MOVING THE MILITARY MACHINE

When Congress closed an epochal session on October 6, 1917, it had appropriated over twenty-one billion dollars. Except for $7,000,000,000 loaned to the Allies, and another billion for the normal expenses of the Government, the amount voted was placed at the service of the Administration as America's sinews of war for defeating the Central Powers. No nation had applied such a huge sum to war purposes in a like period. The loans to the Allies were not considered as part of the American war outlays. The Allies gave their own bonds to the Government as collateral for the loans, bearing the same rate of interest, and a condition attached to the loans was that the money be spent in the United States for war equipment. Hence the loans were allocated for the purchase of material in this country and substantially aided American industries.

Included in the work of Congress was final agreement on a war revenue measure after six months of debate (with wide divergence of taxation plans between the House and Senate) estimated to produce $2,534,870,000, of which $851,000,000 was to be levied on incomes, and $1,000,000,000 on excess profits.

On October 1, 1917, the Government appealed for popular subscriptions to the second Liberty Loan for $3,000,000,000. As in the case of the first Liberty Loan the response at the outset flagged. Two weeks later only 14 per cent. of the maximum total had been subscribed and a daily subscription of $358,000,000 was needed to make the loan a success within the time allotted for receiving subscriptions. A period of apprehension and misgiving followed; but that had happened during the floatation of the first loan, and no European war loan had been asked without a similar experience. It was not an easy task to draw three billion dollars from the public purse, and the purse was leisurely, even lax, in loosening its strings. It needed a nationwide advertising propaganda to open it. The President entered the fray by naming a Liberty Day, fixed for October 24, on which he asked the American people to assemble in their respective communities and pledge to one another and to the Government the fullest measure of financial support.

"The might of the United States," he declared in his proclamation, "is being mobilized and organized to strike a mortal blow at autocracy in defense of outraged American rights and of the cause of liberty. Billions of dollars are required to arm, feed, and clothe the brave men who are going forth to fight our country's battles and to assist the nations with whom we are making common cause against a common foe. To subscribe to the Liberty Loan is to perform a service of patriotism. "Let the result be so impressive and emphatic that it will echo throughout the empire of our enemy as an index of what America intends to do to bring this war to a victorious conclusion."

The Government's efforts to brace popular interest in the loan, aided by hundreds of thousands of voluntary workers throughout the country who formed Liberty Loan organizations, bankers, boy scouts, girl scouts, the newspapers and magazines, and patriotic, commercial, and fraternal bodies, produced a flood of subscriptions at the last moment which dissipated all fear of failure. The people needed driving, knew that their procrastination called for a dinning advertising campaign to translate intentions into deeds, and finally yielded good-humoredly to the impetus. They responded in such good measure that on October 27, 1917, when the loan closed, $4,617,532,300 had been subscribed, or $1,617,532,300 over the amount asked. The oversubscription exceeded that which the first loan yielded. Approximately 9,400,000 shared in applying for the loan. Of this number, it was estimated, 9,306,000, or 99 per cent., subscribed in amounts ranging from $50 to $50,000, the aggregate of such subscriptions being $2,488,469,350.

The loan proved to be popular in a degree of which the world afforded no equal. Never had there been a loan taken by 9,400,000 subscribers. It surpassed all previous experience of Government loans. The single offering was larger than the total takings in all subscriptions made in the four years of the Civil War. It far exceeded the response to any government loan of the other belligerents.

With an ample treasury to draw from, provided by Congress and the public, the Government proceeded with the war preparations, but in face of inevitable obstacles and friction. The American military establishment was not designed for making War on a huge scale, and, like the British War Office at the beginning of hostilities, was swamped and confused by an avalanche of new responsibilities. There were admitted shortages in clothing, artillery, and machine guns in the cantonments, and delays in the construction of new shipping also produced impatient criticism. Congress interposed by investigations into the general conduct of the war, with the result that the air was cleared and defects of organization located. The investigations appeared to have developed primarily not so much from ineffective and wrong decisions in meeting war needs as from delays due to indecision and procrastination. The result was a change of administrative methods aiming at a centralization of authority, which England and France had early found imperative in conducting the war, instead of depending on a bureaucratic system with its complicated channels of distributed authority. The friction which had arisen seemed to be substantially due to a clash between the methods of business men, whom the administration had requisitioned into war service, and the red tape of an established governmental system. The Administration recognized at length that an infusion into the Government ranks of capable business organizers, bent on conducting their share of the war with expedition, could not blend with departmental systems clogged by traditions, customs, rules, and regulations, written and unwritten. The whole Government became engaged in a process of introspection. The investigations compelled it to see itself as others saw it, and were salutary in that respect alone. In other directions the inquiries revealed, in spite of departmental shortcomings, that an enormous amount of work had been accomplished in a short time. When war was declared the country was wholly unprepared; it was working at full capacity in many war fields to maintain the largest foreign commerce reached in its history. Its industries being thus occupied on the outbreak of war, they could not readily digest a flood of orders, aggregating more than ten billion dollars in value, which the Government suddenly superimposed upon their capacities, with their equipments already driving at top speed under forced draft. On one point at least there was agreement—that the task so far accomplished could not have been done in the same period by any other nation.

In Secretary Baker's view, much of the criticism leveled at the War Department was due to a natural and praiseworthy impatience of the people at large to build a war machine worthy of their country's power. "Every one of us," he said, "wants to see our country hit like a man at the adversary." Answering the charge that the War Department had fallen down the Secretary set out to remove the impression prevalent in the country that the failures and delays were disproportionate to what had been achieved. He thereupon disclosed the results accomplished.

On April 1, 1917, a few days before the United States declared war on Germany, the army stood at 9,524 officers and 202,510 men. On December 31 of that year this force had grown to 110,856 officers and 1,428,650 men, composed of the regular army, the National Guard, and the National Army. In other respects the work accomplished by the War Department at the close of 1917 was summed up by Secretary Baker as under:

"1. A large army is in the field and in training; so large that further increments to it can be adequately equipped and trained as rapidly as those already in training can be transported.

"2. The army has been enlisted and selected without serious dislocation of the industries of the country.

"3. The training of the army is proceeding rapidly, and its spirit is high. The subsistence of the army has been above criticism; its initial clothing supply, temporarily inadequate, is now substantially complete, and reserves will rapidly accumulate. Arms of the most modern and effective kind—including artillery, machine guns, automatic rifles, and small arms—have been provided by manufacture or purchase for every soldier in France, and are available for every soldier who can be gotten to France in the year 1918.

"4. A substantial army is ready in France, where both men and officers have been additionally and specially trained and are ready for active service.

"5. Independent lines of communication and supply and vast storage and other facilities are in process of construction in France.

"6. Great programs for the manufacture of additional equipment and for the production of new instruments of war have been formulated."

An outcome of the investigation was the creation of a War Council within the War Department, composed of the Secretary of War, the Assistant Secretary of War, and five general officers. Its purpose was to supervise and coordinate the supplies of the field armies and the military relations of those armies with the War Department.

The National Army, composed of civilians enrolled under the selective draft law, was the most ambitious experiment in constructive military organization any country had ever attempted. It presented innumerable problems for which no solutions could be found in available textbooks, and the celerity with which it was converted into a real army rested wholly upon the skill with which the problems were grappled by the cantonment commanders and drill officers. Before the magnitude of a training organization could be considered and the drilling set in motion, much groundwork had to be covered in preparing the cantonments. There were sixteen of them, situated in various sections of the country, each roughly housing 40,000 men, and cost the Government at least $100,000,000. Their sites generally were in rugged, partially cleared country, marked by scrubby timber, dirt roads, wooden buildings, occasional patches of canvas, clouds of dust or acres of mud. They sprang up, in brief, out of wilderness tracts, usually some miles away from large centers of population. Their construction meant the creation out of the void of sixteen fully equipped cities, furnished with water supply, sewage systems, electric installations, governing organizations, police, and transportation. Standardization of construction was the only method by which the camps could be brought into being with dispatch. Each type of building, and every stick and board, ventilator and window sash used therein for all the cantonments were shaped to identical measurements, and produced by the enormous driving power of modern engineering, working under contract. Out of industrial plants, devising standardized material, came the camps. The number of buildings in the camps varied from 1,200 to 1,600, and included, besides the barracks proper, kitchens, shower baths and sanitary units, hospitals and administration offices, churches, schools, clubs and lodges, laundries, commissary stores, and even moving-picture theaters. The first stage of training the men was confined largely to elementary military drill, which was a test of their physical capacity to withstand the driving routine of marching fifteen to twenty miles a day, burdened with a sixty-pound pack, ammunition, and rifle. The second stage embraced advanced military drill, involving several weeks of Swedish exercises, manipulating the army Springfield and marching and countermarching in close or extended order. The third phase was specialized warfare as taught abroad, with British and French trench instructors.

Military tactics having been revolutionized by modern trench warfare, no time was wasted in the open-country maneuvers formerly employed to accustom the troops to actual field service. The National Army was trained for the single purpose of effective trench fighting. On adjacent hillsides and plains extensive field fortifications were prepared, equipped with barbed-wire entanglements, artillery, and machine-gun emplacements, bomb-proof dugouts, communication trenches, support trenches, listening posts, and every other device which had been evolved from the war operations in Europe. The men were taught how to enter and leave a trench, to repel attacks, make raids in pursuit of information, surprise forays by day or night behind the protection of barrage fire, and how to take care of themselves, repair artillery damage, and reenforce the barbed-wire barriers.

The training was intensive and embraced a sixteen weeks' course crowded with manifold detail, which was vigorously observed. More attention was paid in the curriculum to drilling individual men, platoons, and companies than to conducting brigade, divisional, and regimental exercises, these latter being deferred until the smaller units were fit for advanced warfare. The platoon, commanded by a lieutenant, was the fighting unit in trench operations, and upon the lieutenants was therefore imposed the responsibility of training less than company units in order to effect an intimate and sympathetic cooperation between officers and men when they encountered the stern realities of warfare in Europe.

Camp conditions formed a chief subject of the Congressional investigation. The War Department had been confronted with the task of providing for a new army which had to be rushed into training, and had to depend upon congested railroad facilities to equip the camps. But everything had been done, Secretary Baker told the committee, to care for the men, and where defects had occurred they were quickly removed.

"And where, I want to know, in all history can you find an achievement comparable to that of America's in raising this great army from her citizenry in this period of time?" asked the Secretary of War. "It has never been done before, and it is to America's credit that she has accomplished it in the nine months we have been at war."

The outlook, as viewed by Secretary Baker, was that if adequate transport facilities were available, 1,500,000 men could be shipped to France during 1918. He indicated that a third of that number would be on the western front early in the year as a forerunner of the main body.

The country appeared satisfied by this prospect. The War Secretary had revealed much information regarding the military preparations to the Senate investigators; but he had to suppress much more to keep Germany—who was anxious to learn General Pershing's plans—in the dark, especially as to the number and disposition of American troops already there. The conclusions drawn from the progress of war preparations at the beginning of 1918 were that greater advances had been made than was expected. American troops would be in the thick of the fighting in the early spring and would be greatly reenforced just as soon as the Entente Allies pooled their tonnage resources.

The Administration's critics in Congress, nevertheless, were not pacified. A bill was proposed in the Senate creating a War Cabinet, the purpose of which was to divest the executives of Government departments of all authority in the conduct of the war. The new body was to be composed of "three distinguished citizens of demonstrated ability," to be named by the President and indorsed by the Senate. They were to control the administrative Cabinet officers and other department heads in the war's conduct, and adjust all differences, subject to the President's review. The President saw in the proposed new war administration nothing but "long additional delays" and the turning of the Government's experience into "mere lost motion." He said as much to Senator Chamberlain, the author of the measure, in a letter which stoutly defended the Government's military preparations.

"The War Department," he wrote, "has performed a task of unparalleled magnitude and difficulty with extraordinary promptness and efficiency. There have been delays and disappointments and partial miscarriages of plan, all of which have been drawn into the foreground and exaggerated by the investigations which have been in progress since the Congress assembled.... But by comparison with what has been accomplished, these things, much as they were to be regretted, were insignificant, and no mistake has been made which has been repeated."