Part 31

Although, upon our entry into the European war, preparations were immediately begun for the complete motorization of the various trains—ammunition, engineer, sanitary, and supply—which comprise the divisional trains, each of these sections was still controlled by the corps or department to which it pertained. In other words, the ammunition trains were controlled by the Ordnance Department so far as the procurement of vehicles and the supply of personnel was concerned; the engineer trains were under the control of the Corps of Engineers; the sanitary trains were under the Medical Corps, and only the supply trains came under the jurisdiction of the Quartermaster Corps. It must be understood, however, that the divisional trains were assigned to and became a part of the division itself, being, therefore, under the direct command of the divisional commander. As might have been expected, this system resulted in inefficiency and confusion because of municipal officers in control. Instead of all motor activities being directed by a single head, each of the staff departments using motor vehicles had its own ideas and worked along its own lines. Thus, the Corps of Engineers had designed and was manufacturing various types of vehicles adapted to engineering work. The Signal Corps was producing vehicles designed for carrying radio equipment, photographic laboratories, and the like. The Medical Corps was experimenting with various types of ambulances, dental wagons, and mobile laboratories, while the Ordnance Department was dividing its allegiance between the tractor type and the model known as the “Quad” or four-wheel drive. Thus it was that for many months after the declaration of war the motor activities of the army were distributed among several arms of the service, with the inefficiency and duplication of effort which invariably results from decentralization.

The necessity for a separate organization to handle motor transportation was first recognized by the A. E. F., and in December, 1917, General Pershing issued a general order creating a Motor Transport Service. The new service was described as a part of the Quartermaster Corps, and an assistant to the Chief Quartermaster was detailed as its chief. For all practical purposes, however, it became a separate organization. In the United States the transition was more gradual, it not being until August, 1918, that the Secretary of War authorized the creation of a Motor Transport Corps as a separate and distinct branch of the military establishment, Colonel Charles B. Drake, who was later made a brigadier-general, being named as its first chief. The new organization was built up along the same lines as the Motor Transport Service, the officers and men of the latter being transferred to similar positions in the new corps, thus enabling them to continue the performance of their duties without interruption or confusion. The effect was as though the Motor Transport Service was lifted bodily out of the Quartermaster Corps, renamed, and made completely independent, the only visible sign of the change being, however, that the officers and men changed their Quartermaster insignia for the winged helmet superimposed upon a motor-wheel which was adopted as the device of the new corps.

Under the new order all the motor transportation of the army, save only tractors used for artillery purposes, was embraced in the Motor Transport Corps. The Medical Corps, the Engineer Corps, the Quartermaster Corps, the Signal Corps, and the Department of Military Aeronautics, all of which had developed special types of vehicles for their respective needs, immediately turned over their equipment to the new organization. The designing of bodies was left to the several branches, but the designing of all types of chassis was included in the functions of the Motor Transport Corps. Among the duties of the new corps were the design, procurement, storage, maintenance, and replacement of all motor vehicles, though a few weeks later procurement was assigned to the Purchase, Storage, and Traffic Division of the office of the Quartermaster-General, with the proviso, however, that the Motor Transport Corps should prescribe the type and design of the vehicles supplied to it. The corps was thus enabled to insist that it be supplied only with the standardized military truck, the design of which had been achieved by the Motor Transport Service in spite of much opposition and after untiring effort. This arrangement also effectually prevented the purchase and use of vehicles of many different designs and put an end to the complicated and extravagant system of spare parts and supplies inseparable from the use of a multiplicity of types.

I might mention, in passing, that in the spring of 1917, just prior to our entry into the war, the automotive engineers of the United States met in Washington and, putting aside all thought of commercial rivalry or profit, or, indeed, of everything save patriotism, designed a motor-truck which combined the best features of the many trucks which were then being manufactured, placing at the disposal of the government designs and patents that were the result of heavy expenditures of time, money, and talent. This work of standardization was in charge of Mr. Christian Girl, who was probably better fitted for the task than any man in the United States. The result was a standardized military motor-truck which is generally admitted to be the most efficient vehicle of its kind in existence.

The efficiency of any motor-transport service, no matter how well equipped with vehicles, must depend primarily upon the efficiency of its personnel. The finest truck that mechanical genius can design and money can buy can be ruined in a few hours by the carelessness or ignorance of its driver. It was quickly realized, therefore, that, if the Motor Transport Corps was to give efficient service, its officers and men must be as carefully trained as their fellows in the combatant branches of the army. The first real training-school for Motor Transport officers was established by General Pershing in France, its students being recruited mainly from Americans who had gone overseas prior to our entry into the war and had entered the French service as camion and ambulance drivers. These men possessed much practical knowledge, gained in actual warfare, and a large percentage of them were given commissions in the Motor Transport Service of the A. E. F. The chief training-centre in the United States was at Camp Joseph E. Johnston, on the St. John’s River, near Jacksonville, Fla., and a smaller one was later organized at Camp Meigs, in the District of Columbia. Using as a basis of instruction the curriculum adopted by the A. E. F., the officers and men at these camps were given a very thorough course of training in all phases of motor-transport work, including road-training, tactics, maintenance and repair of cars, and a certain amount of infantry drill in order to inculcate discipline. But with the growth of the army increased training facilities became imperative, it being estimated that between 20,000 and 30,000 men per month would be required by the Motor Transport Corps. In fact, requirements from overseas for men for operations up to July 1, 1919, was placed at upward of 231,000 officers and men. In order to train these men and organize them into the proposed units, it was planned to establish motor-transport training-centres at Camp Bowie, Texas; Fort Sheridan, Illinois; Camp Frémont, California; Camp Wheeler, Georgia, and Camp Taylor, Kentucky, which, in conjunction with the schools already in operation at Camp Joseph E. Johnston and Camp Meigs, and other schools which had been established by the Committee of Education and Special Training, would have given a total monthly training capacity of 23,800 men. The signing of the Armistice put an abrupt end to this enormous training programme, but plans have already been perfected for the formation of a Motor Transport Reserve Corps, which, it is believed, will result in providing a large number of officers trained in motor-transport duties and ready for immediate service in the event that the United States should again go to war.

About six weeks before the signing of the Armistice a spectacular campaign was inaugurated in order to obtain for the corps recruits possessing the necessary technical and mechanical training. Officers and civilians were sent to the principal cities in the United States to open recruiting offices, though no funds were appropriated for office rent, clerical hire, supplies, or advertising, each recruiting officer being expected to exercise his ingenuity in procuring all of the above without cost to the government. But thanks to the co-operation and assistance rendered by the local Chambers of Commerce and Boards of Trade, and to the patriotism of the automobile manufacturers and newspapers, the campaign proved, in spite of the lack of funds, a remarkable success, there being received more than 50,000 applications for enlistment.

Shortly after the beginning of hostilities steps were taken toward the establishment of three great motor-transport centres: Camp Holabird, about twenty miles from Baltimore, on the shores of Chesapeake Bay; Camp Jessup, at Atlanta, Ga., and Camp Normoyle. The huge assembly and repair shops erected at these camps are perhaps the most complete plants of their kind in existence, being of permanent construction and adapted to the needs of the army for many years to come. At each of these camps storage facilities have been provided for the vast number of motor vehicles which will not be required under peace conditions, but which will be kept in constant readiness for use in an emergency. Practically all motor vehicles destined for service overseas passed through Camp Holabird, where they were uncrated, assembled, put in thorough running order, inspected, registered, and finally loaded aboard ship for transport to France. During the last summer of the war, when the shipment of motor vehicles was at its height, Camp Holabird was worth journeying a considerable ways to see, there being literally acres of vehicles, ranging all the way from huge artillery repair trucks, veritable machine-shops on wheels, to “flivvers” which unsuccessfully attempted to conceal their identity beneath coats of olive-drab. The paint-shops were, incidentally, one of the most interesting features of the camps, the paint being sprayed on the vehicles by means of air-brushes and a hose in little more time than it takes to tell about it. Thanks to this ingenious method, it did not take very much longer to paint a motor car or a truck than it does to polish a pair of shoes. Then there were the trimming-shops, where tops, curtains, boots, and cushions were turned out by the thousand; the supply depots, whose huge steel and concrete buildings were stacked to the ceilings with incredible quantities of tires, tubes, lamps, and other accessories; the repair-shops, with their forges, lathes, and travelling cranes; and the spare-parts department, where, thanks to a remarkably ingenious card-index system, there could be obtained without confusion or delay any duplicate part that might be called for, whether it was a new rear axle for a mobile repair-shop or a tiny cotter-pin for a motorcycle. Though these great shops had been in operation only a few months when the war ended, and though their personnel had been obtained anywhere, everywhere, almost at a moment’s notice, they were probably, everything considered, the best organized and most efficient plants of their kind in the world.

The Motor Transport Corps naturally resolves itself into two main branches: Park Service and Field Service. The first of these branches is subdivided, in turn, into four general types of parks: Reception, Organization, Replacement, and Repair. The Reception Park was usually established at, or near, a base port for the purpose of receiving motor vehicles for shipment abroad. Here the vehicles were uncrated, assembled, registered, and put in running condition. This done, the vehicle was sent on to an Organization Park, where vehicles and men first met, the latter coming from one of the Motor Transport Corps schools; here the various units were organized, and the personnel and material held in readiness for assignment. The function of a Replacement Park is, as its name signifies, to fill any deficiencies in equipment or personnel. Though this scheme of organization was quite generally adhered to in the A. E. F., each camp in the United States devoted to motor-transport activities may be said to have combined the functions of Reception, Organization, and Replacement Parks under a single head.

The present organization of the Field Service units of the Motor Transport Corps is as follows: the personnel of a motor-transport company consists of a first lieutenant, a second lieutenant, eight sergeants, forty-four privates (ten first-class), and two cooks; the equipment consists of a light open motor-car, a motorcycle with side-car, twenty-nine cargo trucks, including one for light repair and one for company supply, two tank trucks, and a rolling kitchen. A motorcycle company has a first lieutenant, a second lieutenant, six sergeants, a corporal, thirty privates, first-class, and a cook, together with thirty-two motorcycles with side-cars, and two cargo trucks. A headquarters motor command is in charge of a captain, who has two first lieutenants, a second lieutenant, five sergeants, four corporals, and two privates, first-class; the rolling-stock includes two heavy motor-cars, two light closed cars, one light open car, one cargo truck, and two motorcycles with side-cars. Though there are no tables of organization for the larger units of the Motor Transport Corps, a Supply Train is composed of a headquarters motor command and not less than two or more than six motor-transport companies.

So much space has been devoted in the newspapers and magazines to the exploits of the combatant arms of the service that the public has heard little, if anything, of the less spectacular but no less arduous and important work of the men who wore the purple hat-cords of the M. T. C.

It was their endurance and resourcefulness which made possible the transfer by road to the St. Mihiel and Argonne sectors, in nineteen days, of more than half a million men, and this in spite of the unprecedented congestion as a result of the preparations in progress for the great offensives. It was the tireless, iron-hard drivers of the M. T. C. who got forward the food for the men and the food for the guns. It was the despatch-riders of the corps who, jeering at death, delivered the vital messages which were intrusted to them, tearing down the steel-swept, shell-pocked roads at express-train speed on their roaring motorcycles. No mud was too deep, no shell-storm too violent, no road too dangerous to stop the men of the M. T. C. They went wherever their wheels could find traction—and in some places where they could not. They did not possess so much as a bowing acquaintance with either fatigue or fear. They were the newest corps in the army and they made their own traditions. They were as unconventional in their methods of doing things as the old-time army teamster, the stage-coach driver, and the pony-express rider, whose qualities they have inherited and whose lineal descendants they are. When in doubt they stepped on the accelerator, for the motto of the Motor Transport Corps is “_Get There!_”

X

MENDERS OF MEN

Beneath the crest of the British Royal Artillery appears the word “_Ubique_”—“Everywhere.” It is a motto which might more fittingly be applied to the Medical Department of our own army, however, for that corps has its representatives in every branch of the service—on land, afloat, and in the air. It directed the designing and production of our first gas-masks and from it was drawn the nucleus of our original Gas Defense Service. It provided the medical staffs for the hospital ships and for the army transports. By means of the ingenious system of tests which it devised, it selected our flying-men, determined on the form of aviation work for which they were mentally and physically fitted, and, by a system of unceasing observation, kept them constantly in condition to fight the Boche in the skies. It organized an ambulance service which won the admiration of the world. No battery or battalion went into action without its quota of medical officers, who shared all the perils and privations of their comrades of the line and worked longer. Only two units in the American Army were granted by the French the coveted distinction of wearing the _fourragère_: one of them was an Air Service squadron, the other a unit of the Sanitary Corps of the Army Medical Department. Our medical officers were actually the first in the field and the first to sustain wounds; the first American killed after the declaration of war was a medical officer.

A list of the Medical Department’s activities would include the Dental Corps, the Sanitary Corps, the Veterinary Corps, the Nurse Corps; laboratories for the study and prevention of infectious diseases; organizations for the isolation and the special care of the tuberculous, the insane, the victims of war neuroses; convalescent centres and sanatoria; a division of psychology for gauging the mental capabilities of the army’s enlisted personnel; a division of physical reconstruction for the rehabilitation of the sick and wounded; a hospital division which planned and equipped hospitals to meet the constantly increasing needs of the army; a motion-picture industry which enabled the staffs of the various hospitals to see depicted on a screen the latest methods of surgery and medicine and which also illustrated to the soldier the danger of breaking sanitary regulations; the publication of a chain of hospital papers to strengthen the morale of the soldier patients; a system, working in co-operation with the War Risk Insurance Bureau and the Adjutant-General’s Office, designed to expedite the settlement of war claims, and a remarkable statistical classification of the sick and wounded, including a complete medical history of each individual case. To this array of extraordinary activities must be added, of course, the features usual to any well-organized medical department: services of internal medicine and surgery working in the closest harmony in every hospital unit; divisions of head surgery (including eye, ear, nose, and throat), orthopedics, urology, and Roentgenology; and finally that vast organization for the care of the wounded whose operations began with the stretcher-bearers out in No Man’s Land and ended only when the men had passed out of the great general hospitals in the homeland with the wound-chevrons on their sleeves.

When, in the past, we have been suddenly confronted by the necessity of making war, we have had to do our organizing after the beginning of hostilities. And, though the titanic conflict had been in progress for more than two years and a half before we entered it, we ran true to form, being as unprepared for war from a medical standpoint as we were from an ordnance, an artillery, or an aviation, point of view. Barring the superficial experience gained by some of our medical officers during the mobilization on the Mexican border, our medical preparations were all made after war had been declared. This unpreparedness was not the fault of the heads of the Medical Department, mind you; it was not due to carelessness or lack of foresight, but was, instead, the logical result of a deliberate policy of those who held that to be prepared for war was to invite war. When the war-cloud broke, it became necessary, therefore, to build overnight, and virtually from the ground up, a mammoth and highly complex organization. When war was declared, the Medical Department, including the Medical Corps, the Dental Corps, the Veterinary Corps, and their respective reserves, had barely 700 commissioned officers on duty in the United States and its possessions. Though the regular Medical Corps included many officers whose achievements had contributed very largely to the prevention of disease and the amelioration of suffering in all parts of the world—it has been said of former Surgeon-General Gorgas that he “made the Canal possible and the tropics habitable”—and though these officers were skilled in preventive medicine, field sanitation, and other phases of the work of the army surgeon, there was, after all, only a handful of them. It became necessary, therefore, to provide, on the instant, not only for an enormously augmented personnel but also for new and unconsidered conditions. An ambulance service had to be organized and vehicles for it had to be designed and manufactured; hospital trains had to be built—there was only one in the United States when the war began; antiseptic methods in field surgery had to be devised as a substitute for the complete surgical cleanliness possible only under peace conditions; a system had to be devised and put in operation which would insure the prompt collection of the wounded on the battle-field and their rapid evacuation; measures had to be taken for the reconstruction of the severely wounded and their training for future efficiency in civil life.