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Other documents randomly have
different content
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
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