Demobilization

Four hours after the First Division finished parading in Washington, its troops were in Camp Meade, thirty miles away, where the “emergency” soldiers in the division’s ranks were to be discharged. There, like the millions who had preceded them into the demobilization centers, they fell into the hands of two expert crews, each competing with the other in speeding up the processes of discharge from the Army.

The two principal operations in the discharge of a soldier were (1) examining him physically and (2) computing how much the Government owed him and paying over to him the amount determined. These two activities were in the hands of central organizations functioning at the demobilization centers. The preparation of the soldier’s certificate of discharge and of the papers for his permanent record, to be retained in the government files, was in the hands of his company officers.

For the first time after a great war the American Army retained a complete record of the exact physical condition of every soldier at the time of his discharge. Had the Army done this in the past, doubtless it would have saved the Government much trouble and expense arising from fraudulent claims for alleged physical disability arising from military service. The purpose of the final physical examinations at the camps was not only to give the Government this record, but also to discover any men who might be suffering from contagious diseases or from infirmities susceptible of cure under further treatment in the army hospitals. The Army would not let men go until the Medical Department had done all it could for them.

The boards of physicians and surgeons which conducted the examinations were made up of specialists in seven branches of medicine, including dentistry. As each soldier entered the examination building, he was first taken in hand by officers who explained to him what the Government would do in the way of compensation for disabilities incurred in the Service and who urged him to make claim for any disability from which he knew he was suffering. For this purpose he received a claim form to fill out. He then passed through the seven sections of the examination; and if this scrutiny disclosed no disability, and if he had claimed none, he was granted a clean bill of health and passed on to the pay officers.

The degree of disability was expressed in percentage. A rated disability of 50 per cent meant that in the opinion of the examiners the soldier’s earning power in his former occupation had been decreased by half by reason of injury or infirmity incurred in the military service. Under the law the Bureau of War Risk Insurance automatically granted compensation to disabled veterans of the war up to eighty dollars a month (for total disability), requiring only that the disabled soldier prepare his claim on a form sent to him by the Bureau upon its receipt of the report of the examining board at the demobilization center. Disability of less than 10 per cent was not compensatable under the law, and so the examining boards certified to the Bureau of War Risk Insurance only the records of disability amounting to 10 per cent or more.4

At first it took the medical boards a considerable time to give examinations to large units of troops awaiting discharge; but Washington kept putting more and more pressure upon the demobilization centers to speed up, until finally the flat order went forth that all troops arriving at a camp must be put through to discharge within forty-eight hours thereafter. Since sometimes the greater part of a division of troops, or even a whole division, reached a demobilization camp practically at once, the order meant day and night work for the examiners, until they had cleared away the accumulations of men. At such times the boards raced with the finance crews, the doctors exulting if they passed men faster than the disbursing officers could make out the pay rolls, and the latter crowing when they could twiddle their thumbs and wait for men to come from the examination rooms.

The cash settlement between Uncle Sam the employer and his four million soldier employees was a transaction much more complicated than would appear at first glance. There were many elements to be considered in computing the final pay of a soldier, and to determine these elements for each man of the four million the pay officers had to make a complete search of the records each time.

The records were often voluminous. The private soldier’s base pay was $30 a month. His records showed when he was last paid, and the Government owed him for the interval between his last pay day and the date of his discharge, at the rate of $30 a month. But perhaps he had been deducting a certain amount of his pay each month as an allotment to his dependents. He could deduct up to $15 a month, and the Government would match him dollar for dollar when it paid the allotment to his dependents. At any rate, any allotment was deducted from his final pay, too. Was he insured with the War Risk Insurance Bureau? If so, the pay officer deducted a premium from each month’s pay due him, and the premium varied with each man’s age. Perhaps he had purchased a Liberty Bond through the War Department. In that event the monthly partial payment was deducted. Deductions had to be made for sickness incurred not in line of duty, or to fulfill penalties imposed by courts-martial. After March 1, 1919, every soldier was entitled to draw a bonus of $60, and this was included in his final pay. Finally the law granted him a mileage allowance at the rate of five cents a mile for the distance between his place of discharge and his home. And this did not mean the distance to the railroad station nearest his home, but the distance clear home, to his front door, even though he lived off in the back country forty miles from the railroad. The pay officer had to have at his elbow, not only the tables of railroad distances, but also complete road maps of the district served by the demobilization center.

It should be remembered that pay officers were personally responsible for errors in their work, and if the Government chanced to lose money as the result of error, the unfortunate disbursing officer or his bondsmen had to make it good. In spite of the many elements entering into the pay computations, the finance crews at the centers grew astonishingly expert in making out the pay rolls. It became so that a team of two pay officers could enroll names on the pay sheet at the rate of two names a minute.

To accomplish such a result the Director of Finance, in whose hands eventually centered all the finance activities of the War Department, swept aside hampering regulations and precedents and adopted the direct methods of business. This impatience of red tape was not better shown than in the treatment of wounded men in the American hospitals. The regulations were hard and fast in adherence to the rule that a soldier could be paid only upon the representations of facts as written into his service records. Wounded men, however, picked up unconscious on the battle field, often too sick for months thereafter to look out for their personal affairs, in thousands of instances had lost their service records altogether. The matter came to a focus in early 1919 when the finance officer at Walter Reed Hospital at Washington reported that there were nearly a thousand patients in that institution who possessed no records at all to show what the Government owed them. The Director of Finance thereupon issued instructions that they and all other wounded men in the domestic hospitals should be paid off on the basis of their sworn affidavits setting forth the amounts owed to them by the Government. The finance officer at Walter Reed Hospital collected the affidavits, but, feeling his personal responsibility, hesitated to certify the pay roll; whereupon the Director of Finance showed his courage by certifying it himself, thus setting a precedent which the hospital officers were willing to follow.

That was one departure from tradition. A more important one, because it concerned more men, did away with the individual final statements which all soldiers in the past had been required to make when coming up for discharge. The final statement was an elaborate form which each soldier filled out, at the cost of considerable time and effort. Moreover, the pay officers could not work rapidly from these forms. For them was substituted the final-payment roll which served for an entire company of men and which could be made up quickly by the company officers. Working with individual final statements, a certain demobilization center had been able to discharge four hundred men a day. As soon as the final-payment roll was adopted the same crew at the same camp was able to discharge men at the rate of fifteen hundred a day.

The men who paid off the demobilized troops at the camps were trained for the work in a finance service school established immediately after the armistice at Camp Meigs, in the District of Columbia. The school graduated some 250 experts in army camp finance. These men were distributed among the demobilization centers, working in teams of two men each. For a long time the work of discharging the Army kept these teams at work from dawn until late at night, with never even a Sunday as holiday.

From the pay-roll teams the certified sheets went to another set of finance teams for “change-listing.” The final payments to soldiers were made in cash. The “change-listers” took the pay rolls and computed precisely how many bills of each denomination, how many half-dollars, how many quarters and dimes and nickels and pennies, it would require to pay off all the men without requiring one of them to make change at the window. The aggregate change lists went to the camp disbursing officer, and he procured the cash from the nearest bank. The banks nearest to some of the camps were miles away through desolate country, and sometimes a disbursing officer had to bring back in his automobile as much as a million dollars in currency. He rode under the escort of a heavy guard and was further protected by armed men in his camp office. Losses incurred through robbery were insignificant.

Every morning the disbursing officer turned over to his assistants the exact quantity of bills and small change needed to cover the payments to be made that day. The men reported to the pay office in companies. Their officers called out their names one by one, and when each man had verified his cash he received his discharge certificate, on the back of which was endorsed the amount of money just paid to him in final settlement. At that moment he was no longer a soldier. He could do as he pleased from that time on, but he usually yielded to the good influences of those urging him to proceed directly to his home.

The Seventy-seventh Division was paid off and discharged at Camp Upton in two days. There were 27,000 men in the division as it reached the demobilization camp. The problem of the finance officers was simplified by the fact that practically all of the men resided in New York City, which made it easy to compute mileage. Each man received an average of $100, including the bonus, an amount which is probably a fair approximation of what was paid to the average overseas soldier upon discharge. The advantage of speed in demobilization was not all to the soldier. It cost about two dollars a day to maintain a private soldier in the Service. Each day’s delay, therefore, in demobilizing the Seventy-seventh Division cost the Government $54,000.

A further simplification of methods resulted in promptness in discharging commissioned officers. The disbursing officer at a demobilization camp saw all officers in three classes—those who in service had been accountable for neither government property nor money; those who had been accountable for property only; and those who had been in possession of government funds. The officers of Class 1 could be paid off finally at discharge; but the accounts of accountable officers were subject to audit, and their final pay was withheld until these audits were made. Inasmuch as officers often came up for discharge with two or three months’ back pay due them, the withholding of such considerable amounts of money for an extended period imposed a hardship upon them. Under the old system it would have been a long time before all of the discharged officers could have received their final pay. In fact, after the termination of every previous war in which American emergency troops had ever engaged it was a long time before the Government finally settled the pay claims of the accountable officers. The accumulation of officers’ accounts in the spring of 1919 became so great as to make it evident that under the existing plan the War Department would be a dozen years at least in auditing all of them; which meant—if the old audit system were to be continued—that it would be 1931 before some of the World War officers received their final pay for their services.

The Director of Finance determined to do better than that. To be sure, the audit of the property accounts was required by law; but instead of continuing the system of auditing them in Washington, the Director of Finance arranged for a force of field auditors to go to the demobilization centers and audit the property accounts as they were presented. The result was that the officers responsible for property were enabled to draw their final pay with their discharge certificates.

Officers responsible for government money occupied a different status, but such officers were relatively few in number. The former plan in use required the audit of their accounts by the Treasury Department, and it was evident that the Treasury Department would be a year or more in making these audits. Meanwhile none of the discharged officers would be able to draw their final pay. This auditing arrangement was a requirement, not of law, but of military regulation, which the Director of Finance was able to sweep aside, paying off such officers finally upon the receipt of statements from them accounting in detail for the money which they had handled. The Government risked nothing by this innovation, because officers accountable for money were required to give bond to indemnify the Government against losses. On the other hand the change made it possible for discharged accountable officers to receive their final pay within a month after discharge.

On February 24, 1919, the President signed a bill granting a cash bonus of sixty dollars to every soldier who had been in uniform before November 11, 1918. The payment of the bonus to soldiers still to be discharged after the bonus law was in effect offered no difficulty at all, since the camp disbursing officers needed only to add the bonus to the final pay of each man coming up for discharge. But on February 24 approximately 1,600,000 troops had already been discharged. The payment of the bonus to these men added measurably to the burden of work upon the Finance Service.

The Director of Finance announced that he would begin paying the bonus on March 1. The Zone Finance Officer at Washington was designated as the official to pay the bonus to officers and enlisted men who had already been discharged. He hastily organized an office with about sixty new and inexperienced clerks. Meanwhile the newspapers, the Red Cross, the American Legion, and all other organizations concerned with the welfare of discharged soldiers spread the tidings of the bonus payment and urged all discharged men to present their claims for it at once. It is doubtful if ever before a national publicity campaign reached its mark with such thoroughness in such a brief period of time. Claims for the bonus snowed upon Washington at the rate of 100,000 a day, and within two weeks practically all of the discharged 1,600,000 had filed their claims. The pay office grew until it numbered more than a thousand clerks. With this force it cleaned up the whole job in two months’ time.

Never before had government checks been issued at such a rapid rate. It was necessary to make use of the most modern labor-saving appliances in accomplishing this record of payment. The Bureau of Engraving, which prints the paper money for the Government, engraved a special check with the sixty-dollar amount printed in, so that it was necessary for the clerical force only to date the checks, fill in the names of payees, and then sign the instruments. The Zone Finance Officer himself was the only person in his department authorized to sign checks on the Treasury. However, upon his request the Treasury Department authorized five clerks whom he designated to sign his name for him. The Treasury further authorized the use of the pantograph or multiple signing device, which enabled each designated clerk to sign five checks with one writing of the signature. On the name line of each check was typed in the payee’s name, his address, and his army serial number. The Zone Finance Officer adopted a window envelope through which could be seen the recipient’s name and address as written on the check inside, and this measure saved the great labor of addressing the envelopes. All checks were typed in triplicate—one original and two carbon copies. Both copies were filed away to be the Government’s record of the transaction. The cases in which the duplicates were filed filled a large room.

Soldiers of the surname of Smith received 15,200 of these bonus checks, and these were only the Smiths among the 1,600,000 troops discharged before March 1, 1919. If the same percentage carried through the rest of the Army, it is evident that there were enough Smiths in uniform to make up an entire combat division with a sufficient residue over to provide the necessary accompaniment of supply troops. If pushed to it, the Smith family could fight a respectable war on its own account. But the balance of power is maintained by the Brown army. The Brown family collected 9,000 of the 1,600,000 bonus checks issued from Washington in the spring of 1919.

Although every effort was made to pay off all troops in full at the time of their discharge, there were many men who, through their own fault or the fault of those in command of them, or else because of conditions over which there was no control, failed to receive all of the money rightfully theirs when they left the military service. For such men the remedy was the claim. A financial claim against the Government is notoriously a static thing. At the present day there are Civil War claims still outstanding and unsettled. The Director of Finance determined that the World War should leave behind it no great body of soldier claimants to haunt Washington and nurse their grievances for years to come. Under the ordinary procedure the claims of soldiers for arrears of pay had to go through the channels of both the War Department and the Treasury Department before final payments could be made. The Director of Finance sought and, on January 30, 1919, received a decision of the Comptroller of the Treasury which permitted the former to settle back-pay claims without reference to the Treasury Department when there was no construction of law involved and the rights of the claimants were evident.

Although the claimants numbered many thousands, the number was relatively small compared to the total number of men in uniform. At the end of the calendar year 1919, less than 5 per cent of the nearly 4,000,000 men who were under arms on the first day of the armistice had filed claims with the War Department. Three-fourths of the claims were for the refund of allotments deducted from pay but for one reason or another never paid by the Government to the allottees; so that only a little more than 1 per cent of the Army left the service with claims resulting from errors in soldiers’ pay accounts. Because of the more intricate financial relations between officers and the War Department, the claims of officers were greater in proportion, but the officers’ claims submitted up to the end of the year 1919 amounted in number to only 10 per cent of the total number of officers commissioned.

The failure of the Government in many instances to pay over allotments to soldiers’ dependents arose from a multiplicity of causes. In the first place, the legal method of paying allotments changed in the midst of the active part of the war. The War Risk Insurance Bureau for many months paid to soldiers’ dependents the allotments granted by the soldiers, plus the amount which the Government added to each allotment. In June, 1918, Congress enacted a law requiring that all allotments of this form be paid directly by the War Department, leaving the War Risk Insurance Bureau to pay only those allotments which did not carry government allowances with them. The troops were at once apprised of this change; but because of the failure of individuals to discontinue their deductions to the War Risk Insurance Bureau, or because officers, busy with other things, neglected to do it for men under their command, or because of the loss of papers in the mails, thousands of pay deductions continued to go in to the Bureau of War Risk Insurance long after that bureau had discontinued paying the allotments to dependents. Out of this situation arose thousands of claims from discharged soldiers.

In other instances allotments were made to persons residing in enemy countries or in countries cut off from mail communication, Russia being the principal one of the latter class. Failures to deliver allotments for this reason resulted in claims.

As to soldiers’ pay, there were many reasons why payment was not always accurate. Sometimes amounts were withheld by the Government erroneously as court-martial forfeitures or because of alleged losses of government property. Men upon promotion often failed to note on their pay vouchers that they were entitled to the advanced pay, and so failed for a time to receive their increases. Some failed to receive the increase in pay due for foreign service, and some did not get their cash commutations of rations and quarters while on leave at the recreational areas in France. In all there were fourteen major classes of claims for back pay.

There were claims of still another class—claims for personal baggage lost by the Government in transporting the Army.

Although the individual soldier’s affidavit was largely used in the settlement of claims, still such a short-cut method of arriving at a judgment was permissible only when the official records were missing. The gradual concentration of records after the armistice, and sometimes the discovery of lost records as the disbanding Army cleared up its quarters, often brought to light papers that had been missing when the troops were discharged. Every claim submitted involved on the part of the Finance Service a search of the records. Since many of the records on which the claim depended were in the possession of the A. E. F. in France, it was impossible for a long time to do much in Washington with such claims. The A. E. F. records returned to the United States in the early autumn of 1919, but it was several months thereafter before they were properly sorted, filed, and made available for research.

During the first fifteen months after the armistice, the claims submitted to the War Department by former enlisted men totaled 184,256. Of these, about 64,000 were paid in that period, 33,000 declined, and 6,400 transferred to some other branch of the Government for settlement—103,000 claims disposed of and 81,000 still in process of adjudication and settlement.