WHAT AMERICA DID

Troop Transport Leaving New York for France

WHAT AMERICA DID
A Record of Achievement in the Prosecution of the War

BY
FLORENCE FINCH KELLY

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 FIFTH AVENUE

Copyright, 1919,
By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America

PREFACE

My purpose in this book has been to condense into a brief account just those things that the ordinary man or woman wants to know about how we prepared for and waged our share in the world war. I have tried to picture the large outlines of achievement, to present the important facts, and to show how it was all inspired and rushed forward by the flaming spirit of the people. Volumes will be required, and will of course be written, to tell comprehensively and in detail the complete story of America’s many-sided effort in the prosecution of the war. But I have sought, rather, to make such a book as would meet the needs of the every-day reader by disregarding details and weaving into the panorama of our war adventure only the essential facts of each phase of war effort and the spirit by which it was all unceasingly animated.

In such a volume, it seemed to me, there was no place for account of the controversies that have raged over almost every step of progress, nor for mention of criticisms or investigations or even of the mistakes that delayed by a few weeks or a few months the reaching of the peak of achievement in this or that particular. All of them, doubtless, will be chronicled in those many volumes that will tell the story of America’s participation in the war comprehensively and in detail. Otherwise, they will all be forgotten in six months. It is achievement that counts, and this book aims only to be a record of things that were done.

But it is in no boastful spirit and with no vainglorious purpose that “What America Did” is presented. There is no one of the millions who shared in that doing but knows and is glad to say that beside what Britain, or France, or Italy did or Belgium suffered America can only stand with bent head and reverent heart. It is much to be desired that a similar record, presenting outlines and essential facts within a space possible for the reading of the average busy person, of the achievements and sacrifices of each of these nations should be prepared for our own and for coming generations. For the sum total of their testimony would so utterly disprove the old, old lie that a democracy can not be efficient and so summarily cast it into outer darkness that men would never again say it or believe it as long as time lasts. If this little volume is privileged to do its share toward proving that “the highest and best form of efficiency is the spontaneous coöperation of a free people” I shall feel it an honor to have done the work of assembling and presenting its evidence.

To those many officials and temporary assistants of the Government—they are far too many to mention separately—who have given me their cordial and painstaking coöperation in my effort to make all the facts and figures and statements of this work accurate and authoritative I wish to acknowledge my very great indebtedness. Without their constant and most courteous help the book would have been impossible.

Florence Finch Kelly.
New York City,
May, 1919.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

WHAT AMERICA DID

FOREWORD: ENTERING THE WAR

When the United States entered the war, April 6th, 1917, she had an army, including all the forces of the Regular Army, the National Guard and the Reserve Corps, totaling 202,510 men and 9,524 officers, a navy not large but well prepared, and the nucleus of an aeronautical section so small and undeveloped that it was negligible. Behind these fighting forces that, except the navy, were insignificant in comparison with the vast numbers of men swaying back and forth across the battlefields of Europe was a nation that ever since its birth had held the profound conviction, a fundamental of its political creed, that this country should never allow itself to be drawn into the quarrels of Europe.

Generation after generation had watched transatlantic wars blaze up and go their bloody way and had seen their flames fed by racial hates and jealousies, commercial greed, desire of territory, and dynastic and personal ambitions. And each successive generation had detested more deeply the whole foul crew of those motives and had been more determined that America should have no concern in the struggles they inspired. No one who does not understand how deeply rooted was this conviction in the political beliefs and ideals, the traditions, the very life of the American people can appreciate what it meant to them to plunge into the war. It demanded no less than a revolution in their methods of thought and in their attitude toward the rest of the world. The Monroe Doctrine, moreover, which for nearly a century had been almost as fundamental in our political life as the Constitution itself, made our abstention from interference in Europe a point of honor. For in its declaration that Europe must keep its hands off the western hemisphere was the implied and recognized obligation that the United States must keep its fingers out of Europe.

Until within a few months of our entrance into the war the vast majority of our people, probably no less than nine-tenths of those who were reading and thinking about it, saw in it nothing more than one of those recurring European quarrels, such as their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers had watched from this side the Atlantic with growing determination that this country should not be entangled in their strife. All that vast majority believed profoundly that the United States should hold aloof from this war for the same reasons that it had kept out of the previous bloody struggles. The American people can scarcely be blamed that they did not for a long time perceive the real cause of the war—the desire of the German Emperor and his people to win world dominion and establish a German autocracy over the conquered peoples. For no nation, and very few individuals, even among the near neighbors of Germany, at first realized that this was the goal of the Kaiser and his Government. Some of those nations had now and then apprehended danger, but only each one for itself, but upon the fingers of one hand could be counted the statesmen and publicists of Europe who perceived the intention of world conquest, until the field-gray legions had been started upon the adventure. And those few who had declared such a conviction concerning German purpose had had their trouble for their pains. For no one had heeded their warning. Slowly, as evidence accumulated that convicted Germany out of her own mouth and was surveyed in the light of the event to which it all pointed, did the governments and peoples that were being attacked come to a realization of the truth.

The American people were still longer in understanding the full significance of the purpose with which Germany launched the war. For their knowledge that through many centuries one after another of the European powers had striven through blood and devastation and agony to gain dominance over the others made them for a long time heedless of the meaning of the accumulating evidence and led them, in all honesty and conscientiousness, to absolve themselves of any responsibility or obligation. German propaganda of the most insidious and plausible sort, its sources well concealed, was busy everywhere and, although it had no success in changing the direction of the spontaneous sympathies of the people, it did aid in preventing them from discerning for many months the real cause and purpose of the war.

Moreover, that any nation in the twentieth century should lust for world dominion and should set out to gain it seemed to the average American mind so impossible, so insane a purpose that it was loath to believe the truth. More and more evidence had to be accumulated and pressed home, more and more proof of the satanic methods by which the Germans were seeking to gain both their immediate and their ultimate ends had to be shown the American people before they could realize the full truth and the full significance of the German purpose. Not until that purpose ceased to stagger their belief did the sense of obligation begin to stir their spirits.

Hardly less universal and profound than the political conviction that this nation should stay out of European entanglements and let Europe settle her own quarrels in her own way was the moral and intellectual conviction that war is a wasteful and wicked means of bringing about any desired result. For more than a generation this belief had been growing and striking deep root in the minds and hearts of the American people. The nation that sprang to arms in April, 1917, was a nation that loathed war from the bottom of its heart.

So powerful and so universal were these convictions, that the country should be kept aloof from European dissensions and that war should be considered only as a last resort in a righteous cause, that no leader could have put the country wholeheartedly into the war until the masses of the people were convinced that the moment had come when they must enter it. And they were not, in their millions, thus convinced until the events near the end of 1916 and early in 1917 had shown them the path they must take. Then it was—and until then it would not have been—a united and determined country that took up the cross of war and faced the ascent of Calvary—how completely and closely united and how sternly determined the pages of this book will try to show.

PART ONE
THE FIGHTING FORCES

SECTION I. ON LAND.

CHAPTER I
THE MAKING OF THE ARMY

The United States sprang into the greatest war the world has ever known, a war in which men and machines and resources were being consumed in enormous quantities, with an army numbering, all told, only 212,000. The first necessity was to create, train and equip an army that would, at the earliest possible moment, number millions of men and thousands of officers. American sentiment had always been strongly opposed to the principle of compulsory military service and the only attempt the country had ever made to use the draft system, during the Civil War, had caused dissatisfaction, disturbance and riot in civil life and in its military results had been practically a failure. Through many days of discussion in Congress and throughout the country the question was threshed out, while enlistments to the number of over 800,000 were swelling the ranks of the Regular Army, National Guard and Reserve Corps organizations. In the end, there was general agreement that only the draft system could furnish the enormous numbers of men required and draw them from civil life with democratic justice and with due regard to social and economic interests.

As a large number of foreign born citizens had come here to escape the compulsory military service of their native countries, there were many grave fears of the result and it was even expected that in centers of foreign population there would be riotous demonstrations of protest. But those who were thus apprehensive had not rightly estimated the intelligence, the democracy and the Americanism of the whole citizenship of the country, foreign as well as native born.

The success of the Selective Service Law, enacted by Congress on May 18, 1917, was as spectacular as it was complete. The entire machinery of registration, compilation and report was organized and made ready for operation in the eighteen days following the enactment of the law and was wholly manned by volunteer service from civil life. On June 5th, in a single day, without disturbance or protest anywhere, the entire male population of the country between the ages of twenty-one and thirty, inclusive, went to the registration booths and registered for military service, and practically all the returns were in Washington within twenty-four hours. Two subsequent registrations of young men who had reached the age of twenty-one after June 5th brought the number of registrants up to a little more than 10,000,000 men.

On September 12th, 1918, occurred the registration under the extended age limits of eighteen to forty-five when over 13,000,000 names were added to the list. Thus in a year and a half of war America listed and classified as to physical fitness and occupational and domestic status her full available power of 23,700,000 men. Out of the first great registration and the two small ones supplementing it and from the Regular Army and the National Guard there had been sent overseas at the signing of the armistice, November 11th, 1918, a little more than 2,000,000 men and there were in the United States, ready for transportation to France, 1,600,000. The American Army totaled at that time 3,665,000. A few of those who had gone were in Italy, Russia, or elsewhere, but nearly all of them were in France, trained, equipped and either on the fighting line, in supporting divisions, or waiting in the rear ready for the front. Those in the American training camps were being transported to France at the rate of from 200,000 to 300,000 per month and would all have been overseas by early spring of 1919. The work of classifying the registrants of September, 1918, and of making the selections for military service was already under way and the flow of these men into the training camps had begun. The plans were all ready for operation for calling into military service 3,000,000 more men from this registration, for training them in the American camps two or three months and then sending them to France for a final training period of six or eight weeks. If the war had continued until the next summer, as it was then universally believed it would, the United States would have had ready for service at the front, within two years of its declaration of war, an army of between 6,000,000 and 7,000,000 men, taken from civilian life, trained, equipped and transported across the Atlantic Ocean within that time.

The mechanism by which this army was gathered, examined, selected, classified and sent to training camps worked as smoothly, as efficiently and as swiftly as if the country had been trained for a century in martial methods. The quotas to be furnished by states, counties and smaller districts were apportioned and local boards were appointed to have charge of the task of calling the selected men, examining and classifying them and sending to the training camps those finally chosen as physically fit for the service and able to serve without injury to dependents or to essential industry.

Registration also had been carried on under these local boards, each registrant being numbered in order. The draft call was made by means of a lottery drawing in Washington where each number that was drawn summoned all the men of the same registration number in all of the 4,500 local boards throughout the country. The local boards called in the men whose numbers were chosen, examined them as to physical condition, considered their claims to exemption, if such were made, on the ground of being the necessary support of dependents or of being engaged in an essential industry, decided for or against them and certified their names to the district board, which acted as a board of review for local boards, as exempted or held for service. If approved for service by the district board, the local board inducted them into the service and sent them to a cantonment or camp to begin their military training. Each of these 4,500 local boards was officered by three men, one of whom had to be a physician. All of them were civilians who worked practically without pay, until, after some months, a small allowance was made for their remuneration. They carried through the arduous work, frequently entailing many hours per day, in addition to their regular business or professional affairs, which had to be much neglected meanwhile, in order that they might offer this important service to their country at the moment of need. The draft organization, besides these 13,500 local board members, included over 1,000 district board members, medical, legal and industrial advisers, clerks, Government appeal agents, and others amounting, all told, to a compact, nation-wide body of over 190,000.

The democratic ideals of America have never had a more searching trial or a more triumphant vindication than was afforded by the swift and efficient making of this Army of Freedom. Columbia stretched out a summoning finger, saying, “I need you!” and there came to her service millionaire’s son and Chinese laundryman, descendant of generations of Americans and immigrant of a day, farmer, banker, merchant, clerk, country school teacher, university professor, lawyer, physician, truck driver, yacht owner, down-and-outer, social favorite—from village and country and town and city they came, representing every occupation, every social grade, every economic condition in the republic. On the democratic level of service to the country they gathered in the barracks and without a whimper or a word of protest the millionaire’s son cleaned out stables, the young man reared in luxury washed his own mess kit and served on the kitchen police, and all of them worked at their training and their drill as hard as day laborers from dawn till dark.

Fourteen tribes of American Indians were represented among the soldiers of the National Army, as the forces formed from the Selective Service were called for more than a year, to distinguish them from the Regular Army and the National Guards. Then all three were merged into the single organization of the United States Army. Among the most efficient soldiers were several regiments of negroes. Every civilized nation on the face of the globe, every language, and every important dialect were represented in the ranks of the soldiers of freedom who carried the Stars and Stripes on the battle fields of France. Through the office of the base censor of the American Expeditionary Forces passed letters in forty-nine languages. Chinese, Syrian and Dane, Persian and Irishman, Japanese and Italian, Latin American and Swede, vied with the New Englander, the Kentuckian, the Texan and the Kansan in loyalty to the United States, in enthusiasm for our ideals and willingness to defend them with their lives. In the September registration men of fifty-two different tongues were listed in New York City. In the first draft men were called and accepted who claimed birth in twenty-two separately listed countries, while a contingent from Central and South America was not credited in the official report to the separate nations they represented and nearly two thousand men from scattered and small countries were lumped together under the designation of “Sundries.” But all of them zealously fought for America.

A great many of these foreign-born men already spoke English. And the education of those who did not began as soon as they were inducted into the army and was continued along with their military training. In every cantonment to which came men who did not understand English schools were established in which they were taught to speak, read and write the language. All the training and all the life around them were in English and this constant association and the daily lessons soon made most of the men fairly proficient.

Along with the training in English went instruction in American ideals, in the reasons why America was in the war and in what the war meant to them individually. The aim was to give to these foreign-born men the kind of training in patriotism and in democratic ideals, condensed into a few weeks, that the American gets by birthright and surroundings. Many, varied and ingenious were the ways by which this was done. There were short talks on war news, on American principles of government, on why America was in the war, on why it was a war for freedom, and similar topics. The special days and the heroes of nations that have their own traditions of revolt against tyranny were celebrated by “national nights” to which came all the sons of that nation in the camp and as many others as could crowd into the auditorium. There were music and speeches and national songs and the hymns of the Allies and in all the talking the speakers would link up American democracy, its mission in the world and the reasons why America was in the war with the traditions of freedom, the heroes of liberty and the sacrifices for democracy and justice of the nation whose celebration was being held. Pamphlets and leaflets, written by men of their own nationality, in English usually, but in their own tongue for those who could not yet read English, which explained the causes of the war, the aims of the combatants and America’s motives and outlined American history in a simple and readable way, were circulated among the men. In a word, these foreign-born soldiers-in-the-making were educated and broadened and so imbued with democratic principles and American ideals that in spirit they rapidly became good Americans, even if they elected to continue citizens of their native land.

But all who wished could be naturalized during their military training. In every cantonment was a court of naturalization and by a special law it had been made possible to shorten the time ordinarily needed for this process. Any man who was going forth to fight the battles of civilization in the American army could become an American citizen, even if he had not previously declared his intention, while he was being trained. In one day at one of the cantonments men of fifty-six nationalities were naturalized. At this camp sessions were held from eight till five o’clock and were often continued until midnight, so many were there who wished to become citizens. The majority of the aliens in the selective service did so choose and the great bulk of the foreign-born part of the huge army that was ferried across the Atlantic had acquired American citizenship. Aliens who did not wish to serve could, and some thousands did, claim, and were granted, exemption on that ground.

Now and then Columbia’s summoning finger brought to the training camp a slacker, or a religious or a conscientious objector. Patient and careful inquiry was given to every case and no effort was spared to make sure that each was receiving exact justice. The official report of the Provost Marshal General for the first draft reckoned that out of the more than 3,000,000 called for service no more than 150,000 of those who failed to appear on time were not accounted for by enlistment, transference or death. The reports of the local boards showed that the bulk of this residue was composed of aliens who had left this country to enlist in their own armies. Out of the remainder of 50,000 a great many of the failures to report were due to the ignorance or heedlessness of workingmen who had moved, between registration and the call, from one job to another in a different locality.

The exemption usually given to religious objectors was extended, after a few months, to include those who based their objections to sharing in warfare upon grounds of conscience even if they were not members of a religious organization. Out of the 3,600,000 men inducted into the service a little less than 4,000 were accepted or recognized as conscientious objectors. A large number of these were assigned to work on farm or industrial furloughs. Some entered non-combatant service and a few were allowed to join the Friends’ Reconstruction Unit. Several hundred refused any service whatever and were sent to prison. In the training camps the conscientious objectors were segregated and placed in the charge of an army officer who was often able by tact and persuasion to influence them to a different point of view. Some swallowed their objections very soon, took up the work of training more or less sullenly, and presently, seeing a better light and feeling the influence of the patriotism and enthusiasm surging round about them, became as good soldiers of Uncle Sam as any of their comrades. The problem of the slacker and the objector was a small one in the making of the great army that was sent overseas, but it was a vexatious one for the honest-hearted men who had charge of it and who took infinite pains to dispense even-handed justice in every case. “My company,” said the captain in one large cantonment under whose command were grouped the slackers, the religious objectors and the protesters for conscience’s sake, “is the most interesting one in the camp—and the most trying.”

Development battalions were established in nearly all the cantonments and did a good work in raising the efficiency of some of the men of the army by helping them to reach better physical condition. To these battalions were sent men who developed minor physical defects and the men sometimes received from the local boards who fell short of the physical standards set by the army. Medical treatment, courses of physical training and, if necessary, surgical operations brought many of them to so much better bodily condition that they could undertake limited service. Many were sent to the forests of the Northwest as part of the regiment that did most necessary work in helping to get out spruce lumber for airplane construction. Others were prepared for clerical and semi-civilian work in the army, thus releasing for active service those who had had it in charge. A goodly number improved so much under treatment that they were enabled to undertake active army service. All told, about 250,000 men passed through the development battalions, of whom nearly half were made fit for duty in either the first, second or third class. Educational work was also carried on in the battalions and many who were either illiterate or had had very little schooling received elementary instruction from former school teachers, of whom there were many in the ranks. Short talks on the duties of citizenship, phases of American history, public questions, and the causes and progress of the war and the encouragement of discussion broadened the outlook and stimulated the minds of the men.

The necessity of organizing and training a huge army in a few months made equally necessary a revolution in some army methods, a revolution that was brought about by the Committee on the Classification of Personnel appointed early in the war. For most of its work, which constantly broadened and became more and more important, it had no precedents, for, except a little experimenting in the British army, nothing like it had ever been attempted before. In scope and function and purpose it was one of those bold innovations upon army traditions and methods which the Secretary of War introduced into the training of this new army of democracy, with results so successful and important that when the complete story of them is known it will be seen that they put a new spirit into military training and were in no small measure responsible for the splendid record made by the American army.

The Director of the Committee was a civilian, a university professor and specialist in psychology who had won distinction by his ability to give that science practical and fruitful application in daily life. Its work was so varied and so well developed in all its phases that it is possible to give here only the barest resume of its achievements. By the methods it devised all the men who entered a cantonment, after they had passed their physical examinations, underwent psychological tests to determine the speed and accuracy of their mental actions, the quality of their native intelligence and the extent of its development. Then they passed on to interviewers who examined and classified them according to their education and training, their occupations and degree of skill. Afterward came trade tests to discover whether or not the men had truly reported their occupations and ability.

These trade tests and the methods of their application, as finally developed, were the result of much work and investigation by the Committee that had brought in the services of psychological experts, employment experts, statisticians and others. Their purpose was to procure a dependable record of the special ability of every soldier who possessed any kind of skill that would serve any one of the army’s varied needs. Every army unit must have specialists of several kinds and in an army that had to be built up at high speed it was necessary to find these specialists among its numbers. Bitter experience developed the fact, very soon, that the account of themselves which the men gave in answer to the questions of the interviewers frequently could not be depended on and the trade tests, which were of three kinds, oral, picture and performance, were devised to meet this necessity quickly and easily.

As the soldier passed through these various examinations his interviewers entered upon his record card his physical and mental qualifications, his trade or profession and his degree of proficiency. Thus was tabulated, for the first time in the history of any army in any nation, the exact physical, mental and industrial ability of every soldier in the American army. These records were kept by the unit to which the soldier was assigned, and followed him if he was changed to another, for the information of the officers under whom he served. A glance at such a card gave to an officer the knowledge he should have concerning the aptitudes, the abilities and the character of any of his men whom he might wish to assign to some particular service. If skilled men were wanted in any of the scores of special occupations which the modern army demands they could quickly and easily be brought together, with the sure knowledge that they would be able to do what was expected of them. One of the greatest of the many problems facing those who had to make an army of millions of men out of raw civilians in a few months was to be sure of getting the right man for the right place, and the Committee on Classification of Personnel, an innovation in the making of armies, solved it.

Similar tests helped to determine the qualifications of officers and enabled their superiors to judge their fitness for any specified duty with accuracy. The Personnel work was conducted by men chosen for it because of their aptitude and their experience in civil life and they were then trained especially for it in schools for that purpose instituted at army camps.

These individual records and the service records of the entire army, both privates and officers, with the history of each unit, are to be preserved among the archives of the Government.

This great army, growing at the rate of a hundred thousand per month, nearly the whole of it composed of civilians who had been entirely lacking in military knowledge and training, without interest in martial affairs and, in large part, averse to the principle of warfare as a means of settling human disputes, had to be trained in the quickest possible time for participation in the greatest, the most shocking and the most scientific war of all history. The Regular Army and the National Guard together could furnish no more than 9,500 officers, a mere handful compared with the number needed. Beginning in May, 1917, four series of Officers’ Training Camps were held, each series lasting three months, at which men studied and drilled with grueling intensity twelve hours a day, fitting themselves for the work of training the Selective Service men who began to be gathered into the cantonments early in September. At these camps were trained, all told, 80,000 officers, from second lieutenants to colonels, although the higher commissions were granted only at the first two series because of the urgent need, at first, for officers of all grades. There were also several special training schools, one for colored officers of the line, and others in Porto Rico, Hawaii and the Philippines. Several thousand officers were trained and graduated also from Reserve Officers’ Training Corps units established at over a hundred colleges and universities.

French and British officers and British non-coms were sent by their governments to the United States to aid by giving practical training out of their own experience and their assistance was of great value. After our own men began to go overseas and have training and experience at the front many of them were brought back for the higher importance of the instruction they could give.

View Across One End of a Cantonment Three Months After its Construction was Begun

Training a Machine Gun Company

From the training camp schools of intensive study and drill many thousands of young men were assigned for work at the special officers’ training camps where officers were prepared for the specialized duties of the Signal, Engineer and Quartermasters Corps, and for coast and field artillery and machine gun work. Here also there were long hours and steady, close application. From these special training camps 60,000 officers were graduated. A shortened and intensified course at West Point greatly increased the number of its graduates ready for officers’ service with the army.

In the autumn of 1918 five hundred colleges and universities became a part of the great program of the War Department. Each of these institutions was transformed into a martial training school and nearly all the men students of the whole five hundred, about 170,000 in all, joined the Students’ Army Training Corps, thus becoming members of the United States Army. But while these youths spent much time on drill and training they also were expected to keep up their other studies. For this was a scientific war and demanded for its prosecution men skilled in many branches of learning. The young men were being trained to be not only soldiers but also engineers, chemists, physicians, geologists, physicists, and specialists in many other lines. From their ranks the most promising were selected and sent to military camps for six weeks of a course of rigid and intensive military training in some special line of military service. West Point graduates, army officers with experience on the other side, officers loaned by our Allies, had charge of the military supervision and work of this great body of students. And during the summer of 1918 7,000 members of university and college faculties attended special training camps to prepare themselves to assist in this work. The school year’s training was expected to yield, by the spring of 1919, from 60,000 to 70,000 officers.

Thus, by training, selection, rigid test, more intensive training, the hardest of hard work, and still more training under men who had proved their worth in battle and had brought back dearly won knowledge of present day methods of warfare, the need for more, and more, and ever more officers for the rapidly expanding army was met. And in the camps and cantonments the daily drill, drill, drill, and again drill, drill, drill, of a million and a half of soldiers was constantly carried on.

Early in the course of all these activities it was perceived that it would be advisable to reconstruct the entire plan of organization of the army in order to make the size and number of its fighting units correspond with those of the English and French armies and thus simplify the brigading of our troops with the others and the exchanging of units in the front lines. This reorganization was carried out, as was also the merging together into one body of the three organizations, Regular Army, National Guard and National Army, in the midst of all the high-speeded preparations for war.

Another revolution in army methods, the result of the imperious necessity for the highest efficiency possible to obtain, whether from soldier or officer, individual or army, was the sweeping away of the old system of promotion by seniority. All officers below the rank of Brigadier-General, under these new regulations, had to undergo the passing of judgment upon them every three months by their immediate superiors. They were rated according to their physical and personal qualities, capacity for leadership, intelligence, and value to the service, and promotion depended upon how well they passed these tests.

CHAPTER II
HOUSING THE SOLDIERS AND THEIR SUPPLIES

While the machinery was being devised and set in motion for forming a great army by means of the selective draft and officers were being schooled for its training, immense camps had to be provided in which hundreds of thousands of men could be trained, warehouses had to be built in which to gather and store the enormous amounts of supplies necessary for their maintenance and equipment, huge plants had to be constructed for the making of certain kinds of ordnance, and included in the vast scheme of construction work, all of it necessary almost at once, were also flying fields, embarkation depots, port and terminal facilities.

The work of building the cantonments was, alone, a very great engineering achievement. It called for an expenditure within three months of $150,000,000, more than three times that of the largest year’s work on the Panama Canal, and it demanded the construction of nearly a score of goodly sized cities, to be ready for occupancy by the following September. For this huge job, when war was declared, there was one colonel with four assistants and a few draughtsmen, clerks and stenographers. Around that lone colonel there was built up, almost over night, by telegraph and telephone, the organization of the Government’s Construction Division, that carried through successfully the whole vast program. For the building of the cantonments, engineers, town planners and civilians having expert knowledge came to its assistance, investigating possible sites and studying their water supply, transportation facilities and availability of construction materials. Contracts were let for sixteen National Army cantonments and as many National Guard camps. These were all signed between the fifteenth and twenty-seventh of June and in three months some of them were in use, while in six months all the work had been finished, plus many additions and betterments.

The building of each meant the creation of a city that would house from forty to eighty thousand people. The ground surface had to be prepared, hills leveled, valleys filled, trees uprooted, brush cleared away and roads built. Then began the construction of barracks for the men, officers’ and nurses’ quarters, hospitals, repair shops, and all the other buildings necessary for the varied activities of the camp, amounting to more than 1,400 separate structures in each cantonment. Sewage systems and steam heating and electric lighting plants were installed. An ample water supply, with plenty of shower baths, was provided, allowing fifty gallons per day per capita, which is eighty per cent more than the average allowance in European army camps. Every care was used to assure the purity of the water. When taken from rivers it was filtered and sterilized.

The total cost of the thirty-two cantonments and camps was $179,607,497. Additions and betterments during the next six months added $22,000,000. Every camp had its garbage incinerator, coffee roasting plant, theater, repair shop and other buildings that added to the comfort and morale of the men and the efficiency of the camp’s work. Such care was taken in the sanitation of the training camps and in the assuring of a pure supply of water—sometimes making necessary the draining of surrounding areas—that the reports of the Surgeon-General showed the practical elimination of water-borne diseases among the troops in training.

Almost as rapid as the work on the cantonments and camps was that which had to provide hospitals, flying fields with all their many buildings for varied uses, huge storehouses and port and terminal facilities. At half a dozen of the Atlantic Coast cities port terminals with warehouses and wharves had been completed or were nearing completion at the end of hostilities unprecedented in size and completeness of equipment in our own or any other country. One storage warehouse provided 3,800,000 feet of storage space and another, for ordnance supplies, had 4,000,000 square feet of space into which were fitted seventy-five miles of trackage and 9,000 lineal feet of wharf frontage.

For the production and storage of certain kinds of ordnance great plants had to be built at the highest speed and, for the most part, because of their dangerous possibilities, in out of the way places where the problem was complicated by the necessity of providing housing not only for the workers who would operate the plant but also for those engaged in its construction. An instance of one of these, and there were many others, was a smokeless powder plant the building of which in eight months transformed farm land along a riverside to a busy town, containing 3,500 people, into which had gone 100,000,000 feet of lumber. It had rows of barracks for single men, blocks of cottages, other blocks of better residences, huge storage houses, laboratories, manufactories. A pumping and purification plant built among the first of the structures took from the river 90,000,000 gallons of water per day and made it fit for use. While the plant was being erected from 200 to 400 cars of freight were unloaded daily. Construction projects of this class, including plants for the production of gas, nitrate, picric acid, powder and high explosives, presented complicated problems and their cost ran from $15,000,000 to $50,000,000 each. And all were erected and in operation within a few months from the day of the first work upon them.

Eighteen months of war saw the construction of nearly five hundred important projects of these various kinds at a cost of over $750,000,000, all of them rushed to completion at the greatest possible speed.

CHAPTER III
FEEDING AND EQUIPPING THE ARMY

The Quartermasters Corps, which formerly totaled 500 officers and 5,000 enlisted men, with its facilities and routine adapted to the feeding and equipping of an army of 127,000 men, had at once not only to meet the needs of the vastly expanding forces and to keep abreast of the actual growth and immediate demands of the army as it came into being, but it had also to anticipate and prepare to meet what would be the much greater needs of a much larger army six or eight months in advance.

While a million and a half of men were being examined, classified and called to service and more than thirty cantonments and camps were being built in which to house and train them and other construction projects were being rushed forward, the Quartermasters Corps had to provide their uniforms and clothing and accumulate in storage the food for their subsistence. At the same time, it had to make sure that it could meet the constantly enlarging needs of the coming months when the army would grow like a Jonah’s gourd with every passing week. Production had to be stimulated and turned aside from its usual channels and enormous quantities of material used for new purposes. It was an emergency that required the practical making over of the methods and purposes of American industry and in the process the Quartermasters Corps had to be both the directing and supervising agency and the channel of communication between industry and the army.

A soldier’s outfit of clothing for a year cost $65.51 and numbered twenty-three different items of a dozen different branches of manufacturing industry. The initial equipment for one man’s shoes alone cost $14.25. During the sixteen months from April 1st, 1917, to the end of July, 1918, the army was supplied, among other things, with 27,000,000 pairs of shoes, field and marching; 29,800,000 pairs of breeches, light and heavy; 19,800,000 coats, both wool and cotton; 192,200,000 shirts, undershirts and drawers, for both summer and winter wear; 156,600,000 pairs of stockings of cotton and light and heavy weight wool; and 21,000,000 blankets. And by the end of July the Corps already was taking measures to provide the clothing necessary during the coming year for the army of 5,000,000 men for which the War Department was preparing. That meant it must have on hand whenever and wherever they should be required, among many other things, all of which at the signing of the armistice it had either ready or in sight, 17,000,000 blankets, 28,000,000 woolen breeches, 34,000,000 woolen drawers, 8,000,000 overcoats, 33,000,000 pairs of shoes, 110,000,000 pairs of stockings, 9,000,000 overseas caps, 25,000,000 flannel shirts.

Ten great storage depots were maintained in as many different regions of the country where huge quantities of equipment were kept and from which the camps in that district were supplied. Other storage plants had to be kept full at the ports of embarkation from which the troops bound for overseas service were outfitted. On the other side of the Atlantic stock depots were maintained with complete equipment for ninety days’ supply for all the troops, numbering finally over 2,000,000, that were sent overseas. As an indication of the enormous quantities of clothing which had to be sent across the Atlantic, on the first of July, 1918, there were, along with similar large quantities of other supplies, on docks in the United States ready for shipment, 2,700,000 blankets, 840,000 pairs of spiral puttees, 7,500,000 pairs of stockings, 1,400,000 pairs of field shoes, 203,000 pairs of hip rubber boots, 713,000 overseas caps, 697,000 woolen breeches, 709,000 overcoats.

A force of inspectors kept the output of the manufacturing contractors constantly under rigorous watch and whenever supplies were not up to the specified standard they were rejected. Because it is of the first importance that a soldier’s feet be always in the best condition, great care was taken in properly fitting each individual. A scientific means was devised of measuring the soldier’s foot when he received his first pair of shoes and of testing the fit so that he could be sure of entire comfort in his foot-gear, no matter what the length of the hikes he should take. And after being perfectly fitted the first time, with each successive pair—each year in the service in the United States he received three pairs and four pairs for each year abroad—he had only to ask for another exactly similar.

The American army has always been a well fed army. In the pre-war days, when it was the smallest army maintained by any large state, experts from other nations, versed in the quantity and quality of army rations, said that the American was the best fed of all armies. And this was still true during the great war, though its numbers leaped on by magic strides. Whether in training at home, in camp on the other side, or on the battle front, the American soldier had better food and more of it than the soldier of any other nation. For instance, extra rations from American supplies were issued to American soldiers when brigaded with those of any other army, in addition to those supplied by the commissariat of the army with which they were working. No experiments were made upon the doughboy in the matter of food and experts saw to it that his ration was agreeable to the taste, well-balanced and nutritious. That it was good was proved by the fact that the average soldier gained from ten to twelve pounds in weight after entering the service.

Food experts were constantly busy devising the best means of preserving the food until it reached the army kitchens, whether in the home camps or behind the lines at the front. A part of their mission was also to eliminate waste. Coffee roasting plants were installed in all the large camps at home and overseas, for the double purpose of giving the soldier better coffee—coffee made within twenty-four hours after the bean had been roasted—and to prevent the waste, about two cents on each pound, which results when the roasted coffee is kept for long periods and so deteriorates in strength and quality. A school was established to which men were sent to learn the art of roasting coffee properly and after they became expert they were detailed to the different camps at home and abroad to take charge of the coffee roasting plants. Lemon drops were found to be a desirable part of the army ration, as they supply needed factors of food, help to quench thirst and are much enjoyed by the soldiers. To make sure that the drops supplied should be of the best quality a formula was prepared calling for pure granulated sugar and the best quality of fruit and the candy makers taking the contract were held strictly to that standard. The same care was taken to see that manufacturers of chocolate candies should use the best cocoa beans in making them. The candy ration for troops on overseas service was a half pound every ten days for each soldier, and a great deal of this was made, toward the end of the war, in factories which the Quartermasters Corps established in France.

The American soldier’s daily ration consisted of twenty-seven articles of food, weighing altogether about four and a half pounds and costing about 50 cents per man, and it had to be ready for him regularly and promptly every day, wherever he might be. No second grade material of any kind was bought and constant inspection of raw materials, of processes and places, of preparation and of army kitchens kept the food up to the standard demanded. It was bought in enormous quantities and, in order to stabilize prices in all sections of the country, part of the supplies was secured through the Food Administration and the remainder by means of a system of zone buying. During the ten months from September 1st, 1917, to the end of June, 1918, 225,000,000 pounds of sugar were required and from the 1917 crop of vegetables and fruits the army bought and used 75,000,000 cans of tomatoes and 20,000,000 pounds of prunes. From the listed amounts of thirty articles of food demanded for the subsistence for one year of an army of 3,000,000 men, the approximate size of the American army before the September draft, the following items are taken. They will give an idea of the size of the task which the Quartermasters Corps undertook in the feeding of our soldiers at home and abroad: Fresh beef, 478,515,000 pounds; bacon, 48,000,000 pounds; potatoes, 782,925,000 pounds; jam, 7,665,000 cans; flour, 915,000,000 pounds; coffee, 61,320,000 pounds; tea, 7,665,000 pounds; canned pork and beans, 4,000,000 cases; canned tomatoes, 6,000,000 cases; evaporated milk, 2,992,500 cases; butter, 15,330,000 pounds. More than six thousand different packers supplied the canned vegetables bought for the army in the summer of 1918, approximately 300,000,000 cans, enough to girdle the earth if the cans were laid in line, end to end.

The necessity of conserving shipping space led to the use of dehydrated vegetables, of which the Quartermasters Corps in the summer of 1918 contracted for 16,000,000 pounds. The soldiers of the American Expeditionary Force received a ration of 16 ounces of pure wheat flour per day each. No wheat saving substitute was used there, for the reason that field bakers must work swiftly and can not afford to experiment with flour mixtures. At the training camps in the United States kitchens were stationary and bakers definitely located and here the prescribed amount of substitutes was used, with satisfactory results. The Subsistence Division of the Corps worked out a special reserve ration for use in the trenches and under first line conditions in France. It was carried in containers proof against rats, water and poisoning in gas attacks. Schools were established for army cooks and bakers, so that only skilled and experienced men should serve the food from army kitchens.

But the Quartermasters Corps, while it was feeding and clothing the army, did not forget to be thrifty and it instituted and developed a remarkable system of conservation and reclamation that eliminated wastefulness and turned waste products into wealth. It reduced army waste of food stuffs, including bread, cooked meat and bones, to three-fifths of a pound per day per man, a figure much lower than the average waste of the civilian population in the cities of the United States.

Every camp, both in the United States and overseas, had its repair shops where every article of clothing—hats, shoes, overcoats, stockings, leggins, breeches, coats, gloves—that could be made to give farther service was put into shape. In one month in the summer of 1918 more than a million articles of clothing and equipment were repaired. Fats were extracted from garbage, manure was sold, waste materials of various sorts were sold or turned over to one or another army organization that could find use for them. A school was established with a three months’ course at which several hundred men were constantly in training to take charge of the repair, dry cleaning and laundry shops of the army and of the prevention of waste in the handling of food in the camps and the reclamation of values from garbage and waste materials.

Out of the importance of this work of reclamation and conservation came the formation of the Field Salvage Service. The members of this Service, after training at a school for this special work, were sent overseas to collect, classify and dispose of the wreckage of guns, shells, tools, all the implements of war that strew a battlefield after an engagement, and which, in former wars, would have been considered of no value. The Salvage Service also operated through all our lines, from the front trenches back through the training camps and lines of communication to every base port, collecting worn or damaged articles of every sort, and turning them to some kind of use. Even empty tin cans were collected and tin and solder salvaged.

The Service had in active operation in France at the end of hostilities four depots, twenty shops and sixty-six laundries and disinfectors. Of all the items it received for renovation and repair it recovered 91 per cent. and utilized the remaining nine per cent. for raw material in repair work. The value of its work during the last month of war was estimated at over $12,300,000, or more than $4,000,000 per day.

Under the care of the Quartermasters Corps was developed the Motor Truck Service, which later became a separate Corps—the “Gas Hounds,” as it was called both in and out of the army. At the beginning of our participation in the war the Corps had only 3,000 trucks, most of them in bad condition after hard service on the Mexican border. During the nineteen months of war there were shipped to France 110,000 vehicles and 15,000 tons of spare parts, and in mid-summer of 1918 the Service had 2,700 officers and 77,000 men. The Motor Transport Corps became of the first importance as a means of transport of troops and supplies, both in the United States and overseas, but especially so in France. Its work in moving men, munitions and supplies to the front was of such great consequence that it deserves the credit of having been an important factor in the winning of the war. In order to assure the quantity production that was urgently needed designs were standardized and all branches of the automotive industry united for their manufacture in close coöperation. Training camps were established to provide officers and men for the operation and maintenance of the Service both in the United States and in France and training was given also at several immense base repair shops. The courses varied from two to eight weeks and 15,000 men were in training at one time.

The American army was the best paid of all the armies of the contending nations. The private and the non-commissioned officer received from two to twenty-five times the pay of privates and non-commissioned officers in the British, French, Italian and German armies. Except for the grades of Lieutenant-General and General in the British forces, the pay of the American officers was also considerably greater than officers received in any of the other armies. The payroll amounted to $40,000,000 per month for every million of officers and men abroad, and was almost as much more for the forces at home. The rapid and tremendous expansion of the payroll, coming at the same time that the Quartermasters Corps was, by necessity, greatly expanding and reorganizing its personnel and was undertaking the huge tasks of providing food, clothing and equipment for the army, somewhat demoralized the system of payment for the first year of war effort. But an individual pay card system was devised which simplified the vexatious problem.

The personnel of the Quartermasters Corps expanded from five hundred officers and 5,000 enlisted men to 9,000 officers, 150,000 enlisted men and 75,000 civilian employees, while the entire Corps was reorganized, several new divisions created and their work specialized, and finally, so enormous and varied were the tasks which came under its supervision that several of them were transferred to other offices of the War Department or new corps were developed to take charge of them. The total expenditures and obligations of the Quartermasters Corps for the war amounted to about $7,000,000,000.

CHAPTER IV
CREATING A MUNITIONS INDUSTRY

Simultaneously with the work of making the new, huge army, of housing and training it, meeting its immediate and preparing to meet its future needs of clothing and equipment, the War Department had to provide, against the time in a very few months when these troops would be at the front, the munitions with which it would fight—heavy and light artillery, machine guns, rifles, automatic pistols, grenades, bombs, gas shells, cartridges, every death-dealing instrument made necessary by modern scientific warfare. And it had not even the facilities with which to make most of them. The few existing plants had to be enlarged, new ones erected, and even the tools for the making of some of the munitions had to be manufactured before work could begin upon the arms themselves. For many years the whole nation had set its face against increase in the army or in the providing of supplies for it in excess of peace time needs. The commercial manufacture of munitions was repugnant to the spirit of American industry, which had never engaged in it to more than a very slight extent. The making of ordnance is a highly specialized form of manufacturing industry and when we entered the war there were in the United States only two large private concerns and six Government arsenals which were versed in its special processes. In the Ordnance Division of the War Department there were only 97 commissioned officers whose training had given them the knowledge necessary to supervise and direct ordnance manufacture.

Conference with our co-belligerents resulted in a scheme of coöperation in the making of munitions which pooled the resources of all the associated nations in raw materials, manufacturing facilities, labor and finished products in order to make more rapid the production by each and all of them of all death-dealing weapons.

America laid out at once a great and thorough-going munitions program and the War Department plunged into it and speeded it at a furious pace. New designs were made and tested, new plants constructed and a big organization for the carrying on of the work was built up so rapidly that office forces doubled and trebled in a few weeks and sometimes even within a few days. In the Ordnance Division the officers’ personnel increased within a year from 225 to 4,600 and the enlisted from a little more than 800 to 47,500. Scores of technical, scientific, professional and business men left their private affairs and joined the working forces of the War Department to aid in rushing its munitions program. Upward of 16,000 contracts were quickly placed that required the working up into missiles of death of thousands of tons of raw material by hundreds of thousands of workmen. When the armistice was signed there were in the United States nearly 8,000 manufacturing plants employing 4,000,000 persons engaged in the making of ordnance. Manufacturing concerns of every imaginable sort converted their plants to the production of the direct materials of warfare for the use of our fighting men.

A corset factory was using its plant for the making of grenade belts. A manufacturer of machinery for popping corn was turning out hand grenades instead. A fireworks establishment was making bombs. A typewriter company was furnishing signal pistols. A big radiator works was an important producer of shells. Artillery carriages were being made by a boiler company, a steam shovel company, and an elevator company. These carriages are very complex, each one consisting of from three to six thousand pieces, exclusive of rivets. So many were needed that, notwithstanding all the help from private industry, in order to insure the necessary quantity production the government built for their manufacture twenty-six plants, all of which were in operation in August, 1918. The intricate and delicate recoil mechanism which sewing machine and other companies began early to furnish was also made in these immense factories. In one industrial district alone, that of Pittsburg, not less than 2,000 industrial concerns were busy in September, 1918, on munitions work. They were employing nearly 200,000 men, with a pay roll of $2,000,000 a day, and their war contracts exceeded in value $2,500,000,000. In that month this district mobilized for coöperation to fill an order for prompt delivery of 33,000,000 semi-steel shells. Shell steel was then being produced at the rate of 500,000 tons per month.

Sixteen new plants for the forging and machining of cannon were built by the Government at a cost of $35,000,000. Two siege gun plants and twenty-six plants for the making of gun carriages and recoil mechanism were completed at a cost, altogether, of $65,000,000. One of the plants for the making of cannon, of which the construction is typical of all, was wholly brought into being after our entrance into the war. Ground for the factory was broken in July, 1917, and in nine months from that date the first completed gun was ready for shipment. The decision early in our participation in the war that our artillery equipment should conform in general to the standard calibers of our war associates made it necessary to alter our existing facilities and create new ones, but the coöperation it made possible resulted, in the end, in a more rapid equipment of our Expeditionary Forces although it delayed somewhat the beginning of our production.

Ordinarily it takes a considerable time to manufacture artillery, big guns requiring two years and lighter ones from six to ten months. We had to create new plants, new tools, new processes. But at the end of the war we had done all this and had produced 5,000 trench guns, 4,900 light and medium guns, 695 heavy guns and 19 railway guns and mounts—more than 10,000 complete artillery units, and a total of 30,880 units had been contracted for. Many gun forgings and completed guns had been sent to England and France and many spare parts had been supplied to our own Expeditionary Forces. At the signing of the armistice an output of about 500 guns a month had been reached. Among them were 155 mm. howitzers, of which we had reached a sufficient production to exceed our own needs and 600 had been sold to France. There were also 7-inch, 14-inch and 16-inch guns, mortars and howitzers mounted on railway carriages that could be moved quickly from place to place. A 75 mm. field gun and an 8-inch howitzer, each self-propelling and mounted on a caterpillar tractor that could climb hills and knock down trees, were ready to be sent overseas and were the advance couriers of a quantity production in these types that was already beginning. Several kinds of caterpillar tractors of from two to ten tons were designed, produced and put to the service of the artillery.

Machine guns became of more and more importance as the war progressed and by the time of the entrance of the United States the demand for them was urgent and prodigious. Their manufacture in the United States was delayed somewhat for the completing and testing of the Browning machine gun, in order to secure a standard gun superior to the older types which could be produced in quantity, and the working out of plans for its manufacture. It soon proved its superiority in the speed and surety with which it works so triumphantly that both the French and British governments asked for whatever surplus over its own needs the United States could give them. The tools for the making of the guns had first to be produced and work that would ordinarily have taken a year was rushed through in half the time. But within a year quantity production of guns had been reached. Of machine guns and automatic rifles we produced during nineteen months a total of 181,662, and during the months immediately preceding the armistice we had reached a monthly production rate more than twice that of France and nearly three times that of England. The production of heavy Brownings began in March, 1918, and by the end of the following October there had been made of these 39,500 and of light Brownings 47,000.

When we entered the war we had only two plants capable of making our own rifles, which were of a different caliber from those of any other nation. One of those factories had been shut down and dismantled and the other, which had been making rifles continuously for the United States for over a hundred years, was producing only twelve hundred rifles per month. The appropriation by Congress for the preceding fiscal year had been for rifles and pistols combined only $250,000. The work was immediately begun of adapting the British Enfield rifle, which was rechambered for our cartridges because they are more powerful than the British and do not jam. But manufacture of this Modified Enfield, Model 1917, was started during the summer of 1917 and over 2,000,000 of them had been produced by the end of October, 1918. During the same time Springfields, which are still used for certain purposes, to the number of 844,000, had also been manufactured, and the Springfield Armory was then producing more rifles in a day than it had formerly made in a month.

To the making of the Modified Enfield rifle go 84 parts and a total of 164 pieces. These parts were all standardized so that any of those made in either of the three large plants that manufactured this rifle could be used in any other. This made possible the rapid rate at which they were turned out. Rigorous tests for each part and close inspection of every process, together with the enthusiastic interest of the employees, made the number of rejected rifles negligible. The employees of one concern, of their own inspiration and desire, adopted the slogan of “one million rifles for 1918” after they had subscribed $1,000,000 to the third Liberty Loan. This plant, which had under roof more than thirty-three acres, was built in 1915 to manufacture rifles for the British Government, but soon after our entrance into the war signed a contract with the United States. It speeded production so rapidly that by mid-summer of 1918 it was two months in advance of its expected production.

Automatic pistols proved of so much value at the front that General Pershing, as soon as the American troops had got well into the fighting, asked for the supply to be quadrupled and at once numerous private plants began to manufacture them. One firm that had been steadily turning out automatics at the rate of 1,500 per day prepared to double its capacity when the front line needs were made known. Of these and revolvers there had been sent to the front 600,000 up to the end of September, 1918. Of small arms ammunition, including that for machine guns, rifles, pistols and revolvers, American factories produced a total of about three billion rounds. Monthly production had reached a rate of 289,000,000 rounds. The armor piercing, tracer and incendiary bullets used in the Aircraft Service and in anti-aircraft defense were developments of the war and had to be designed for our own guns and to have special facilities for their production.

For the loading of shells four huge government plants were constructed with a combined loading capacity of more than 5,000,000 shells per month. They were larger than any similar plants in the world. One of them covered nearly 3,000 acres and was built and put into operation, from the breaking of the ground, in a little more than six months. For the housing of its employees a town was brought into existence, within that time, with heating, lighting and power plants, police and fire departments, cottages for families, dormitories with hot and cold shower baths for single men, club-houses, a theater, restaurants, a baseball field and tennis courts. Of high explosive shells of all sizes there had been made, at the end of September, 1918, 2,500,000; of low explosive shells, 3,100,000; of shrapnel, 5,800,000; and of grenades of all types 11,870,000. One grenade factory had established a pace of a million per month.

The tank, which was the answer to the machine gun, was one of the important new weapons evolved by the war, its basic idea having been suggested by the American farm caterpillar tractor, from which a British engineer worked out the formidable engine of battle which it became. Early in our participation the American Government began arrangements for a considerable tank production and experiments and investigations were started to better the design of those in use in the Allied armies. A Tank Corps was formed to have charge of the recruiting and training of the personnel, which numbered thousands of well trained men, but design and production remained in the hands of the Ordnance Department. The United States adopted two types, one the smaller form used by the French Army, of which 4,000 were being made, and the other a modification and improvement of the large tank used by the British, with whom a joint program of tank construction was being carried out when the armistice was signed. Liberty motors furnished motive power, which gave a speed of eleven miles per hour, and each carried a crew of eleven men, two six-inch guns and several machine guns. Some were equipped with wireless.

This huge tank, finished examples of which had been tested and approved, was forty feet long and could climb steep hills, cross trenches and smash down large trees. It would have been taken across the ocean by hundreds during the winter and great companies of them would have plunged into the enemy’s lines with the resumption of fighting in the spring of 1919. The component parts of a goodly number had already been made in the United States and sent to England for assembly.

A considerable part of the needs of our co-belligerents for propellants and explosives was being met in the United States when we entered the war and it was necessary that we provide our own supplies without interfering with this production for them. In all, four nitrate plants were constructed or started, and work upon them was rushed as fast as the supply of labor and materials made possible, while extensions and additions were made to existing facilities. Many scientists and technologists constantly carried on experimental and research work upon processes for the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen and other problems connected with the supply of nitrates, and always with the aim in view of developing methods that would have economic as well as military value. The results were such as to make the nation for the first time in its history independent of any foreign country for the charge in the guns of its soldiers and also to bring much nearer the day when the United States would be independent of the nitrate deposits in foreign lands for its commercial and agricultural needs. The toluol for the manufacture of nearly all of the TNT used in loading high explosive shells was recovered as a by-product in the manufacture of illuminating gas. At the works of twenty-eight gas companies in different parts of the country plants were constructed, placed in the charge of experts and skilled workers and kept under the closest and most vigilant guard for the recovery of this important product, of which hundreds of thousands of gallons were necessary. As a result of the measures taken and rushed through, the supply of propellant and explosive material needed by our war associates was not interfered with and the loading of American ammunition was not delayed.

The hideousness of war was immeasurably increased during the world conflict by the new uses that were made of chemical science. When these new applications of the death-dealing possibilities of chemistry were first made by the German army the civilized world drew back, horrified and appalled. But when a barbarous foe makes savage use of science those who are fighting him must, in sheer self-defense, meet him with similar weapons. Therefore, when America became a belligerent, averse as all her people were to the use of such weapons, regard for the safety of her troops at the front made it necessary to prepare for this peculiarly hideous and detestable form of war. As with other munitions, the industry to produce the implements of chemical warfare had first to be created. The Government built great plants and the immediate need stimulated scientific investigation, with results that were like a tale of magic, so rapidly did these and contributory chemical industries grow.

The American Government did not overcome its reluctance to use toxic gases until we had gone forward several months in war preparations, when it was found, just as the English and the French had found, that it would have to be done. It was November, 1917, when ground was broken on a Maryland riverside farm for a huge plant that would produce overwhelming quantities of chlorine, phosgene and mustard gas. When the armistice was signed a year later the three hundred acres were covered with vats and kilns, refrigerators, boilers, steel towers, chimneys, pipe lines, railways, and all the other means for carrying on the most deadly manufacturing processes known to man. For much of the machinery needed there were no existing models and many important parts of the immense plant were designed while it was being built. Experts from the French and British gas factories who came to assist in this development saw it rapidly evolve beyond their own knowledge and stayed to learn rather than to teach. Subsidiary plants were built also, and, altogether, American poison gas factories had a total production, during the last weeks of the war, of an average of two hundred tons per day. The British production, speeded to its highest possible point, was never more than thirty tons per day, the French was much less and the German is supposed to have been between thirty and fifty tons per day. Airplanes had been made and successfully tested for the dropping upon German fortified places, such as Metz and Coblenz, of containers holding a ton each of mustard gas with time fuses fitted for explosion a few hundred feet above the forts. Heavier than air, the gas from each container, settling to earth, would not have left a living thing, human or animal, upon, above or under the ground, within or outside of buildings, on a space the size of a large city block.

A new poison gas was developed, far more deadly than any previously in use, and its manufacture carried on with the greatest secrecy. At the end of the war ten tons a day were being produced and it was estimated that a single ton dropped in bombs and containers upon a city of a million inhabitants would have killed them all. Three thousand tons of it were to be ready in the battle zone by March 1, 1919.

Knowledge of these preparations and surety of what would, therefore, happen in the early spring of 1919 are believed by military authorities to have been an important factor in the sudden collapse of the German military plans.

Gas was employed in offensive operations in many and varied ways and these and defensive measures were so important that the necessity for a new division of military activities resulted in the organization of the Chemical Warfare Service in the summer of 1918. Five months old at the end of hostilities, the Service then contained 1,600 commissioned officers and 18,000 men. Defensive measures also had been rushed steadily forward, investigation and experiment had produced a better and more comfortable gas mask than was in use and a big Government gas defense plant had been built, equipped and started upon production with skilled workers. The monthly production of gas masks in the autumn of 1918, of which this plant made the major part, had reached 925,000. The total production for the year and a half was over 5,000,000, with 3,000,000 extra canisters, 500,000 horse masks and large quantities of ointments, antidotes and suits for protection against enemy mustard gas. The American gas mask was recognized by all the war associates as the best on the Western front.

In the Chemical Warfare Service at the end of hostilities were 1,700 chemists from civil life who had worked steadily to aid in its rapid and efficient development. Under the furious goad of war the Service succeeded in reducing the cost of phosgene gas from $1.50 to 15 cents per pound and therefore increasing very greatly its usefulness in various industries, especially that of dyestuffs. The record of development and production in chemistry is one of the fairly amazing war achievements of this country and is replete with possibilities for the peaceful uses of industry.

When America entered the war, problems and needs rose up at every hand, like dragons springing from the ground, and all of them, in all their number and complexity and variety, had to be met and conquered at the same time. None of them was more difficult than this problem of the creation of a munitions industry, for it demanded a highly specialized manufacturing equipment of enormous capacity and great variety which we did not have, concerning which we had in the past known but little and for which we had always had slight regard. We possessed for it neither the plants, the skilled labor nor the experience. New industrial organizations had to be created and financed, plants had to be built, all the complicated and varied weapons of modern scientific warfare had to be designed and manufactured, and so also did many of the great number and variety of the tools with which they would be made. Not only had mechanics to be trained for much of this skill exacting work, but the enormous expansion in the Ordnance Department made necessary rapid development of knowledge and skill among the big proportion of its new members. There is nothing more interesting in the detailed story of the munitioning of our army than the frequency with which one comes upon the statement that “a school was established” for the training of personnel in this, or that, or another phase of ordnance duties.

The bare figures of the cost of all this enormous creation and expansion, made many times greater by the necessity of haste at whatever cost, give a vague sort of measuring stick of the energy and the grim purpose that went into the providing of munitions for our army. In a year and a half of war the amount of money expended or obligated for ordnance totaled $13,000,000,000—thirteen times what it cost to run the entire government for a year in the years just before the war.

CHAPTER V
CARING FOR THE WOUNDED

The story of the development of the Medical Department of the Army, its care of the human wreckage of the battlefield and of the physical welfare of the fighting forces both at home and overseas recounts one of the finest and most wonderful of the achievements of the War Department. It is the same story of marvelous expansion in quick time, of high resolve and determined effort to achieve the apparently impossible, and of results that seem almost magical in their bigness and importance and the rapidity with which they were brought about that is true of all the American war activities.

At the beginning of April, 1917, there were in the Medical Department 750 medical officers in regular service and 2,600 in reserve. The army nurse corps numbered 400 and there was an enlisted personnel of 6,600. There were seven army hospitals with a bed capacity of 5,000, aside from a few small and unimportant post hospitals. A year and a half later it had a larger personnel than that of the entire American army at the outbreak of the Spanish-American war. It numbered then 40,000 officers, 21,000 nurses and 245,000 men. In the United States there were over eighty fully equipped hospitals with a capacity of 120,000 patients and operating with the American Expeditionary Force were 219 base and camp hospitals having a capacity of 284,000 patients. It was estimated that nearly one-third of the entire medical profession in the Union went into active service with the Army and among their numbers were many of the most distinguished physicians and surgeons in the country. Of those who went overseas, nearly half that number, over 1,000, were detailed to serve with the British forces.

As an instance of the speed with which it was necessary to work to secure the needed expansion for the care of war’s wreckage the story of the building of one of the New York City debarkation hospitals is illuminating. Several acres of ground on Staten Island were secured for it and the entire plant, consisting of eighty-six buildings, including a theater of seven thousand seating capacity, with heating plant and electric light, water and sewage connections, was finished and ready for use within one hundred days from the turning of the first spadeful of earth in the preparation of the site. Its normal accommodation was for 1,500 patients, but it was so planned that it could be easily and quickly expanded to care for three times that number. One of its buildings, measuring 230 by 30 feet, was begun in the morning, finished by noon of the same day, and equipped by night. Hospital facilities in France had also to be created quickly and equipped at once with all the means of treating the victims of scientific warfare that the needs of the time had evolved. One such big institution in the Cote d’Or region, for the building of which railways had to be run to the site and concrete mixers set up and kept going day and night until it was finished, had 600 buildings of a permanent type and was, in effect, a series of ten hospitals in one, each devoted to its own specialty and having its own staff of thirty physicians and surgeons, a hundred nurses and twice as many men of the Medical and Sanitary Corps, and its own operating rooms, laboratories, kitchens, officers’ and nurses’ quarters, administration buildings and buildings for patients. A laundry capable of doing the work for 30,000 people served the entire plant. The hospital cared for 25,000 at a time and beside it was a convalescent camp having facilities for all manner of outdoor games with a capacity for 5,000 more into which the men were graduated for recovery. Nearly 800,000 soldiers of the American Army were treated in our overseas hospitals during our war period.

Of the hospitals in the United States a considerable number were in cantonments and camps and were chiefly used by the troops in training. The others, specialized for the use to which they were put, were for debarkation purposes and for the treatment of the wounded, ill, gassed, tuberculous or blinded. Debarkation hospitals received them as they were landed and from these they were transferred to receiving hospitals in and about the port city. Afterward, as soon as physically able, they were sent by hospital boat or train to a specialized hospital, if that were necessary, or if not to the general hospital nearest the patient’s home. These specializing hospitals were so located as to secure for each one whatever advantages were possible of situation and climate. Several hospital trains, each complete in itself, with kitchen, dining and ward cars, special beds for stretcher cases, and a car for the medical staff, were provided for transportation of the wounded by land, while a number of hospital boats properly equipped and staffed with physicians and nurses afforded transportation by water. In addition to the hospitals, convalescents were cared for in numbers of convalescent homes all over the country that were donated for that purpose by individuals and organizations who offered use of their homes, estates, clubhouses and other buildings. The Red Cross erected and staffed convalescent houses at all of the base and general army hospitals in the United States, which gave welcome, cheer and recreation to the recovering patients.

Through the port of New York flowed the main stream of the American Army on its way overseas and there its individual factors had to undergo final physical examination. The work of the Surgeon of the Port expanded from week to week, as his duties in connection with the army and the army transports grew, keeping pace with the increasing numbers that were sent month by month to Europe. In one mid-summer month in 1918, and subsequent months saw even greater numbers, he put his final approval of physical fitness on 272,000 soldiers bound for the battlefields of France. On the first of July, 1917, the staff of the Surgeon of the Port of Embarkation, New York, consisted of two officers and one private. A year later there were under him 530 commissioned officers, 110 contract surgeons, 340 nurses and 2,640 men, while directly under his control, exclusive of other hospitals in the same region, were thirteen hospitals having 12,500 bed capacity of which 11,000 were ready for use.

A more than fifty-fold expansion in the number of army nurses, from 400 to 21,000, was necessary to meet the need for their services. Graduating nurses entered the nurses’ corps and an army School of Nursing was established, with headquarters in Washington and branches in a score of military camps throughout the country. Many hundreds of young women enrolled, took the course of training which, intensive and somewhat specialized for army work, prepared them quickly for duty.

The developments of scientific warfare, with its new and fearful weapons of death and its new modes of attack, laid new duties upon the medical profession and new demands upon its knowledge and its methods of healing. It restores one’s faith in human nature, after realizing the devilish ingenuity of the death and wound dealing instruments of the world war, to find how incessantly the ministers of healing worked in hospital and laboratory behind the lines to evolve new agents and new methods for the mending of the wreckage from the front. Whatever else may or may not have been won out of the vast destruction of the world war, the medical profession can be assured that its devotion and its heroic labors have been rewarded by a wonderful advance in the frontiers of its knowledge.

The army medical officer found new problems facing him at every fresh development of the conflict, and to fit him for grappling with these new phases of human needs the Medical Department of the Army established numberless schools and courses of study at medical institutions, at hospitals and wherever could be brought together the factors necessary for this specialized and intensive training. Physicians and surgeons in overseas hospitals had evolved a number of new and effective methods for the treatment of casualties of various kinds and medical officers newly inducted into the service had to have instruction in these developments, while for those who had to undertake recently specialized work it was necessary to have whatever training in that specialty had become possible.

Intensive training and clinical opportunities were provided for instruction in new methods in war surgery and fractures and in the treatment of infected wounds; there were schools for the training of medical officers in the use of X-rays; of laboratory specialists; for special work with diseases of the heart; for treatment of pneumonia and of those infectious diseases that are of frequent occurrence when large bodies of men are brought together. A particularly determined effort was made along preventive lines to lessen in the American Army both at home and in France the menace of venereal disease, always feared for its power to lower the efficiency of armies. Instruction by various means, an incessant campaign of vigilance by specially trained physicians, treatment of infected men, military punishment of offenders, endeavors to control the surroundings of camps, all were among the methods with which this scourge of all armies was combated, with remarkable success. The percentage of such diseases in the Army was below what it is in civilian life and very much below that of its prevalence in the Allied Armies.

One of the schools made necessary by the new methods of training instituted in the American Army was that for the instruction of military psychologists who were needed for the work of examining the men, as they came from their local boards and were inducted into the training camps, in order to eliminate those mentally unfit for army service and grade those accepted according to their mental qualifications, for the information of their officers, as already described in the chapter on “The Making of the Army.” Under the supervision of the Medical Corps, this school trained many officers for psychological work at the cantonments, the course lasting two months. This development, an American idea, was something new in the making and training of armies, but it proved its value in the higher efficiency gained by enabling officers to select for special duties the men best fitted for them and so increasing the efficiency of the fighting units.

A new development of wartime medical science was made necessary by air warfare which soon brought into being the flight surgeon who kept under his observation the men in training at flying fields. So important did this division of the Medical Corps quickly become that special facilities were provided for the training of flight surgeons and laboratories were established for the investigation of the medical problems connected with the air service.

Until the influenza epidemic swept the country in the autumn of 1918, after devastating the populations of Europe, the disease figures of the American Army had set a new low record both at home and overseas. For the year ending with the first of September, 1918, which covered the time from the first gathering of men in the cantonments, the death rate for all troops in the United States was 6.37, which is a lower rate than that in civilian life for similar ages. But when the plague of influenza, which on its way around the world took a toll of 6,000,000 lives, descended upon the camps and cantonments in the United States the death rate rose to 32.15 per thousand. For the entire term of the war the disease death rate was 17 per thousand in the expeditionary forces and 16 per thousand in the army at home. The comparison of these figures with the rate maintained before the passage of the epidemic shows how deadly it was. During the summer months of 1918 the death rate for the troops both at home and overseas fell to 2.8 per thousand. During the Mexican war the disease death rate was 110 per thousand, during the Civil War in the Northern Armies it was 65 per thousand and during the Spanish-American war 26 per thousand. During the last named war the most important cause of death was typhoid fever, before which medical science was then as helpless as it was during this war under the influenza scourge. It had conquered that menace and typhoid, by its precautions, was almost eliminated from our army both at home and abroad. But notwithstanding the devastations of influenza the disease death rate in the American Army was cut to a lower figure than had been reached by any army in previous wars. The lowest previously recorded was that of the Japanese during the Russo-Japanese war, which was 20 per thousand.

The battle death rate of the American Expeditionary Forces was 57 per thousand, considerably higher than it had been in any of our previous wars. In the Mexican war it was 15, in the Civil war in the Northern Armies 33, and in the Spanish-American war 5 per thousand.

Overseas, during the eight months ending with mid-October, 1918, only four per cent of the admissions to hospital because of disease resulted in death. Of the wounded and injury cases treated during the same period a little less than nine per cent died and over 85 per cent were returned to duty. Of the American Expeditionary Forces 4,000 were permanently crippled and 125 were totally blinded.

The medical officers of all the armies won remarkable results in the quick healing of wounds and the reduction of death from battle casualties by establishing hospital stations immediately behind the fighting lines, regardless of danger. This brave course, together with the efforts of the enemy to annihilate them and their hospitals, caused much loss of life among them. The Medical Corps of the American Expeditionary Forces had 46 killed and 212 wounded in action, and a total of 442 casualties of all kinds.

It was a comprehensive system of caring for the physical welfare of the American troops that was devised and carried out by the Medical Department. It had the fighting man constantly under its eye from the moment of his physical examination for induction into the army until he was examined for his final discharge. It analyzed his water supply, it examined his food and inspected his kitchens, it waged war against flies and mosquitoes in his camps, it made his environment sanitary and it devoted itself to his welfare if he was ill or wounded.

One of the finest of all its multifold and varied works was the scheme for the reconstruction of disabled men and their preparation for a life as useful and successful as they would have enjoyed if unhurt. The principles of occupational therapy were applied to the treatment of ill or wounded soldiers in hospitals, beginning with manual work for the redevelopment of strength and dexterity and continuing with occupational aids for the restoring of the nervous system and the bringing about of a cheerful outlook. Nurse-teachers were prepared for this work by courses of intensive training, lasting from two to four months. By the time the tide of injured men returning to this country was at its height this reconstruction work was in progress in nearly fifty hospitals, some 700 officers and men of the army had been detailed to serve as instructors and assisting them were 1,200 nurse-teacher aids trained in occupational therapy.

After he had been restored to physical and mental health in the hospital any soldier who was permanently disabled was given the opportunity of reëducating himself, if necessary, in order that he might continue to take a self-supporting part in the work of the world. The nation had pledged itself thus to care for its disabled defenders. With the exception of Canada, the United States was the only country to make this duty, from the first, the affair of the whole people, functioning through the Government. By act of Congress, the work of re-training war cripples was placed in the charge of the already existing Board of Vocational Education, whose agents would get into touch with the disabled men as soon as they arrived from France, tell them that the nation would engage to make them economically efficient again and show them that their rehabilitation depended only upon their own desire and energy. The crippled soldier could choose any line of work, agriculture, industry, commerce, any of the professions, and either add to the training he had previously acquired, or, if it was necessary, undertake a new kind of occupation. There lay before him the possibility of a variety of education that ranged from six months of shop work to a complete college course of four years. Whatever artificial limbs or appliances he needed were supplied and if he were short of cash a civilian outfit was furnished. Until this training was completed his pay continued at the same rate as during his last month of active service, or it equaled, if this were greater, the monthly sum to which he was entitled under the War Risk Insurance law. Injured men in all branches of the nation’s defense who needed this reëducation were made to feel that in no sense were they receiving charity but that the country was only, and gladly, discharging a sacred obligation.

Educational institutions all over the land offered their coöperation and the use of all their facilities in the carrying out of this scheme of re-training and so also did shops and factories and industrial and commercial bodies of all sorts. A few months after the wounded began to return about 13,000 men had registered with the Federal Board for Vocational Education and it was estimated that there would probably be about 10,000 more who would need to share in the benefits of the plan.

CHAPTER VI
THE WELFARE OF THE SOLDIERS

Into the forming and shaping of the American Army for the World War went something new in the making of armies, something hitherto unthought of in the history of wars, for its training was based upon a new idea, a bold innovation upon military traditions. The method of army training had always been to minimize the individuality of the fighting man, to lessen it to the disappearing point, and so the more surely and easily and completely merge the individual in the fighting mass. Only so, it was believed, could the necessary discipline, unity and uniformity of an army be secured.

But when the United States entered the war and set about the creation of a great fighting force its Secretary of War inspired the task with a new ideal and the whole making of the American Army was based on the idea of developing and heightening the individuality of the soldier, of discovering, improving and utilizing his personal qualities. The unceasing effort was to make of him a better citizen, a better, finer and more capable man, in the conviction that thus he would be also a better soldier. Believing that the higher the grade of the individuals who compose an army the higher will be the grade of the army, all the training, the environment and the treatment of the soldier, from the time he entered the service until he was discharged, were calculated to develop him physically, mentally and morally as an individual, to inspire him as a person and, in general, to make of him a more intelligent, resourceful, upright, self-dependent, capable and moral man than he was before he entered the army. The immediate purpose was to make a better army, an army of thinking, reasoning units, and therefore an army so intelligent and alert that it would at once perceive the fundamental necessity for discipline and instant obedience and would gain more speedily than by the old method the needful unity and uniformity, while its composite individuals would be more capable of efficient action if deprived by the chance of battle of their accustomed leadership.

That was the first and chief purpose. But behind it lay also the determination that these millions of American young men, the flower of the nation, the beloved of their homes, should be, as far as possible, enabled to preserve themselves from those debasements, corruptions and blights of army life which the world, ages ago, had grown accustomed to accept as inevitable. The purpose was that, so far as foresight and effort could command so unprecedented a result, these young men should bring back no scars or wounds other than those dealt by the enemy. The outcome of this bold experiment was a complete vindication of the vision and the faith of the man who insisted it should be tried.

The preceding pages have shown this purpose of individual development and betterment at work in the methods of training the soldier, giving him at least some measure of education when he was deficient in that respect, instilling in him the principles of good citizenship, inspiring him with patriotism and enthusiasm for American ideals, broadening his outlook, appealing to his intelligence and ambition, discovering and improving his aptitudes and assigning him to work for which he was fitted. Coöperating with the methods and purposes of the system of military training was a large and varied program of recreation designed to fill the soldier’s leisure hours and to work hand in hand with that training to make him at once a better man and a better soldier. A part of this program, that of the Commission on Training Camp Activities, was created by and carried on by the War Department, but many civilian organizations constantly coöperated with it and seconded its efforts.

Within the War Department the Commission on Training Camp Activities—it had its twin in the Navy Department—was appointed by the Secretary of War to provide for the men in training such a comprehensive recreational and educational program as would entertain their leisure hours, stimulate and develop their faculties and better their morale. The Commission, with its representatives in every camp, aimed, as one of its purposes, to make the American army a singing army. Trained musicians and song leaders developed and encouraged vocal and instrumental ability and aided in the forming and training of bands and singing groups. As much music as possible was brought into the daily life and work of all the camps.

An athletic director in each camp organized sports and in consequence baseball, football, cross-country running and other competitive games were of frequent occurrence. Skilled instructors in boxing, wrestling and other such personal sports improved the resourcefulness and the physique of the men. Every large camp had its Liberty Theater seating from one thousand to three thousand men, built on modern lines and equipped for any ordinary performance. Theater managers and dramatic directors and coaches wearing the khaki of Uncle Sam’s service brought to the task of entertaining the soldiers and developing dramatic ability among them the knowledge and the skill gained by years of study and practical experience. Theatrical attractions of every sort, vaudeville, drama, moving pictures, musical artists, entertainers of varied kinds, made the tour of these theaters and plays were given in them by amateur companies formed among the men in the camps.

Educational work of such varied sort was constantly carried on as part of the program of the Training Camp Committee as to give to much of the leisure time of every camp almost an academic atmosphere. The machinery of the university extension work and of the educational department of the Y. M. C. A. was utilized to provide for those wishing to take them a wide variety of college and commercial school courses. English was taught to those of little education and to those of foreign birth. Every camp had its classes in French. There was instruction in subjects which would prepare men to transfer from one branch of the service to another. And always and everywhere there were schools or classes or courses of study for intensive training in one or another phase of military affairs—training for those who would have to undertake these specific and varied duties, training for those who would instruct others in them, training for officers. Every camp and cantonment buzzed with these activities by which the men of a nation unused to military affairs and hating war zealously trained themselves for battle and schooled themselves in new methods of warfare.

The Commission on Training Camp Activities went vigorously into the work of education in social hygiene and the enforcement of law in order to make and keep the camp environment, the camps and the men themselves morally wholesome, to the end that the army should be of the best fighting material and that the men who composed it should return to their homes as fine and clean as when they left. A determined and unceasing effort was made to keep alcohol and the prostitute away from the cantonments. Wide zones in which the sale or gift of alcohol to soldiers was forbidden surrounded each training area. One section of the Commission dealt directly with the problem of woman and girl camp followers and sought to lessen this evil by work among the women themselves, by securing better enforcement of local police regulations and by educational and reformatory work in camp communities. A great educational program was carried on by the Government by which instruction in sex hygiene was given in the training camps. During the first six months of cantonment training more than a million men were reached in this way, and the work was continued with equal energy throughout the war period.

A system of government insurance, provided by act of Congress and taking the place of the old-time pension system, enabled any member of the fighting forces of the United States to insure himself against death or total permanent disability at a low premium, which was taken from his monthly pay. At the end of hostilities 4,000,000 of these insurance policies had been taken out by officers and men of the Army and Navy, totaling over $37,000,000,000. Most of them were for the maximum amount of $10,000. Arrangements were made that would enable each holder of a policy to continue it, if he so desired, after leaving the service. Allotments of pay which could be made directly to dependents and allowances paid by the United States to the families of men in service, if such allowance was necessary, helped to relieve the mind of the soldier of worry as to the welfare of his loved ones.

Unique in all history and an integral part of the War Department’s purpose to make army service become a means of personal development and betterment for every individual soldier was the extensive educational scheme for the Expeditionary Forces in France. The War Department and the Army Educational Commission of the Y. M. C. A. coöperated in the devising and carrying out of this plan, which enabled the officers and men of the American Army in France to continue their school, academic, technical or professional training while in camp. Worked out and put into operation in the summer of 1918, when the armistice was signed some 200,000 men, chiefly in the Service of Supply, had already begun studies of various kinds, but the scheme did not reach full development until some weeks later.

Interior of a Cantonment Library

As finally established in the winter of 1919, this educational plan ran the whole gamut of mental training, from learning to spell to post-graduate work in science, art and the professions. In the Army of Occupation there were compulsory schools for all illiterates, but otherwise the work was optional, and took the place of part of the hours of daily drill. Post schools were established for units of 500 or more men, and generally there were forty such schools for each division. Enrollment at the post schools ran as high as 2,000 and more. Correspondence courses were arranged for men with smaller isolated units. In each army division a high school gave both regular and vocational courses.

Located at Beaune, in the Cote d’Or region, where the huge base hospital had been built, in the great series of buildings no longer needed for trainloads of wounded men was the “Khaki University,” at which were given academic, agricultural, professional, commercial and technical courses of three months each. Of its many buildings four hundred were used for class room purposes and others were converted into laboratories, dormitories, libraries and recreation halls. Fourteen colleges comprised this Khaki University which, including the agricultural college associated with it but located elsewhere, became for the time of its existence the largest educational institution in the world. Its colleges gave instruction in language, literature, philosophy, science, fine and applied arts, journalism, education, engineering, music, business, medicine, and all other subjects usually provided for at educational institutions of every sort, whether technical, academic, commercial or professional. Especial attention was paid to agriculture. The engineering school offered a full variety of courses in civil, electrical, mining, mechanical and sanitary engineering. The college of arts, with an art training center near Paris, had 1,000 students and gave instruction in architecture, sculpture, painting, interior decoration, town planning, industrial art, landscape gardening, and furnished guidance for the study of art museums and structures of esthetic value. In the libraries of the Khaki University were 500,000 volumes. Its faculty numbered 500 members and 15,000 men, all of them privates and officers of the A. E. F., enrolled when the institution opened. The Y. M. C. A., whose Army Educational Commission had devised and organized the entire huge educational scheme, turned it all over to the War Department in the spring of 1919.

Many of the faculty members of important universities and colleges in the United States aided in the working out of this comprehensive educational plan and, under the direction of the Army Educational Commission of the Y. M. C. A. and army officers, coöperated with them in the immediate supervision of the schools. Nearly 50,000 officers and men whose record cards showed them to have been school teachers or university or college professors before they were soldiers were detailed from the army for the work of teaching this huge body of pupils in the post schools and at Beaune.

French and British universities and colleges threw open their doors for those who were prepared to undertake collegiate and post-graduate work. With the Sorbonne leading the list, thirty French institutions offered lectures and courses of study, while at Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin, Liverpool, Manchester, St. Andrews, and elsewhere in the British Isles a welcome awaited the American army man. Furloughs were granted to officers and enlisted men for this work and during the latter part of the winter and the spring of 1919 2,000 worked at British universities, filling to the last one the possibility for their accommodation, although four times as many had applied for the privilege. As many more attended the Sorbonne and other institutions in Paris, while the provincial universities and colleges of France had also their quota.

Solicitous for the welfare of the Expeditionary Force and determined that its members should not fall below the high standard it had established of individual worth and soldierly quality, the War Department met the problem of leaves of absence in a strange land by establishing “leave areas” in especially interesting sections of France wherein was offered a varied program of rest, change, recreation and entertainment. More than a dozen famous resorts in the Alps, the Pyrenees, along the Riviera and elsewhere were leased in whole or in part and put in charge of the Y. M. C. A., which saw to it that the men on leave had a thoroughly good time. Once in four months each soldier in service was entitled to a week’s outing at whichever one of these leave areas he preferred to visit. Beginning in the winter of 1918, during the first year of the operation of this system 220,000 soldiers were thus given an opportunity for recreation and sent back to their duties wholesomely refreshed.

Several civil organizations coöperated with the War Department in work for the welfare of the soldier in training and overseas and very greatly aided the Government in its effort to enable the men who composed the army to return to their homes better and more capable men than they were when they left upon their country’s service. These and their activities are described in more detail in the chapter on “Big Brothering the Army.” But here the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations, the War Camp Community Service, the Jewish Welfare Board, the Knights of Columbus, the Salvation Army and the American Library Association must be referred to briefly because of the very great importance of what they did for the welfare of the American soldiers and because of their influence upon the character of the American Army.

More than five hundred service buildings were operated by these organizations in the various camps and cantonments in this country alone, and many hundreds more overseas. They furnished to the men wholesome club life, in comfortable houses, with music, games, lectures, reading and writing facilities and athletic equipment. The Young Women’s Christian Association built, furnished and officered at least one hostess house in every camp, wherein the women relatives and friends of the soldiers could meet them in homelike surroundings. The American Library Association installed in the camps specially designed buildings, manned them with trained workers and provided many thousands of volumes which were kept in constant circulation.

The War Camp Community Service worked in the localities surrounding the camp, where it aided the citizens in efficient expression of their universal spirit of hospitality and friendliness toward the troops, maintained clubs for soldiers on leave, provided information bureaus, recreation and entertainment, and, in general, helped to create and preserve between the men in training and the community in which they were located a normal and helpful social relationship.

So, in a year and a half, America expanded her army of 212,000 into an army of 2,000,000 men overseas, a million and a half in training, and two million more preparing, as these latter were sent across the ocean, to take their places in the cantonments. She turned this democratically chosen material from raw civilians of peace-loving traditions into gallant fighters and fused a heterogeneous mass of nationalities into a solid body inspired by and fighting for American ideals. It was an army so eager to get into the struggle for liberty and justice against militarism and autocracy and its spirit was so high and unanimous that every regiment leaving a cantonment for overseas service celebrated the coming of its orders with enthusiasm and was envied by all those not yet chosen. It was an army that, above everything else, was the expression of the mind, the heart and the soul of the American people. Almost every home in the nation had some part in it and it went upon its war adventure with the prayers, the blessings, the love and the ardent wish to serve its needs of the whole people. Never was an army sent to war so fathered and mothered, so big-sistered and big-brothered, so loved and cheered by an entire nation and provided for by its Government with such care and far-seeing vision as this that sailed from the ports of America for the battlefields of France.

CHAPTER VII
MAINTAINING THE ARMY IN FRANCE

To receive, care for and handle the army in France made necessary prodigious works that, like everything else in the prosecution of the war, had to be planned and executed at the highest possible speed. While the making of the army, the building of cantonments, the development of flying fields, the creation of an industry for the supplying of munitions, the building of shipyards and ships, the expansion of the navy, and all the multitude of wartime tasks to which the nation at once turned its energies were being pushed breathlessly forward, a vast development of facilities had to be begun and carried on in France before our army and its supplies could even be landed upon French shores and transported to the front.

The chief ports of France were already being utilized to their utmost capacity by France and England, and for either of these nations to give up any portion of the port facilities they were using would have meant a serious detriment to their war effort. Therefore it was necessary for the United States to develop sufficiently for our needs the smaller and more backward harbors and port towns. Our shipments of troops and supplies began to land in France at the end of June, 1917, and at once the ports it was possible for America to use became badly congested because of the lack of unloading facilities. In response to the sore need of our war associates and their urgent request our khaki-clad men were sent over in a constantly increasing stream that grew month by month to ever larger proportions. With each 25,000 men it was necessary to dispatch simultaneously enough supplies of every sort to maintain those men for four months. And at the same time had to be shipped the varied kinds and immense amounts of material for the development of the ports, the building of storehouses, the making of camps, the providing of railways and rolling stock, and all the rest of the work to be done.

As the vessels carrying all these war necessities crowded into the small and undeveloped French ports in the summer of 1917 they had to wait their turns at the docks. It often happened that a ship would discharge the most needed part of its cargo, give up its place to some other ship which also carried sorely needed supplies and wait for another turn to land the rest of its load. Sometimes, so great was the congestion because of the lack of berthing and unloading facilities, a ship would find it better, rather than wait for another opportunity, to return to the United States with part of its original cargo still aboard, reload and cross the ocean again, when it would appear at the French port by the time its next turn came around.

By the following summer, a year after these things were happening, so enormous were the developments and improvements this country had made, that with 250,000 and sometimes even 300,000 soldiers per month pouring into the French ports, with all the vast amounts of food, equipment, clothing and munitions for their use that went in with them, and with all the huge and varied quantities of construction material also being landed, the port facilities were equal to all needs and docks, warehouses and unloading machinery were ready for the still greater demands upon them which would presently have followed if the war had not come to an end.

A great part of the material for this development had to be shipped from the United States, as well as the tools with which the work was done. The piles for the building of the docks, the lumber for the barges on which to place the pile drivers, the material for long blocks of storehouses, the rails and cars and locomotives for the making and operating of hundreds of miles of track, lumber for the building of barracks for the thousands of workmen, dredges, cranes, steam shovels, tools and materials of every sort—almost all had to be shipped from the United States and unloaded at the small, congested French ports, which were being enlarged and developed all the time that this work of unloading was going on in the cramped and crowded space.

In all, more than a dozen French ports were used by the American Government and in each one more or less expansion and development had to be done to make it serviceable, and in all the more important ones a very great amount of development work was instituted and carried through at breakneck speed. So much was done that through the last months of the war it would have been of little strategic value to the Germans if they could have gained possession of the Channel ports of France, for which they had striven mightily in order to cut off communications between England and the British armies in the field, for by that time there was room for them also at the more southerly ports. St. Nazaire was opened first and was followed by Bordeaux, Brest, Le Havre, La Rochelle, Rochefort, Rouen, Marans, Tonnay-Charente, Marseilles and others.

One of the Docks in a French Port Developed by the United States

St. Nazaire, through which poured immense numbers of American troops and vast quantities of supplies, in the early summer of 1917 was a sleepy little fishing village with a good natural harbor which was used only by occasional tramp steamers and coastwise shipping. The berthing and unloading facilities were meager, small, old and dilapidated. The harbor basin was dredged and enlarged, piers were built affording three times the former berthing capacity, the unloading facilities were multiplied by ten. At Bordeaux, in June, 1917, there were berths for seven ships and no more than two ships per week could be unloaded. Dredging and construction made it possible for seven ships at the existing pier to discharge their cargoes at the same time and inside of eight months docks a mile long, which the French told the American engineers could not possibly be finished in less than three years, were built on swampy land, concrete platforms, railroad tracks, and immense warehouses were erected and huge electric cranes were set up for lifting cases of goods from ships to cars. Approximately 7,000,000 cubic feet of lumber were used in this construction, nearly all of it shipped from the United States. In less than a year it was possible to unload, instead of two ships in a week, fourteen ships all at the same time. The amount of development, of dredging and construction, that had to be done at these two ports alone indicates the size of the task which awaited the United States Government overseas before our men and their supplies could even be landed in France.

There were very few supplies available in Europe for the American Army. Practically everything for their maintenance had to be shipped from the home base, and no chances could be taken with the possible cutting of the line of supply by enemy operations at sea. Therefore, for every soldier sent to France there went an amount of food and clothing sufficient to meet his needs for four months—an immediate supply for thirty days and a reserve for ninety days. The supply was kept at that level by adding to the amount already sent, with each fresh unit of 25,000 men embarked from America, the increase needed for them. As our Army overseas grew to 500,000, to 1,000,000, to 2,000,000, and with each new leap of the numbers subsistence and clothing for their four months’ use also crossed the ocean, great cities of warehouses sprang up, almost overnight, for the storing of these immense quantities of goods. Each port had its base supply depot a few miles back from the shore where were stored the materials as they were unloaded from the ships. Here was kept, in the depots of all the ports, a part of the reserve sufficient to maintain the entire Army, whatever its size at any given time, for forty-five days. Well inland, midway between the base ports and the front lines, was another series of warehouse cities to which the goods were forwarded from the base warehouses and from which they were distributed to the final long line of storage depots immediately behind the battle zones. In the intermediate warehouses was kept constantly a thirty days’ supply for all the American forces in France and in the distributing warehouses behind the front and at hospital, aircraft and other centers of final distribution there was always on hand a sufficient supply for fifteen days. Most of the material for all this vast network of storage houses had to be shipped from the United States. This was especially true of the base supply depots and the early construction. Later, much of the wood was cut by American engineering troops in French forests. Let two or three of these warehouse cities afford an idea of the immensity of the task of housing the supplies for our armies.

At the St. Nazaire supply depot nearly two hundred warehouses afforded 16,000,000 square feet of open and covered storage. Back of Bordeaux there was wrought in a few months a transformation from miles of farms and vineyards to long rows upon rows of iron and steel warehouses, each fifty by four hundred feet and affording, all told, nearly ten million feet of storage. At Gievres, what was a region of scrub growth upon uncultivated land became in a few months an intermediate supply depot of three hundred buildings, covering six square miles, needing 20,000 men to carry on its affairs and having constantly in storage $100,000,000 worth of supplies.

These and all the other depots had to have their barracks for the housing of the thousands of men for their operation. In each one a sufficient supply of pure water had to be developed, for nowhere in France was there enough wholesome water for American needs. Usually either artesian wells were sunk or existing sources were enlarged and purified, and reservoirs, tanks and piping were installed. One water-works and pumping station had a capacity of 6,000,000 gallons a day. Let a supply depot at which 8,000 enlisted men were employed illustrate them all. Rows of neat, two-story barracks housed the men and a huge mess hall, which served also as church, theater and entertainment hall, accommodated 3,100 men at a sitting and allowed 6,200 to dine in an hour. Planned on scientific principles, its overhead service, from which the food was heaped on the mess kits of the doughboys, enabled them to pass quickly in an unbroken line from the serving stations, of which there was one for each company, to the dining tables. Four smaller dining halls seating 500 each added the accommodations necessary for the entire camp. The food was cooked in two large, concrete-floored kitchens, each 312 by 60 feet and having thirteen big stoves, and in two smaller kitchens of three stoves each. An underground sewer carried the camp refuse to the sea, there were plenty of hot and cold shower baths and the whole was lighted by electricity.

At all large supply stations and permanent camps there were huge bakeries, each baking thousands of pounds of bread every day, coffee roasting and grinding plants—one of these prepared 70,000 pounds of coffee per day—ice and cold storage plants that made their own ice, of which one had a daily capacity of 500 tons of ice and held 6,500 tons of beef, big vegetable gardens cultivated by soldiers temporarily unfit for duty at the front, hospitals, nurses’ and officers’ quarters.

Within a few weeks after our entrance into the war, and before the first troops had sailed for France, a railroad commission was at work there studying the transportation problem which would have to be solved and preparing for the huge organization which would have to be set up before we could give efficient aid. At first the American Army was simply a commercial shipper over French lines, then American cars and engines were sent over and operated by American personnel on the French roads, under French supervision, and a little later most of the American lines of communication were taken over by the American Army. And hundreds of miles of railroads and switches were built and operated at terminals, between base ports and supply depots, in the supply stations, at the front, and between camps and other centers.

At first American locomotives were shipped in knocked-down parts and set up again after their arrival in France. But this method consumed too much time, when time cost high in human life and treasure. A hurried search was made for ships with holds and hatches big enough to receive such burdens. The first ship that went thus loaded carried thirty-three standard locomotives and tenders tightly packed in bales of hay. Each one was lifted from the rails beside the dock by a huge derrick, as easily as a cat lifts a kitten, and on the other side was lifted from its place in the hold to the rails, ready for express service to the front, in forty-six minutes. In all, 1,500 locomotives, either knocked-down or ready for service, were transported and 20,000 freight cars were taken over in knocked-down parts and erected again at a big assembling station. There were constructed 850 miles of standard gauge railroads for needs which the existing French railways did not meet, of which 500 miles were built in the last five months of the war. In addition, there were constructed 115 miles of light railway, while 140 miles of German light railway were repaired and made fit for operation. In order to carry our own lines across French roads without interfering with traffic it was necessary to build many miles of switches and cut-offs. Americans operated 225 miles of French railways. The transportation system made use also of 400 miles of inland waterways on which hundreds of barges towed by tugs sent over for that purpose carried army supplies. This entire huge transportation system was planned, developed, operated and manned by American railroad men, from railway company presidents and general managers to brakemen, and required the services of more than 70,000 men.

The aviation program called for big construction works in France, where seventeen large flying fields, divided into several air instruction centers, were developed. One of these aviation centers covered thirty-six square miles and was a city complete in itself, as was each of the other centers, with their barracks, dining halls, hangars, repair and assembly shops, hospital, officers’ and nurses’ quarters, welfare buildings. And all of these complete, self-contained cities, each housing thousands of people, grew in less than a year upon farming lands.

Hospitals were built upon a standardized system that could expand the number of available beds by from one thousand to five thousand in one day. When the armistice was signed there were in operation 219 base and camp hospitals and twelve convalescent camps and the hospital service was ready to provide a total of 284,000 beds. One of these hospital centers, the huge institution at Beaune, afterwards utilized by the “Khaki University,” was constructed in a few months, its 600 buildings of a permanent type including the necessary operating rooms, laboratories, administration buildings, officers’ and nurses’ quarters, and buildings for patients for a series of ten hospitals, each devoted to its own specialty and having its own staff of surgeons, physicians, nurses and men. For the building of this hospital center railways were run to the site and concrete mixers set up to provide the material, and work was kept going at high speed day and night until it was ready to receive patients.

Hundreds of construction projects were constantly under way for the housing, care, training and welfare of the army whose numbers were growing by tens of thousands every week and would in a few months more have amounted to four million men. There were receiving camps of tents and wooden barracks and dining halls and welfare structures, each of which had its water works and electric lighting and sewage disposal plants, for the debarking men; training camps; schools for the instruction of cooks, chauffeurs, Salvage Corps workers, Tank Corps men, candidates for the Engineering Corps, cavalry officers, coffee roasters, statistical officers, trench artillerymen, and for scores of other specialties in fighting and in caring for the fighting men, by intensive work through long hours every day; nearly a hundred factories in which were made candy, chocolate, crackers, hard bread and macaroni and coffee was roasted and ground, by which much tonnage was saved per month and costs were reduced; huge salvage and repair work; big laundry and sterilizing plants in one of which more than half a million pieces were washed or sterilized per week; motor truck depots and reconstruction parks—one of these latter transformed in two months from a thousand acres of farm land into a great motor plant with shops of steel and concrete covering 125,000 square feet, railways and switches, storehouses and offices; and dozens of other structures and developments in which great buildings had either to be erected or leased and adapted to new purposes.

Upon the shoulders of the Engineering Corps of the United States Army fell the task of achieving this miracle of construction and development in France. At our entrance into the war it consisted of 256 commissioned officers and 2,100 enlisted men, in seven organizations. A year and a half later it had expanded to 9,000 officers and 255,000 enlisted men, in 309 organizations of which each did a specialized kind of work. A quarry regiment got out stone from French quarries; forestry regiments, under the permission and supervision of the French Government, went into French forests and cut down trees, set up saw mills and carried on lumbering operations in order to help supply the immense lumber needs of our construction projects and so lessen the pressure upon the shipping service; highway regiments repaired roads and built new ones; railroad regiments laid hundreds of miles of railway track; a camouflage regiment composed of architects, painters, sculptors and engineers protected and disguised army operations and ran a factory for the making of camouflage material; map-making regiments printed maps immediately behind the battle lines; others developed water and electric power and installed plants for our manufacturing necessities in more than three hundred localities; still others dug trenches and tunneled under the enemy’s lines and built bridges in the rear of the fleeing foe for the immediate passage of American troops in pursuit; and sometimes they threw down picks and shovels and with hastily seized rifles and bayonets showed themselves to be as good fighters as workers.

All this vast and varied achievement in France, of which it is possible to mention here only illustrative parts of a mere outline, was made possible by the big, closely knit and smoothly working organization of the two branches of the A. E. F., the Army and its Service of Supply. At the head of it all, organizer and administrator as well as soldier and general, was General Pershing, Commander in Chief. Under him the five great divisions of General Head Quarters,—the section that saw to it that all the needed elements of warfare, men, munitions, supplies, and materials for construction, were landed in France; the section that received and distributed all these elements; the section that trained the personnel of every sort; the sections that operated the troops and secured information concerning the enemy and safe-guarded that concerning our own affairs,—carried on each its own work in a great, widely ramifying organization, systematized and highly organized down to its last detail. Running all these organizations on business principles, in addition to the army officers who directed the phases dealing with combat, were successful business and professional men from private life in the United States who gave up big salaries and important positions to work for their country in France on the pay of an army officer. Among them and spending twelve, sixteen, even twenty hours out of the twenty-four on the job of speeding each his own particular work to success were engineers of international renown who had put through mighty projects of bridging and damming rivers, building railroads and tunneling the earth, experts in financial law, in mechanics, in construction, in finance, manufacturers of automobiles, leaders in steel industries, organizers of big business, officials of important railway companies.

CHAPTER VIII
AT THE FRONT

When Americans endeavor to estimate the value of their work on the lines of battle they are bound to see and should be glad in justice to admit that our actual fighting effort was small indeed compared with the vast and bloody and appalling struggles in which our war associates had almost exhausted themselves. They are bound to see that its importance in the final decision was incommensurate with the amount of what they actually did on the fighting lines, although not, perhaps, with the extent of the nation’s preparation. It fell to America to add the deciding strength after years of battle in which the combatants had been so nearly equal that their armies on the Western front had swayed back and forth over a zone only a few miles in width.

Nevertheless, no just summing up of the last year of the war can fail to award to America the credit of having been the final deciding factor, a credit that belongs alike to the valor and size of her armies, the ability of their officers and the overwhelming might and zeal with which the whole nation had gathered itself up for the delivery of the heaviest blows in its power to give. The rapidly growing evidence of how powerful those blows would be, as shown by our enormous preparations in France and the war spirit and war activities in the United States, had convinced the enemy that unless he won decisive results by the autumn of 1918 there was no possibility of his final victory. And therefore he put forth his supreme efforts during the spring and summer of that year. The enormous scale upon which this country entered upon and carried through its preparations for war both at home and in France sent to high figures the money cost of the war to the United States, but it made immeasurable savings in human life, for anything less would have meant more months of war, even more bloody than the preceding years.

The enemy’s determination to win a decisive victory in the spring or summer of 1918 before, he believed, it would be possible for the American Army to make itself felt at the front forced England and France and Italy to make what would have been, without our help, their last stand. They had reached the limit of what they could do and were fighting “with their backs to the wall.” Exhausted by nearly four years of bitter struggle they were almost but not quite strong enough to withstand the final, determined, desperate rush of the foe for which he was gathering together all his powers. And American forces gave the aid that was needed to drive him back.

Of high importance among the things that America did to help bring about decision between the battle lines was her share in the final agreement upon unified control of the associated armies in France. It was the voice of the United States Government through its representation in the Supreme War Council that carried the day for this measure and led to the appointment in March, 1918, of Marshal Foch as Generalissimo of the Allied and Associated Armies, an action which military authorities are agreed should have been taken long before and which, when finally brought about, was fruitful of the best results.

The aim of the War Department, as carried out by General Pershing, Commander in Chief of the American Expeditionary Forces, was to make the American Army in France an integral force, able to take the offensive and to carry on its own operations, and with that end in view he shaped its training and planned for its use at the front after its arrival in France. While he offered and furnished whatever troops Marshal Foch desired for use at any part of the battle line, General Pershing refused to distribute all his forces, insisted upon building them up as they became ready for the front into a distinctive American Army—at the signing of the armistice the First, Second and Third American Armies had been thus created—and by the time the American forces had begun to make themselves felt at the front he had substituted American methods of training, finding them better adapted to his men than the European, and in his last battle, the decisive action in the Meuse-Argonne region, his staff work was all American.

The plan of training carried out, except in the later months when the demand for troops at the front was immediate and urgent, allowed each division after its arrival in France one month for instruction in small units, a second month of experience by battalions in the more quiet trench sectors and a third month of training as complete divisions. When the great German offensive began in Picardy in March, 1918, General Pershing had four divisions ready for the front and offered to Marshal Foch whatever America had in men or materials that he could use. None of the Allied commanders believed that men so recently from civilian life could be used effectively in battle and it was only General Pershing’s knowledge of the character of his men, his insistent faith that they would make good under any trial of their mettle and his willingness to pledge his honor for their behavior under fire that induced Marshal Foch to accept his offer.

Brilliantly did these men justify their commander’s faith in them in this and in all the later battles in which they took part. In all, 1,390,000 were in action against the enemy. Less than two years before they had been clerks, farmers, brokers, tailors, authors, lawyers, teachers, small shop keepers, dishwashers, newspaper men, artists, waiters, barbers, laborers, with no thought of ever being soldiers. Their education, thoughts, environment, whole life, had been aloof from military affairs. They had been trained at high speed, in the shortest possible time, four or five months, and sometimes less, having taken the place of the year or more formerly thought necessary. But it was American troops that stopped the enemy at Chateau-Thierry and at Belleau Wood in June, when the Germans were making a determined drive for Paris and had reached their nearest approach to the French capital. They fought the enemy’s best guard troops, drove them back, took many prisoners and held the captured positions. Because of their valor and success the Wood of Belleau will be known hereafter and to history as “the Wood of the American Marines,” although other American troops fought with the Marines in that brilliant action. In the pushing back of the Marne salient in July, into which General Pershing, with absolute faith in the dependability of his men, threw all of his troops who had had any sort of training, American soldiers shared the place of honor at the front of the advance with seasoned French troops. Through two weeks of stubborn fighting the French and the Americans advanced shoulder to shoulder and steadily drove the enemy, who until that time had been just as steadily advancing, back to the Vesle and completed the object of reducing the salient.

Early in August the First American Army was organized under General Pershing’s personal command and took charge of a distinct American sector which stretched at first from Port sur Seille to a point opposite Verdun and was afterwards extended across the Meuse to the Argonne Forest. For the operation planned against the formidable enemy forces in front of him General Pershing assembled and molded together troops and material, all the elements of a great modern army, transporting the 600,000 troops mostly by night. The battle of St. Mihiel, for which he had thus prepared, began on September 12th, and this first offensive of the American First Army was a signal success. The Germans were driven steadily backward, with more than twice the losses of our own troops and the loss of much war material, and the American lines were established in a position to threaten Metz.

Two American divisions operating with the British forces at the end of September and early in October held the place of honor in the offensive that smashed the Hindenburg line, which had been considered impregnable, at the village of St. Vendhuile. In the face of the fiercest artillery and machine gun fire these troops, supported by the British, broke through, held on and carried forward the advance, capturing many prisoners. Two other divisions, assisting the French at Rheims in October, one of them under fire for the first time, conquered complicated defense works, repulsed heavy counter attacks, swept back the enemy’s persistent defense, took positions the Germans had held since 1914 and drove them behind the Aisne river.

The battle of St. Mihiel was a prelude to the Meuse-Argonne offensive and was undertaken in order to free the American right flank from danger. Its success enabled General Pershing to begin preparations at once for the famous movement that, more than any other single factor, brought the war to its sudden end. No military forces had ever before tackled the Argonne Forest. French officers did not believe it could be taken. With the exception of St. Mihiel, the German front line, from Switzerland to a point a little east of Rheims, was still intact. The purpose of the American offensive was to cut the enemy’s lines of communication by the railroads passing through Mézières and Sedan and thus strangle his armies. The attack began on September 26 and continued through three phases until the signing of the armistice. Twenty-one American divisions were engaged in it, of which two had never before been under fire and three others had barely been in touch with the front, but of these their commander said that they quickly became as good as the best. Eight of the divisions were returned to the front for second participation, after only a few days rest at the rear. In all, forty German divisions were used against the American advance, among them being many picked regiments, the best the German army contained, seasoned fighters who had been in the war from the start. They brought to the defense of their important stronghold an enormous accumulation of artillery and machine guns and the knowledge that they must repulse the offensive and save their communications or give up their entire purpose and confess themselves beaten. German troops did no more desperate and determined fighting in the war than in this engagement.

Mobile Kitchen Back of the Front Lines

An American Big Gun in France

Day after day the American troops moved slowly forward, over rugged, difficult ground, broken by ravines and steep hills, through dense underbrush, in the face of deadly fire from artillery and nests of machine guns hidden in every vantage point, through incessant rain and mud and fog and penetrating cold, pushing the enemy steadily back, until they reached Sedan, cut the German Army’s most important line of communication, and so brought the end of the war in sight. For a few days later came the German request for an armistice and terms of peace.

Aiding the fighting men at the front were non-combatant troops who by their courage and zeal helped greatly and won high honor. Regiments of engineers worked with the lines at the front, keeping the roads open, building railways, repairing bridges in front of the advancing lines to enable them to pour across in pursuit of the fleeing enemy, and, in the earlier months, mining and tunneling under the enemy’s lines and constructing trenches. Much of the time they worked under fire and it sometimes happened that, suddenly attacked, they seized rifles from the dead and wounded around them and fought back the assaulting party. The camoufleurs worked close behind and sometimes at the front, disguising roadways, ammunition dumps, artillery and machine gun positions, concealing the advance of troops, most of the time in the shelled areas and often under fire. Immediately behind the front lines during the St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne offensives and under the protection of camouflage the map makers and printers of the American Army had big rotary presses on trucks and turned out the necessary maps at once as they were needed. British and French lithographers had told them it could not be done, but their mobile map-making trains kept in touch with the army, turning out a million maps during the Argonne drive.

The Signal Corps gave services of such inestimable value that without them the successes of the combatant troops would have been impossible. The war enlarged the personnel of the Corps from 1,500 to 205,000, of whom 33,500 were in France, where they strung 126,000 miles of wire lines alone, of which 39,000 miles were on the fighting fronts. Their duties were varied and highly specialized and demanded the greatest skill and efficiency. Regardless of danger the personnel of the Corps carried on their work with the front lines, went over the top with the infantry, and even established their outposts or radio stations in advance of the troops. A non-combatant body, it lost in killed, wounded and missing, 1,300, a higher percentage than any other arm of the service except the infantry. Its photographers made over seventy miles of war moving picture films and more than 24,000 still negatives, much of both within the fighting areas.

The enemy captured 4,500 prisoners from the American forces and lost to them almost 50,000, so that the Americans took ten for each one they lost. The American Army captured also in the neighborhood of 1,500 guns. There were 32,800 Americans killed in action and 207,000 were wounded, of whom over 13,500 died of their wounds, while the missing numbered almost 3,000. The total casualties of all kinds, exclusive of prisoners returned, for the Army amounted to 288,500, while those for the Marine Corps totaled over 6,000 additional. The battle death rate for the expeditionary forces was 57 per thousand.

In recognition of their exceptionally courageous and self-forgetful deeds on the battle field nearly 10,000 members of the American Expeditionary Forces received decorations from the French, British, Belgian and Italian Governments. Our own rarely bestowed and much coveted Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest recognition for valor the Government can give, was won by 47 heroes, while Distinguished Service Medals were awarded to several hundred individuals and to a goodly number of fighting units.

Those of their own officers who had had a lifetime of military training and experience marveled at the spirit of these civilian soldiers and their feeling was voiced by one of them who said, “They have taken our West Point tradition of implicit obedience and run away with it, as they have with every other soldierly quality.”

Field Marshal Haig complimented the American divisions who had fought under him upon “their gallant and efficient service,” and “the dash and energy of their attacks,” said that their deeds “will rank with the highest achievements of the war” and told them, “I am proud to have had you in my command.”

Marshal Foch said that “the American soldiers are superb” and told how, when General Pershing wished to concentrate his army in the Meuse-Argonne sector, notwithstanding its many obstacles and forbidding terrain, he consented, saying to the American general, “Your men have the devil’s own punch. They will get away with all that.”

Other British and French officers on many occasions praised the “gallantry” and “the high soldierly qualities” of these civilian troops, their “energy, courage and determination,” their “discipline, smartness and physique,” said they were “splendid fighters with marked initiative,” and one French general commanding an American division that was in battle for the first time declared that their “combative spirit and tenacity” rivaled that of “the old and valiant French regiments” with which they were brigaded. German documents captured not long after our men had begun to take an important part showed that the foe already had a good opinion of the American soldier, for they spoke of his expertness with weapons, his courage, his determination, his fighting qualities and—curious soldierly quality for a German to recognize—his honor in battle.

Many observers of our own and other nations bore witness to the fine character of the American soldiers back of the fighting lines, among their fellow soldiers of the other armies and the civilian population. Their cheerfulness, high spirits, good nature and simple, human helpfulness gave new heart to the soldiers of the Allies with whom they fraternized and made warm friends of the people in the cities, towns, villages and countrysides with whom they came in contact. The Secretary of War, after several weeks of intimate study of our army in France, said that it was “living in France like the house guests of trusting friends.” And the Chairman of the Commissions on Training Camp Activities, after two months of investigation in all the American camps in France declared, as the result of this long and intimate association, that the question Americans should consider was not “whether our troops overseas were worthy of us and our traditions but whether we were worthy of our army.”

PART ONE: SECTION II. BY SEA

CHAPTER IX
EXPANSION IN THE NAVY

Our entrance into the war found the Navy ready for immediate service. The almost universal popular sentiment against an army of large size that had been growing in strength for a generation or more had not been manifest against the support of a navy comparable with the navies of other nations. Recognition of the necessity of a better defense for the long coast line of the United States had led Congress in 1916 to sanction the strongly urged plans of the Secretary of the Navy and authorize one of the largest ship-building programs ever undertaken by any nation. This Act of Congress with the ample appropriation that accompanied it laid the basis for a program of naval preparedness and enabled the Department of the Navy to make itself ready to meet the state of war which was threatened by unfolding events. For it not only authorized the building of 156 ships, including ten super-dreadnaughts and six battle cruisers, but by authorizing the enlargement of the Navy personnel and the creation of a big Naval Reserve and a Flying Corps and providing machinery for the expanding of the service as desired it made possible the putting of the Navy upon a tentative war basis during the months immediately preceding our declaration of war. By the first of April, 1917, its plans had been drafted and its preparations made and it was ready for action. Indeed, its work had already begun, for in the previous month it had provided guns and gun crews for the arming of American merchantmen under the order of President Wilson, made in response to Germany’s notice of unrestricted submarine warfare.

Upon the declaration of war on April 6th, the fleet was at once mobilized and a flotilla of destroyers was equipped for foreign service and sent overseas, where the first contingent arrived at a British port on May 4th, 1917. The second reached Queenstown on May 13th, and before the end of the month both were engaged in the work of hunting submarines in coöperation with the British and French navies. Early in June units of the naval aeronautical corps landed upon French shores and inside another month the vanguard of the American Expeditionary Forces, convoyed by the Navy, arrived in France. Battleships and cruisers quickly followed the destroyers across the ocean and took their places with the British Grand Fleet, on watch for the appearance of the German navy from behind its defenses at Heligoland.

While it was thus quickly making itself felt in the prosecution of the war, the Navy Department at once entered upon a great program of development, expansion and training. It had in commission when war was declared 197 vessels. When the armistice was signed there were 2,000 ships in its service. In the same time its personnel had expanded from 65,777 to a total of 497,000. In addition to the cruisers and battleships on the ways, 800 smaller craft were built or put under construction during our nineteen months of war. Formerly the building of a destroyer required about two years. But the great importance of that type of vessel and the urgent need for more of them speeded production to the fastest possible pace and at the end of the war destroyers were being built in eight months and in some cases in even less time. In one instance a destroyer, the Ward, at the Mare Island Navy Yard, was launched in seventeen and one-half days from the laying of its keel and within seventy days was in commission. The end of the war found the American Navy with more destroyers in service or under construction than the navies of any two nations had possessed before the outbreak of the war in 1914. In the first nine months of 1918 there were launched 83 destroyers, as against 62 during the entire nine preceding years.

The submarine menace made necessary the concentration of effort upon types of vessels fitted to deal with it and therefore construction of destroyers and submarine chasers was rushed and every vessel that could be effectively used was put into that service. Submarine chasers to the number of 355 were built for our own use together with fifty for another nation. A new design, the Eagle, was worked out in the Navy Department and preparations were made to produce it in quantity. The manufacturing plant had to be built from the foundation. Work upon the plant was begun in February, 1918, and the first boat was launched the following July. Its tests were successful and two had been put in commission when the armistice was signed while work was being speeded upon over a hundred more, of which part were for one of our co-belligerents. After the destroyer, the Eagle boat was believed by naval officers of our own and other nations the best weapon for the extermination of the submarine.

Privately owned vessels of many kinds, to the number of nearly a thousand, were taken over and converted to naval uses and many new small craft were built in order to provide the hundreds of boats needed for patrol service and as tugs, mine sweepers, mine layers and other auxiliaries. Two battleships and twenty-eight submarines built by the navy were completed and put into service during the war.

Along with this big increase in ship production went a similar expansion in naval ship-building plants and in production of implements of warfare for the navy. Before we entered the war the Navy’s ship-building capacity amounted to ways for two battleships, two destroyers, two auxiliaries and one gun-boat. At once was begun a work of expansion which within a little more than a year added five ways and, when completed, would provide facilities for the simultaneous construction of sixteen war vessels, of which seven could be battleships. Three large naval docks, which can handle the largest ships in the world, were built. Camps were constructed for the training of 200,000 men. A naval aircraft factory was built which turned out its first flying machine seven months after work started upon the factory. A little later it was producing a machine a day. Naval aviation schools were established and production was speeded in private plants of sea planes, flying boats and navy dirigibles and balloons.

The navy’s bureau of construction and repair undertook the work of making seaworthy again the hundred and more German ships in our harbors when war was declared which had been seriously injured by their crews, under orders from the German government. So much damage had been done, especially to the cylinders, that the enemy had thought, according to memoranda left behind, it probably could not be repaired at all and certainly not within a year and a half. Officers of the navy, in the face of opposition by engine builders and marine insurance companies, determined to make the repairs by means of electric welding, the use of which on such an extensive scale was unprecedented. The experiment was successful and these great ships were in service within six months, the navy’s engineering feat having thus saved a year of time and provided means for the transportation of half a million troops to France.

The naval gun factory at Washington was enlarged to double its output. The navy powder factory and the Newport torpedo station had their capacity greatly increased and a large new mine-loading plant was constructed. A big projectile factory was begun in the summer of 1917, and the buildings were finished, the machinery installed and the plant in operation in less than a year.

Within a year and a half the work of the ordnance bureau of the navy increased by 2,000 per cent, its expansion including the gun, powder and projectile factories mentioned above. Plants for various purposes taken over by the bureau from private industry increased their output at once by large percentages, in one case, in which the product was steel forgings, 300 per cent. The depth bomb proved one of the most efficient means of fighting the submarine. It contains an explosive charge fitted with a mechanism which causes explosion at a predetermined depth under the water. An American type was developed and within a few weeks was being manufactured in large quantities, while manufacture of the British type was continued for their navy. A new gun, called the “Y” gun, was devised and built especially for firing depth charges. It made possible the throwing of these bombs on all sides of the attacking vessel, thus laying down a barrage around it. A star shell was developed which, fired in the vicinity of an enemy fleet, made its ships visible, our own remaining in darkness. Anti-submarine activities made necessary an enormous increase in the manufacture of torpedoes and torpedo tubes, which grew by several hundred per cent and far surpassed what had been thought the possibility of production.

The ordnance bureau of the navy developed a new type of mobile mount for heavy guns which, by the use of caterpillar belts, made them as mobile as field artillery although the weight and muzzle velocity of the huge projectile rendered impossible the use of a wheeled gun carriage. The entire gun and mount, weighing 38 tons, can be readily transported by this means over any kind of ground. Immense naval guns, originally intended for use on battle cruisers, were sent to France with railway mounts especially built for them by the navy. Their important and successful operations overseas are described in the chapter on “The Navy on Land.”

Smoke producing apparatus, to enable a ship to conceal herself in a cloud of smoke, was evolved of several kinds, for use by different types of vessels. A shell that would not ricochet on striking the water, when fired at a submarine, and so glance harmlessly away in another direction, was an immediate necessity, brought about by the conditions of sea warfare. After many experiments a shell was devised that on striking would cleave the water, to the menace of the submarine’s hull, and, equipped with a depth charge, was soon in quantity production. A heavy aeroplane bomb which united the qualities of a bomb with those of a depth charge and did not explode on striking the water was another development of the navy ordnance bureau, which also devised a nonrecoil aircraft gun which, after much experiment, was installed on our seaplanes and put into quantity production. Its success meant the passing of an important milestone in aircraft armament. An American device for detecting the sounds made by a submarine gave highly important aid to that phase of the war. The Navy Department equipped our own submarines, destroyers and chasers with them and furnished them in large numbers to the British navy.

Not only was there need for an immense production of mines and depth charges for ordinary uses, but the decision by the British to carry out the American Navy Department’s plans for a mine barrage across the North Sea, whose story is told in more detail in the chapter on “Working with the Allied Navies,” made necessary the production in enormous quantities of a new type of mine. Combination of the best types already in use and experiment with new features resulted in a satisfactory product of which large quantities were made and shipped abroad. All this need for high explosives caused a critical shortage and the supply of TNT, the standard charge for mines, aerial bombs and depth charges, was almost exhausted, because of the scarcity of toluol, its principal ingredient. In this menacing situation the navy’s bureau of ordnance began making exhaustive experiments which finally proved that xylol, the near chemical relative of toluol, could be used in its place. The resulting high explosive, to which was given the name TNX, proved to be the equal in every way of TNT and the building was ordered of a plant for the distillation of xylol which would make possible the production for the following year of 30,000,000 pounds of high explosives.

Armament had to be furnished for merchant ships, 2,500 of them, equipment for destroyers and submarine chasers, and all the multitude of requirements for ships on distant service and for the repair ships that accompanied them. All this increase in ships and plants and personnel called for an enormous increase in the amount of materials and stores it was necessary to provide for them. The greatest total of supplies bought for the Navy in any one pre-war year amounted to $27,000,000. But the greatest total for a single day during the war amounted to $30,000,000.

Among the giant tasks which the Navy undertook during the war was the building of an enormous structure in Washington for the housing of the Navy Department, of several immense storehouses, of which one in Brooklyn is said to be one of the largest storehouses in the world, the installation at Annapolis of the greatest high-power radio station yet erected, and the completion of the powerful radio plant at Pearl Harbor.

The Medical Department of the Navy increased under war conditions from 327 doctors to 3,074, dentists from 30 to 485, women nurses from 160 to 1,400, and Hospital Corps members from 1,585 to 14,718. Three hospital ships were added to its equipment, it had numerous hospitals and dispensaries scattered through Great Britain and France and its hospital service at home was enlarged from 3,000 to 17,000 beds.

The inventive ingenuity of the American people was apparently much attracted towards the problems of sea warfare in this conflict, for they began to send ideas, suggestions and devices to the Navy Department even before the United States became a belligerent. After that date the Consulting Board of the Navy, which has charge of such matters, was almost snowed under by these suggestions. During our participation in the war the Board examined and acted upon 110,000 letters, of which many included detailed plans or were accompanied by models of the contrivances which their writers hoped to have adopted. Most of them were either worthless or already known, but a comparatively small number were found valuable.

At the beginning of our war activities our naval roster listed over 65,000 officers and men, with 14,000 more in the Marine Corps. A year and a half later the Marines numbered 70,000 and in the Navy there were a little more than 497,000 men and women, for a goodly number of patriotic women had enlisted in order to undertake the duties of yeomen and so release able bodied men for active service. The total permanent personnel of the Navy, officers and men, had grown to 212,000. This rapid expansion had made necessary intensive training for both men and officers that was carried on with never ceasing activity at training stations on shore and on ships at sea in both home and foreign waters. In small-arms training alone a force of 5,000 expert instructors was built up who trained an average of 30,000 men per month.

How all this immense expansion in ships, men, stores, facilities and production measures against the previous history of the Navy appears in this fact: In the almost century and quarter since the Navy was established in 1794 until and including 1916 its expenditures totaled, in round numbers, $3,367,000,000, an amount which exceeded its expenditures in the next two years alone by only $34,000,000.

Convoy of Troop Ships Entering the Harbor of Brest

CHAPTER X
OPERATING AN OCEAN FERRY

The United States had to carry on its share in the war from a base three thousand miles distant from the battle zone and to transport troops, munitions, supplies across an ocean infested by submarines intent upon sinking as many of them as possible. It was a task so unprecedented and so difficult that before it was attempted it would have been thought, in the dimensions it finally assumed, utterly impossible. The enemy was so sure it was impossible that he staked all his hopes and plans upon its failure.

In this stupendous enterprise the British Government gave much invaluable assistance. Without its help the task could not have been discharged with such brilliant success, for this country did not have enough ships—no one country had enough—for such an immense program of transportation. But the two nations combined their resources of shipping and naval escort and with some help from the French and Italian Governments the plan was carried through with triumphant success.

With the incessant call from Britain and France of “Hurry, hurry, send men, and more and more men, and hurry, hurry” speeding our preparations, the need for transport facilities for men, munitions and supplies was urgent. And those facilities were meager indeed. When war was declared we had two naval transports, of which one was not quite completed and the other proved unseaworthy. There was no organization for transport service, because none had ever been needed. For the first transport fleet, that sailed in eight weeks after the war declaration, the Government chartered four cargo vessels, nine coast liners and a transatlantic passenger ship and at once began to prepare them for their new uses and to engage and alter other ships for the transport service. They had to be overhauled and made seaworthy, staterooms had to be ripped out and in their place tiers of bunks built in, big mess halls made ready, radio equipment, communication systems, naval guns and other defensive facilities installed, ammunition stored, lookout stations built, ample quantities of life boats, life rafts and life preservers provided.

Work upon the big German liners in American ports that had been seized upon our declaration of war to repair and refit them for use as transports was undertaken by the navy and carried forward with speed and zeal. Under orders from the German Government their officers and crews had injured them in many ingenious ways to such an extent that they did not believe the ships could be made seaworthy again in less than a year and a half, at the least. Cylinders had been ruined, valves wrenched apart, engine shafts cracked, boilers injured, pipes stopped up, ground glass put into oil cups, acid poured upon ropes and into machinery, bolts sawed through and all manner of mischief done that would injure without destroying the seaworthiness of the ships.

For all of this reconstruction and refitting work there was insufficient skilled labor, indeed, insufficient labor of any sort, because the needs of the fighting forces were drawing men by the hundred thousand into the training camps and the equally urgent needs of the ship-building program, the munitions manufacture, the coal mines, the hundreds of factories that were turning their attention to the vital necessities of warfare, were draining the labor supply. There were insufficient numbers also of trained personnel to officer and man the huge transport service that would be necessary. Training for this work was carried on in schools on shore and on ships at sea, and civilian officers and crews were taken into the service. Sailors from the navy yards turned to with a will for mechanical labor in the repairing and refitting of ships, their zeal compensating, in some measure, for their lack of skill.

The British Government gathered up all the ships it could spare, taking risks with its own supply of food and raw materials, and sent them to take part in this enterprise upon whose success depended the fate of the Allied cause. The seized liners were ready for service long ahead of the time in which any one had thought they could be repaired, the first of them taking their trial trips within five months of the declaration of war and the remainder becoming ready for service at various times within the next four months. So much more efficient had the engineers of the navy made them that the utmost speed the Germans had been able to get out of several of them was increased by two or three knots. The French and Italian Governments supplied a few ships, and the United States Shipping Board furnished scores of merchant ships, as they became available under its program of ship-building and taking over of sea-going vessels. Later in the war period a number of vessels were obtained from Holland.

It was agreed between the War and Navy Departments that the Army should take charge of the work of operating docks and providing and loading cargoes and that in the hands of the Navy should lie the responsibility of providing more tonnage when necessary and of equipping, keeping in repair, operating and escorting the transports. To the Navy therefore belongs the credit of having operated with marvelous success for a year and a half an ocean ferry service of enormous proportions across 3,000 miles of submarine infested seas. To call it a ferry service is no exaggeration. For the convoys started so promptly from American shores, moved with such precision across the Atlantic, discharged their passengers and left upon the homeward trip in such good time that the ships came and went upon almost as sure a schedule as that of a ferry across a river. In all, seventy-six groups of transports sailed with troops, the size of a group ranging all the way from a single unescorted ship to as many as fifteen troop ships escorted by from one to four or five cruisers, destroyers and converted yachts. The famous Leviathan, with her capacity for carrying from 9,000 to 11,000 men, made ten such trips, most of them unescorted, her own guns, the skill of her gun crews, the care with which watch was kept and her speed and maneuvering ability being thought to give her ample protection. Trip after trip the Leviathan took with the greatest regularity, steaming down New York Bay with her decks brown with khaki-clad men, speeding across the Atlantic, unloading on the other side and returning to her dock in the New York port promptly in sixteen days. And in eight days more, just as promptly, would she be ready for another trip.

From a beginning that was next to nothing, for it lacked merchant ships, organization, officers, crews, there was developed a cruiser and transport fleet of 42 transports and 24 cruisers with a personnel of 3,000 officers and 42,000 men. There was a fleet of cargo carrying ships in steady service numbering 321 and aggregating 2,800,000 tonnage, nearly one-third of which were supplied by the United States Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation and officered and manned by the efforts of the Navy Department. At the end of hostilities there had been transported across the Atlantic in the seventeen months from the first sailing over 2,000,000 troops, of which 911,000 had been carried by U. S. naval transports and 41,500 by other United States ships, while British and British leased ships had carried 1,075,000 and French and Italian ships 52,000. In the summer of 1918 as many as 300,000 per month were carried overseas. Of the entire army of 2,079,880 men American ships carried 46¹⁄₄ per cent and British ships 51¹⁄₄ per cent, while 2¹⁄₂ per cent sailed in French and Italian ships. Of the total strength of the naval escort guarding these 2,000,000 troops 82³⁄₄ per cent was furnished by the United States, 14¹⁄₈ per cent by Great Britain and 3¹⁄₈ per cent by France. All the troops carried in American ships were escorted by American warships, cruisers, destroyers and converted yachts, and American destroyers gave a large part of the safe conduct through the danger zone to the troops that were carried by British, French and Italian ships.

The enemy had counted confidently upon being able to paralyze American transport of troops and supplies by submarine activity and his undersea vipers were constantly speeding back and forth and up and down through the eastern waters of the Atlantic and even as far as its western shores. But no troop transport on its heavily laden eastward trip was ever lost and none at all under American escort. Only three troop ships, all told, were sunk by submarines, and these were westward bound and the loss of life was very small. The first convoy of troop ships twice battled with submarines and many others were attacked, while the naval officers who did convoy duty saw the undersea boats upon almost every voyage. By submarines and raiders there were lost during our war period 130 cargo carrying ships but under the guarded convoy system these losses steadily decreased.

In a convoy the troop or merchant vessels sailed in echelon formation with destroyers or cruisers steaming in front and at the rear while a destroyer ranged in zig-zag course along each side. Naval gun crews manned each ship and on each one, in addition to the watches kept on board the escorting vessels, keen eyes constantly swept the surrounding waters, every moment of the day and night. At night all lights were dimmed, so that not a ray of even a lighted match on deck was ever visible, and the great black hulks rushed onward through the darkness, never knowing at what moment they might collide with one another or with one of the escorting vessels. But so skillfully navigated were they that all such dangers, though they were very real, were escaped.

No greater feat was achieved by our fighting forces than this of ferrying across the Atlantic an army of 2,000,000 troops, with their food, equipment, and munitions, and the material necessary in enormous amounts for the creating and carrying on of the Service of Supply. It was an arresting achievement not only because of its unparalleled bigness and its audacity and success but also because of its vital importance. Without it the war could not have been won. And the credit for the achievement belongs to the American Navy. Our co-belligerents gave vitally important aid. But the American Navy suggested, developed, organized, supervised, operated and was responsible for the entire huge system. Into its success went many factors, not the least of them the foresight and watchfulness and careful planning of the officials of the Navy, from the Secretary down to the junior officers on the troop ships. There was constant study of the submarine peril and of means to lessen it, and it was, by autumn of 1918, almost eliminated by the combined efforts of the associated nations. There were the zeal and diligence of officers and crew alike and the consequent high morale, the skill of the gun crews, who never ceased from the effort to make it better still by daily target practice, and that constant attention to detail which leaves no loophole anywhere through which success might dribble and slide away. And finally there were the skill, courage, devotion and audacious spirit of the naval officers whose ships escorted the convoys back and forth across the ocean. All these and other factors combined to make possible an achievement that stands out commandingly even in a war compact of big things and huge achievements.

By Permission of Mid-Week Pictorial, New York Times Co.

Mine Barrage Across the North Sea

CHAPTER XI
WORKING WITH THE ALLIED NAVIES

The American Navy was the first section of the American fighting forces to take part in the war. It was ready to begin operations at once upon our declaration of war, it lost no time in sending its first contingent across the ocean and the importance of its coöperation with the navies of our co-belligerents constantly increased until the end of hostilities. Aside from the vital consequence of its achievement in operating an Atlantic ferry, one of the capital performances of the entire war, its chief work was done in coöperation with the British, French and Italian navies in European waters from the Mediterranean to the White Sea.

Upon our entrance into the war a patrol force was at once organized charged with the protection of the western waters of the Atlantic and the shores of America, from the Bay of Fundy to Colombia, including the West Indies and all the region west of the 50th degree of longitude. But within a few months it became apparent that the enemy would confine his efforts mainly to European waters and accordingly most of our naval forces were sent overseas. For the protection of our own coasts and coastwise shipping when, during the second summer, enemy submarines appeared along our own shores, submarines, sub-chasers, destroyers, mine sweepers and other small craft of offense and defense were ready to be put into action and prevented the enemy from doing any considerable damage.

At the end of hostilities we had in European waters 364 vessels of all classes, of which 304 were warships, and serving there were 5,000 officers and 70,000 enlisted men of our Navy, a total greater than its full strength when we entered the war. Our destroyers had been steaming an average of 275,000 miles per month and our ships of all classes, including only those actively engaged in naval duties and excluding those operating as escorts, had steamed a total monthly average of 626,000 miles. Individual destroyers steamed a total, during the first year of service overseas, of from 60,000 to 64,000 miles. The Navy established bases at the Azores, Gibraltar, Corfu, at many places along the French coast, at English Channel ports, on the Irish coast, in the North Sea, at Murmansk and at Archangel, fifteen in all. Our 14-inch naval guns mounted on British monitors did their share in the attack on Zeebrugge, and smaller naval guns mounted on floats and manned by Italian crews gave much aid in the defense of Venice.

The bases at the Azores and at Gibraltar, where we maintained a considerable naval force, were provided with all the necessities for our cruisers, destroyers, submarines, chasers and other small craft which joined the Allied navies in the policing of the Mediterranean and the adjacent Atlantic waters where we coöperated in the hunting of the undersea enemy and the protecting of transport and merchant craft. Several of our battleships and cruisers worked with the Italian Navy in Mediterranean waters. American sub-chasers gave important aid in the battle of Durazzo, in which they were given the advance post of honor and, preceding the Allied fleet, went forward picking a way of safety for the larger vessels through the thickly strewn mine field. Inside the harbor they shared in the battle, aiding in the attacking and sinking of Austrian steamers, destroyers and submarines. Assisting in mining operations and in the construction of a mine barrage was another of the important works of this group of submarine chasers in the Adriatic Sea.

Several naval bases were established along the coast of France and through the last year of the war seventy vessels, of which half were destroyers, operated in these waters, their chief duty being to meet the convoys of American troop and cargo ships and escort them through the danger zone. They also worked up and down the French shores, hunting enemy submarines and escorting coastwise shipping. At all these repair and supply bases it was necessary to provide extensive facilities; a number of huge fuel oil tanks were built, most of the new destroyers and many other ships being oil-burners; several naval hospitals were constructed; a dozen naval port offices were established, from Cherbourg to Marseilles, to expedite the movements of American shipping through as many ports; naval aviation stations were built; rescue tugs and a wrecking steamer watched for and assisted damaged vessels; minesweepers kept open the approaches to the ports.

The principal bases from which our destroyers operated were Gibraltar, Brest and Queenstown, of which the last named was the largest; the submarine chaser bases were at Queenstown, Plymouth and Corfu; and those for our submarines were at the Azores and at Berehaven on the Irish coast. The flotilla of destroyers that was dispatched from the United States a few days after our declaration of war reached Queenstown, part of it within four and the rest within five weeks after that date, and the whole flotilla was at work in coöperation with the British forces within eight weeks after our entrance into the war. In the latter part of 1917 a squadron of six American battleships was sent to strengthen and coöperate with the British Grand Fleet that was on watch in the North Sea to give battle to the German ships if they should come out from their hiding place behind the defenses of Heligoland. It was this vigilant watch of the Grand Fleet, assisted by our battleships, that kept the German navy off the high seas, where it would have raided commerce, made far more difficult the transporting of our troops and war material to France, fought our own and the Allied warships and greatly prolonged the war and made it even more bloody and destructive. Our craft constituted twelve per cent of the fleet that kept the German navy thus bottled up and rendered it incapable of harm.

The American squadron worked in entire harmony with the Grand Fleet, and was assigned to one of the two places of honor and importance in line of battle, the head or rear of the battleship force. So vigilantly did the Grand Fleet keep its watch and so persistently did it go after the enemy whenever he dared to appear, whether in a single ship, a squadron or his entire fleet, and so vigorously chase him back that he ventured out less and less frequently and toward the end rarely came more than a few miles from his base. All manner of temptations were used to induce him to come out into the open where battle could be joined—a few ships apparently detached venturing into the Heligoland Bight, merchant ships apparently without protection passing near the entrance to the Bight, and other devices. When the German fleet did emerge and a battle seemed imminent, the American division of battleships headed the line and would have led the attack if the enemy had not slipped quickly back.

The plan of laying a mine barrage across the North Sea, from the Scottish coast to the Norwegian shore waters, originated with the Ordnance Bureau of the American Navy. For some time the British Admiralty insisted that it was not practicable, but after much discussion they finally consented and the details of the operation of the scheme were worked out together. A new type of mine was demanded, because of the depth of the water, and this and a new firing device had already been developed by the Ordnance Bureau of the Navy. The number of mines required to lay a barrage 245 miles long and 20 miles wide was so enormous and the need to have them ready at the earliest possible moment so urgent that it was impossible to provide them by the usual methods of manufacture. Therefore the mine was divided into its many component parts and these were separately produced in as many as four hundred industrial factories. The parts were partially brought together in sub-assemblies in this country, and were thus shipped to Europe, where the complete assembling was done just prior to issue to the mine planters. There were manufactured 100,000 of these mines, of which about 85,000 were shipped abroad, some of them being used in similar mine barrages elsewhere. For this purpose a fleet of over fifty merchant ships was taken over by the navy and fitted out for the carrying of all this mine material overseas. Out of the entire fleet only one was lost by enemy action. Mine bases were established on the coast of Scotland, many mine layers and auxiliary vessels were fitted out and the work was carried on at a high rate of speed, sometimes as many as a thousand mines a day being laid. The American Navy furnished all the mines and laid 80 per cent of them for this huge barrage, of a greater length and in deeper water than had ever before been thought possible. The barrage was fatal to at least ten submarines within a short time after it was finished, and had the war continued would have reduced the submarine danger to little consequence.

Immense quantities of oil were needed on the east coast of Scotland for the British and American ships of the Grand Fleet and other purposes and the practice had been to send it on its journey from the United States in tankers around the north coast of Scotland. But enemy submarines took a heavy toll of the precious liquid and the Navy Department suggested the laying of a pipe line across Scotland. The work of laying the line was mainly done by the American Navy, which furnished the pipe for the work. The line could deliver 100 tons per hour and was the longest in Europe. The entire work was completed in six months and was finished on the day when firing ceased.

The relations of the American Navy with the Allied fleets were in every case cordial and harmonious. The close and friendly coöperation was especially noteworthy with the British fleet, because the major portion of American operations was with it and the association was closer and more constant. American vessels operated under British command and British under American command effectively and without friction and the ability, skill and seamanlike qualities of each, officers and men alike, won hearty praise from the other. The British Admiralty sent a commission to the American squadron of the Grand Fleet to inquire how the ships were kept in such a state of readiness and high efficiency without sending them to the dockyards.

American naval forces in European waters engaged in 500 battles with submarines, in which it was known that at least ten undersea boats were sunk by them and thirty-six others damaged. Deaths in the Navy from war causes totaled 1,200 and at the close of hostilities there were 15,000 patients in naval hospitals.

In both European and American waters a total of 48 naval vessels of all classes was lost during the war, of which the armored cruiser, San Diego, which struck a mine off the coast of New York, was the most important. The losses were occasioned by submarines, mines, collisions and miscellaneous causes.

CHAPTER XII
THE NAVY ON LAND

The American Navy did work important and memorable on land as well as upon the sea. Its Marine Corps fought in decisive battles with unsurpassed courage, daring, endurance and aggressiveness and some of its big guns were instrumental in more quickly bringing to pass, unexpectedly early, the order to “cease firing.”

The Marine Corps, the landing and fighting force of the Navy, added glowing pages to its already splendid record. As with every other fighting force of the United States, it had first to increase its numbers and train its new members. It had a total, when we entered the war, of 14,000 officers and men. At the end of the war it had 70,000, the new members having come, mainly by enlistment, from all classes of the community and including business, professional, working and college men. In one instance a whole college battalion enlisted together. Marine Corps service has always attracted young men of the highest quality and these new members were especially notable for their intelligence, spirit and fine soldierly character, qualities that shone brilliantly in their action in the lines of battle. More democratic than any other fighting force of the nation, the Marine Corps officers are mainly promoted from its rank. Several officers’ training camps were held at which intensive, practical and competitive work gave thorough training in quick time and yielded a plentiful supply of officers chosen in accordance with the work and character of the men. Certain quotas of the Students’ Army Training Corps, which was hard at work when the armistice was signed, were designated for Marine Corps service. Recruiting and training stations for the Corps were increased and enlarged and intensive training of the recruits went on steadily, with such especial attention to rifle practice that when the Marines drove the enemy back at Belleau Wood over 90 per cent of the men in line had qualified as marksmen, sharp shooters or expert riflemen.

When the German Army, in its steady drive toward Paris in the last days of May, 1918, had reached its nearest point to the capital city and the Allied armies were facing a serious crisis. General Pershing offered to Marshal Foch whatever he had in men and material that the French Generalissimo could use and a division composed of regiments of Marines and of the Regular Army was thrown forward to block the German advance, which had been rolling steadily onward and driving everything before it at the rate of six or seven miles per day. The Marines blocked the advance in an engagement on June 2nd. Calmly setting their rifle sights and aiming with precision, they met the German attack and under their deadly fire, supported by machine guns and artillery, the enemy lines wavered, stopped, and broke for cover.

Then followed, a few days later, the fierce and stubborn attacks of the Marines upon the defenses which the Germans had set up and which they held with determination. Belleau Wood, a jungle of underbrush, heavy foliage and piles of boulders, they had filled with machine gun nests. The Marines attacked in wave formation, rushing, halting, rushing again, the rear waves plunging forward over the dead and wounded bodies of those who had fallen. It was almost a month before the Americans reached their final objectives and completely routed the Germans from Belleau Wood, to be known ever after as the Wood of the American Marines because of the valor and heroism with which it was won. They fought day and night, day after day, much of the time without sleep or water or hot food. Their officers sent back messages that the men were exhausted and must be relieved and were told that the lines must hold and if possible continue to attack. And the lines again went forward. They fought from tree to tree, they charged machine gun nests with the bayonet, wiped them out and turned the guns against the retreating foe. Some companies lost every commissioned officer, some that had entered the battle 250 strong dwindled to fifty or sixty. The Germans threw in fresh troops, their best Prussian Guards, with orders to retake the lost positions at whatever cost. But the Marines and their fellows of the Regular Army held on, repulsed the fresh attacks, and slowly advanced their positions. And at last, toward the end of June, with some reënforcements and following an artillery barrage that tore the woods into fragments, the Marines made their final successful rushes and with rifle and bayonet cleaned out all the remaining machine gun nests. The enemy had been turned back, Paris had been saved, the morale of the best German troops had been undermined and the Allied commanders and armies had been shown what raw American troops could do. After the battle of Belleau Wood neither British nor French commanders had any doubt about sending American troops anywhere, no matter whether they had had much or little training and little or no experience.

At Soissons, in July, the Marines again showed their valor and at the battle of St. Mihiel, in mid-September, they took over a portion of the line and, attacking with two days’ objectives ahead of them, won them all by mid-afternoon of the first day. And early in October the Second Division, brigaded with the French and still composed of Marines and Regulars, swept forward in an attack on Blanc Mont Ridge, east of Rheims, the keystone of the German main position, for the possession of which German and Allied Armies had fought many bitter battles. The Marines and their companions attacked the rugged and wooded Blanc Mont, rushed the enemy before them across its summit and pushed him down the slope, repulsed counter attacks and forced the Germans to fall back from before Rheims and yield positions they had held for four years.

The casualty list of the Marine Corps amounted to about 6,000, of whom only 57 were captured by the enemy. They lost approximately half of their numbers who entered battle. But they took more prisoners than they lost, all told, of their own men, and they inflicted more casualties than they received.

The big guns sent by the Navy to France for land warfare played an important part in the decisive battles of the last few weeks of the war. These huge, 14-inch guns, 66 feet long, had been intended originally for the new battle cruisers, but a change of ship design had made them available for other uses and the Navy Bureau of Ordnance suggested that they be put on railway mounts and used on land. They were first offered to the British authorities for use behind their lines, but they doubted the effectiveness of the guns and delayed final answer until General Pershing asked for them. At the end of December, 1917, not a drawing for the mounts had been started. Four months later one of the guns was rolling on the wheels of a completed mount for long range tests at the Sandy Hook Proving Ground. At the end of hostilities forty-four guns and mounts had been sent over in various steps of preparation for the front and six of the monsters had been in action, throwing their destructive shells far behind the German lines.

The railway mounts, designed for this particular purpose, were built and covered with armor plate by the Navy according to plans and designs prepared by its Ordnance Bureau, while the locomotives and the twelve cars for the operating forces of each gun, including berth and kitchen cars, armored ammunition cars, machine shop cars containing everything from a forge and anvil to a handsaw, crane and wireless cars, were all built and equipped especially for the purposes of these land batteries of naval guns. Intensive training was given to the men, all of them taken from naval forces, who would operate the huge batteries in France and serve the guns in action. The whole battery was so mobile that even if it were in action when the order came to move, the gun, personnel and entire train of cars could be put under way in an hour.

The first gun to be sent landed in France in the latter part of June but did not go into action against the enemy until mid-September, when, placed near Soissons, it fired on the railroads entering Laon. It had been intended for use against the German “Big Bertha” that had been dropping shells upon Paris from a distance of over seventy miles, but on the day in August when the American gun was ready to begin action “Big Bertha” retired and was heard of no more.

The German long range guns which bombarded Paris and Dunkirk and other places were set on permanent steel and concrete foundations, and therefore were immobile, and the military efficiency of their shells was reduced by the fact that they were small and made for long flight. The enormous shells of the American guns had a range of thirty miles, weighed 400 pounds each, seven times as much as the German, and could penetrate eight feet of solid concrete. Each gun, without its mount, weighed more than a hundred tons. They fired heavier projectiles and had a greater range than any mobile land artillery that had previously been used. Their chief usefulness was in the destruction of ammunition dumps and of railroad yards and rolling stock and the consequent demoralization of the enemy’s transportation system. When the shells from one of the guns were directed upon the railroad stations and yards of Montmedy and Longuyon they stopped all traffic there and one which struck the German headquarters killed twenty-eight members of the general’s staff.

Cruising through France like battleships on wheels, demonstrating their perfect mobility and proving their usefulness by cutting the enemy’s lines of communication and seriously obstructing his transportation, these big naval guns on railway mounts proved their value so triumphantly that the Navy had been requested, when the end came, to provide as many more as it could rush quickly to the front.

The Navy also removed a number of 7-inch guns from battleships, the changed conditions of warfare demanding a lighter and quicker firing gun, and devised for them, at General Pershing’s request, a new type of mount, utilizing the principle of the caterpillar belt and thus making it possible for them to travel directly over any kind of ground. So satisfactory were the first tests that the Army asked the Navy to furnish 36 such guns and mounts as quickly as possible and these were being rushed to completion when the armistice was signed.

The Navy maintained a large personnel and carried on considerable operations on shore both in Great Britain and France. On the coast of each of these countries was a series of bases for the repair and upkeep of escorting and patrolling ships, from cruisers to converted yachts. In many cases it was necessary to construct complete repair plants. At every naval base overseas there was a fully equipped hospital. In Scotland the Navy took over an entire watering place whose hotels, bath-houses and other structures were converted into large hospital buildings wherein were cared for many British as well as our own sick and wounded.

CHAPTER XIII
THE WINGS OF THE NAVY

The wings of the Navy, that had barely begun to sprout when the United States became a belligerent, grew in a year and a half as if under a conjurer’s wand. Previous to that time the appropriations that had been granted for the development of naval aeronautics had been so small that little could be done. Upon our declaration of war the Navy had 22 low powered seaplanes of no value except for training purposes, five kite and two free balloons and one dirigible balloon, and the Naval Aviation Service had three stations, but no adequate training field, while its personnel consisted of 45 naval aviators and less than 200 enlisted men.

When the armistice was signed the Aviation Service of the American Navy had 1,656 trained airplane pilots, of whom half were in service over European waters; 1,349 ground, or executive, officers; 3,912 student officers at training fields at home or abroad who would soon have been ready for service; an enlisted personnel numbering almost 37,000; approximately 8,000 trained mechanics and 6,000 more in training; in France, sixteen naval aviation stations besides others for training and supply work; two stations in England and four in Ireland; three stations in Italy and the Azores; two stations in Canada; one station in the Canal Zone; eleven stations in the United States; 759 seaplanes and flying boats in service for patrol and bombing work and 140 airplanes or land machines for land service, with 491 seaplanes and 100 land airplanes for training purposes, while a dozen planes of new and experimental types were being tried out; 282 kite and seven free balloons and 11 dirigible balloons. Many hundreds of seaplanes, flying boats and balloons of various kinds were on order for early delivery. All this development of material and personnel, of systems of training for pilots, ground officers and mechanics, of stations and service, and of the big and smoothly working organization that produced important results in the work of the naval aviators was the growth of but eighteen months.

To ensure the rapid production of planes a naval aircraft factory was erected at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. The contract for its construction was signed in August, 1917, and in the following March, 228 days after the breaking of the ground, the first machine had been completed and was given its trial flight. And a few days later this machine and another which had followed it to completion and trial were on their way to Europe. In the meantime, in order to meet the expansion which was foreseen to be necessary in naval aviation plans, the naval aircraft building was greatly enlarged. Included in the extension was a huge assembly plant for the assembling of airplane parts separately built in a large number and variety of private manufacturing plants whose work for the aircraft factory was directed by its management. By this means team work was secured, resulting in quick deliveries and an ample supply of craft for both service and training purposes. By September of 1918 enough naval aircraft had been shipped overseas to meet the needs of its assembly bases there for several months. The big rubber plants which had almost ceased the manufacturing of balloons renewed and expanded that phase of their activities and balloon fields and schools were created or enlarged and newly equipped. The completion of the Liberty motor brought the later development of the flying boat, used especially for coastal patrol work.

By Permission of New York Times Co.

Naval Gun on Railway Mount

Candidates for flying commissions were sent to technical institutions for special courses and afterward to flying stations for instruction in flying. The most difficult part of the problem of seaplane construction was that of finding skilled workmen and personnel for their direction acquainted with the making of aircraft. The same difficulty handicapped the procuring of trained officers and enlisted men for work at the supply and repair stations, which were constantly busy with the assembling and upkeep of the machines. To meet this difficulty half a score or more of schools for naval aviation mechanics were established in different parts of the country, with a force of instructors, who volunteered for the work, composed of professors in technical schools and colleges. From these schools came the trained mechanics and ground officers who filled the roster of the Naval Aviation Service at the end of hostilities.

The Navy Department saw at once that the most important aid its Aviation Service could give would be coast-wise work directed against the submarine menace. With that end in view it located its stations at strategic and important points all down the eastern coast of the United States, eleven in all, from Cape Cod to Key West, with another in the Canal Zone. Similarly its patrol stations were dotted up and down the shores of France, the British Isles and the Azores. On both shores of the Atlantic its dirigibles and seaplanes helped to escort outgoing convoys and went far out to sea to meet those coming in, eagle eyes sweeping the waters to watch for and warn against the sea vipers. The dirigibles were especially useful in this convoy work, as they were able to keep pace with the ships.

In addition to this assistance in the convoy service the naval aviators ranged above the waters far out from shore, hunting submarines, looking for disabled vessels and for boats and wreckage carrying shipwrecked passengers and crews sent adrift on the ocean by submarine officers, and locating mines, and they carried on bombing operations by sea and land.

The first United States forces to land in France for service against the enemy belonged to the Air Service of the Navy, which set ashore there within a month after our declaration of war five naval air pilots and 100 enlisted men. From this beginning grew the nine seaplane, one training, three dirigible and three kite stations that dotted the French shores from Dunkirk almost to the Spanish border. Most of these stations were used for convoy work, for submarine hunting and for searching for mines and wrecks. But at Dunkirk was a station for bombing operations which made day and night attacks on the German naval bases and supply depots along the Flanders coast, with especial attention to Zeebrugge and Ostend. After the British blockaded the entrances to those places the naval aviators, American, British and Belgian, coöperating in the work, dropped such a steady rain of bombs by day and night that the Germans were prevented from clearing away the obstructions. Two stations that were completed and in operation within ten months included a large aviation school and flying field at a lake near the coast, which specialized in bombing practice, and an aviation assembly and repair base with large machine shops and accommodations for the housing of their 5,000 men. The naval aviation stations along the French shores were so spaced that the entire coast line could be kept constantly under the observation of seaplanes and dirigibles. Some of the stations were located on uninhabited islets and others in tiny fishing villages on bleak peninsulas. This naval aviation force with its dirigibles and seaplanes coöperated so well with the sea patrol that between them they kept the whole of the French coast, for fifty miles from shore, safe from submarines through the last six months of the war.

The two naval aviation stations in Italy and that on the Islands of the Azores coöperated with the British and the Italian air patrols in the never ceasing hunt for submarines, the locating of mines, the watching for wrecks and the convoy of troop and merchant ships. Especially harmonious and cordial was the teamwork of the men of our six naval air stations in England and Ireland with the men of the British naval air service. The aviators flew together, they used each other’s planes, coöperated in the guarding of the coasts and the convoy of incoming and outgoing groups of troop transports and cargo vessels, worked together upon perilous enterprises. Some of the most moving tales of daring adventure and heroic endurance of the whole war narrate the deeds of these American boys who guided the wings of the navy over the coasts and waters of England, Ireland and France.

In the United States alone naval aircraft flew a distance of over 6,000,000 miles. On the other side, seaplanes and dirigibles aided in the convoying and protecting of 75,000 ships. Submarine hunting, which had a greater development than any other line of naval air work, reached a notable point of scientific exactness in its methods. Each patrol as it started out had mapped for it designated areas of the air of certain sizes and shapes and locations which it covered by following the directed courses by means of the compass. It is certain that many submarine attacks upon our shipping were thus prevented and that, by the dropping of bombs, several undersea boats were sunk. At the time of the signing of the armistice the plans of the Navy for its Air Service had not nearly reached the peak of development. But its effect upon submarine activities was already evident and it is probable that it saved in values of shipping that would have been destroyed but for its protection more than its development cost the Navy Department, which had expended upon it $100,000,000.

The Marine Corps, the Navy’s landing force of fighting men, developed its own Aviation Service with both heavier and lighter than air craft, for flying above both land and water, which gave important assistance in several parts of the battle front.

CHAPTER XIV
THE TRAINING OF THE RESERVES

The rapid, splendid expansion of the navy to more than sevenfold its former size brought its own big problems of how to prepare for a very specialized kind of life and duty young men having, as was the case with most of them, no sea tradition in their blood and but little previous interest in the naval affairs of their own country. In Great Britain there are hundreds of families whose names have been represented in the British naval roster, without the break of a single generation, for centuries. The very strength of the tradition draws the sons of these houses into the naval service by an insuperable attraction and from childhood attunes their minds and hearts to preparation for naval life and work. And everywhere in Britain pride in the navy is high and interest in it is keen.

No such previous mental attitude of a whole people made easy the problem of expanding the American navy and training its new recruits under the necessity of the highest possible speed. Pride and interest in their navy have always been potential rather than actual and constant among the American people. If it did something, in war or peace, that aroused their sub-conscious feeling about it they were quick and ardent in their response. But through year after year the navy was something as foreign to the daily life and interests of the great mass of people in all that wide extent of inland country wherein lives the majority of the population as were the canals on Mars. Very few of them ever saw a battleship or a destroyer or a naval officer or a bluejacket and only an occasional picture, or newspaper headline, or magazine article reminded them at wide intervals of the American navy’s existence.

Under such conditions, the quick response of the country to the navy’s needs was one of the finest and least to be expected of its many achievements. From all over the country, Mid-Western and coastal regions alike, young men began to pour into the naval recruiting stations, and it is well within the truth to say that the majority of them came from homes and from regions in which the navy had hardly been even mentioned or thought about by any one from year’s end to year’s end. Moreover, they were mainly men of old American stock. The navy for this war did not become a fused mass of nationalities, as the army did, but returned to a condition even more thoroughly native-American than it had recently shown. Between ninety and one hundred per cent of the seamen of the enlarged navy were American born. The most of them were of that fine type of young men, educated and intelligent, who become, a little later, of consequence in their communities. In their training the fact that they had had no “sea legs” in their ancestry, or in their own minds and hearts, did not seem to matter in the least. They took to the training and to the life on the sea-washed, rolling decks of destroyers, chasers and other craft as ducks take to water.

The increase of over 400,000 in the naval personnel came partly through expansion in the permanent strength of the navy, partly through the enlargement of the various naval reserves, fleet, auxiliary, coast defense and others, and to some extent through the national naval volunteers and the Marine and Hospital Corps. In September, 1918, provision was made by which men in the selective service might enter the navy instead of the army. A quota of 15,000 men a month was allotted to the naval service, and 5,000 monthly to the Marine Corps for four months, after which its monthly quota was to have been 1,500. Provision for the navy was made, at the end of September, in the Students’ Army Training Corps, under instruction in several hundred colleges, and naval sections were established in ninety of these institutions and placed under the instruction of naval officers.

But the sudden close of the war in November made unnecessary the completion of these plans for the further expansion of the navy. While increasing its size and strength at the swift pace that marked all our war preparations, at the same time it met every need for its services, of whatever sort, with promptness and efficiency. That had meant zealous and incessant work in the education for their new duties of more than 300,000 young men who had joined the Naval Reserve Force, in addition to those who had become a part of the naval forces in other ways. At a number of immense camps, where were built barracks, lecture halls and other necessary buildings for the housing and training of from 20,000 to 40,000 students at each station, the young men were trained in naval discipline and schooled in the maritime and naval subjects in which they must be proficient. Special schools for officers gave to those who were qualified and ambitious the necessary instruction. Other schools for advanced and specialized work trained officers for submarine duty, for assignment to the naval torpedo station and for work as naval aviation and naval turbine-engine engineers. An intensive course of instruction at Annapolis Naval Academy completed the training for officer duty for many who had already had sea service.

The Navy furnished during the war to the United States Shipping Board 200,000 trained enlisted men, as well as 20,000 trained officers, to man its new ships, and the training for these men, in addition to that for fireman’s and seaman’s duty given at the regular naval training stations, was provided in nearly fifty different schools, from those for carpenters, cooks, yeomen, signalmen and divers, to those for mine sweeping, searchlight control and aviation aerography. On both ships of the Navy and naval-manned merchant ships sea-training constantly went on of those who had finished the courses at training stations, camps and schools, each ship of whatever type receiving its quota for a certain length of training in specified duties. Training bases in Europe for men who had already had some service aboard ship furnished material for refilling the crews of destroyers, part of whose complement had been sent back to this country to form the nucleus of new destroyer crews.

The taking over by the Navy, upon our declaration of war, of all radio stations, the constantly increasing demand for radio operators in the Navy and on merchant vessels in the transport service and in commerce made necessary greatly enlarged radio training facilities. Two large naval radio schools were developed, one at Harvard University and the other at Mare Island Navy Yard, each of which gave a four-months’ course and graduated thousands of operators.

In all the naval training camps, stations and schools the utmost effort was made, as in the army training camps, to conserve the physical, mental and moral well being of the young men preparing for sea service. The activities and beneficence of the Army Commission on Training Camp Activities have already been described. Under the same head and working along similar lines the Navy Commission on Training Camp Activities busied itself with the welfare of the men fitting for naval service and provided them with books, sports, lectures, music, theatrical entertainments, moving pictures. There was the same endeavor to develop musical and dramatic talent and direct its use among the men. The cordial coöperation of the same civilian organizations that did so much to promote the welfare of the soldiers in training aided also in safeguarding the naval recruits and in adding to their pleasure. The thorough organization of athletic sports in all the camps, both outdoors and indoors, provided seasonal recreation in the way of football, baseball, basket ball, hockey, running races, boxing, wrestling, rowing and swimming. In the last named sport, when it was found that less than half the young men gathering in the camps were able to swim, instructors were added to the list of athletic directors and told to make sure that every man in the camp learned to take care of himself in the water.

PART ONE: SECTION III. IN THE AIR

CHAPTER XV
CREATING A NEW BRANCH OF WARFARE

The United States had to create for itself, after entering the war, not only the new arm of air warfare almost from its very foundation, but also the industry for its development and support. Much controversy raged over the Government’s air program and its progress during almost the entire year and a half and many and loud and long-continued were the charges of inefficiency, incompetence and failure. Mistakes there were, since human beings have not yet ceased the making of them, but when America’s achievement in air warfare is considered in all its phases and as a whole the frank and fair judgment can not fail to be that her development of the air section of her fighting forces deserves to rank among the most notable of all her wartime achievements.

In April, 1917, this country had in the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps two small and poorly equipped flying fields, sixty-five officers, 1,120 men and less than 300 second rate planes, most of them for training, and there were ready for its use comparatively few of the many and varied manufacturing industries and the trained workmen necessary for the development of an extensive war aviation program. Nor was there any one who had more than a vague appreciation of the complicated technique that would be required for such a development.

Although aviation had been born in the United States it had not received here the interest and commercial encouragement necessary for its growth and had had to betake itself to Europe to find the means and the opportunity for development. This lack of commercial interest had been reflected in the army and a conservative General Staff had given only the slightest consideration to the military possibilities of aircraft. Not until the summer of 1914 had an aviation section been incorporated in the army and there had been very little increase or betterment in its facilities during the following two and a half years. Even after our declaration of war an important aircraft participation was not contemplated by the General Staff until it was asked for by our war associates.

At the outbreak of the war each of the great belligerents was better equipped for air warfare than was the United States, just as they were better prepared for war in every way—war having been for centuries almost the normal condition of Europe, while wars had been few in America’s short history. But even their planes were comparatively few in number, poorly equipped and of uncertain military value. Aircraft had quickly proved their importance and under the stress and competition of actual warfare there had been already wonderful developments in the size, horse-power, equipment and usefulness of the planes and in the skill of the pilots and the methods of training. But, because the needs at the front were ever changing and it was often necessary to discard one week the successful achievement of the week before and constantly to reach out for new means and new methods, all this development was of less value to the United States than it would have been under more stable conditions. Any of it might have to be scrapped any day because of the developments of the day before. Moreover, so urgent was the need of England, France and Italy for every flier and every plane they possessed that, in justice to their own hard pressed battle lines, they could not offer as much assistance as they would have liked to give to the development of our rapidly planned air program.

That program was instituted in accordance with the urgent representations of the British and French war missions which came to this country soon after our declaration of war. The plans of the Allied forces, formed under the immediate and the clearly foreseen conditions of battle, called for great numbers of planes, pilots and mechanicians at the earliest possible moment they could be sent overseas. Therefore, the Government began at once to provide the industries and institute the training facilities necessary for the creation of this new branch of warfare. The development had to be from the foundation on both the side of production and the side of training. From the cutting of spruce trees in northwestern forests and the weaving of wing fabric to the making of the engines and the oil for their lubrication, the industry of airplane production had to be developed and speeded to the point where it would meet the desires of our war associates. This country had never trained an aviator sufficiently for participation in aerial warfare and it had neither schools, nor flying fields, nor fliers trained for teaching, nor a scheme of instruction. Neither had it the mechanics necessary for the upkeep of training planes nor schools in which to train them. It had to begin at the beginning in all these things, and it had to develop industries and establish schools and prepare fields and train fliers all at the same time. One could not wait upon another phase lest the final result be delayed.

Nineteen months later, when the armistice was signed, the two small and poorly equipped flying fields had increased to thirty-six in the United States and seventeen in France, preparing students for all of the demands of aerial warfare. The sixty-five officers had multiplied to 10,300 flying men and there were 5,460 cadets in training and almost ready to be added to the number of those in the air, while there were nearly 8,000 officers in the non-flying divisions of the service, which contained also 133,600 enlisted men, trained for their specialized work. Within a year and a half the Air Service had been expanded from a beginning of little consequence to a size greater than that of the army in the years before the war and all of it had been trained in the technique of a new branch of warfare. In the production of aircraft and accessories 200,000 men and women were engaged, nearly all of whom had been trained for this skill-demanding work. There had been produced over 12,000 air and sea planes, more than 1,000 balloons and 31,800 aviation engines. During the last month of the war production, which had then reached a quantity basis, had mounted to the rate of 1,500 planes and 5,000 engines per month.

CHAPTER XVI
PROVIDING THE MEANS

Spruce and fir production in the forests of the Northwest for airplane stock was at once pushed forward. I. W. W. agitators endeavored to incite the men of the logging camps to cease work, disable machinery and injure stock. But they were driven away, the loggers and lumbermen of the district formed a Loyal Legion which was assisted by 30,000 enlisted men sent to the Northwest for this purpose, and production was increased to unprecedented figures. The output previously had never exceeded two and a half million feet per month. By the end of hostilities it had reached 25,000,000 feet per month and was still increasing in the effort to reach the goal, as it would have done very shortly, of a million feet per day.

To make this possible several railroads had to be located, the right-of-way cleared and graded and the roads built, all within a few months. One of them, reaching into two fine spruce districts, had thirty-seven miles of main line and twenty-three of spurs. The gravel for the ballasting of its tracks, nearly 5,000 carloads, had to be transported for a hundred miles. Part of the right-of-way had first to be cleared by hand power of huge trees amounting to a million feet of lumber per acre while other portions were covered by thickets so dense they were impenetrable except as opening was made with axes. Half a dozen or more other lines penetrated far into the vast spruce and fir forests of the Northwest. Sawmills were built, great warehouses were constructed and all the cities of the West and Northwest were searched for the enormous necessary equipment of shovels, scrapers, picks, axes, tools of many kinds, steam shovels, pile drivers, horses. Substantial camps were built to house comfortably the thousands of workmen. A kiln-drying plant was erected to insure proper drying of the wood and economize freight charges upon the stock.

A total of 174,000,000 feet of spruce and fir was shipped out for airplane manufacture, of which a large part went to our co-belligerents. It was, indeed, seven months after our entrance into the war before any of it was sent to American factories, the Inter-Allied War Council thus directing the supply across the ocean because the need for airplanes was very great and they could be more quickly made and sent to the front in this way. Not until more spruce was produced than was necessary to satisfy their urgent need was any of it sent to our own factories. By November, 1918, enough spruce was being shipped out of the Northwest to meet the needs of all the associated nations.