of the spruce trees,
the steel cables on which the great trunks slid down the mountain
sides, the railroads built into hitherto inaccessible wildernesses. But
punctuating his rhetoric were the hard figures of costs, expenditures,
losses, deliveries, and values. The British had shared in this whole
enterprise in the Pacific Northwest, the development of which had never
reached the stage of turning out the airplane lumber at low prices.
As Mr. Steever talked he invited interruption and objection, and the
British delegates availed themselves of the invitation. The various
objections were resolved as the case was unfolded. At the conclusion
Mr. Cuthell asked for any further objections to the statement. But
the British had exhausted their challenges during the presentation
of the claim. The only objection raised was to British participation
in the cost of certain dry kilns in which the export airplane lumber
was not treated. This item was promptly subtracted from the claim’s
total, and then Mr. Cuthell briefly urged that the column’s footing be
accepted tentatively as the British obligation. If not to the surprise
of the Americans, certainly to their extreme gratification, the British
commission agreed.
That was the real victory, for it set the precedent for the entire
settlement. Each day the Americans presented a new case; and each
evening when the American representatives left the Hotel Metropole in
London, where the conferences were held, a tentative agreement in that
case had been reached. Finally all the claims were settled tentatively,
except the Liberty engine claim. Once more the Americans pressed to
have the original statement accepted, and it was. It was understood,
however, that all figures were to be subject to verification by a
British audit of the books of the War Department in Washington.
On the tenth day the Americans brought to the Metropole a tentative
written agreement, embodying all the sub-settlements agreed upon. Mr.
Cuthell then pointed out the considerable cost of a British audit of
our books, the possibilities of friction arising over the presence of
British auditors in our War Department over an extended period, and
the likelihood, since all the American estimates were conservative,
that the audit would not in any event greatly change the amount of the
British obligation and might even increase it; and he suggested that it
would be good policy for the British to accept the tentative figure as
final and let it go at that. Lord Inverforth promptly agreed. That was
cricket, as the English say.
The agreement fixed the cash liability of the British Government
for its unpaid American war bills and its obligations arising
from the termination of its American contracts and engagements at
$35,464,823.10. Of this the Liberty engine item was the largest
item--approximately $14,000,000. The British paid over $13,000,000
to satisfy all claims of the United States arising from the British
purchases of airplane spruce, fir, and cedar. Its powder contracts
accounted for nearly $4,700,000 of the settlement sum, wood distillates
(principally acetone) for about $2,900,000, and its 2-per-cent share in
the linters pool for the rest.
Practically all the settlements made by the Cuthell Board were carried
as offsets to the American liabilities under the general foreign
liquidation accomplished by the United States Liquidation Commission;
but the British preferred to make their settlements separate
transactions. Accordingly, on August 2, 1919, a representative of the
British Treasury delivered to the War Department a check in payment
of the British obligation under the terms of the Cuthell-Inverforth
Agreement. This, however, was not a complete termination for Great
Britain. That Government admitted full liability under numerous other,
but small, claims which the War Department had not yet had time to
prepare in detail. As invoices were subsequently presented to the
British Government, these claims were promptly paid. The minor cases
came to approximately $7,000,000.
Progress almost equally swift was made by the Cuthell Board in securing
a settlement of the American claims against France. At first there was
no official French agency empowered to make such a settlement. Mr.
Cuthell and his assistants proceeded immediately to Paris after making
the British agreement and importuned the French Government to designate
a representative competent to conclude a settlement. There they were
joined by Messrs. Charles B. Shelton, William Fisher, John H. Ray,
Jr., and Harry A. Fisher, who brought with them from Washington the
formulated statements of various American claims against the French.
After several days’ delay Premier Clemenceau appointed the French
Liquidation Commission, headed by M. Édouard de Billy, who had been
with the French High Commission in Washington during the war and was
therefore familiar with the French contracts in the United States.
To France the War Department had sold picric acid, cotton linters,
smokeless powder, airplane lumber, and Liberty engines. The French
liability in these cases was finally fixed at $95,968,561.87, and a
formal agreement admitting the liability was signed on May 29, 1919.
There were other considerable claims against France, the statements of
which had not yet been prepared. Later (September 9, 1919) Mr. Cuthell
came to an agreement with M. Casenave, minister plenipotentiary of
France in the United States, whereby the French admitted an additional
liability of $64,910,352.92. Of this sum, $38,000,000 represented ocean
freight charges upon war supplies bought by France in the United States
and carried to France in American army cargo transports.
Two additional settlements with France, one terminating the French
contract with J. G. White & Company for raw materials for airplane
manufacture and the other terminating the French contract with the
General Vehicle Company for the production of Gnome rotary airplane
engines, increased the French liability by $2,117,785.34. These
settlements were made in France by Mr. Monte Appel, chief assistant to
Mr. Cuthell. The total liability arising from the American war business
of France was therefore $162,996,700.13. This sum went into the
general settlement agreement made with the French by the United States
Liquidation Commission.
Soon after the French settlement was a fact, the Italian Government
appointed a commission to treat with the Cuthell Board. The Italian
agreement, dated August 13, 1919, admitted an obligation on the part
of Italy in the sum of $5,200,000, representing Italian war purchases
of picric acid, smokeless powder, airplane lumber, linters, and
trinitrotoluol, this agreement not including an admitted obligation of
approximately $395,000 for Liberty engines, clothing, and other small
items not yet invoiced. Against this obligation Italy presented a claim
for $4,053,073 for the overseas transportation of American troops on
Italian ships. The Italian Government paid the difference, namely,
$1,146,927 to the War Department on September 26, 1919, and also paid
the minor claims as they were presented.
Minor claims against the governments of Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Cuba,
and Czecho-Slovakia, to the total of $4,709,330.89, were presented by
the Cuthell Board and paid by the governments concerned.
* * * * *
While the Cuthell Board was engaged in rendering the bills to the
Allies for supplies purchased by them in America and collecting the
money on those bills,--and here let it be said that the collections
were greater in aggregate amount than the total sum involved in all
the claims for or against the United States prosecuted or resisted by
the nation’s official diplomacy from the beginning of our national
existence up to the outbreak of the war in Europe; international
transactions which included the Louisiana Purchase, the purchase of
Alaska, and the purchase of the Canal Zone,--all the while that Mr.
Cuthell and his associates were collecting money for Uncle Sam, the
United States Liquidation Commission was busy adjusting the fit of the
shoe on the old gentleman’s other foot. In other words, the Commission
was paying the war bills owed by the United States to the Allies. This
was a business equally great and even more important.
There was some question whether the President, with all his war powers,
could legally empower boards and commissions to conclude international
settlements involving the passing of money, since such power resided
only in the State Department, the acts of which had to be ratified by
Congress before they were binding upon the United States. The Cuthell
Board and the United States Liquidation Commission were actually
created in January and February, 1919; but to remove any doubt as to
the binding force of their settlements, Congress, on March 2, 1919,
passed an act empowering the Secretary of War to settle, through any
agency he might set up, all international war claims in which the War
Department was involved.
The Secretary of War appointed Mr. Edwin B. Parker chairman of the
United States Liquidation Commission. As members he appointed Brigadier
General Charles G. Dawes, Mr. Homer H. Johnson, and Hon. Henry F.
Hollis. During the active part of the war Judge Parker had held the
important post of priorities commissioner of the War Industries Board.
General Dawes, in private life a Chicago banker, had been General
Purchasing Agent of the A. E. F. In 1920 he sprang into national
prominence when, as a witness before a congressional investigating
committee, in vigorous and unconventional style he defended the
material transactions of the A. E. F. and denounced those critics who,
in searching for waste and lavish expenditure, evidently overlooked the
fact that the prime purpose of the A. E. F. was to defeat a dangerous
enemy on the field of battle. His striking utterances on that occasion
did more than reams of printed propaganda to reconcile the American
public to the inevitable wastes of the war. President Harding soon
afterwards appointed “Hell and Maria” Dawes, as he had come to be
known, federal budget commissioner, thus placing him in charge of the
most important attempt at economy in national expenditures which the
United States had ever made. Mr. Johnson was an able and well-known
lawyer of Cleveland. Mr. Hollis was a former United States senator from
New Hampshire.
When the Liquidation Commission reached France and organized for work
about March 1, 1919, it found the ground well prepared for it. Mr.
Edward R. Stettinius, the well-known New York financier, had been sent
to France in July, 1918, as a special representative of the Secretary
of War to act as a sort of surveyor-general over the war industry
resulting from the foreign orders placed by the American Expeditionary
Forces. Mr. Stettinius found that a considerable part of the munitions
being procured abroad was being produced and delivered under informal
and more or less vague agreements and understandings. Before the
armistice Mr. Stettinius had done his best to reduce some of the more
important of these understandings to the form of written, definite
contracts. Promptly after the armistice he took steps to cancel all
further production for the Americans and then began the negotiations
leading to the settlements. Mr. Stettinius resigned in January, 1919,
and the United States Liquidation Commission inherited these various
negotiations in the stages at which Mr. Stettinius left them.
Although, as we have said, the characteristic note of our industrial
demobilization abroad was outright cancellation of contracts and the
payment of indemnities, the policy was not maintained consistently.
There were several important exceptions, and one of these was the
method adopted in terminating the British manufacture of artillery
and shell for the A. E. F. The numerous orders, contracts, and
agreements placed and made by the A. E. F. for the delivery of British
artillery and ammunition were consolidated, on October 19, 1918, by Mr.
Stettinius in conference with Mr. Winston Churchill, then the British
Minister of Munitions, into a single formal agreement. In terminating
this contract after the armistice Mr. Stettinius assumed that it would
be better to accept completed guns and ammunition, even though these
might be surplus above the future requirements of the Army, than to
pay heavy cancellation indemnities and receive nothing in return.
Artillery does not deteriorate rapidly, either materially or in design.
The negotiations opened by Mr. Stettinius with the British Government
looking to this end were picked up by the Liquidation Commission,
which, in March, 1919, reached an agreement with the British that, in
lieu of paying any cancellation damages, the United States would accept
a limited quantity of _matériel_ completed after the armistice under
the American contract.
America accordingly accepted the post-armistice delivery of 498
British-made guns, ranging in model from 60-pounders to 8-inch
howitzers, and 420,000 rounds of ammunition for them. For this
_matériel_ the American Government paid £6,637,598.
A most interesting negotiation conducted by the Liquidation Commission
for the United States was that which wound up the tripartite
international project for the construction of 36-ton tanks, better
known as the Anglo-American Mark VIII tanks. France was originally a
party to this transaction only to the extent of agreeing to provide a
site for the assembling plant in France. England and the United States
were equal partners in the enterprise, England supplying hulls and
guns and America the power and traction. The French, however, were to
be permitted to buy tanks at the partnership price; but the French
at first did not ask for any, asserting that their own light tank
production was sufficient for them.
The plant was built at Châteauroux, Neuvy-Pailloux. About the time the
project was getting well under way, heavier tanks began to demonstrate
their effectiveness in the field; and then France insisted that,
because her armies held the most front-line mileage, the most of the
Anglo-American tanks to be built at the Châteauroux plant should be
allotted to her. Reluctantly the British agreed that the first 1,200
tanks should be divided equally between France and the United States
and that France should receive all of the next 300.
Then the war ended. About 24,000,000 francs had been invested at
Châteauroux. The British had spent £3,000,000 in the manufacture
of components and the Americans a like sum, expressed in dollars.
France had not put in a centime; yet she had expected to receive
nine-sixteenths of the first year’s output. The question was, what
share of the heavy loss should France stand? The French arrangement
with the Tank Commission was tantamount to a contract, with the
British-American partnership standing in the light of contractor.
It was evident, then, that the French were morally bound to pay
cancellation charges--to stand part of the loss, in other words. The
British and American negotiators at London thought it would be about
right if France would pay back the 24,000,000 francs expended by the
British and Americans at Châteauroux, and the British and Americans
would throw in the tank plant itself as an inducement.
Then the question arose, how would this 24,000,000 francs be
divided? Both England and America had lost heavily in the big-tank
enterprise--each had, in fact, agreed to let these losses balance
each other; neither was to bill the other for anything in the
settlement--and here seemed to be the chance to get some of the money
back. Naturally, the Americans assumed that the French reimbursement
would be divided equally, since both America and England had
contributed equally to the cost of the Châteauroux plant. But no, the
British contended; since they had surrendered their share of the first
year’s production of tanks, the lion’s share of the reimbursement
should go to them. There was logic in this, but, without deciding the
point, both sides repaired to Paris to present their joint tank claim
to the French; and then it appeared that the British and Americans had
been dividing some French chickens before they were hatched. Through
M. Louis Loucheur, the Minister of Munitions, the French Government
metaphorically lifted its eyebrows in surprise that its associates
could present such a claim. To be sure, the French expected to take
the Anglo-American heavy tanks, but so did the Americans and British
expect to receive light tanks from the French industry. These were
merely understandings, not formal contracts; and the French, to do
their share, had made large expenditures in developing the light-tank
manufacture for the benefit of all. Needless to say, the French
Government had lost heavily in terminating its tank industry. These
national losses should set off each other....
The British and American representatives retired to ponder this
rejoinder. It seemed to have merit; yet the fact remained that somehow
or other France was evidently going to emerge from the tank discussion
with the Châteauroux plant in her possession. The delegates returned
and argued with such force that the French Government agreed to pay
20,000,000 francs in settlement, taking over the Châteauroux plant.[14]
Since the salvage value of this plant was estimated at 5,000,000
francs, the sum of 15,000,000 francs was considered as the indemnity
paid by France. England then asked for five-sixths of the total
payment, but the American argument scaled this down to 70 per cent.
America thus received 6,000,000 francs out of the settlement.
The bargaining Yankees, however, were yet to have the final word in the
tank deal. With the settlement complete, sealed and delivered, the
British had on their hands 105 sets of tank parts with only junk value,
although it had cost the British £5,000 a set to manufacture them. The
Americans offered £1,000 a set for these parts, and the British snapped
at the offer. This fine bargain enabled us later, at low cost, to
assemble these parts with the American-built components and thus place
in the war reserves 100 of the largest and most formidable tanks ever
built.
Another, a minor, tank transaction should be noted. The British Army
had supplied, during the action, sixty-four tanks of various sorts
to the 301st Tank Battalion of the A. E. F. Fifty of these, some of
them more or less damaged, had been returned to the British after
the armistice, and the remaining fourteen were shipped to the United
States. For the purchase of the fourteen and for the war use of the
other fifty, the Liquidation Commission agreed to pay the British
Government the sum of £189,233 2s 11d.
Outside the claims for payment for materials actually delivered, the
British pressed upon the Liquidation Commission collateral claims of
several sorts. One of these was for interest upon money invested by
the British in stocks of goods destined for American consumption.
Our people protested successfully against paying interest upon such
investments, but admitted the point that we should pay interest
after the goods had been delivered and we had been billed, allowing
a reasonable interest-free period for vouchering and checking.
Investigation showed that both armies had been dilatory in paying their
bills to each other, and that the average time of delaying payment
had been five months and a quarter. The British bills against America
exceeded the American bills against England by some £51,000,000. One
month and a half was allowed as a reasonable interest-free period after
billing. Accordingly the commission agreed to pay 5-per-cent interest
on the British billing excess, a sum which amounted to £797,854 11s 2d,
and this America paid.[15]
It was impossible for the Liquidation Commission to make a lump
settlement of all the minor bills, accounts, and claims of Great
Britain against America, because of the difficulties in securing full
statements of the indebtedness. It was roughly estimated, however, that
these claims would aggregate £10,000,000.
One obscure and involved problem for the Commission to solve related
to the so-called British “hidden losses” on steel products sold to the
United States during the war. The British treatment and control of its
war prices differed radically in method from ours. The War Industries
Board, it will be remembered, fixed prices high enough to stimulate
production and then held the industries to those prices, no matter to
whom they sold. The British plan was an opposite one. With steel, for
instance, the British Government simply monopolized the raw materials
and sold them to the producers at prices that represented a loss to
the Government. In effect, it was a subsidy. To the British public it
made no difference whether it paid this subsidy or an equal amount
in the increased cost of artillery, ammunition, and other munitions
made of steel. But when it came to a settlement between England and
the United States, the British Government insisted that the United
States was not fairly entitled to the “manufacturers’ issues” price for
the raw steel that went into the British-made munitions supplied to
America. The British, therefore, after the main settlements, presented
a supplementary claim to compensate for the hidden loss, and this claim
amounted approximately to £3,770,000.
In principle, the Commission was willing to admit the force of the
British contention. It asked the British, however, to prepare a more
definite statement, showing (1) the average British governmental loss
on all steel supplied to manufacturers for the year preceding the
armistice, (2) the amount of such steel that went into products sold to
America, and, finally, (3) the hidden loss on all steel furnished to
America as thus estimated. When the revised statement was presented,
it was found to contain items of hidden loss which America could not
possibly allow. The British war subsidies went all through their war
industry. For instance, in order to stimulate production, the British
Government had paid subsidies to the makers of silica brick, used in
building steel furnaces. The British asked us to stand a part of this
subsidy, inasmuch as some of the shell supplied to us had been produced
from furnaces built of subsidized brick. The Commission retorted by
asking why Great Britain did not also ask us to share the subsidy on
the bread the British steel workers had eaten while they were working
on the American artillery and shell orders. In other words, we were
willing to pay hidden losses so long as they were not too remotely
connected with the American contracts. The Commission also raised the
shrewd question, why, since the British were asking us to pay for
hidden losses, they did not admit us to the benefits of their “hidden
profits”--_viz._, the profit taxes collected from the British steel
manufacturers.
In the autumn of 1920 General G. W. Burr, the Director of Purchase,
Storage, and Traffic after the armistice and a member of the War
Department Claims Board, went to England to close up all the
outstanding claims existing between the United States and Great
Britain as a result of the war. The outcome of his negotiations was
the Burr-Niemeyer Agreement, which tied up all loose ends and brought
about a final termination of the war business between the two nations.
All pending claims were brought into one lump-sum settlement, under
the terms of which the United States paid to Great Britain the sum of
£2,946,511 2s 8d. This sum settled all the miscellaneous and minor
claims noted above; settled, too, the debt owed by the United States
to the British for the maintenance of our Siberian Expedition; and
settled all other claims, including the hidden-loss claim and a British
claim for reimbursement for various “overhead” inspection and storage
charges. The settlement figure was much under what the British had
originally claimed. In this settlement the hidden-loss and “overhead”
claims were paired in a single item which accounted for approximately
£1,500,000 of the total paid by the United States. The Burr-Niemeyer
Agreement was dated November 23, 1920.
One general claim set up by the British Government against the United
States the Liquidation Commission rejected. After we had paid to Great
Britain the bill rendered for the transportation of our troops and
supplies in England, the British Government rendered a supplementary
bill for the same services. During the war Great Britain gave
guaranties of income to the British railways, and in settling with
the railroads the British Government granted to them an increase in
military passenger rates, an increase which was retroactive to April
1, 1919. The British asked us to pay our share of the retroactive
increase. This was refused on the ground that by the same token we
could hold the British to their share of the loss sustained by the
American Government in its operation of the American railroads by the
United States Railroad Administration, since our roads had hauled great
quantities of British supplies. To open up closed settlements because
of retroactive agreements would open up a Pandora’s box of troubles for
both nations.
Thus the international bargaining went on, back and forth, give and
take, broad principles of settlement prevailing rather than the minute
and individual merits of particular items, both sides accepting
estimates and unaudited totals and each relying upon the good faith
of the other. Thus this tremendously involved and intricate business
was closed up with dispatch and amiability. As a rule the A. E. F. in
its purchases had dealt with governments, with which such liquidation
methods could be adopted; but there were a few relatively small
contracts made directly with private individuals in England, France,
Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland. These contracts were canceled
outright in the full knowledge that we should have to pay indemnities.
In the settlement of such contracts the United States Liquidation
Commission acted for the A. E. F. much as the War Department Claims
Board did for the producing bureaus at home--as a supervisory body,
approving the settlements made by the various services of the A. E. F.
and paying off the contractors. In all, indemnities were paid for
the cancellation of some 450 contracts in Europe. In making these
settlements, the United States benefited greatly by the depreciated
rates of exchange against the currencies of several of these nations,
since all indemnities were paid by the United States in the currency of
the countries in which the claims arose. Expressed in dollars at par,
it cost the United States $3,568,653.23 to cancel the miscellaneous
European contracts, but the reduced exchange rates effected a
considerable saving under that figure.
It is much easier to detect the failings and peculiarities of aliens
than it is to recognize our own shortcomings; and if in these pages
we have exulted somewhat over the successes of our delegates in
checkmating the designs of our European associates, this is not to
be taken as any boast that we ourselves were too disinterested and
altruistic to overlook the main chance for ourselves. The truth is
that, although all the belligerents were in the field primarily to
win a victory of arms, not one of them entirely lost contact with the
counting room. This was clearly shown in the American arrangements for
the supply of French artillery.
The numerical expansion of the A. E. F. in the spring and summer
of 1918 resulted in a greatly increased demand by the A. E. F. for
French artillery and ammunition. America supplied schedules of the raw
materials which she could furnish, and the French made estimates of the
numbers of guns they could deliver monthly to the A. E. F. But this was
all understanding and mutual agreement--no formal contract was drawn.
When Mr. Stettinius reached Paris in the summer of 1918, he immediately
began to press to get this agreement down in black and white, so that
America might know exactly what her obligations were. At that time,
of course, there was no thought that the war would end within the
year. About the 1st of November, however, it became evident that an
armistice was drawing near, and immediately the Americans grew lukewarm
on the subject of a formal contract. The reason was evident. Under the
terms of a formal contract, America’s termination obligations would
be questions of fact; with the affair left as an unwritten agreement,
our obligations would be questions of equity, to be negotiated, and we
were likely to emerge from such negotiations in better case financially
than we should be if held by the set and rigid conditions of a formal
contract.
Nevertheless, the United States did not seek to evade its just
obligations under the French ordnance agreement. France had spent
large sums of money in expanding the industry to take care of the
expected American consumption, and the money so spent was a proper
charge against the United States in any settlement. Immediately after
the armistice Mr. Stettinius ordered production stopped on our orders;
but this the French, for domestic, social, and economic reasons, were
unable to do; and at first they were inclined to insist that we should
accept and pay for a large quantity of artillery produced during a
gradual termination of the industry. Mr. Stettinius successfully
maintained the position that this post-armistice production was
undertaken purely in pursuance of an internal policy of the French
Government and that by no stretch of logic could it be entered as
a proper war charge against the United States. Mr. Stettinius then
went on to conduct the settlement negotiations, and these were about
complete when the Liquidation Commission arrived to inherit the
transaction and to draw the final settlement contract.
As in the settlement of the British artillery contract, the American
negotiators accepted guns and ammunition produced after the armistice
by the French; and they did it in complete consistency with the
position and policy defined in the preceding paragraph. The armistice
found great numbers of French guns in process of manufacture for the
A. E. F. The United States was obligated to accept and pay for this
unfinished material. After the inventory of it had been taken, the
Liquidation Commission suggested that in lieu of the unfinished parts
the United States accept their value in full completions and that
the production of all other guns be canceled without charge to the
United States. This alternative, allowing, as it did, a measure of
post-armistice production in the French mills, the French Government
quickly accepted and, in carrying out the terms of the subsequent
settlement contract, delivered to the United States 944 75-millimeter
gun units, 700 155-millimeter howitzer units, and 198 155-millimeter
gun units, all with limbers and with additional parts as spares. For
these the United States paid 117,501,887.45 francs.
The French agreed to a similar plan in canceling the construction of
airplanes and engines for the United States. This construction had been
undertaken under a formal contract, signed by General Pershing. The
contract contained no cancellation clause, but the French Government
had provided for cancellation in its subcontracts with the French
producers. Under the terms of the contract large numbers of airplane
cellules (airplanes without engines), engines, and other aëronautical
supplies were in production on the day of the armistice. In lieu of
unfinished parts, the French agreed to deliver their equivalent (in
value) in finished equipment. Under a preliminary agreement the United
States acknowledged a cancellation debt of 167,667,761 francs. Of
this, about 23,000,000 francs represented cancellation charges and the
rest money to be paid for completed materials, the schedule of which
included 3,568 cellules and 3,979 engines. This preliminary agreement,
however, was modified later by the French Liberty engine settlement
negotiated by the Cuthell Board. Under this settlement France agreed
to accept and pay for Liberty engines still to be delivered, to the
value of $19,530,000, and in addition to pay nearly $2,000,000 in
cancellation indemnities.
This, then, was the situation. We were bound to accept and pay for a
large number of French airplanes and engines which we did not need.
The French were bound to accept and pay for a large number of Liberty
engines which they did not need. We could, however, use some of the
French planes and engines, and the French wanted 500 Liberty engines.
Therefore we agreed to deliver the 500 engines and to accept French
materials up to their value, and then to offset the excess number of
Liberties provided for in the engine settlement agreement against the
excess of French air materials named in the French aircraft settlement
contract. This left a surplus of Liberty engines with the A. E. F., but
these were delivered to the British to fulfill our obligations under
the British Liberty engine settlement; and a few of the engines were
sold to Poland.
The settlement with France for our use of her railroads during the
war was so complicated that it would not be profitable to go into the
details here. The intricacy of the problem was due to the fact that,
while 2,000,000 Americans in France had used the French railroads
for every transportation need,--and our forces fought farther from
their expeditionary bases than did any other army in France,--we,
in turn, had supplied to the French railroads locomotives, cars,
crews, repairing, coal, track construction, and many other items. The
Liquidation Commission itself did not attempt to go into these details,
but turned the whole transaction over to a special section headed by
Colonel F. A. Delano, the Deputy Director General of Transportation for
the A. E. F., who had formerly been president of the Wabash Railroad
and a member of the Federal Reserve Board. The upshot of the settlement
was that we acknowledged a debt to France of 434,985,399.73 francs
after all our claims had been set off against the French claim.
The United States Liquidation Commission agreed to pay to the French
Government the sum of 3,000,000 francs for port dues assessed against
our vessels for their use of French ports during the war.
When these and other subsidiary questions of settlement had been
decided and the proper credits established by agreement in each
instance, the United States Liquidation Commission took up the task of
a general blanket settlement of the business relations between France
and the United States during the war. This was a long and involved
work; but, since the major items in the settlement had already been
determined, there was little difficulty in securing an agreement.
The General Settlement was dated November 25, 1919. It embraced all
transactions between the two nations from April 6, 1917, to August 20,
1919, except (1) France’s purchases of our surplus military property,
(2) the railroad transportation and the port dues settlements noted
above, and (3) France’s claim arising from the overseas transportation
of American troops in French transports. The sum total of the other
claims showed that the United States owed France 1,488,619,027.52
francs and that France owed the United States $177,149,866.86. The rate
of exchange and form of payment were left to future negotiations by
the United States Treasury; but, assuming that francs were worth ten
to the dollar, the net balance in favor of the United States was about
$28,000,000.
We are not yet ready, however, to determine the net financial result
of the international war business relations in which America was a
participant. There was still the money to be realized from the sale of
our surplus military property abroad. It will be remembered that one of
the two functions of the United States Liquidation Commission was to
dispose of the expeditionary property. Out of the sales transactions
arose the largest single credit to the account of the United States on
the international ledger: the proceeds from the bulk sale of A. E. F.
installations and supplies to the French Government.
The arguments sustaining the wisdom of a bulk sale of the expeditionary
property have already been sufficiently rehearsed in this volume.
The first step on our part leading to the negotiations was to take
an inventory of the entire property. The difficulty encountered
then may be deduced from the fact that the French and the British,
whose surpluses were not inordinately greater than ours, never even
attempted such an inventory of their own property. The A. E. F. was a
going concern, continually drawing from the stocks on hand, and its
_personnel_ was shifting and diminishing. Nevertheless, by a strong
force of men, under the direction of Colonel J. H. Graham, Engineer
Corps, in six weeks of day and night work, such an inventory was taken,
the property being divided into eighteen categories, as follows: 1.
Clothing and textiles; 2. Subsistence supplies; 3. Kitchen utensils and
household furnishings; 4. Machinery, metals, tools, and hardware; 5.
Building materials; 6. Forest products; 7. Railway and dock equipment;
8. Transport equipment (trucks, motor cars, motorcycles, wagons, horses
and mules, etc.); 9. Hospital supplies, toilet supplies, and chemicals;
10. Photographic, measuring, and musical instruments; 11. Electrical
equipment; 12. Oils, gasoline, and paints; 13. Ordnance and gas-warfare
equipment; 14. Blasting apparatus and supplies; 15. Printing machinery
and supplies; 16. Office fixtures, stationery, and supplies; 17. Hides
and leather; 18. Aëronautical equipment.
These eighteen categories included only the movable property of the
A. E. F. There were still to be considered the fixed installations--the
barracks, camps, hospitals, warehouses, docks, railroad yards,
buildings of almost every conceivable type. Judge Parker, the chairman
of the Commission, cabled to France, before he sailed for Europe, a
direction that the installations be inventoried and appraised. This
work was first undertaken by Colonel Graham, who later, after he
took charge of the inventory of movables, was succeeded by Brigadier
General Edgar Jadwin, whose subsequent appraisal was known as the
Jadwin Report. It showed the war cost of construction to have
been $165,661,000, the normal cost $81,543,000, and the armistice
value $39,256,000. As a matter of fact, any sum obtainable for the
installations was clear gain, since the salvage value of the structures
would not have paid the cost of dismantling (assuming that this work
would have required the labor of 40,000 men for seven months), the
ground rentals, and the costs of restoring the sites to their original
condition.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Howard E. Coffin_
WRECK OF COAL MINE AT LENS]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
MOTOR TRANSPORT SALVAGE IN FRANCE]
Then arose the determination of the “utilization value” of the movable
stocks. This was estimated by taking the war cost of production, plus
the cost of freighting the goods to France, and subtracting various
estimated allowances--for natural deterioration, for expected losses
from fire, theft, and other causes, for the saving to the United
States in costs of merchandizing, labor, storage, insurance, interest
on investment, and other overhead expense obviated by a possible
bulk sale, for the fact that the stocks were widely scattered and
had to be collected to be of use. The Commission consolidated these
subtractions into a lump deduction of 25 per cent of the estimated
value. Thus determined, the utilization value of both installations and
movables was set at $562,230,800; and this was the figure carried by
the Commission into the negotiations with the French.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph taken in France_
INTERALLIED PURCHASERS
Left to right: Louis Loucheur, French Minister of Munitions;
Winston Churchill, British Minister of Munitions; David
Lloyd-George, Prime Minister of England; and Bernard M. Baruch,
Chairman of the War Industries Board.
]
The French Government designated M. Paul Morel, the French
Undersecretary of Finance for the Liquidation of War Stocks, to
represent it in the negotiations with the Commission. On April 7,
1919, it was agreed in principle that France would buy the American
_installations_, at any rate, at a price still to be fixed, the French
assuming all charges and claims against the installations. The French
were not so sure about the movables. M. Morel first proposed that the
French Government pick out what it wanted and negotiate a price for
the selection. But this would have skimmed the cream of the American
property and left the A. E. F. with large quantities of unsalable
materials which in all likelihood would eventually have become fuel
for bonfires. This proposal was therefore rejected, and the French
representatives were urged as a duty to buy all the movables in bulk,
since the French people could use practically all the supplies. M.
Morel, after consultation with his principals, eventually agreed to buy
all the stocks at a price to be fixed.
Came the question then of the price. M. Morel’s first bid was
1,500,000,000 francs. Reckoning the value of francs then at ten to the
dollar, that was an offer of $150,000,000, an offer firmly rejected.
This was followed by other offers which our representatives could not
entertain. The negotiations, which had begun early in April, continued
throughout the spring and the fore part of the summer. M. André Tardieu
and other eminent Frenchmen entered the conferences in July. On July 24
a tentative agreement was reached, and its terms were practically those
of the bulk-sale contract, which was dated August 1, 1919.
France paid $400,000,000 for the property, the United States accepting
in payment interest-bearing 10-year French bonds. Not all the property
listed in the original inventory was involved in the sale. America
made certain exceptions: (1) all animals (these were sold separately
for a total of $29,016,506.59); (2) supplies previously sold out of
the surplus stocks to France herself and other buyers to the value of
$77,265,597.83; (3) military equipment returned to the United States,
valued at $15,000,000; (4) supplies needed for the maintenance of the
remnant of the A. E. F., worth $4,000,000; and (5) supplies worth
$10,000,000 turned over to the American Red Cross as a gift. Thus, the
utilization value of the original inventory was scaled down by these
subtractions to approximately $427,000,000, and for this quantity the
French Government paid $400,000,000--a fair return. It should be noted
that in paying this price the French Government also canceled its claim
for the payment of customs duties on the goods, and a conservative
estimate placed the aggregate amount of these unpaid duties at
$150,000,000. An even greater benefit to us was the fact that by the
terms of the settlement France assumed all land claims which might
otherwise have been pressed upon the United States by French nationals
for years to come.
The bulk sale to France was the largest single transaction in the
disposition of the A. E. F. surplus; but there were many other sales,
some of them large. Goods went in these transactions to the governments
of the Allies (France herself, outside the general sale, being a
purchaser to the extent of $95,000,000), to individuals, companies,
and syndicates in western Europe, to relief societies, to coöperative
societies in the Balkans (these, being the economic organization of
whole peoples, were not affected by political changes and sometimes
seemed to have greater stability than the new governments themselves),
to the governments of the so-called “liberated nations,” and to other
purchasers. Although the United States Liquidation Commission made
every effort to keep each transaction on the dollar basis, it was
not always possible to do so, and payments were accepted in pounds
sterling, in francs, in marks, and in other European currency,
sometimes much depreciated. Yet, translating foreign money into
terms of the dollar at average rates of exchange, and adding in the
$400,000,000 received from France, we reach a total of approximately
$800,000,000 received by the United States for the entire quantity
of American military property left in Europe after the return of the
expedition. It is roughly estimated that the property thus sold cost
the United States $1,328,000,000. The salvage return, therefore,
was practically 60 per cent of the cost. The miscellaneous sales
transactions have practically all been closed, and the receipts have
been covered into the Treasury. The French $400,000,000 is represented
by bonds maturing in 1929.
The two blanket transactions with France--the bulk sale of buildings
and supplies and the general settlement of claims--were of great value
to the United States in relieving this nation of the responsibility
of having to deal with individual French claimants. In taking over
all the A. E. F. installations the French Government agreed to hold
the United States harmless from all claims for property damage and
restoration. In the general settlement the French Government assumed
responsibility for all other claims of French nationals against the
United States and agreed to settle with the claimants. If, however, the
claims paid by France exceed 12,000,000 francs, America is bound to pay
the excess up to 6,000,000 francs. Except for this arrangement, the
American Government would have had to maintain in France for years an
organization for dealing with French individuals’ claims.
* * * * *
We are now in position to see in close approximation the financial
result to the United States of the international war business.
On the credit side we have the Cuthell settlements, amounting to
$48,716,080.99 in all--this figure, however, not including the Cuthell
Board’s settlement with the French, the debt of France on her American
war contracts being carried over into the general settlement effected
by the United States Liquidation Commission. We have, as a further
credit, the 6,000,000 francs which were the American share of the
French payment in the liquidation of the Anglo-American heavy tank
project. Finally, the general settlement of the Liquidation Commission
with the French Government brought to the Treasury the further sum
of $28,000,000. To all these credits must be added the $800,000,000
received from the sale of the A. E. F. property. The sum of all the
American credits (counting ten francs as a dollar) is approximately
$877,000,000.
From this credit, however, we must subtract, first, £17,726,685 13s
13d as the American obligation embodied in the termination contracts
made with the British Government by the Liquidation Commission, and
£2,946,511 2s 8d as our debt to England under the Burr-Niemeyer
Agreement. We must subtract also the $3,568,653.23 paid by the A. E. F.
in cancellation charges to individual European contractors. A final
subtraction is the 437,985,399.73 francs paid by the Liquidation
Commission for port dues and for the transportation of the A. E. F. on
French railroads. Translating pounds sterling and francs into dollars
at average exchange rates, the total debit of the United States is
found to have been about $120,000,000. The net balance, therefore,
in favor of the United States as a result of the international war
industrial transactions was the sum, approximately, of $757,000,000.
CHAPTER XIX
THE BALANCE SHEET
What did the war cost America? It may be that an accurate answer to
that question will never be given. Certainly it cannot be given now,
when the stocks of surplus materials are still being sold and the final
settlements of the more difficult claims are still being made. Still,
we can arrive at a fair approximation of what the war cost the War
Department alone. In doing so we must deal with billions of dollars in
our columns, and therefore errors and differences of a few millions,
or even of a few hundred millions, have no important effect upon the
totals. Even if all costs and credits could be figured out to the
penny, the result would not be much unlike the estimates which follow.
As a starting point we can take the appropriations for the Army made
by Congress, since all the war costs of the War Department must be
included within those appropriations. And we find that for the Army
Congress appropriated in all, for every war purpose, the sum of
$24,373,274,223.67. But not all these appropriations were expended.
Some were made late in the war, and none of the money authorized
by these acts to be spent was even obligated before the armistice
terminated all proposed new projects. Congress hastened to repeal
the untouched appropriations, and the various repeal acts canceled
authorizations to the amount of $7,703,448,569.36. Therefore, the net
amount made available to the War Department by the war appropriations
was $16,669,825,654.31.
This figure still does not represent the gross war cost of maintaining
the War Department, but it is close to it. Since final expenditures and
reimbursements have not yet been determined, but are still growing, as
claims are paid and surplus property is sold, it is necessary that we
accept a date somewhere and examine the ledger on that day, and from
this examination we may be able to estimate closely the final figures.
The date chosen here is April 17, 1920,--a day far enough this side
of the armistice to bring the figures fairly close to their ultimate
and conclusive form. By that day the Army was almost completely
demobilized, the liquidation of the Army’s foreign affairs was
virtually complete, the demobilization of the domestic war industry was
approaching the end, and the greater part of the surplus war supplies
had been sold.
On April 17, 1920, then, we find that the actual expenditures of the
War Department had reached the total of $16,276,288,337.19. This was
within $400,000,000 of the net war appropriations, the difference, of
course, being in the Treasury as unexpended balances available to those
paying the final war bills of the War Department. Yet this expenditure
cannot be labeled the cash cost of the war to the Army. We must first
make several large deductions for money derived from sales of materials
and, especially, for the property on hand set aside for the permanent
Army and for the military readiness of the United States.
The foreign liquidation, as we have seen, recovered into the Treasury
approximately $757,000,000. On April 17, 1920, the sales of military
property in the United States had brought in the sum of $641,261,000.
Transfers of army property for use by other departments of the
Government--a proper credit--involved materials valued at $42,096,000.
On the date selected there still remained in the United States surplus,
but unsold, army property valued at $600,000,000. The average recovery
from the sale of surplus within the United States was about 75 per cent
of the cost. Assuming that this ratio would hold throughout the entire
liquidation, we can anticipate a cash recovery of $450,000,000 from the
surplus still existing on April 17, 1920.[16]
These reimbursements, however, even in the aggregate, constitute a
minor credit when compared with the value of the equipment left by the
war enterprise to be the inheritance of the permanent establishment
and to be insurance of the continued safety of the United States
in a world not yet willing to lay down its arms. The property of
the War Department at the beginning of the war with Germany was
estimated to be worth $500,000,000. At the end of the demobilization
the property of the War Department was worth, at a rough estimate,
$6,000,000,000. It is evident, therefore, that this increment in
value--$5,500,000,000--represents present useful property, and that
it must be subtracted from the expenditures in order to arrive at
the net cost of the war itself. This valuation of property on hand,
incidentally, does not include the value of real estate and buildings
acquired during the war and retained in use afterwards, since it has
never been fully determined as yet which of these installations will be
kept.
The deductions, then, on account of sales and on account of property
retained, amount to $7,390,000,000, and this is the gross credit on
the war page of the army ledger. To find the net cost of the war
proper, we must subtract this from the gross expenditures, and we must
do this roughly; because with transactions so large, indefinite, and
complicated, it becomes absurd to reduce the figures to cents or even
to thousands of dollars. The rough subtraction gives us the figure
$8,885,000,000, which is not many millions away from the actual net
cost. This, of course, represents cost to the War Department alone.
It does not include the Navy’s costs, nor those of the United States
Shipping Board, nor of the United States Railroad Administration, nor
any costs of other great and expensive war enterprises which properly
must be added in to give the full score of the cost of the war to the
United States.
This net cost, this sum of $8,885,000,000, represents what the
Government paid in transporting the 4,000,000 men of the Army, in
feeding them, clothing them, and providing them with all other sorts
of expendable supplies which they actually consumed, and in paying the
troops their wages. The supply cost, of course, includes the cost of
the industrial liquidation after the armistice and the losses from the
shrinkages and wastes of war. The whole bill comes out at about $2,200
a man.
This, too, is but the direct cash cost, the cost in money. The
intangible costs, which are never brought into a tabulation of this
kind, are, after all, the true costs of war. They include the 50,000
American soldiers killed in battle in Europe. They include also the
200,000 Americans who were wounded in the fighting--some of them still,
two and a half years after the armistice, in hospitals and thousands
of them facing life with permanently impaired bodies. These usually
unreckoned costs, too, include the 57,000 who died of disease or
accident while in the service.
But beyond these losses of life there were other profound penalties
which the people paid and are still paying. These, too, must be set
down to the account of war in any complete reckoning. One of them was
the greatly increased cost of almost everything necessary to sustain
life and render it pleasant, including particularly an increase of
rentals, bringing with it, as a natural consequence, the overcrowding
of living quarters, to the detriment of the health of those existing in
such conditions. The high costs of living are aggravated by the special
war taxes laid everywhere, taxes which, in one form or another, must be
imposed for many years to come in order to pay for the losses of the
war.
There were, moreover, spiritual losses--an incredible moral slump from
the national exaltation of the war to the bickering and bitterness of
the demobilization. Governments fell as the war-ridden peoples of the
earth blindly and brutishly vented their spleen and irritation for
the hardships they had experienced upon those who chanced to be in
power. Erstwhile statesmanship lapsed into a narrow, advantage-seeking
partizanship that regarded not, it sometimes seemed in this country,
even the fate of the world. The United States turned its back upon the
League of Nations, which was the most ambitious attempt ever made by
the nations of the earth to substitute a rule of reason for the rule of
force.
But if we recite these and other intangible and indirect costs that
might be named, then we are equally justified in looking for the
benefits derived from our participation in the war; and we find these
benefits to be great ones. First of all, we gained the victory;
and that alone, and especially so because the cause of America was
righteous, was worth all it cost in blood and money and burdens
shouldered for the future. We gained, moreover, a state of preparedness
for war that would have been impossible of attainment under any other
circumstances. In the reserves of supplies we have equipment ready
to arm 1,000,000 men as rapidly as they can take the field. In the
reserves of machinery we have a potential war industry capable of
maintaining such an army until industry generally can take up the
manufacture of munitions. Not again during the existence of the present
generation should we, if the emergency came, have to experience the
uncertainties and delays of 1917 in the production of supplies. We have
within our war reserves the machinery and the materials for producing
all the more difficult sorts of munitions, and we have, moreover,
preserved records of how to produce them.
Then, again, the health of the nation has presumably gained a benefit
from the experience. Hundreds of thousands of young men were removed
from sedentary occupations and placed in the vigorous, ordered,
athletic regimen of camp life. Several months of this, on the average,
did not fail to have its effect, and the medical records of the Army
showed a marked increase in the average weight of soldiers during the
war. Akin to this consideration is the fact that men were picked up
from farms, villages, and city neighborhoods and transported to distant
parts of the earth. This travel broadened thousands of them, quickened
their ambition, and strengthened their life purposes. Moreover, the
men of the Army were thoroughly mixed in the ranks and services. The
boy from Maine fraternized with the one from Arizona, and Illinois
and Virginia sent their sons to be comrades. Sectional, national, and
even racial lines disappeared in the ranks. This extensive regional
interacquaintanceship is to-day a national asset. The infiltration of
4,000,000 men who secured these individual benefits into the civilian
life of America is calculated to elevate the physical, mental, and
moral tone of the whole nation and to improve America’s homogeneity.
Other benefits might be named. The principle of selective military
service has been established by the precedent set in the World War.
As long as that experience is remembered there will be no danger
that America would ever return, in any serious emergency, to the
unscientific volunteer system that takes the brave and the enterprising
and leaves behind the indolent and timorous. Above all, we must count
as gain from the war the confirmation it gave us in our faith in
our ability to continue our existence as a nation. The experience
demonstrated that our national resources include not only valor in arms
in boundless quantity, but also the ability to organize effectively a
nation as great as ours for a purpose as complicated as modern war has
come to be. The experience in 1917 and 1918 gave us a firm foundation
for national self-confidence.
These are all benefits and gains which may properly be set off against
the intangible costs of the war. Among the benefits secured, however,
is not yet one which we might, in 1917 and 1918, have expected to
find there. The American host which crossed to France went, almost
to a man, uplifted and made heroic by the feeling that it was an
army of crusaders fighting to end wars forever. No mere instinct of
self-preservation, no simple prospect of a victory over a strange,
foreign enemy in gray uniforms, could have inspired the morale of
the American Expeditionary Forces, nor yet that of the forces in
training in the United States, nor that of American industry in its
eager, headlong devotion to the national undertaking. This was to
be Armageddon, the last of wars, the war to make safe the unwarlike
peoples of the world; and no cynical dictum that man is still too near
his neolithic savagery to rely on anything other than might in his
international contentions, no Chauvinistic picture of new migrations
of Asiatic hordes, can change the fundamental fact that America went
to war in the belief that its chiefest object was to end war forever.
Until we have made some national attempt to secure that benefit, the
page will not balance.
FOOTNOTES
[1] In this the system differed from that in use in the United States.
Not the Quartermaster Corps but the Embarkation Service in the United
States prepared the overseas troops for the voyage and embarked them
on the transports. The Embarkation Service also operated many of the
transports. After the armistice the Embarkation Service, now merged
into the Transportation Service, continued to manage the Army’s ocean
shipping facilities, and it also attended to the details of debarking
troops at the ports in this country; but its jurisdiction over those
troops began only after they had boarded the ships in France.
[2] Deadweight tonnage represents the weight of cargo it takes to sink
a vessel in the water from her light-load line to her deep-load line.
[3] In the spring of 1919 the Transportation Service brought back to
America from Archangel the American troops, about 4,500 in number,
sent to northern Russia in September, 1918, to combat the Bolsheviki.
It also, in late 1919 and early 1920, transported from Vladivostok to
American Pacific ports about 10,000 American troops who had been sent
to Siberia at different times to aid Czecho-Slovak, Japanese, and other
Allied forces in operations against German and Austrian troops aiding
the hostile native Russians in Siberia. In 1920 the Transportation
Service, acting as an independent contractor, undertook to repatriate
30,000 of the Czecho-Slovak Siberian troops cut off from escape to
the Balkans by the successes of the Bolsheviki in southern Russia.
To the government of Czecho-Slovakia the Service named the price of
$12,000,000 for this work, a price criticized in this country as too
low. The last of the 30,000 Czecho-Slovaks were landed at Trieste
about January 1, 1921, and the whole job had been carried through
at a cost of approximately $8,000,000. The Service employed twelve
U. S. transports for one or more trips in the movement of the Czech
expedition, and two of them--the _America_ and the _President Grant_,
both ex-German liners--circumnavigated the globe in the process of
the work, proceeding from New York to Vladivostok _via_ Panama and
thence to Trieste _via_ the Indian Ocean and the Suez Canal, and
from Trieste to New York _via_ Gibraltar. The Czechs traveled under
American military discipline with what that implies in cleanliness and
sanitation, and therefore moved without the epidemics of disease that
have usually accompanied the progress of Balkan forces.
[4] The disability discovered in these examinations was surprisingly
small, affecting a little more than 5 per cent of the soldiers
examined. Since the so-called limited-service men--soldiers suffering
from physical disability at the time of their induction and accepted
for military duties with the proviso that they should serve in
capacities where their physical shortcomings would not impair
their value to the Government--since these men also went to the
demobilization centers for discharge, it is evident that, to show a
true picture of the physical condition of the Army at demobilization,
the limited-service troops must be subtracted from the totals. With
such subtraction made, it is estimated that less than 5 per cent of
the men called to arms and accepted for service incurred physical
disability of any sort by reason of their experience.
[5] This work was practically all done after the date of the armistice
and before the advent of spring in 1919--in other words, during the
time of the year when the days are short and the nights long.
[6] The financing of war factories, and particularly of those which
had to make large and expensive plant additions before manufacturing
could proceed, was effectively aided by the War Credits Board of the
War Department. In the autumn of 1917 Congress authorized the War
Department to advance to contractors amounts up to 30 per cent of the
total contract obligations. The War Credits Board administered this
work. In all, it lent to war department contractors about $250,000,000.
On June 1, 1921, it had recouped all but $14,500,000 of these loans.
Its total losses were not expected to run over $150,000, while the
profits (interest, of which $8,000,000 had been collected) were
estimated at $12,000,000.
[7] The A. E. F. importations include all American-made guns shipped to
France, these same guns also being included among the 6,663 units noted
as built in the United States.
[8] This and other special artillery plants since sold to private
buyers are regarded as military assets. In the event of another great
war they would undoubtedly be used once more for the work their walls
encompassed in 1918.
[9] Includes surplus for sale.
[10] Sufficient to equip engineer troops with army of 825,000 men.
[11] _Chemical Warfare._ By Fries and West; the McGraw-Hill Company.
[12] Abridged from the discussion in _Chemical Warfare_. By Fries and
West; the McGraw-Hill Company.
[13] Under the contract France and England must at any time lease this
or some other cross-Channel cable to the United States upon the request
of this country.
[14] The French Government later converted the plant into a railroad
car repair shop.
[15] This sum was much more than offset in our favor by the decline in
sterling exchange during the time bills were unpaid.
[16] Due to the slump in business and prices in 1921, this estimate is
probably too high.
INDEX
Aberdeen Proving Ground, 176
Abuse of Uniform, 109–110
Agriculture, Department of:
Army supplies transferred to, 43, 275–276
Army surplus nitrate sold by, 274
Aircraft:
Production, 199–203
Storage, 208
Aircraft Board, 204
Aircraft Industrial Demobilization, 204–207
Airplane Engines:
Returned by A. E. F., 210
Sale of surplus, 280
War production, 202–203, 206
Airplane Lumber, 280
Airplane Lumber Claim, 293–294
Airplanes:
Burning of unserviceable, 211–213
Contracts, 199
Production, 202, 206
Returned by A. E. F., 210–211
Sale of surplus, 280
Air Service: Demobilization of, 50, 133, 204, 207, 280–281
Air Service Claims Board, 204
Air Service of A. E. F.:
Demobilization, 210–213
Maintenance cost, 203
Allies: Business settlement with, 287–288, 313–314
Allotments, 71–72
Amatol Arsenal, 188
American Brake Shoe & Foundry Co.: Builders of Erie Howitzer Plant,
171
American Car & Foundry Co.:
Claim of, 156
Post-armistice production by, 179
American Cyanamid Co.: Process of, at Muscle Shoals fixation plant,
184
American Expeditionary Forces:
Identification of dead of, 85, 89–91
Repatriation of, 38–42
Strength of, 1
Welfare activities in, 92–97
American Legion:
And abuse of uniform, 110
And bonus, 69
And disabled veterans, 104
American Red Cross:
Bonus payment aided by, 69
Demobilization camp banks of, 110
Soldier reëmployment campaign aided by, 109
Ammonium Nitrate, 274
Ammunition, Artillery: Disposal of, 188–190
Anglo-American Tank Project, 298–300
Anglo-American Tanks: Purchase of British parts for, 300–301
Animals: _See_ Horses and Mules
Appel, Monte: Claims against French settled by, 295
Appraisers, War Department Board of, 142
Army:
Status of demobilization, February 28, 1919, 50
Strength, 1
Army Retail Stores, 282–285
Army Subsistence School, 247–248
Artillery Carriages: Demobilization of industry producing, 174–175
Artillery, Field:
Production, 164, 175, 176
Reserve manufacturing facilities for, 168, 172
Reserves of, 175, 176
Artillery, Motorization of, 194
Artillery, Railway: Demobilization of industry producing, 176–180
Assistant Secretary of War, The:
As president of War Department Claims Board, 135
Purchase of cantonment sites ordered by, 265
Attorney General: Ruling of, against commission agents, 123
Ayer, Lieut. Col. F. R.: On Ordnance Claims Board, 147
Babcock, Col. Conrad S.: “Pershing’s Own Regiment” trained by, 94
Baggage, Military, 74–75
_See also_ Lost Baggage
Baggage Service, 75–78
Baldridge, Private C. LeRoy: On _Stars and Stripes_, 96
Balloons, 203, 206, 213
Barnes, Lieut. Col. A. V.: Chief of Baltimore ordnance district, 149
Bausch & Lomb Optical Co.: Optical glass produced by, 192–193
Beaune, University of, 93
Belgian Government: Supplies sold to, 189, 216, 241, 252
Belgian Relief Commission, 241
Benson, Admiral William S.: And German passenger vessels, 36
Billy, M. Édouard de: On French Liquidation Commission, 294
Bonus, 51, 69–70
Boosters and Adapters, 186
Bordeaux: As port of embarkation for A. E. F., 11, 12, 16, 19–24, 25,
28
Boston: As port of debarkation, 54
Bound Brook Tetranitroaniline Plant, 182
Boy Scouts: Walnut trees hunted by, 157
Brashear Co., J. A.: Prisms for panoramic sights produced by, 191
Brass, 277
Brest: As port of embarkation for A. E. F., 11, 12, 16, 17, 24–25, 29
Briggs & Turivas: Senter tetryl plant bought by, 182
Briggs, Lieut. Col. M. F.: On Ordnance Claims Board, 147
British Army: Unidentified dead of, 84
British Government:
American claims paid by, 294
American surplus aircraft sold by, 213
Ships of, withdrawn from American service, 31
Britt, Field Clerk James A.: On _Stars and Stripes_, 95
Browns: Number of, in Army, 70
Bryant, Waldo C.: Chief of Bridgeport ordnance district, 148
_Buford_, U. S. A. T.: Conversion of, 35
Bulk Sale of A. E. F. Property, 309–312
Bullard Engineering Works: Demobilization of ordnance work at, 165–167
Burr, Maj. Gen. G. W.:
British claims settled by, 303–304
On War Department Claims Board, 135
Burr-Niemeyer Agreement, 303–304
Bush Terminal Co.: Cartridge cloth sold by, 280
Camphor, 285
Camps, Sale of, 261–264
Candles, Toxic, 223–226
Cantonments: Purchase of sites of, 264–266
_Cape May_, U. S. A. C. T.: Loading record of, 40
Cargo: Quantity of A. E. F., returned, 42–43
Cargo Transports, Conversion of, 32, 34–35
Cartridge Cloth, 278–280
Castor Bean Case, 208–210
Cemeteries, American, in Europe, 86–89
Charleston: As port of debarkation, 54
Châteauroux Tank Plant, 195
Chemical Warfare Service:
Demobilization activities of, 133, 220–227, 282
Nitrogen fixation plant built for, 184–185
Chicago Storage Depot, 187
Claims, Soldiers’, 70–73
Classification Board, 142
Coffin, Howard E.: As chairman of Aircraft Board, 204
Combat Troops, Embarkation of, 13
Commerce, Secretary of: War contract conference called by, 117
Construction Division, 257–266
Construction Division Claims Board, 260
Construction in France, 214, 215
Contract Adjustment, Board of:
Function, 124, 137
Informal contracts settled by, 140–141
Contractors, Ordnance, 159–162
Contract Review, Superior Board of, 122–124
Contracts: _See_ Cost-plus Contracts _and_ War Contracts
Contracts and Adjustments, Board of, 237
Contracts, Class A, 140
Contracts, Class B, 140
Contracts, Informal, 126–128, 139–141
Contracts, Surveyor of, 121
Copper, 274
Cost-plus Contracts, 114–116, 117–121, 124–125
Council of National Defense, 106–107, 248
Cross-Channel Cable, A. E. F., 229
Cupro-nickel, 277–278
Cuthell Board, 288–296
Cuthell, Chester W.: Activities of, in settlement of international
claims, 290–296
Cuthell Board organized by, 288
Cuthell-Inverforth Agreement, 291, 293
Czecho-Slovakia: Supplies bought by, 242
Czecho-Slovak Siberian Troops, 46 (footnote)
_Daily Mail_, London: _Stars and Stripes_ printed in plant of, 95
Dawes, Brig. Gen. Charles G.: On United States Liquidation
Commission, 296, 297
Debarkation Camps, 55–57
Deceased Soldiers’ Effects, 80–83
Delano, Col. F. A.: French railroad transportation claim settled by,
308
Delousing, 17–19, 57
Demobilization Centers, 49
Demobilization Problems, 3, 4–8
Dent Act, 128, 140
Diphenolchlorarsine, 223–226
Disability in Service, 63 (footnote)
Dodge Brothers:
Recuperator plant of, 172–174
Truck contracts with, 232
Dorr, G. H.:
On War Department Claims Board, 135
Dravo, Ralph M.: Chief of Pittsburg ordnance district, 150
Du Pont Powder Co.:
Claim of, 156
Dyes manufactured by, 182
Early, Capt. Stephen T.: On _Stars and Stripes_, 96
Eddystone Rifle Plant, 196
Effects Bureau, 80–83
Embarkation Camps, A. E. F., 16–17
Embarkation Service:
Merged in Transportation Service, 57
Employment Service, United States, 106–108
Engineer Claims Board, 219
Engineer Department, 50, 213–219, 281–282
Engineering Supplies, 216–218
Equipment, Soldier’s, 21
Erie Howitzer Plant, 167, 171
Erie Proving Ground, 176
Eustis, Camp Abraham, 177
Expeditionary Bases, Disposal of, 45–46, 258
Final-payment rolls, 66
Finance, Director of:
And final payment to officers, 67–69
And wounded soldiers, 65–66
Finance Service, 64–69, 133, 266
First Censor and Press Company, 96
First Division, 29, 59–62
Fisher, Harry A.: On Cuthell Board, 294
Fisher, William: On Cuthell Board, 294
Fixed Nitrogen Commission, 183, 185
Food Administration, United States: Contract settlements of, 141
Ford Motor Co.:
Tank contracts with, 195
Truck contracts with, 232
Forest Service: Supplies turned over to, 228
_Forward to the Farm! Why Not?_: In reëmployment campaign, 110
Frankford Arsenal: Machinery concentrated at, 181, 187, 191, 192, 198
French Claims, 306–308
French Government:
American supplies purchased by, 190, 213, 216, 229, 230, 238–240,
242, 245, 252, 281, 311–313
Claims negotiations with, 217, 295, 306–309
French Liquidation Commission, 294
Gas Defense Division, 220
Gas, Toxic, 220–222, 226–227
General Sales Agent and Board, 240, 241
General Vehicle Co.: French contract with, settled, 295
Genicart, Camp, 23
German Passenger Ships, 35–36
Goethals, Maj. Gen. G. W.: Purchase, Storage, and Traffic Division
built around, 234
Graham, Col. J. H.:
A. E. F. property inventoried by, 309–310
Grand Central Palace Debarkation Hospital, 99
Graves Registration Service, 85–91
_Great Northern_, U. S. A. T., 39
Greenhut Building Debarkation Hospital, 99
Greenwood, Levi H.: Chief of Boston ordnance district, 148
Gun Plants, 167–168
Gwinn, Ralph W.: Work of, on Cuthell Board, 291, 292
Harness, 286
Harrisburg Manufacturing & Boiler Co.: Railway artillery produced
after armistice by, 178, 179
Harrison, C. L.: Chief of Cincinnati ordnance district, 150
Hawley, Private Hudson: On _Stars and Stripes_, 95
Hidden-loss Claim, British, 302–303
Hill, Camp, 55
Hines, Brig. Gen. Frank T.:
As chief of Transportation Service, 57
Foreign passenger vessels secured by, 36
Plan of, for repatriation of A. E. F., 30–32
Hoboken Casual Companies, 56
Hollis, Hon. Henry F.: On United States Liquidation Commission, 296,
297
Hoover, Herbert: Surplus food purchased by, 241
Horses and Mules, 244–246, 253–255
Horse Shows in A. E. F., 94
Hospital Trains, 99–100
Howe, Richard F.: On Aircraft Board, 204
Humphreys, Camp, 268
_Imperator_, S. S., 36
Imperial Munitions Board: American contracts in Canada settled by,
140, 142, 148
Informal Contracts: _See_ Contracts, Informal
Inland Traffic Service, 57
Interallied Maritime Transport Council, 36
Interdepartmental Conference, 117–121
Interior, Secretary of: Army lands sold by, 267
Invalid Contracts: _See_ Contracts, Informal
Inventory and Appraisal of A. E. F. Property, 309–311
Inverforth, Lord: Empowered to deal with Cuthell Board, 290–291
Italian Government: American claims paid by, 295
Jackling, D. C.: Nitro powder plant contracts adjusted by, 142–143
Jadwin, Brig. Gen. Edgar: A. E. F. installations appraised by, 310
Jadwin Report, 310
Japan Paper Co.: Ordnance claim of, 158
Johnson, Homer H.: On United States Liquidation Commission, 296, 297
Jones, John C.: Chief of Philadelphia Ordnance district, 149
Keuffel & Esser: Optical glass produced by, 192–193
Labor, Department of: War industry terminated on advice of, 131, 132
Lamont, Col. R. P.: On Ordnance Claims Board, 147
La Pallice, 12
Layton, W. T.: On Inverforth Commission, 291
League of Nations, 318
Leather, 286
Le Havre, 12
Le Mans: Embarkation area at, 13–15, 23, 24, 28, 53–54
Lewis, Capt. W. Lee: Lewisite invented by, 223
Lewisite, 223, 226
Liberty Engine Claim, 292, 293
Liquidation Commission, United States:
Claims settled by, 217, 298–303, 304–305, 306–309
Creation, function, and policies of, 288–290, 296
Property sold by, 210, 240, 309–313
Loading Plants, 188
Lost Baggage, 72, 75–77, 79–80
Lost Baggage Bureau, 75, 76–77, 78–79
Loucheur, M. Louis: Refusal of, to pay Anglo-American tank claim, 300
Lumber, 273
Mahogany, 280
Marion Steam Shovel Co.: Railway artillery produced after armistice
by, 178
Marlin-Rockwell Corp.: Ordnance claim of, 156
Marseilles, 12
Marshall, Waldo H.: On Ordnance Claims Board, 147
_Maui_, U. S. A. C. T., 39–40
Maxwell-Chalmers Co.: Tractors produced by, 194
Mayor’s Committee of Welcome, 55
_McClellan_, U. S. A. T., 25
McLane Silk Co.: Cartridge cloth sold by, 280
Meade, Camp, 62
Medical Department: Demobilization activities of, 49, 61–64, 97–101
Medical Supplies, 232, 233
Meigs, Camp, 66
Meloney, Major William Brown: Reëmployment pamphlet written by, 108
Merritt, Camp, 55–56
Midvale Steel & Ordnance Co.:
Howitzer plant of, 179–180
Rifle plant of, 196
“Mill” at Bordeaux, 19–23
Mills, Camp, 55, 56
Mines, Bureau of: Nitrogen fixation plant built by, 184–185
Mobile Repair Shops, 195
Morel, M. Paul: A. E. F. property purchased for France by, 311–312
Morgan Engineering Co.: Post-armistice production of railway
artillery by, 178–179
Motor Transport Corps, 49, 230–232
Motor Vehicles, 230–232
Mules: _See_ Horses and Mules
Muscle Shoals Nitrogen Plant, 183, 184, 185
National Defense Act, 114
National Defense, Council of, 106–107, 248
Navy Department:
Army property turned over to, 180, 275
Operation of troopships relinquished by, 33
U. S. A. T. _Northern Pacific_ repaired by, 42
Warships used as troopships by, 36
Nebraska Aircraft Corp.: Army airplanes bought by, 280
Nervous and Mental Cases in Army, 102
Neuve, Camp, 23
Neville Island Gun Plant, 180
New York: As port of debarkation, 54
New York Air Brake Co.: Ordnance claims of, 156
Newport News: Debarkation at, 54, 99
Newport News Shipbuilding Co.: Use of, by Transportation Service, 34
Nitrate of Soda, 274
Nitrogen Fixation Plants, 183–185
Nitro Powder Plant, 142–143, 182, 262, 276
Noble, Frank S.: Chief of Rochester ordnance district, 149
_Northern Pacific_, U. S. A. T., 42
Northwestern Ordnance Co.: Machinery of, transferred to Erie Howitzer
Plant, 171
Officers:
Final payments to, 67–69
Transportation of, from France, 41–42
Old Hickory Powder Plant, 181
Operations Division, 259
Optical Glass, 192–194
Optical Instruments, 192
Ordnance Claims Board, 146–147
Ordnance Contractors, 159–162
Ordnance Department: Demobilization activities of, 133, 146, 147–159,
163, 164–165
Ordnance Industry, 145–146
Ordnance Plants, 276
Ordnance Salvage Board, 275–280
Otis Elevator Co.: Recuperator plant of, 173, 174
Parker, Edwin B.: Chairman of United States Liquidation Commission,
296, 297
Peirce, Brig. Gen. W. S.: Chief of Ordnance Claims Board, 147
Perryville Ammonium Nitrate Plant, 182
Pershing, Gen. J. J.:
A. E. F. disbanded by, 12, 37
Armistice announced by, 1
Departure of, from France, 29
Parades with First Division, 59–61
_Stars and Stripes_ supported by, 95, 96–97
“Pershing’s Own Regiment,” 94
Pershing Stadium, 94, 215
Physiotherapy, 100–101
Picatinny Arsenal: Machinery concentrated at, 181, 187, 188
Picric Acid Plants, 182
Pittsburg Plate Glass Co.: Optical glass produced by, 192–193
Platinum, 277
Polish Relief Corp., 242
Pontanezen, Camp, 16–17
Ports of Embarkation, A. E. F., 10–11, 12, 39
Portugal: A. E. F. supplies bought by, 242
Post Office Department: Supplies turned over to, 228
Powder Plants, 181, 182
Preparedness: American post-armistice state of, 319
Public Health Service, 101–102, 103–104, 252, 275
Pullman Car Co.: Post-armistice production of railway artillery
_matériel_ by, 179
Purchase Claims Board, 247
Purchase, Director of, 133, 235, 246–248, 252–253
Purchase, Storage, and Traffic, Division of:
Industrial demobilization controlled by, 134–135
Purchasing functions of, 219, 234–235
War contracts controlled by, 121
Quartermaster Department, 50, 234–235
Quartermaster Supplies:
Demobilization of industry producing, 246–247
Purchases of, in Europe, 235–236
Sales of:
To French Government, 238–240
To other purchasers, 240–243
Storage of, 251–252
Termination of European contracts for, 237
Value of A. E. F. surplus of, 243
Racine trinitrotoluol Plant, 142
Railroad Administration, United States: Cut rates to discharged
soldiers granted by, 51–52
Railroad Claim, French, 217
Railway Passenger Equipment, Army, 57–58
Raritan Arsenal, 176
Raw Materials Division, 248
Ray, John H., Jr.: On Cuthell Board, 294
Real Estate Service, 267–268
Recording & Computing Machines Co.: Optical instruments produced by,
192
Recuperators, 172
Reeves, Col. Ira L.: President of Beaune University, 93
Remount Service, 244–246, 253–255
Reo Motor Co.: Tractors produced by, 194
Ritchey, Dr. G. W.: Optical workers trained by, 191
Roads, Bureau of Public: Supplies furnished to, 217, 252, 282
Roberts, George J.: Chief of New York ordnance district, 149
Robinson, Fred J.: Chief of Detroit ordnance district, 149
Rochester Gun Plant, 167, 170–171
Rock Island Arsenal:
Artillery stored at, 176
Machinery concentrated at, 172, 174–175, 197
Post-armistice production:
Recuperators, 173
36-ton tanks, 195
Roosevelt, Theodore: Attitude of, toward burial of soldiers in
France, 84
Ross, Private Harold W.: As editor of _Stars and Stripes_, 96
Roumania: Supplies bought by, 242
Russell, E. A.: Chief of Chicago ordnance district, 149
Russell, Fort D. A.: Artillery stored at, 176
Sales Branch, 269, 271–275
Sales, Director of, 269–270, 276
Salvage, 24, 243–244
Savanna Proving Ground, 176
School System of A. E. F., 92–93
Scovil, Samuel:
Chief of Cleveland ordnance district, 149
Selective Service Men, Entrainment of, 1, 47–48
Senter Tetryl Plant, 182
Seventy-seventh Division, 59, 67
Sheffield Nitrogen Plant, 183–184, 185
Shell:
Demobilization of Industry producing, 185–187
Disposal of A. E. F. stocks of, 188–190
Shell, Gas, 222–223
Shelton, Charles B.: On Cuthell Board, 294
Sights and Fire-control Instruments, 190–193
Signal Corps, 227–229
Singer Manufacturing Co.: Post-armistice production of recuperators
by, 172, 173
Singleton, Marvin E.: Chief of St. Louis ordnance district, 150
Small Arms: Demobilization of industry producing, 195–197
Small-arms Ammunition, 197–198
Smith, Dan: Reëmployment poster painted by, 109
Smith, Sergeant John W. Rixey: On _Stars and Stripes_, 96
Smiths: Number of, in Army, 70
Smoke, Toxic, 223–226
Soldier Dead: Place of burial of remains of, 83–84, 91
Spencer Lens Co.: Optical glass made by, 192
Springfield Armory: Machinery stored at, 197
Spruce Production Corp., 143, 281
Standard B Trucks, 231
Standard Contract Provisions, 122–124
Standards, Bureau of: Optical glass manufacture by, 192, 193–194
_Stars and Stripes_, 9–10, 94–97
Steel, 277
Steever, Miller D.: Work of, on Cuthell Board, 291, 292–293
Stettinius, Edward R.: Activities of, in settling foreign industrial
claims, 297, 298, 305–306
Stewart, Col. G. H.: On Ordnance Claims Board, 147
St. Nazaire: As port of embarkation for A. E. F., 11, 12, 16, 25, 28
Storage, Director of, 251
Storage Service, 250–252
Stuart, Camp, 55
Sulphur, 274
Surplus Army Supplies, 270–271
Surplus Property Division, 285–286
Symington-Anderson Co.:
Chicago shell factory of, retained as stand-by plant, 187
Rochester Gun Plant built by, 170
Tank Claim, British, 301
Tanks, 195
Tardieu, M. André: In negotiations leading to bulk purchase of
A. E. F. stocks, 311
Thayer, Harry B.: On Aircraft Board, 204
Theatrical Performances, Soldiers’, 94
Thirty-third Division, 59
Tires, Automobile, 286
Toluol Plants, 182–183
Training Camps:
Demobilization of troops in, 48–50
Use of, as debarkation camps, 55
Transportation Service:
Air service squadrons in England repatriated by, 38
Cargo transports redelivered by, 43–45
Conversion of cargo transports by, 34–35
Creation of, 57
First Division transported by, 59–60
German passenger vessels secured by, 36
Military passengers carried by, after armistice, 59
Morale of, 32–33, 38–39
News bureau of, 55
_Personnel_ adjutants of, 41
Port facilities disposed of by, 45–46
Pre-armistice stoppage of embarkation by, 37
Reserve of troopships created by, 45
Russian and Siberian expeditionary troops repatriated by, 46
(footnote)
Sick and wounded transported by, 58–59
Troopships diverted by, 54
Troopships operated by, 33
Transports, 43 _See also_ Cargo Transports _and_ Troopships
Travel Allowance, 51
Treasury, Comptroller of: Decision of, invalidating informal
contracts, 127
Trinitrotoluol Plants, 183
Troop-movement Section, 47–48
Troopships, 31, 34, 36–37, 45
Trucks, Motor, 199, 286
Tuberculosis, 102
Tullytown Bag-loading Plant, 188
_Tuscania_, S. S.: Identification of effects of soldiers lost in
sinking of, 82–83
Twenty-eighth Division, 59
Twenty-seventh Division, 59
United States Aëronautical Engine Plant, 207
Universities, Foreign: A. E. F. soldiers in, 93–94
Upton, Camp, 55, 56
Vessel owners: Demand of, for redelivery of chartered tonnage, 33–34
Veterans:
Employment campaign for, 104–111
Generosity of Government to, 104
Victory Parades, 59
Vocational Education, Federal Board for, 101, 102–104
Wah Chang Trading Corp.: Ordnance claim of, 158
Wallgren, Private A. B.: On _Stars and Stripes_, 96
Walnut Timber, 156–157
War Camp Community Service: Reëmployment campaign of, 109
War Contracts:
Extent of, 112–113, 128–129
Standardization of, 122–124
Termination and liquidation of, 129–132, 138
_See also_ Cost-plus Contracts
War Credits Board, 119–120 (footnote)
War Department:
Contract liquidation system of, 135–136, 138
Contractors paid in advance by, 137–138, 141
Contractual obligations of, 112–113, 128–129
Cost of war to, 315–318
Effect of 1917 organization of, upon contracts, 116–117
Expansion of plant of, 256–257
Policies of:
In burying soldier dead, 83–84
In discharging troops, 49–51, 52–53, 105–106
Real Estate Service of, 266–267
Reëmployment campaign of, 104–105
Reorganization of, in 1918, 121
War contracting powers of, 114
War Department Claims Board:
Castor bean case settled by, 208–210
Creation and _personnel_ of, 135
Growth of, 141
Informal contracts settled by, 140
Record of, 143–144
War Industries Board:
Australasian wool purchased by, 248
Contracts made by, 141
Function of, 248
Termination of war industry aided by, 131, 132
War Industry:
Extent of, 2–4
Liquidation of, 132, 133–137
Warner & Swasey: Panoramic sights produced by, 191
War Risk Insurance, Bureau of:
Amalgamation of, with other veterans’ bureaus, 103–104
Disability compensation paid by, 63
Function of, 101
War, Secretary of:
Order of, as to post-armistice production, 131
Powers under Dent Act delegated by, 140
War Department Claims Board created by, 135
Watertown Arsenal:
Expansion of, 168, 169–170, 174, 180
Machinery concentrated at, 178, 179, 180
Watervliet Arsenal:
Expansion of, 168–170, 174
Machinery concentrated at, 180
Watson, Major Mark: On _Stars and Stripes_, 96
Weems, F. C.: On Cuthell Board, 291
West Indian Laborers, 257
_Where Do We Go from Here?_: Booklet used in reëmployment campaign,
108–109
White & Co., J. G.: Settlement of French contract with, 295
Willys-Overland, Inc.: 75-mm. gun carriages produced by, 173
Wilson, Woodrow, President of the United States: And Italian
delegates to Peace Conference, 290
Winterich, Corporal John T.: On _Stars and Stripes_, 95
Woods, Col. Arthur: Reëmployment campaign conducted by, 107
Wool Administrator, 248
Wool Pool, Liquidation of, 248–250
Woollcott, Sergeant Alexander: On _Stars and Stripes_, 96
World War: Costs and benefits of, 315–321
Wounded Soldiers:
Payment of, 65–66
Transportation of, 58–59
Wright-Martin Aircraft Corp.: Engine plant of, retained, 207
Young Men’s Christian Association: Schools of, in A. E. F., 93
Zinc, 277
Zone Finance Officer at Washington: Bonus paid by, 69
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs
and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support
hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to
the corresponding illustrations.
Footnotes, originally at the bottoms of pages, have been sequentially
renumbered and moved to just before the Index.
The index was not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page
references.
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