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 that eleven o’clock a.m. that day, French time, an armistice with Germany had gone into effect. No message more momentous had ever come to the American War Department. The World War was at an end. It was peace. It was victory.

Over there on that American front which had penetrated the supposedly impregnable Argonne and now commanded the enemy’s main line of communications at Sedan, boys in our own khaki wriggled, charged, fought, plunged ahead all the morning, like the players of some mighty football team gaining every inch of advance possible before an intermission; and finally, as the whistles shrilled and the great silence fell at last upon a theatre that had shaken and roared with the thunder of war for more than four years, they set their heels into the turf of a line that was to be held as a starting-off place if the armistice, too, should prove to be only an intermission and a period of recuperation.

Behind these outpost men were the American Expeditionary Forces, two million strong. Behind the A. E. F. in America was a training and maintenance army nearly as numerous.

Behind the uniformed and organized Army as it existed on the eleventh day of November was another force of a quarter of a million men, technically under arms. These were Selective Service men, drafted men, entraining that day and adding themselves to the human flood sweeping on toward Germany. In number this force alone was larger than any ever previously enrolled at one time in the American military service, except the forces called to the colors during the Civil War; yet so expanded had become our values that they attracted only passing attention in the midst of larger war activities. These inductives were one more increment—that was all.

And behind the Army itself were twenty-five million American men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, registered, classified, and numbered in the order in which they too in turn should join the current that led, if necessary, to the supreme sacrifice.

The foundation on which rested this human edifice was industrial. Nothing less than the whole of America’s material resources had been pledged to the end of victory. The whole of America’s resources! How inadequately could pigmy man realize their might before he took them all and formed and molded them into one single-purpose machine! That machine was born in travail that broke men’s bodies and reputations, that threw down the mighty from their seats and exalted those of low degree, that moved inexorably but surely. And when the machine was built it released forces terrifying even to men accustomed to administering the greatest of human activities, forces well-nigh ungovernable.

It took seven million workers, men and women, to operate the war industrial machine—seven million Americans delving in the earth for ores, chemicals, and fuels, felling the forests, quarrying the rocks, carrying the raw materials to the mills, tending the fires and the furnaces, operating the cranes, guiding the finishing machinery with a precision never before demanded, slaughtering the beeves, curing the meat, packing the vegetables, weaving the fabrics, fashioning the garments, transporting all, and accomplishing the million separate tasks necessary to the munitioning of the Army.

And as a background to all this, behind both the military and the industrial armies, was another force, perhaps the greatest force of all—the will of the people themselves, of one hundred million Americans who, without the coercion and duress of law and as a purely voluntary act, denied their appetites, their pleasures, and their vanities, contributed their utmost to the war finances, made war gardens to add to the food supply, produced millions of articles for the comfort of the soldiers both well and wounded, and in one way or another put forth effort that did not flag until victory came.

Such was America in a war that truly threatened her existence—America invincible.

The armistice put an end to all this enterprise and effort. It did more—the armistice was a command to the Government to scrap the war machine and restore its parts to the peaceful order in which they had been found. In military law, an armistice denotes the temporary cessation of hostilities; but the armistice of 1918 was a finality. Its terms destroyed the German military power. Those in authority, aware that the armistice was to be no period of waiting with collected forces for the outcome of negotiations, did not pause even to survey the magnitude of the thing they had built: they turned immediately to the task of dismantling it. Some of the processes of demobilization began before the guns ceased to fire. Five days before the armistice the A. E. F. canceled many of the foreign orders for important supplies. On November 1 we stopped sending combatant troops to France. In late October the Ordnance Department created an organization for demobilizing war industry.

However, before the machine could be knocked down and its parts distributed, it had to be stopped. There are two ways of stopping the limited express. One is to throw a switch ahead of it—effective, but disastrous to the train. The other way is to put on the brakes.

The war-industry machine had attained a momentum almost beyond mundane comparisons. Slow in gaining headway, like any other great mass, as thousands added their brains and their muscles to its progress it gathered speed until, at the first day of the armistice, it was nearing the point at which it could consume the material resources and turn them out as finished war products up to the capacity of American mechanical skill and machinery to handle them. It had not quite reached that point. Many of the vital but easily manufactured supplies had long since reached the pinnacles of their production curves, but some of the more difficult ones were not yet in full manufacture. On Armistice Day, however, the industry was not more than six months away from the planned limit of its fecundity.

For the administration of the industrial enterprise the task ahead was first to bring that momentum to a halt and then to break up the machine. The easiest way was to throw a switch ahead of it—in other words, to issue a blanket stop-order on all military manufacturing projects. But to have done that would have been to court consequences as disastrous as those of war itself. Business and industry would have fallen into chaos and the country would have been filled with jobless men. The other way, the way chosen, was to apply the brakes to the thousands of wheels.

The magnitude of the task ahead was appalling. The liquidation of the war industry was seen to be a matter as complex, as intricate, as full of the possibilities of error and failure as the mobilization itself. In only one respect did demobilization begin with an advantage: there was at hand an organization, the organization which had administered the creation of the Army and the manufacture of its supplies, ready to be turned into a wrecking crew.

Balanced against this situation was the countering fact that the men of this organization were war weary. Ahead of them were none of the conspicuous rewards that follow conspicuous war service. The nation does not award medals and other honors to those who restore the conditions of peace. The people themselves were satiated with war and desired nothing so much as a space in which they could forget battles and campaigns. At best, demobilization was to be a thankless job. Moreover, many of the executives, particularly those in the industrial organization, were men of large personal affairs, serving their country at a sacrifice. For the most part they were disheartened men, denied the satisfaction of seeing the full fruition of their plans have its effect against a hateful enemy. Every interest of personal gain called to them after the armistice to desert their official posts and return to the satisfactions of private endeavor, and only the righteous sense of their duty to the nation held them in the organization.

It was necessary for the organization not only to remain intact, but to speed the activities of demobilization as it had sped those of mobilization. The pre-armistice spirit had in some way to be maintained. On November 11 the war was costing the United States about $50,000,000 a day. Every day of indecision in adopting the plan of demobilization and every day’s delay in carrying out the plan added tremendously to the burden of taxation that would rest upon the nation for generations to come.

Demobilization meant, first of all, the disbanding of the American Army. Whatever economic considerations might graduate the termination of war industry, no such considerations were to be permitted to retard the homeward progress of the troops. Four million American homes demanded their men at once; and whether the immediate return of the troops meant unemployment and distress or not, the Government was determined to comply with the demand.

The creation of the Army and its movement toward France had involved the rail transportation of about 8,000,000 soldiers in special cars and trains. The home movement would require an operation almost as great. Of the 2,000,000 men of the American Expeditionary Forces, more than half had crossed the ocean in foreign ships, all of which, of course, were withdrawn from our service immediately after the armistice. The unbroken eastward transatlantic procession of troopships had continued for about fourteen months. On the first day of the armistice the transatlantic ferrying capacity of the American-flag troopships was not much in excess of 100,000 men a month. Moreover, practically all our troop transports had reached the point of having to be laid up for reconditioning. Assuming, however, that they could be kept in continuous operation, they could not bring back to America more than two-thirds of the troops in the time it had taken the whole A. E. F. to cross to France. Yet the problem of demobilization was to repatriate the A. E. F. in that time at most.

Demobilization involved a final cash settlement with everyone of the four million men under arms; computations of back pay, complicated as they were with allotments and payments for government war bonds and the war risk insurance; and, finally, the payment to each soldier of the sixty-dollar bonus voted by the Congress. Demobilization also included the care of the wounded for many months after the fighting ceased, their physical and mental reconstruction, and their reëducation to enable them to take useful places in the world.

On the industrial side demobilization was the liquidation of a business whose commitments had reached the staggering total of $35,000,000,000. Demobilization meant taking practically the entire industrial structure of the United States, which had become one vast munitions plant, and converting it again into an instrumentality for producing the commodities of peaceful commerce. This without stopping an essential wheel, and also in the briefest possible time, for the world was in sore need of these products. Efficient demobilization, it follows, would permit the 7,000,000 industrial war workers to turn without a break in employment from the production of war supplies to that of peace supplies.

At the base of modern business stability lies the inviolability of contracts. He who breaches a contract must expect to pay indemnity, and the Government cannot except itself from this rule. Demobilization meant the suspension and termination of war contracts running into billions in value, many of them without a scrap of paper to show as a written instrument; it meant termination without laying the Government open to the payment of damages, and therefore it implied the honorable adjustment of the claims of the contractors.

One of the conditions on which complete demobilization depended was the adoption of a future military policy for the United States. But this was in the hands, not of the military organization, but of Congress. The whole program, therefore, could not be put through until Congress had acted. After the policy was defined, then it became the duty of the demobilization forces to choose and store safely the reserve equipment for the permanent establishment and for the field use of a possible future combatant force until another war industry could be brought into existence.

When that had been done there would remain a surplus of military property. It thereupon became the function of demobilization to dispose of this property through a sales organization that would have in its stocks goods of a greater variety and value than those at the disposal of any private sales agency in the United States. This branch of the work also included the sale of great quantities of A. E. F. supplies in Europe, which was already glutted with the surpluses of its own armies. The sales at home must include the sale of hundreds of buildings put up for the war establishment.

Paradoxically, demobilization included the acquirement of large quantities of real estate—for the storage of reserve supplies and the creation of a physical plant for the permanent military establishment.

Finally, demobilization meant the delicate business of striking a cash balance that would terminate our relations with the Allies, meeting their claims against us for the supply of materials and for the use and destruction of private property abroad, and pressing our own claims against them for materials sold to them.

The astonishing thing was the swiftness with which this great program was carried through. Within a year after the last gun was fired America had returned to the normal. The whole A. E. F. had been brought back in American vessels in ten months. In that time practically the entire Army had been paid off, disbanded, and transported to its homes. War businesses were braked to a standstill in an average time of three months, without a single industrial disturbance of any consequence. At the end of the year the greater part of the manufacturers’ claims had been satisfied with compromises fair both to the contractors and to the Government. The savings in contract terminations and adjustments had run into billions of dollars. A blanket settlement had been made with the Allies, thus virtually closing up our business in Europe. A permanent military policy had been written into law. The storage buildings and spaces were filled with reserve materials inventoried, catalogued, and protected against deterioration. Packed away compactly were the tools and machinery of an embryonic war industry ready to be expanded at will in the event of another war. Materials, largely of special war value and therefore normally to be regarded as scrap and junk, had been sold to the tune of billions, the exercise of ingenuity in the sales department producing a recovery that was remarkably large, averaging 64 per cent of the war cost.

Such was our war demobilization. No other single business enterprise in all human history compared with it in magnitude; yet, in the midst of the peace negotiations and amid the economic crises fretting the earth, it attracted scant notice. To-day, only the continuing sale of surplus war materials and the adjudication of the last and most difficult of the industrial claims give evidence of the enterprise which engaged the efforts of the whole nation so short a time ago.