Demobilization

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 the armistice, to be evacuated by the home forces occupying them. The fluvial system leading into that sea of humanity which we knew as the A. E. F.—main river crossing the ocean, chief tributaries leading up to the ports in this country, beyond them their branch creeks and brooks, and the rills at the sources—was running bank-full on the day of the armistice. Demobilization, which inverted many of the processes of war and changed familiar names into their antonyms, abruptly reversed the direction of troop-flow, as if some tremendous power had uplifted the reservoir and the mouth of the main stream in France above the ultimate sources in this country. Before the expeditionary sea could drain out, the home channels of troop supply had to discharge their contents into the nimbus of civilian life.

The process of dissolution began within the hour in which the news of peace came to Washington. It happened that November 11 was the first of five days during which the Army planned to absorb 250,000 soldiers inducted into service under the terms of the Selective Service Act. Although it was evident that an armistice was at hand, the Railroad Administration went ahead with preparations for the transportation of these men to the training camps, and even dispatched the draft trains on the morning of November 11 to pick up the selectives, although the morning newspapers had announced that the armistice was indisputably to begin at eleven o’clock in France. The only preparation looking toward demobilization had been to set up telephone and telegraph circuits over which the officials in Washington could stop and turn back the troop trains in a minimum of time. Immediately after receiving General Pershing’s message announcing the start of the armistice, the Secretary of War notified the Troop-Movement Section of the Railroad Administration to stop the draft trains. This was done within an hour, although the trains were then in operation in every section of the United States. Some thousands of young men who had taken the oath of allegiance that morning, and who at the approach of noon were on troop trains proceeding to military camps, found themselves back at home, civilians once more, before the embers of the celebrating bonfires had died out that night.

Hard on their heels came the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who made up the combat divisions in training in the United States. These were the men last to don the uniform—men who were only partially trained, and who could be of no service to the War Department in the activities of demobilization. Their disbandment was not a difficult undertaking. They had been in the service so short a time that there were no complications of back pay and incomplete records to hinder their discharge. Moreover, they were geographically homogeneous—i.e., their homes were generally in the regions surrounding the training camps—and therefore their demobilization brought about no problem in transportation. As a rule they were paid off and discharged at their training camps and allowed to make their way to their homes.

Quite apart from the divisional troops, there was another great body of soldiers in the United States on the day of the armistice. These were men undergoing training in special camps, such as those of the Air Service and the Quartermaster Corps, and also the troops engaged in maintaining the great war establishment in the United States. The demobilization of these men was more difficult. It was for them in the first place that the War Department set up the demobilization system which was to be seen in the perfection of operation later on when the A. E. F. began reaching the United States en masse.

Soon after the armistice the War Department established by order a system of thirty-three demobilization camps, or centers, as they were called. In large part these centers were former training camps. Practically all the National Army cantonments and some of the National Guard camps were so used. Other military posts and stations were added so as to distribute the demobilization centers evenly throughout the country according to the distribution of population. The War Department’s policy was to discharge soldiers in as close proximity as possible to their former places of residence.

The special troops on duty in this country lacked homogeneity in the regional origin of the members of the various units. Many of the organizations were composed entirely of men chosen because of special aptitude for special service. Single units were therefore made up of men from widely separated parts of the United States. When the time came to disperse these troops it was found impossible to send the units intact to demobilization centers and there to disband them, except at a great waste of transportation. Throughout the whole activity the War Department husbanded transportation. Before the armistice it had been the general policy to move men always to the eastward, since east was forward. The armistice inverted the policy; and in order to avoid expensive duplication of travel, the Army in assembling its demobilization units moved its men always essentially westward until at length they reached the camps where they were to be discharged.

Throughout the winter of 1918–1919 the disintegration of the home forces proceeded rapidly, as the great subordinate services of the Army tapered off their war activities and released their men. One or two of the services, such as the Medical Department and the Motor Transport Corps, held on to their troops for a few months in order to carry out necessary duties connected with the disbanding of the Army and the restoration of the military establishment to a peace footing; but the others, such as the Air Service, the Signal Corps, the Corps of Engineers, and the Quartermaster Corps, reduced strength as rapidly as the country could absorb the men. These men lost their unit identity as they proceeded toward the demobilization centers and finally found themselves once more grouped with their neighbors, regardless of what service any of them had performed.

By the end of February, 1919, more than 1,600,000 officers and enlisted men had been discharged from the Army. At that time only about 300,000 of the expeditionary troops had reached the United States. The great body of the A. E. F. was still to come, but the demobilization centers in the United States were empty and ready for it.

The policy of discharging troops at centers adjacent to their homes rested upon a sound foundation. As the country faced the demobilization of 4,000,000 troops, young men most of whom had been held for many months under the rigid restraints of army discipline, there was a widespread apprehension that the discharged soldiers might congregate in the larger cities and create profound economic disturbances. Upon the War Department there was no compulsion of law to transport the troops to their own neighborhoods before discharging them. Obviously the easy and convenient thing was to discharge them wherever they happened to be—at the thousand and one camps in the United States, or at the Atlantic ports upon their arrival from France—discharge them there, pay them off, and so farewell to them. Such, in fact, had been army procedure before the World War. The Army discharged its men at the posts where they were serving and paid to them the travel allowances granted by law. Whether they used their money to pay for actual transportation home was no concern of the Army’s. They were all free, and most of them white and twenty-one. As long as discharges were relatively few this procedure had no effect upon the economic life of the nation. But what would have been the result if the War Department had continued this practice when disbanding the 4,000,000 troops in uniform on the day of the armistice? Most of them would have been turned loose in the vicinity of the large cities of the United States—more than 1,000,000 of them at New York alone. Their pockets would have been crammed with money. Congress by special enactment raised the travel allowance for discharged soldiers to five cents a mile, payable for the distance between the place of discharge and the soldier’s home, whether the entire journey could be accomplished by railroad or not. Congress also granted a bonus of $60 to every soldier—payable also at discharge. Thousands of soldiers, when they came up for discharge, were entitled to back pay. Thus every man received a considerable sum of money with his discharge certificate, and for the overseas soldier this sum probably averaged more than $100. The streets of our cities would have been thronged with such men during the first six months of 1919. After their hardships the temptation to have a fling at metropolitan entertainments would have been well-nigh irresistible. They would have been fair game for gamblers and sharp practitioners. The rare individual might have bought his ticket and gone soberly home, but the majority could scarcely have been expected to show such restraint. In a little while, pockets that had jingled with money would have been empty, the streets would have been crowded with stranded soldiers, and the burdened municipalities would have had to face a severe civic problem.

This was what the War Department sought to avoid, and what it did avoid, by its demobilization policy. There was also another consideration—that of financial economy. The War Department could carry troops at a cost of much less than five cents a mile per capita. Therefore, by distributing the Army about the country and discharging every man within his own native section the War Department was able to save millions of dollars which otherwise would have been paid out in mileage allowances.

The good offices of the Government to the demobilized soldier did not end when the War Department had paid him his money and discharged him. As a special inducement to demobilized soldiers not to linger in the communities near the demobilization centers, the United States Railroad Administration made a special travel rate to them of two cents a mile. In order to secure the cut rate, however, the soldier had to buy his ticket within twenty-four hours after receiving his discharge. Thus it was to his direct financial advantage to go home at once. Nor did the Railroad Administration permit him to overlook the opportunity. All the principal demobilization centers had their own railway terminals, from which special trains for discharged soldiers departed at intervals. The Railroad Administration set up railway ticket booths in the offices of the camp finance officers, so that each newly discharged man, as he turned away from the disbursing window with his money in his hand, faced the railway ticket booth. At his elbow were Red Cross, Y. M. C. A., and other camp welfare workers to urge him to buy his railway ticket at once and leave on the first train. The path of least resistance led straight home, and he was indeed a headstrong individual who did not follow it. As a result of the whole system the demobilization of the Army went through without any trouble at all.

The policy had an effect upon the mode of troop travel that was to be observed even beyond the ports of embarkation in France. The original plan had been to bring all the expeditionary divisions back to the camps in which they had been organized and trained, and there to disband them. There seemed to be nothing in the way of so simple a solution of the problem. In organizing the divisions in the first place, it had been the policy, to which there were but few exceptions, to create divisions of men originating in the territory contiguous to each training camp. As the divisions started for France they possessed definite territorial identity; and the divisional names which they commonly adopted for themselves—the New England Division, the Sunset Division, the Buckeye Division, the Keystone Division, and so on—usually indicated the geographical origin of the men of the organizations. It was thought that, by transporting the overseas divisions back to their original training camps in this country, each would be placed in the demobilization center most convenient to the respective homes of its soldiers.

The attempt to put this policy into practice quickly showed the fallacy of it. Immediately it was discovered that the composition of the divisions had radically changed during the service in France. Men had died in battle, fallen sick, been transferred to other organizations, and their places had been taken by replacement troops shipped from the United States. Whole divisions had been rearranged. In the autumn of 1918 the expeditionary divisions were no longer representative of separate districts of the United States; each was in effect a cross section of the whole of America.

One of the first organizations to come back from France was a minor unit, a company, which had received its training at Camp Cody, Texas. The unit was sent to Camp Cody for demobilization and discharge. There it was discovered that, of every ten men who had joined the unit when it was in training, only four remained. The other six were newcomers, and to reach their homes they had to travel to points scattered from Oregon to the Atlantic coast.

Had this system been followed throughout the disbanding of the expeditionary units, it is evident that it would have cost the Government heavily in travel allowances paid to discharged soldiers, without saying anything about the tremendous traffic burden upon the railroads of the country. There was nothing to do but to break up the whole organization of the A. E. F. before sending it to the demobilization centers, and to assemble the men once more in units that possessed geographical identity.

The A. E. F. received instructions to attempt this break-up in France—at least to begin it there. It was found impossible to regroup the services of supply troops to any extent, because the embarkation ports in France, at which the supply troops were prepared for embarkation, were neither organized nor equipped to handle such a difficult work. More could be done with the divisional troops at Le Mans. Thereafter, whenever a division came into the area of Le Mans those soldiers who had joined the division after its training had been complete, and who did not live in the district centering in the original training camp in America, were detached and assembled with neighbors of theirs into territorial demobilization units, which became known as overseas casual companies. When the division itself went on from Le Mans to the ports it consisted only of the remnant of charter members who had been with it from the outset.

The prescribed size of an overseas casual company was two officers and 150 men, but it was seldom convenient to send forth companies uniformly organized. Men were not held waiting in France until casual companies could be built up to the prescribed size. One company might consist of fifty soldiers and the next 250, according to circumstances in the embarkation camp.

The principal ports of embarkation in the United States before the armistice had been New York (Hoboken), Newport News, and Boston. To these, in the system for receiving the overseas troops, was added Charleston, South Carolina. Charleston was opened as a port of debarkation principally for soldiers who were proceeding to the southern demobilization centers. The entire fleet of troop transports was divided proportionately among these ports, the greatest number operating between New York and the ports in France and the next greatest between Newport News and France. In the main each port kept its own fleet, but sometimes it became necessary to divert a vessel at sea from her usual course.

Only in a general way did the embarkation authorities in France pay attention to the destinations of the ships. After each loaded transport left a French port the embarkation officials there cabled to the Transportation Service in the United States a full description of the troops on board. If, for example, a vessel bound for Boston were carrying a preponderant number of soldiers from the South, the Transportation Service used the wireless to divert the transport to Newport News or Charleston.

The passenger lists cabled to the United States often contained the first information received in this country about the departure of units from France. There was no news more eagerly awaited by the people. Cities and states had often made elaborate preparations for the reception of their overseas soldiers. A number of states and cities sent representatives to the ports to welcome the troops home at the gates of America. The harbor boat of the New York Mayor’s Committee of Welcome was busy almost every day taking visiting delegations down the bay to meet the incoming transports. In the times when from 150,000 to 200,000 soldiers were on the ocean at once in transports bound for the United States, keeping track of each unit became difficult. The Transportation Service set up a news and information bureau through which the press and the public kept in touch with the movements of organizations crossing from France.

Upon the debarkation camps at the Atlantic ports fell the chief work of splitting up the returning expedition into demobilization units. There were five major debarkation camps—Merritt, Mills, and Upton at New York, and Stuart and Hill at Newport News—besides numerous smaller centers at both ports. At the height of the return movement these camps were insufficient to accommodate the incoming thousands, and the Transportation Service used former training camps as debarkation camps, in both the Hoboken and Chesapeake districts. As long as Boston and Charleston acted as ports of debarkation they, too, made use of neighboring training camps.

Of all of the debarkation camps, Camp Merritt was the largest. In it were to be observed some of the most interesting processes of troop demobilization. It was the principal camp both for reception of overseas casual companies and for the breaking-up of organized units and the formation of casual detachments for distribution among the thirty-three demobilization centers.

During demobilization Camp Merritt was like a great terminal post office. The mail consisted of bulk consignments of soldier members of the disintegrating American Expeditionary Forces. It was the task of the post office to sort the mail for thirty-three principal destinations. The individual soldiers were thrown into receptacles called Hoboken Casual Companies, each, when filled up, consisting of two officers and 150 men, and each addressed to one or another of the demobilization centers. Each bore an identifying number, and the numbers ran consecutively, reaching well into four figures before the work came to an end.

Special trains frequently left the two railroad stations which served Camp Merritt. Sometimes an entire train would be loaded with casual companies bound for the same center. Other trains were made up of special cars destined for different terminals. In the camp new casual companies in skeletal form were constantly being organized. Those scheduled to travel to the less populous sections of the country might be several days in filling up to standard strength. Others reached full size in a few hours. As soon as a casual company was complete, it was dispatched immediately to its proper demobilization camp. For several months in the spring and summer of 1919 the average interval between the time a skeleton company was formed and the time it was dispatched from camp was less than twenty-four hours.

Before the armistice, troops which had been inspected, equipped for the overseas voyage, and otherwise prepared at Camp Merritt, marched east from the camp over three miles of macadamized highway and then down the old Cornwallis trail descending the Palisades, until they reached the little landing on the Hudson River known as Alpine, several miles north of the metropolitan limits of New York. There they boarded ferry-boats and rode on them directly to the transport piers in the North River. After the armistice, soldiers debarking at the piers boarded ferry-boats at the pier ends, rode up the river to Alpine, climbed the Palisades, and marched to Camp Merritt. Those bound for Camp Mills or Camp Upton took ferry to the Long Island Railroad terminal at Long Island City on the East River. Those ticketed for Camp Dix boarded trains which had been run into the Hoboken yard on the spur track constructed there by the Government after it seized the pier property from Germany.

At the debarkation camps the Army applied its final precautions against the importation of European diseases and insect pests. There was a thorough disinfection of all clothing and equipment, and each principal camp maintained a delousing plant. However clean the soldiers might have been when they embarked in France, it was always possible for a few of them to become infested on the transports. So far as is known, not a cootie got through the barrage of steam, superheated air, soap, and hot water laid down by the Army at both ends of the transatlantic ferry route.

Before the return of the A. E. F. was well under way an important change took place in the organization of the official military travel bureau. Before the armistice, military transportation had been in the hands of two independent war department agencies. The Inland Traffic Service had charge of the movements of men and supplies by rail within the United States and up to the ports of embarkation. There the Embarkation Service received both, loaded them on the ships, and delivered them to the ports in France. Beyond those points the Quartermaster Service of the A. E. F. was in charge of military traffic. Both the Inland Traffic Service and the Embarkation Service were branches of the General Staff Division of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic.

In December, 1918, the Inland Traffic Service and the Embarkation Service joined to form a new branch called the Transportation Service, and for the first time the Army had a single organization in charge of all military travel, both freight and passenger, on this side of the piers in Europe. General Hines of the Embarkation Service became chief of the Transportation Service. The union brought about a coördination which made it possible for a limited equipment of railway coaches to carry troops away from the ports of debarkation as fast as the ships delivered them there.

As a rule, the overseas men did not travel so comfortably from the ports of debarkation to the demobilization centers as they had ridden when, months earlier, they had traveled from those same centers up to the ports to board the ships for France. The conditions of military transportation were different. The equipment of railway cars at the Army’s disposal was limited. It had never consisted of more than 1,500 sleeping cars—tourist sleepers they were, made by removing the rugs and hangings from first-class Pullman coaches. These 1,500 cars, in full operation, could carry less than 50,000 men at one time. Nevertheless, although before the armistice the Army supplied railroad transportation to over 8,000,000 men, nearly every one who traveled at night slept in a comfortable berth. During that period practically all the long-haul travel was between the training camps and the ports of embarkation. The forces in America proceeded to embarkation by divisions—camp by camp. Thus it was possible to arrange the shipping schedules to allow for the most convenient operation of the military rolling stock. But no such arrangement was possible during demobilization. The system of splitting up the overseas units at the ports in this country and distributing their men according to residential origin made it necessary to maintain practically continuous train service between the various Atlantic ports and the thirty-three demobilization centers. The sleeping-car equipment was not nearly large enough to serve in such an operation, and a great many soldiers rode in day coaches halfway across the continent. They did not grumble too much at the treatment. It was better than riding in French box cars, at any rate, and after all they were getting home.

One of the finest accomplishments of military transportation after the armistice was the distribution of 150,000 sick and wounded soldiers of the A. E. F. among the many military hospitals of the United States. The Transportation Service operated six hospital ships at New York. These vessels took the patients from the general debarkation hospital on Ellis Island and carried them on their way to various special evacuation hospitals in the New York metropolitan district. From there they were sent to general hospitals throughout the country. The Service kept six hospital trains in continuous operation, as well as about 250 hospital cars. No such movement of invalids was ever before known in the United States.

The records of the Transportation Service show that in disbanding the Army it carried over 7,000,000 military passengers in special cars and trains. The average journey was 500 miles. Train accidents cost the lives of only two soldiers and injured only seventeen. This high degree of safety was largely due to the fact that troop trains were held down to a running schedule of twenty miles an hour.

The whole system of distribution and travel would have worked almost automatically except for one thing—the victory parades. Whenever it could do so without too great disruption of the system, the War Department yielded to the desire of communities to celebrate with parades the return of their overseas sons. Nearly 200,000 troops in all marched in more than 450 parades, which ranged from the brief processions of single companies to such great demonstrations as those of the First Division in New York and Washington in September, 1919.

Six parades of returning overseas troops passed under the triumphal arch over Fifth Avenue at Madison Square, New York. Of these, the parades of the Twenty-seventh and Seventy-seventh Divisions, both originally composed almost exclusively of New York men, were closest to the metropolitan heart. Part of the Twenty-eighth Division paraded in Philadelphia on May 15, 1919. The Thirty-third Division paraded in Chicago in three sections in late May and early June.

These processions were but preliminary to the greatest celebration of all—the one which occurred when the First Division, first to go to France, last to come back, returned, with General John J. Pershing, the Commander-in-Chief of the American Expeditionary Forces, at its head. In arranging for the parades of the First Division, the War Department determined to show the spectators a combat division in full field panoply—and that meant equipping it with its transport animals. All divisions had left their animals in France, and solely for these spectacles the Transportation Service assembled in New York before the day of the first parade several thousand horses and mules secured from army posts as far west as Texas and then transported to New York.

The First Division gathered in the debarkation camps at New York. It included as an attached unit the specially trained drill regiment of the Third Army Corps. So augmented, it consisted of nearly 24,000 men and their wheeled equipment of artillery, service trains, repair shops, bakeries, kitchens, and so on, the motorized equipment alone numbering five hundred trucks and sixty motorcycles. The transportation of this great unit to Washington afforded a special problem that would have been impossible of solution by any organization less expert than the one which had administered military travel for so many months past. There were no facilities at Washington for the accommodation of such a number of troops, and therefore it was necessary to hold them in the New York camps and take them to Washington on the eve of the parade itself. After the New York appearance of the Division its motor fleet was sent over the highways to Washington, the vehicles incidentally carrying 1,770 men with them. The freighting to Washington of the animals and horse-drawn vehicles, including the artillery, began immediately after the New York parade disbanded and continued for several days. The twenty-two trains carrying the foot soldiers all arrived in Washington during the night before the parade, the last ones just in time to allow their passengers to find their places in the procession.

The moving spectacle which followed gave the national capital and, through the newspaper accounts, the country, an approximation of the Grand Review that occurred in Washington at the close of the Civil War. For four hours the Division marched between throngs such as Washington ordinarily knows only when a President is inaugurated, down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the Treasury and the White House and the reviewing stand, in which were some of the chief uniformed and civilian dignitaries of the Government, including General Pershing. A roaring squadron of airplanes skimmed the tree-tops between the capitol and the war department building; an observation balloon swayed in air above the White House; and as the steady procession passed—mile after mile of trig ranks, bronzed faces, showy war medals and regimental decorations, burnished caparisons, regimental bands, field guns, limbers and caissons, ammunition trucks, quartermaster supply trains, ambulance trains, engineering trains with strange implements mounted upon motor trucks, horse-drawn carts for many purposes, rolling field kitchens, and finally the jarring tanks, their caterpillar treads leaving indelible matrices in the sun-warmed asphalt—with emotion the spectator beheld this living presentment of the power which America had exerted in the great war.