Demobilization

At a few minutes past ten o’clock of the morning of November 11, 1918, the Secretary of War in Washington received from General Pershing a communication informing the Government...

The American Expeditionary Forces, on November 11, 1918, were ill prepared to conduct the manifold activities leading to their demobilization. Up to that day the expedition had...

On the first day of the armistice, before Washington knew its exact terms or could form an estimate of how great a force we should have to maintain in France pending the conclus...

Before the American Expeditionary Forces could be disbanded in this country it was necessary for the training camps, most of which were to become demobilization centers after th...

Four hours after the First Division finished parading in Washington, its troops were in Camp Meade, thirty miles away, where the “emergency” soldiers in the division’s ranks wer...

Even in the United States, with its well-developed trunk-checking and baggage-transfer systems, the management of any considerable amount of personal luggage gives concern to th...

The World War brought to America a new and enlightened discernment of the Government’s responsibility toward the men whom it had called to the uniform. In former wars the milita...

Of all the business activities of the American Government in the World War, none aroused in the business men of America more interest or more concern than the Government’s emplo...

In the preceding chapter we have been discussing chiefly the written, formal contract, the tangible, visible document, duly signed and witnessed, which could be submitted to any...

When the average man speaks of munitions, he means ordnance and, even more specifically, guns and ammunition. In this he is nearly half right. Technically, the word “munitions”...

There was a great deal more to the demobilization of the war ordnance industry than the mere office operation of settling with the contractors. It included an immense field acti...

The armistice found in the United States an enormous industry devoted to the production of ammunition for the artillery. Including its powder-making plants and its plants for th...

Next to the manufacture of ordnance, the production of airplanes and balloons and their accessories was the largest war enterprise of American industry. A hundred thousand workm...

The demobilization problem of the Corps of Engineers was a two-branched one in that, while the Engineers had purchased heavily of supplies in the United States, they had used th...

The quartermaster does not loom large against the heroic background of war. The Army’s victualer and clothier collects few _croix de guerre_, and his interest in the Congression...

One of the major industrial activities conducted in the United States during the war was the construction of buildings for the Army. The Army’s physical plant, as it existed on...

In our earlier chapters, frequent and more or less extended references have been made to the disposition of surplus property acquired by the various branches of the Army during...

Although as these words are written it is more than two and a half years since the armistice of November 11, 1918, was signed, it is still impossible to give a clean-cut and def...

What did the war cost America? It may be that an accurate answer to that question will never be given. Certainly it cannot be given now, when the stocks of surplus materials are...