Demobilization

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 conclusion of permanent peace, General Frank T. Hines, the Chief of the Embarkation Service, which had administered the great work of transporting the 2,000,000 men of the A. E. F. to France and had carried nearly half of them across the ocean in its own ships, placed before the Secretary of War a plan for the return of the troops.

It can be said that the outlook for the speedy repatriation of the overseas soldiers was not bright. It had taken nearly seventeen months to transport the expedition to Europe, and more than half of the men had crossed in the ships of other nations. England had been the chief contributor of tonnage to our overseas movement prior to November 11. To build up on the western front the numerical superiority that was the chief factor in the victory, the British Empire combed the seas for suitable passenger ships, cut her own civilian requirements to the minimum, and devoted to our transport service every ton of troop-carrying capacity she could procure. France and Italy had each supplied a few vessels.

With the immense fleet thus assembled the War Department transported men across the Atlantic with an intense concentration of effort never before known. First in the determination that the Germans should not conquer, later in the assurance that we ourselves should win, the Department shipped the troops over with scarcely a thought of how they were going to get back again. Future events were to be allowed to take care of themselves.

Now such events had come to pass. England, faced with the sudden necessity of returning her own colonial soldiers to their native lands, and looking ahead, too, to the restoration of her all-important foreign commerce, immediately withdrew her tonnage from our service. France and Italy did likewise. The magnificent “bridge of ships” on which the American Expedition had crossed the Atlantic melted away, and 2,000,000 Americans found themselves partially marooned in a strange land.

Yet not completely marooned. The fleet of American-flag troopships assembled during the war had on the day of the armistice a one-trip capacity of 112,000 military passengers. Operated in armed and guarded convoys, this shipping could not quite average one round-trip transatlantic voyage a month; its transporting capacity under war conditions was somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 troops a month. The armistice did away with the need of steaming in convoy and allowed the transports to be operated by the much more efficient system of individual sailings. Under such conditions the monthly capacity of the American-flag fleet was about 150,000 men. This capacity was to be discounted somewhat by the fact that practically all of the vessels had reached a point of having to be retired for a season of reconditioning and repair. It was evident that, unless this fleet were aided, it would take it, under the most favorable conditions, over a year to bring home the A. E. F.; and it was likelier that, actually, the spring of 1920 would be at hand before the last of the overseas soldiers set foot once more on their native soil. General Hines’s plan provided for such aid. It discounted in advance the subsequent fact that the Allies withdrew their passenger ships, and turned to our own resources for increased transport capacity.

It appeared that we should have considerable tonnage available for such use—tonnage released by the armistice from other service. For one source, there was the Navy. Its battleships and cruisers variously had been protecting the coast, convoying transports, and holding themselves ready in the combined Grand Fleet to meet the expected German naval attack in force. These duties had come to an end. The Hines plan contemplated the temporary conversion of a number of war vessels into troop carriers by the installation of berths and messing accommodations. Although all foreign tonnage was to be withdrawn at once, the Transportation Service hoped to secure some additional capacity by chartering passenger vessels from foreign owners under new arrangements.

The most promising source of new capacity, however, lay in the fleet of army cargo transports which, on the day of the armistice, represented about 2,500,000 deadweight tonnage2 in the aggregate. The armistice immediately rendered a great part of this tonnage no longer necessary to the Government in the maintenance of a vast overseas supply service. The A. E. F. was thereafter to exist on a garrison basis, requiring only the ordinary garrison supplies of food and clothing. The great cargoes of ordnance and aircraft, of raw steel and semi-finished materials for the French and English munitions plants, of horses and mules, of railway and engineering supplies—the tonnage which had laden the cargo fleet in the past and had heaped up at the Atlantic terminals—were to cross the ocean no more. It was proposed to take the best of the cargo transports and convert them immediately into troopships.

The War Department adopted the entire plan, and the first act of the Transportation Service was to begin a survey of the cargo fleet to determine what vessels were most suitable for conversion. Only the larger and faster boats would serve, and of course they had to be ships with holds adapted to the installation of troop quarters. Specialized vessels, such as tankers and ore carriers, would not do.

For the Transportation Service the armistice was but an episode. It merely changed the character of its work and added to the volume of it. The peak of the operations curve, so far as troop transportation was concerned, was not reached until eight months after the armistice had been in effect. The thousands of troops in the Transportation Service yearned for discharge and home as ardently as did the rest of the Army; yet these men realized that it would be months before their work could end. Meanwhile they would have to see hundreds of thousands proceeding to demobilization camps as rapidly as steamships and trains could carry them, with never a thought of the transportation men who had made their early discharge possible.

The resulting drop in morale was one difficulty which the Transportation Service faced at the outset of its labors in demobilization, but one which it met and solved successfully. Another more concrete one had to do with the operation of troopships. Early in the war the Army had turned over to the Navy the task of operating most of the troopships at sea, principally because the military authorities found themselves unable to compete with the high wages of the munitions industries in securing civilian crews for vessels. The Navy, with the uniform it offered and its appeal to patriotism, had no such trouble; and consequently it assumed the operation of the troop transports and manned them with bluejackets. These young Americans enlisted for danger and adventure and had no stomach for the work of operating a collection of prosaic ferry-boats across the now safe Atlantic. The Navy Department, seeing that it could not hold them in service, notified the War Department to take back its ships. This the Transportation Service did, hiring civilian crews and placing them aboard the troop transports at a rate that relieved the Navy of the work entirely by the summer of 1919, except that the Navy continued to operate three or four troopships with crews made up of men serving under term enlistments.

While the Transportation Service was contemplating the conversion of many of its cargo carriers into troopships and the consequent use of the vessels for a number of months to come, it was subjected to pressure from the owners of some of these same ships, who demanded that the Government give them up. Practically all of its cargo tonnage the Army held under charter from private ownership, the charters running during the emergency. After the armistice the vessel owners naturally desired to get back into the race for foreign commerce. It was to the interest of the United States that the military tonnage be so employed at the earliest possible time, but the early return of the overseas expedition was even more important, and it received the priority.

Another obstacle in the way of carrying out the Service’s demobilization plan swiftly and efficiently was the congested condition of the American shipyards, practically all of which were engaged to the limits of their capacities in new construction for the Emergency Fleet Corporation. This congestion not only hampered the project to convert the cargo vessels into troop carriers, but it also strung out the necessary work of overhauling the regular troop transports already in commission. For over a year these vessels had been driven mercilessly through fair weather and foul, with never a let-up for the general repairing and reconditioning which every ship needs at intervals. Large forces had been carried on all of them as part of the crews to keep the vessels going somehow by making emergency repairs whenever needed. Only conditions as they existed before the armistice warranted such abuse. The armistice occurred opportunely for most of these vessels, and particularly for the ex-German liners. War or no war, they had about reached the point where they had to be drydocked, regardless of the effect upon the overseas movement. After the armistice it would have been folly to set this tonnage at another great task without first putting it in good condition. To do the work the Transportation Service had at its disposal only its own repair yards at New York and the drydock and ship repair yard of the Newport News Shipbuilding Company. Because of this limitation the shipping was tied up longer than would normally have been necessary.

The survey conducted by the Transportation Service immediately after the armistice designated fifty-eight cargo transports for conversion. They were the largest vessels of the cargo fleet, and conversion equipped them to carry, on the average, 2,500 troops on each. Thus the project added 125,000 accommodations to the trip capacity of the troop-carrying fleet as it existed on the day of the armistice—more than doubling it in size. By December 13 the survey was complete and the marine architects were drawing the conversion specifications for the individual vessels; and on that day the Service awarded the first of the contracts, that for converting the Buford (which later carried the exported radicals to Russia and gained fame as the “Soviet Ark”). The cost of remodeling the Buford was $70,000, and the contractor completed the work in twenty-eight days. By the end of the year twenty conversion contracts had been placed. Others followed at intervals until April 29, 1919, when the last of them was signed. Before June 1 all fifty-eight ships were in service as troopships.

In spite of adverse conditions in industry the ship contractors made extraordinarily good time in remodeling these vessels. Such conversion was practically a rebuilding job. It meant tearing out practically the entire interiors of the hulls and rebuilding to provide troop quarters, galleys, mess rooms, and sanitary facilities. The average time for completing this work was forty-one days and the average cost was more than $161,000. The total cost was about $9,000,000.

It will be seen that the project, because of its expense if on no other account, was a bold step for the Transportation Service to take. The cost of conversion per passenger accommodated was about $72—more than the cost of a single steerage passage across the Atlantic on a commercial liner. Looked at in a broader way, however, the expenditure of the $9,000,000 was really an economy, for it enabled the Government to bring home and discharge several hundred thousand soldiers weeks and even months sooner than would otherwise have been possible.

This single act of converting the cargo transports into troop carriers did more than any other one thing to expedite the return of the A. E. F.; yet the aggressiveness of the Transportation Service did not end there. Under the terms of the peace treaty Germany agreed to turn over to the Allies under charter most of the remnant of her formerly great passenger-carrying merchant fleet. For nearly five years these vessels had swung at their moorings in German harbors and rivers. At her pier in the river Elbe was the Imperator, the largest ship in the world, exceeding in size her sister ship Vaterland, which had become the U. S. Transport Leviathan. The Allied Maritime Transport Council, which had allocated world tonnage in the struggle against the submarine, decided to divide this fresh German tonnage equally between Great Britain and the United States, giving us all the larger vessels because we possessed harbors that could accommodate them. The smaller ships England was to use in repatriating her Australian troops.

General Hines, the chief of our Transportation Service, took part in the proceedings in London, securing from the Council ten large German vessels. At once a U. S. navy board, headed by Admiral Benson, chief of the Bureau of Operations during the great struggle, went to Germany to put the allotted ships in condition for service. Repairs were quickly made, and presently all ten ships, propelled by machinery unfamiliar to American sailors, sailed out of the German harbors and into the harbor at Brest, manned from bridges to firing rooms by Yankee bluejackets and their officers.

From the London conference General Hines went to see various shipping concerns in European Allied and neutral countries and secured by charter thirty-three passenger ships in all—thirteen from Italian owners, twelve from Spanish and Dutch ownership, and eight from French interests.

Long before this event the Navy had taken fourteen of its battleships and ten armored cruisers and by the installation of berths and other accommodations had turned them into passenger boats capable of carrying 28,600 troops at once. These vessels added to the homeward movement more than a division of troops a month.

Thus was the Atlantic rebridged after the armistice and with a structure even broader and more capacious than the one on which the expedition had crossed to France. On June 23, 1919, the troopship fleet reached its greatest expansion. On that day it consisted of 174 vessels with trip accommodations for 419,000 troops. It could have transported the entire A. E. F. in five trips, with room to spare. It was greater in capacity than the combined facilities at our disposal before the armistice, yet practically all of it sailed under the Stars and Stripes. In number of ships it was four times as large as the troop fleet which the Army held in charter and ownership on November 11. It outnumbered by forty vessels the combined fleet both of American and of Allied troopships at our disposal before the armistice. Yet on the day of the armistice we seemed to have exhausted the possibilities of ocean shipping!

Always courageous and swift in action, the Transportation Service was one of the first of the war department bureaus to anticipate the armistice and the consequent demobilization. On November 1, ten days ahead of the armistice, upon the confidential intelligence that the German Government had ordered its fleet out to give battle to the Grand Fleet of the Allies, and further assured that the defeat of Germany on land was in sight, the Transportation Service stopped the overseas movement of all combat troops. Primarily this action was taken to avoid a disaster to our troop transports, a disaster almost bound to occur if in the expected forthcoming naval engagement any of the German warships were by chance able to slip through the Allied cordon and reach the Atlantic. After the armistice the anticipatory act of the Transportation Service proved to be of material benefit in demobilization, for it had kept away from France at least four divisions of troops, diminishing by so much the work of bringing back the expedition.

On the fifth day of the armistice General Pershing named thirty divisions that were to conduct the advance of the Army of Occupation to the Rhine and hold open the communications, designated the supply troops to support the divisions, and released the rest of the Expeditionary Forces for return to the United States as soon as transportation facilities could be provided. This order freed nearly half the expedition for demobilization. A million men were thus ready to return home at once.

While the authorities in France were preparing for the embarkation to come, there was at hand a job in overseas transportation to which the Transportation Service could turn with such troopships as were available for immediate use. In England on the day of the armistice there were stationed more than 70,000 American soldiers, most of them members of the air service squadrons undergoing training in the British aviation camps. Their embarkation through the large British seaports offered no particular difficulty. On our own regular transports and in such space as the Army could secure on British commercial liners, this whole force was set down in the United States within six weeks after the armistice began.

The embarkation of the A. E. F. in France may be said to have started about the middle of December, simultaneously with the appearance of the order establishing the three embarkation ports and the embarkation area at Le Mans. From then on week by week the embarkations of home-coming troops steadily increased in number. In January the first of the converted cargo transports joined the troopship fleet. A little later some of the chartered foreign tonnage appeared in the service. About that time, too, the Navy began adding its increment of war vessels fitted out as troop carriers. In the late spring we secured the German tonnage. In June, 1919, the American troop sailings reached a maximum never before attained in any military or civilian movement. In that month 368,300 American soldiers embarked on transports in France, and 343,600 landed on American soil. The movement exceeded by 60,000 men that of the greatest month in the transport of the A. E. F. to France. In taking the forces to France we had been assisted by the merchant marines of the principal Allies to the limit of their combined capacities, but we brought back the expedition single-handed.

This great record was made possible not only by the utilization of all tonnage that could be adapted to such service, but also by the operation of the shipping at its highest efficiency. The drop in morale among the personnel of the Transportation Service in the first disheartening weeks of the armistice was soon offset by the spirit of the transportation men in early 1919 when they realized the great value of the service they were rendering to their comrades of the expedition and to the country at large. When it bore into their consciousness that they were exceeding all expectations in delivering troops from France to the United States, they fell to with a spirit unexcelled even in the days when every soldier set down in France was so much added insurance of a speedy end to the war. Ship vied with ship to cut down steaming time, and the ports competed with each other in dispatching vessels to sea.

Under such circumstances all records for shipping efficiency fell. In 1918, with every energy bent upon the attainment of maximum efficiency, the average turn-around, or round voyage across the ocean and back, of the American troop transports was something over 36 days. In 1919 during the return movement it dropped to 32.6 days.

The oil-burning transport Great Northern, which was bought outright by the War Department in the spring of 1918, proved to be the fleetest thing that ever plied the Atlantic. Leaving Hoboken on June 24, 1919, with a few passengers, a few days later she landed them at Brest, took on 2,999 troops by moonlight, and recrossed to Hoboken—all within twelve days, five hours, and thirty minutes. No other vessel, military or commercial, ever equaled this speed. The Great Northern also established the record of eighteen transatlantic cycles at the average rate of twenty-three days for each; and in the whole war enterprise she transported more troops per ton of capacity than did any other troopship. She was closely crowded for honors, however, by her sister ship Northern Pacific.

The vessels alone could not write such records except through the coöperation of the port organizations on both sides of the Atlantic. Before the armistice the capacities of the ports, especially of those in France, were a sharper limitation upon the expansion of American power at the front than was the shortage in ocean shipping. After the armistice the improvement in shipping efficiency was attained largely by speeding up the loading and unloading of transports in port. On May 17 the transport Maui at Brest took aboard 3,612 troops and sailed for America in three hours and thirty-five minutes after arriving. These soldiers had to be carried out to her in lighters, and they boarded her at the rate of sixty-five a minute. On the same day the transport Cape May, one of the converted cargo vessels, arrived at Bordeaux and sailed on the same tide with a load of 1,928 troops, having been dispatched in one hour and nineteen minutes. These were extreme instances, but they were indicative of the efficiency of the port machinery.

At first the Transportation Service would fix no schedule for the return of the expedition, except the general one that it hoped to bring back the last man before January 1, 1920. By the beginning of spring, 1919, the situation looked so much better that the Service brought out a schedule showing the probable troop-carrying capacity available in the French ports by months, and estimating this capacity for several months ahead. The schedule promised a gradual increase until the shipping reached a goal of 250,000 embarkations a month. On the basis of this schedule the command of the A. E. F. fixed priorities for embarkation and published both the schedule and priority dates, to the excitement of the men of the expedition, most of whom were then still in France. To be sure, the authorities promised nothing definitely and informed the soldiers that the schedule would be met “if practicable”; yet the men of the A. E. F. banked on the Transportation Service to fulfill its predictions.

The goal of 250,000 embarkations a month was the extreme maximum which the Service thought it might attain if everything went right. Yet three months later, when embarkations approached 400,000, the goal had been passed by 50 per cent. The actual performance brought 300,000 overseas soldiers home two months ahead of schedule, and 300,000 others beat the schedule by one month. Here was the equivalent of 900,000 men returned and discharged from service one month earlier than the nation had any reason to expect. The cost of maintaining such a force in arms for one month is approximately $66,000,000, a saving which must be set down to the credit of the administration that made it possible.

The days spent at sea by the returning troops were not time wasted. Although the embarkation officers in France did their best to send out with each soldier a complete record of his service, in the press of the work it was not always possible to attain this ideal. It was unjust to hold back a soldier from embarkation because his records were incomplete; yet before he could secure his discharge his papers had to be in perfect shape. The Transportation Service, through its debarkation camps in the United States, took it upon itself to perfect the individual records of the soldiers, and it did most of this work on the ships at sea. In special schools at Hoboken and Newport News the Service trained a force of traveling personnel adjutants for assignment to the transports. As soon as a troopship started out from France the personnel adjutant aboard opened an office, and from that moment until the ship docked he was busy from morning to night smoothing up the service records. He also compiled the papers which the debarkation camps would need and instructed the troops in the procedure to be followed after landing.

Unexpectedly, the Transportation Service found itself obliged to bring home in first-class accommodations many more persons than it had carried to Europe in that style. Thousands of officers had crossed before the armistice in commercial liners, and so had crowds of red cross and other welfare workers. Numerous soldiers had acquired wives in Europe. Military regulation gave these women and their husbands accompanying them the right to occupy first-class quarters on transports. After the armistice several congressional committees and hundreds of experts employed by the Government in the peace negotiations traveled first-class on the transports in both directions. The result was that on July 1, 1919, at the ports in France awaiting first-class transportation to America there were 32,000 persons over and above the capacity of such accommodations in sight for several months to come. To have brought them all back in the state to which they were entitled would have made necessary the full operation of the entire transport fleet for three months beyond the time when the return movement actually ceased. To settle the matter the Service adopted the expedient of bringing home several thousand junior officers quartered in the troop spaces of certain of the larger and faster vessels. Although some outcry arose over this treatment, the majority of the officers were too glad to get home at all to be critical of the mode of their transportation.

Not a man of the 2,000,000 passengers lost his life as the result of marine disaster after the armistice. The worst accident occurred shortly after midnight on January 1, 1919, when, during a blinding rainstorm, the great transport Northern Pacific, with a load of 2,500 troops, two-thirds of whom were sick and wounded men, went aground on the Long Island shore near the entrance to New York harbor. The sea was rough, the wind making, and as the ship turned port side to the beach and worked up on the sand, pounding heavily, rescue for the time was impossible. The weather was cold, the ship’s machinery was out of commission, and she was lightless and unheated. It took three days to rescue the passengers; yet, despite the severity of the experience, no person on board suffered seriously from it. The pounding had so damaged the ship’s hull that many of the plates had to be renewed. A more serious injury was a broken stern-post. In former marine practice such an injury meant the casting of a new post in steel. The Navy, as in the instance of the broken machinery in the interned German ships, resorted to the electric welding torch for repairing the broken stern-post, saving several months in time and perhaps $50,000 in money.

The A. E. F. sold most of its property in Europe. The cargo transports brought home about 850,000 tons of military freight—a small fraction of the property held by the expedition at the time of the armistice. The goods were sold abroad at a loss, the average recovery being considerably under that received from the sale of similar goods in the United States. Yet it was good policy to do what was done. Europe needed the supplies and we needed the ship-space for other purposes. If the materials had been returned to the United States for sale, out of the proceeds would have had to be deducted the transportation cost; and the Government was little, if anything, out of pocket by the transaction.

Among the materials freighted home were 100,000 tons of road-making machinery. This the War Department turned over to the Department of Agriculture to be used in the construction of highways in the United States. The cargo transports also brought back large ordnance stores, principally artillery, much of it of British and French manufacture. The shipments included a large number of captured German cannon, brought back for distribution among American communities as war trophies.

While the returning troop movement was at its height the Transportation Service was winding up its war business and returning to a permanent peace footing. This program consisted principally of disposing of its vessels and its shore establishments. On November 11, 1918, the Service was operating 580 vessels with a total deadweight of nearly 4,000,000 tons. At the end of 1919 the army fleet consisted of only the few transports actually owned by the Government through purchase, construction, or seizure from Germany or Austria.

Most of its vessels the Army held under charter from private owners. The best interests of the United States required the return of these ships to their ownership just as soon as the Army could do without them. The cargo boats were first to go. In February, 1919, the Transportation Service began turning them back—redelivering them, it was called—at the rate of three ships a day. In July, when the peak of the overseas troop movement had passed, the Service began disposing of its chartered troopships (including the converted cargo transports), redelivering the last of them in December.

The Government faced tremendous costs in these transactions. The charters provided that the Army must restore the shipping to its owners in its original condition, ordinary wear and tear excepted. Nearly every ship had been remodeled to a greater or less extent to make it more serviceable to the Army. All the domestic shipyards and repair yards were glutted with work, and it was evident that it would be a long time before the Transportation Service could recondition the vessels. Meanwhile the Service would have to maintain all of this idle shipping at a heavy continuing expense.

Instead of reconditioning the ships, therefore, the Transportation Service adopted the policy of returning vessels as they were, at the same time compensating the owners with lump-sum settlements for damage done by war service. In most instances the owners were glad enough to accept such an arrangement. To protect the Government in the settlements, joint boards of vessel survey, each consisting of an army, a navy, and a United States shipping board official, were set up at all the ports where ships were to be redelivered. Expert marine surveyors under their direction made detailed examinations of all the ships. With these surveys in hand, and with the complete history of each ship and of the service it had undergone while in the War Department’s possession, the survey boards were able to arrive at a close estimate of the amount of the Government’s financial liability in each case. The owners also employed their expert surveyors, and out of the two examinations grew negotiations which arrived at compromise settlements.

In December, 1918, the Service redelivered ships of approximately 189,000 deadweight tons. In January the redelivered ships aggregated 461,000 deadweight tons; in February, 470,000; and in March occurred the heaviest redelivery, amounting to approximately 532,000 deadweight tons. Redeliveries crossed the two-million-deadweight-ton mark shortly after the middle of April. By June most of the cargo transports had been restored to their owners, except those which had been converted into troop carriers. On June 15 the Army began dispensing with the use of battleships and cruisers, the last of the twenty-four being withdrawn on August 1. The break-up of the troop fleet began in earnest on August 1, and by the first anniversary of the armistice most of the chartered troopships had gone back to commercial work.

Many questions of admiralty law arose in connection with the restoration of the transports to the merchant marine. The legal branch of the Transportation Service on the day of the armistice consisted of but two lawyers. By that time a large number of maritime claims awaiting adjudication had accumulated, and it was recognized that such claims would multiply during the progress of negotiations leading to the redelivery of the vessels. With much difficulty the Service built up a force of twenty admiralty lawyers. In fact, the War Department, after the armistice, was so badly in need of lawyers for use in the liquidation of war business, that for several months it was forced to maintain the rule that no man of legal training should be discharged from the military service.

In breaking up the fleet of troop transports the Transportation Service found opportunity to create for the War Department a large permanent reserve of troopships without expense to the Government for their maintenance. The German and Austrian ships seized by the Government at the outset of the war became in large part the property of the Army. Most of these vessels were admirably adapted to war service, but they were too large and too costly in operation to justify their continuance in the transport service of the peace-time establishment. Consequently the Transportation Service turned thirteen of them over to the Shipping Board under an agreement providing for their charter to private operators, subject to their recall by the Army in the event of another war. These ships can accommodate approximately 50,000 troops at once. All of the special military fittings have been classified and stored away ready for use again, if it ever becomes necessary.

When the war traffic ended, the Transportation Service found itself in possession of enormous port facilities. Prior to the armistice the Government had seized or leased over seventy steamship piers at various Atlantic and Gulf ports; but even such facilities being entirely inadequate to the vast amount of shipping contemplated, the Government began the construction of seven great port bases located at Boston, Brooklyn, Port Newark, Philadelphia, Norfolk, Charleston, and New Orleans. Not one of these projects was complete on November 11. One of the early demobilization questions to be settled was what to do with these installations. Should the Government abandon them and set down as loss the millions spent, or go ahead with their erection and perhaps make the whole enterprise profitable by leasing the facilities to American commerce? The latter course was chosen. The contractors completed the construction at a total cost of $143,000,000. As the new piers became ready for use the Transportation Service turned back its leased piers to their owners. Then, as the military traffic dwindled, the space in the base terminals was leased to private ship operators. These terminals, among the largest and finest in the United States, are now rendering an important service to our foreign trade, but on terms ensuring their instant availability to the Government in the event of a future emergency.3