The American Mobilization
“We want men, men, men,” insisted Marshal Joseph Joffre. Part of an Allied mission that came to Washington as soon as the United States declared war, the former French commander shocked American officials with his frank discussion of affairs on the Western Front. The rest of the Allied mission supported his emphatic demands for American troops. By World War I standards, however, the size of the United States land forces was pitiful. In April 1917, the regular Army numbered 133,111, reinforced by another 185,000 National Guardsmen. Another 17,000 officers and men had joined one or another of the federal reserve forces established by the National Defense Act of 1916. The War Department General Staff agreed that the Army would have to be enlarged and that the equitable, efficient way to raise a mass force was by conscription.
Aware that forced military service was distasteful to Americans, President Wilson and Secretary of War Newton D. Baker characterized their call for men as “selective service.” Conscription evoked memories of the Civil War experience: evasion, violent resistance, communal hostility. With those perils in mind, the General Staff officers who crafted the Selective Service Act of May 18, 1917, created a manpower policy and administrative system that demonstrated political deftness, flexibility, and efficiency. Since Congress, particularly the House of Representatives, proved reluctant to accept conscription as the price of intervention, the Wilson administration did everything it could to soften the draft and place its execution with local civilians rather than federal military authorities. It also surrounded the draft with a flood of patriotic symbols and civic rhetoric that stressed voluntarism. Even as Congress voted for conscription, the Army and National Guard launched recruiting drives to bring themselves to war strength. By the end of 1917 they had enlisted nearly 700,000 volunteers. Weighed against the War Department’s estimated manpower needs and complex quota system, nearly 500,000 of the volunteers could be counted as substitutes for potential draftees. The result was that the 1917 draft did not bear heavily upon the American male population. In June nearly 10 million men in the draftable age range of twenty-one to thirty registered for conscription. Although 3 million were called to service in 1917, one-third were found physically unfit and another million were exempted from service on the grounds of dependency, alien status, critical occupations, and religious beliefs. Of the remaining draftable men, only half a million were called into the service by the end of 1917. As intended, the draft “selected” those men the Army wanted and society could best spare: 90 percent of the draftees were unmarried, and 70 percent were farm hands or manual laborers.
The organization of the draft diffused resistance and hostility toward the national government and applied the full majesty of the local community—“your friends and neighbors”—to make the draft work. At the national level the War Department administered the draft through the Office of the Provost Marshal General, headed by Major General Enoch H. Crowder, a crusty lawyer and former opponent of conscription. Crowder’s staff, ever sensitive to civilian advice, established national policy, issued general orders, and held the lottery that established the order of call-up. It did not select or exempt individuals. Supervised by state officials and district boards, the actual task of inducting draftees rested with the members of some 4,600 local boards. Additional committees of citizens groups gave medical and legal advice and assisted the inductees until they departed for the training camps. Of the nearly 200,000 participants in the system in 1918, only 4,000 were Army officers and enlisted men, most of whom served in Washington. State officials, not the federal government, appointed the members of the district and local boards. The result was a system attuned to local occupational needs, personal problems, and community attitudes.
One reason conscription moved with all deliberate speed was that the War Department in 1917 did not think it would need an army of more than 2.2 million men. Given supply shortages, it was not sure it could equip such a force in less than eighteen months. For the first six months of its war, the War Department, assisted by varied military missions to France, wrestled with mobilization plans. By early autumn 1917, the planning initiative shifted to the General Headquarters (GHQ), American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), which had sailed for France in late May, followed by one token division to boost Allied morale. Major General (soon General) John J. Pershing, the ambitious, austere, politically adept commander of the AEF, had no intention of sharing the critical decisions of forming his army with either the General Staff or the Allies. Actually, GHQ AEF and the General Staff drafted similar plans, although Pershing’s program had a specific strategic rationale. After surveying the wreckage of the Western Front and assessing Allied troop and logistical deployments, Pershing decided to mass his army in Lorraine between Verdun and the Moselle River. Across no man’s land in this inactive sector lay the fortress city and railhead of Metz and the coal and iron fields of the Saar. An offensive against these objectives, Pershing’s staff reasoned, would break the German defenses throughout France and force a peace on Allied terms. Even though a general offensive might not be possible until 1919, GHQ AEF wanted to have twenty combat and ten training and replacement divisions in France by December 1918. With all its supporting units, the AEF would require 1.1 million men. This “thirty division program” governed the Army’s planning and shaped the execution of the draft.
Raising men for war had been a traditional government task, but World War I introduced Americans to a new, poorly understood aspect of twentieth-century war: Economic mobilization and regulation. In 1917 few policymakers realized the accuracy of the observation of automotive executive Howard E. Coffin: “Twentieth century warfare demands that the blood of the soldier must be mingled with from three to five parts of the sweat of the man in the factories, mills, mines, and fields of the nation in arms.” The Allies had already learned this lesson by 1917, but Americans, with the notable exception of a few businessmen and Army officers, had not paid much attention to the economic implications of a national mobilization. For almost a year the United States struggled to find the political-administrative system best suited for industrial and agricultural mobilization and the productive capacity to meet the war’s demands.
In the broadest economic terms, American entry into the war meant that demands for goods and services far exceeded supply. In peacetime the economy normally served American consumption and domestic investment with an important second function, serving foreign consumers. With World War I foreign demand increased dramatically, both to maintain the English and French civilian economies and to supply the Allied armies. The foreign demand by 1917 had pulled the economy out of a recession, but it had also committed much of the American economic effort to the war. For example, American munitions and firearms companies were already fully committed to Allied orders. In April 1917, therefore, the United States could not form a wartime Army and Navy of its own without expanding and regulating its economy.
The short-term effects of wartime mobilization put unforeseen strains on the economy. Military forces are prodigious consumers of both civilian supplies and specialized military equipment, largely because military training and wars tend to make weapons and supplies disappear. In World War I the United States eventually put 4.8 million men in uniform; this force represented about one-twenty-fifth of its total population. As wage earners, these men would have contributed to and consumed a larger fraction of the gross national product. As a wartime Army and Navy, however, these Americans eventually absorbed an estimated $32 billion. During two years of wartime spending, the American armed forces consumed about one-quarter of the entire gross national product.
Any form of strict economic calculus would not include another factor that inhibited American economic mobilization: the federal government did not trust concentrations of power, either in the government or in business. From the dominant coalition in Congress, made up of small-town and rural Progressives of both parties, to Secretary of War Baker and Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels and President
Wilson himself, the government was a bastion of hostility to big corporations and powerful government bureaucracies. The military reinforced the bias against centralized, collaborative relations with business. The Army and Navy bureaus responsible for material procurement did not want to deviate from peacetime practices and relationships, although they recognized that speed required a change in contracting procedures. For the Navy, wartime expansion proved to be manageable within the existing bureau system and did not place special strains upon the Navy’s peacetime system of shipbuilding and supply procurement. The Army was quite another matter. During the course of the war, the Army placed $14 billion in orders, and for more than a year these orders came from eight separate agencies that had not considered priorities and limited supplies. Moreover, the Army tended to think in terms of “outputs” (rifles, planes, tanks, blankets, shoes) rather than “inputs” (raw materials, skilled labor, and production technology). Therefore, the War Department was not organized to work efficiently with industry. Waste, artificially high prices, and inefficiency characterized Army procurement throughout the war.
The federal government need not have suffered the mobilization fiascos of 1917, since, in the technical sense, it had adequate information about the challenges of economic mobilization. Anticipating American entry into the war, the Navy Department and the Chamber of Commerce (and belatedly the War Department) formed advisory committees in 1915 and 1916 to examine the problems of industrial mobilization. In an institutional sense these actions had produced a Naval Consulting Board, an Industrial Preparedness Committee of the Chamber of Commerce, and, most important, the Advisory Committee to the Council of National Defense. The council, organized by statute in 1916, included the principal cabinet members who would guide a wartime mobilization. These committees—which eventually led to a General Munitions Board and the War Industries Board (WIB) in 1917—viewed the potential impact of a total economic mobilization with alarm. By and large the committee leadership included public-spirited businessmen and professional managers. They feared that a wartime economic crisis would bring the nationalization of some industries; they also feared a continuation of Progressive antitrust legislation. They preferred instead a system of industry self-regulation with some governmental participation, and they argued that, with military support, such a system was also most likely to produce the material needed for a major war. Led by Coffin, AT&T executive Walter S. Gifford, management educator Hollis Godfrey, advertising executive Grosvenor B. Clarkson, financial speculator Bernard Baruch, construction executive Benedict Crowell, and manufacturer Frank A. Scott, these men argued for more centralized governmental control of economic mobilization, but designed to preserve the existing character of American industry.
Despite the establishment of the War Industries Board in July 1917, the Wilson administration and the War Department for different reasons resisted giving it full powers to regulate the economy and to allocate scarce raw materials and goods between the Allied, domestic, and military claimants. Wilson and Baker would not relinquish their own (largely unused) authority and did not trust the WIB, dominated by businessmen in temporary government service. The General Staff and logistical bureaus did not want civilians interfering with the determination of military requirements or contracting procedures. The latter had already been modified to ensure the speedy letting of contracts. Instead of public bidding and fixed-price contracts, the War Department had shifted to contracts negotiated with sole-source suppliers on a cost-plus-fixed-fee basis. This practice allowed the Army to deluge the economy with orders and money in 1917. It also created opportunities for businesses to control pricing and profits through some sixty “commodity committees” of business representatives, provided the cooperating industries did not have to fear conflict-of-interest and antitrust laws. In 1917, however, the federal government would not suspend these laws and thus stifled productivity. The industrial mobilization progressed, therefore, without firm central direction.
In some critical areas the government had to accept more centralized control. Two separate administrations assumed the responsibility for production, pricing, and distribution of food and fuels. A Shipping Board and Emergency Fleet Corporation in 1916 expanded the American carrying trade and allocated vessels to meet Allied and military needs. To increase production and encourage domestic conservation, Congress passed a Food Production (Lever) Act and Food and Fuel Act in August 1917. In December 1917, with railroad traffic tangled throughout the eastern United States, the government temporarily took over the management of the nation’s railroads. To handle Allied orders, Congress created a War Trade Board, but it too had difficulties dealing with parochial industries and the weak WIB. Despite the movement to greater centralization, the American economy did not respond rapidly to the military’s demands, and by the winter of 1917–1918 shortages of civilian goods and military supplies plagued the nation.
The War Department’s wartime procurement efforts had a mixed effect. Military construction produced thirty-six major cantonments for training full divisions of almost 30,000 each. These military boomtowns of tents and barracks were largely completed by the winter of 1917–1918. Ordnance problems proved more intractable, and the Army decided to arm the AEF with British-model rifles already being produced in the United States and accept Allied machine guns, mortars, artillery pieces, and tanks. American soldiers in France used more Enfield rifles than Springfields, more French automatic weapons than new Browning automatic rifles and machine guns, more French 75-mm field guns than American 3-inch cannons. The aviation program was especially disappointing. Announcing its intention to build 10,000 warplanes, the government turned to the automobile industry, which had a deserved reputation for mass production miracles. The automobile manufacturers, in fact, produced a sturdy, dependable engine—the Liberty—but airframes proved more difficult to produce. Although the manufacturers eventually adopted Allied designs, aircraft production never met requirements, and Army aviators flew to glory in French and British aircraft.
The fitful performance of the Wilson administration and the national economy in 1917 might have been excusable if the strategic situation had improved while the Allies awaited the AEF. Instead, the three-front European war changed to a one-front conflict. In the autumn of 1917 the Russian war effort collapsed, and the Bolsheviks sued for peace. German divisions immediately entrained for the Western Front. In Italy a German-Austrian offensive shattered the Italian army at Caporetto and drove the remaining Italian troops back toward Venice. Although the front stabilized with an infusion of Allied reinforcements, additional German troops were freed for transfer to France. From the council chambers in London and Paris to the headquarters of the Allied armies, General Pershing found unrelieved pessimism. Allied commanders knew the Germans could now shift to the strategic offensive for the first time since 1914, and they doubted that they could stop a general attack without American troops. But in December 1917 the AEF numbered fewer than 200,000 men and could provide only four divisions, none of which had completed their training. The Americans would have to provide more than promises, but it was uncertain that they could do so in time to prevent German victory.
The Navy’s War
For the American army three thousand miles of cold Atlantic Ocean led to the war, and in 1917 passage along this highway of waves was perilous. Unless the U.S. Navy, in league with the Royal Navy, could win the war against the German submarines, the conflict in Europe might end before the great American “reinforcement” arrived. Some German admirals predicted that the U-boats would ensure that the American soldiers would feed the Atlantic fish, not fill the Allied ranks in France.
In February 1917 the German navy started its second flurry of unrestricted commerce raiding with a force of only 133 U-boats. This force, never to expand appreciably, was deployed from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. In operational terms the Germans could keep about 32 to 36 U-boats positioned to intercept merchantmen approaching British ports. With this meager force the
German navy almost brought the British Empire to its knees. German planners believed that if their U-boats could sink 600,000 tons of shipping a month for six months, they would force Britain to sue for peace or accept economic collapse. In March, the estimated tonnage sunk passed the magic 600,000-ton mark. From April to August, the U-boats kept up the torrid pace of sinkings. Although it juggled tonnage figures to hide the fatal attrition of the transoceanic merchant fleet, the Admiralty staff confessed to its civilian superiors that Britain faced its greatest peril of the war.
The first contribution of the U.S. Navy in the war against the U-boats was the weight of professional opinion. It was an important contribution, for it encouraged the Admiralty to adopt the convoy system and eventually break the U-boat menace. The force behind the American position for convoys was Admiral William S. Sims, stormy petrel of naval affairs and the commander of American naval forces in European waters. Arriving in London on a fact-finding mission before the declaration of war, Sims assessed the U-boat war and immediately supported those Royal Navy officers who argued for the formation of convoys. The opposition was unmoved: The proper way to fight U-boats was to seek them out with patrols, not wait for them to attack merchantmen. Moreover, merchant vessels would not hold formation, maintain adequate speed, or submit to naval commanders. As the sinkings mounted, the conservatives’ arguments weakened. The forceful Sims insisted: “The mission of the Allies must be to force the submarines to give battle.” The convoy system offered the best chance for decision, since the U-boats had to come to the Allies to accomplish their mission. The convoy escorts—primarily destroyers—could sink or drive off the U-boats. When two experimental convoys crossed the Atlantic in May with slight losses, the Admiralty made convoying the new policy. By the autumn of 1917 the rate of sinkings had slowed, and U-boat losses began to mount.
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