Demobilization

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 still being sold and the final settlements of the more difficult claims are still being made. Still, we can arrive at a fair approximation of what the war cost the War Department alone. In doing so we must deal with billions of dollars in our columns, and therefore errors and differences of a few millions, or even of a few hundred millions, have no important effect upon the totals. Even if all costs and credits could be figured out to the penny, the result would not be much unlike the estimates which follow.

As a starting point we can take the appropriations for the Army made by Congress, since all the war costs of the War Department must be included within those appropriations. And we find that for the Army Congress appropriated in all, for every war purpose, the sum of $24,373,274,223.67. But not all these appropriations were expended. Some were made late in the war, and none of the money authorized by these acts to be spent was even obligated before the armistice terminated all proposed new projects. Congress hastened to repeal the untouched appropriations, and the various repeal acts canceled authorizations to the amount of $7,703,448,569.36. Therefore, the net amount made available to the War Department by the war appropriations was $16,669,825,654.31.

This figure still does not represent the gross war cost of maintaining the War Department, but it is close to it. Since final expenditures and reimbursements have not yet been determined, but are still growing, as claims are paid and surplus property is sold, it is necessary that we accept a date somewhere and examine the ledger on that day, and from this examination we may be able to estimate closely the final figures. The date chosen here is April 17, 1920,—a day far enough this side of the armistice to bring the figures fairly close to their ultimate and conclusive form. By that day the Army was almost completely demobilized, the liquidation of the Army’s foreign affairs was virtually complete, the demobilization of the domestic war industry was approaching the end, and the greater part of the surplus war supplies had been sold.

On April 17, 1920, then, we find that the actual expenditures of the War Department had reached the total of $16,276,288,337.19. This was within $400,000,000 of the net war appropriations, the difference, of course, being in the Treasury as unexpended balances available to those paying the final war bills of the War Department. Yet this expenditure cannot be labeled the cash cost of the war to the Army. We must first make several large deductions for money derived from sales of materials and, especially, for the property on hand set aside for the permanent Army and for the military readiness of the United States.

The foreign liquidation, as we have seen, recovered into the Treasury approximately $757,000,000. On April 17, 1920, the sales of military property in the United States had brought in the sum of $641,261,000. Transfers of army property for use by other departments of the Government—a proper credit—involved materials valued at $42,096,000. On the date selected there still remained in the United States surplus, but unsold, army property valued at $600,000,000. The average recovery from the sale of surplus within the United States was about 75 per cent of the cost. Assuming that this ratio would hold throughout the entire liquidation, we can anticipate a cash recovery of $450,000,000 from the surplus still existing on April 17, 1920.16

These reimbursements, however, even in the aggregate, constitute a minor credit when compared with the value of the equipment left by the war enterprise to be the inheritance of the permanent establishment and to be insurance of the continued safety of the United States in a world not yet willing to lay down its arms. The property of the War Department at the beginning of the war with Germany was estimated to be worth $500,000,000. At the end of the demobilization the property of the War Department was worth, at a rough estimate, $6,000,000,000. It is evident, therefore, that this increment in value—$5,500,000,000—represents present useful property, and that it must be subtracted from the expenditures in order to arrive at the net cost of the war itself. This valuation of property on hand, incidentally, does not include the value of real estate and buildings acquired during the war and retained in use afterwards, since it has never been fully determined as yet which of these installations will be kept.

The deductions, then, on account of sales and on account of property retained, amount to $7,390,000,000, and this is the gross credit on the war page of the army ledger. To find the net cost of the war proper, we must subtract this from the gross expenditures, and we must do this roughly; because with transactions so large, indefinite, and complicated, it becomes absurd to reduce the figures to cents or even to thousands of dollars. The rough subtraction gives us the figure $8,885,000,000, which is not many millions away from the actual net cost. This, of course, represents cost to the War Department alone. It does not include the Navy’s costs, nor those of the United States Shipping Board, nor of the United States Railroad Administration, nor any costs of other great and expensive war enterprises which properly must be added in to give the full score of the cost of the war to the United States.

This net cost, this sum of $8,885,000,000, represents what the Government paid in transporting the 4,000,000 men of the Army, in feeding them, clothing them, and providing them with all other sorts of expendable supplies which they actually consumed, and in paying the troops their wages. The supply cost, of course, includes the cost of the industrial liquidation after the armistice and the losses from the shrinkages and wastes of war. The whole bill comes out at about $2,200 a man.

This, too, is but the direct cash cost, the cost in money. The intangible costs, which are never brought into a tabulation of this kind, are, after all, the true costs of war. They include the 50,000 American soldiers killed in battle in Europe. They include also the 200,000 Americans who were wounded in the fighting—some of them still, two and a half years after the armistice, in hospitals and thousands of them facing life with permanently impaired bodies. These usually unreckoned costs, too, include the 57,000 who died of disease or accident while in the service.

But beyond these losses of life there were other profound penalties which the people paid and are still paying. These, too, must be set down to the account of war in any complete reckoning. One of them was the greatly increased cost of almost everything necessary to sustain life and render it pleasant, including particularly an increase of rentals, bringing with it, as a natural consequence, the overcrowding of living quarters, to the detriment of the health of those existing in such conditions. The high costs of living are aggravated by the special war taxes laid everywhere, taxes which, in one form or another, must be imposed for many years to come in order to pay for the losses of the war.

There were, moreover, spiritual losses—an incredible moral slump from the national exaltation of the war to the bickering and bitterness of the demobilization. Governments fell as the war-ridden peoples of the earth blindly and brutishly vented their spleen and irritation for the hardships they had experienced upon those who chanced to be in power. Erstwhile statesmanship lapsed into a narrow, advantage-seeking partizanship that regarded not, it sometimes seemed in this country, even the fate of the world. The United States turned its back upon the League of Nations, which was the most ambitious attempt ever made by the nations of the earth to substitute a rule of reason for the rule of force.

But if we recite these and other intangible and indirect costs that might be named, then we are equally justified in looking for the benefits derived from our participation in the war; and we find these benefits to be great ones. First of all, we gained the victory; and that alone, and especially so because the cause of America was righteous, was worth all it cost in blood and money and burdens shouldered for the future. We gained, moreover, a state of preparedness for war that would have been impossible of attainment under any other circumstances. In the reserves of supplies we have equipment ready to arm 1,000,000 men as rapidly as they can take the field. In the reserves of machinery we have a potential war industry capable of maintaining such an army until industry generally can take up the manufacture of munitions. Not again during the existence of the present generation should we, if the emergency came, have to experience the uncertainties and delays of 1917 in the production of supplies. We have within our war reserves the machinery and the materials for producing all the more difficult sorts of munitions, and we have, moreover, preserved records of how to produce them.

Then, again, the health of the nation has presumably gained a benefit from the experience. Hundreds of thousands of young men were removed from sedentary occupations and placed in the vigorous, ordered, athletic regimen of camp life. Several months of this, on the average, did not fail to have its effect, and the medical records of the Army showed a marked increase in the average weight of soldiers during the war. Akin to this consideration is the fact that men were picked up from farms, villages, and city neighborhoods and transported to distant parts of the earth. This travel broadened thousands of them, quickened their ambition, and strengthened their life purposes. Moreover, the men of the Army were thoroughly mixed in the ranks and services. The boy from Maine fraternized with the one from Arizona, and Illinois and Virginia sent their sons to be comrades. Sectional, national, and even racial lines disappeared in the ranks. This extensive regional interacquaintanceship is to-day a national asset. The infiltration of 4,000,000 men who secured these individual benefits into the civilian life of America is calculated to elevate the physical, mental, and moral tone of the whole nation and to improve America’s homogeneity.

Other benefits might be named. The principle of selective military service has been established by the precedent set in the World War. As long as that experience is remembered there will be no danger that America would ever return, in any serious emergency, to the unscientific volunteer system that takes the brave and the enterprising and leaves behind the indolent and timorous. Above all, we must count as gain from the war the confirmation it gave us in our faith in our ability to continue our existence as a nation. The experience demonstrated that our national resources include not only valor in arms in boundless quantity, but also the ability to organize effectively a nation as great as ours for a purpose as complicated as modern war has come to be. The experience in 1917 and 1918 gave us a firm foundation for national self-confidence.

These are all benefits and gains which may properly be set off against the intangible costs of the war. Among the benefits secured, however, is not yet one which we might, in 1917 and 1918, have expected to find there. The American host which crossed to France went, almost to a man, uplifted and made heroic by the feeling that it was an army of crusaders fighting to end wars forever. No mere instinct of self-preservation, no simple prospect of a victory over a strange, foreign enemy in gray uniforms, could have inspired the morale of the American Expeditionary Forces, nor yet that of the forces in training in the United States, nor that of American industry in its eager, headlong devotion to the national undertaking. This was to be Armageddon, the last of wars, the war to make safe the unwarlike peoples of the world; and no cynical dictum that man is still too near his neolithic savagery to rely on anything other than might in his international contentions, no Chauvinistic picture of new migrations of Asiatic hordes, can change the fundamental fact that America went to war in the belief that its chiefest object was to end war forever. Until we have made some national attempt to secure that benefit, the page will not balance.