treated his first two Chiefs of Staff, Maj. Gen. Hugh L. Scott and General Bliss, as chiefs of the War Department General Staff only. Abroad much of the time on special missions, Scott in Russia with the Root mission and Bliss with the new Supreme War Council in Paris, they exercised little influence in Washington. Nearing retirement, they also lacked "that certain ruthlessness which disregards accustomed methods and individual likings in striking out along new and untrodden paths.” So did Secretary Baker.42

The War Department General Staff, at that time primarily the War College Division, during this period was not a coordinating staff but simply the department's war planning agency, as some critics indicated it should have been all along. Mr. Baker looked to the Chief of Staff and the General Staff for advice and plans on raising, training, and equipping the Army. He ignored their advice on the need for more effective control over the bureaus through the Chief of Staff until the issue could no longer be postponed.43

There were other factors which made it difficult for the General Staff to act effectively. Fearing Congressional reaction Baker ordered that line officers only, and not War Department staff officers, should be promoted. General Pershing was allowed to select any War Department officers he wanted for his own headquarters staff. Finally experienced civil servants in the bureaus could not be commissioned and continue to serve in their former civilian capacities. They had to be transferred out of Washington.

As a result both the General Staff and the bureaus lost experienced and valuable personnel at a time when their services were needed most. Such key figures as Brig. Gen. Joseph E. Kuhn, Chief of the War College Division, and Lt. Col. John

42 While Bliss was in Paris during November and part of December 1917 and from mid-January to March 1918, Maj. Gen. John Biddle was Acting Chief of Staff. (1) Coffman, The Hilt of the Sword, pp. 39–44, 48–53. Quotation from p. 41. The author was their successor, General Peyton C. March. (2) Coffman, "The Battle Against Red-Tape," pp. 1-3. (3) Beaver, Newton D. Baker and the American War Effort, pp. 80-81. (4) U.S. Army, Order of Battle of the Land Forces in the World War (1917-19), Zone of the Interior (Washington, 1949), pt. 1, pp. 16-17, 27. Hereafter cited as Order of Battle (1917-19), ZI. (5) Erna Risch, Quartermaster Support of the Army: A History of the Corps, 1775-1939 (Washington, 1962), pp. 599-600.

43

(1) Beaver, Newton D. Baker and the American War Effort, pp. 39-49, 59-61, 93-94. (2) Kreidberg and Henry, History of Military Mobilization, pp. 216, 290–303. (3) Order of Battle (1917-19), ZI, pp. 29–31. (4) Coffman, “The Battle Against Red-Tape," pp. 1-2.

McAuley Palmer left for overseas as soon as possible. From July to the end of September the War College Division lost over a third of its staff, leaving only twenty-four inexperienced staff officers on duty. The bureaus suffered comparable casualties. As one critic privately wrote General Pershing, "The policy you have adopted in your General Staff should have been adopted in Washington. The highest type of men should have been selected and kept in Washington on the General Staff without prejudice to their advancement. That would have given us greater continuity of policy." 44

The War College Division had become the General Staff in fact because of the abolition by Congress of the Mobile Army Division. Retaining its prewar organization the War College Division was divided into five functional committees and a separate Military Intelligence Section. The committees concentrated on raising the new Army in terms of organization and recruitment, military operations, equipment, and training. The fifth committee dealing with legislation and regulations, prepared the necessary administrative and legal support.

The Military Operations Committee was responsible for operational planning, including the defense of the United States and its overseas possessions. It drew up the plans for sending troops to Europe, prepared studies on the amount of shipping available, and issued troop movement schedules. The Equipment Committee was responsible for supplying troops, preparing standard tables of equipment for each unit, distributing supplies among the troops, procurement planning, and maintaining liaison with the supply bureaus. It had no authority over the bureaus. It could merely request action from them.

A serious drawback was the General Staff's awkward loca"(1) Col Briant H. Wells, The Transition of the General Staff from Peace to War, Army War College lecture, 10 Sep 22. Miscellaneous Papers No. 10, 1922-1923, pp. 4-6. (2) Risch, Quartermaster Support of the Army, pp. 602–03. (3) Edward M. Coffman, The War to End All Wars: The American Military Experience in World War I (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 24. (4) In a memorandum of 3 September 1917 Mr. Baker claimed that Congress in the Selective Service Act provided only for promotions in the mobile army, not the War Department. He had asked Congress for legislation which would permit promotions within the department, but Congress had not acted on it so far. Baker Papers, Box 240 (1917-M). (5) The quotation is from a letter of Maj. Gen. Henry T. Allen of 18 March 1918 to General Pershing. Papers of General of the Armies John J. Pershing, Library of Congress. I am obliged to Lt. Col. Heath Twichell who has written an excellent biography of General Allen for calling my attention to this letter.

tion across town in the War College which inevitably created delay and ungenerous remarks that it had become a dead-letter office. Consequently, both the Military Operations and Equipment Committees moved from the War College to the main War Department building in the fall of 1917 to perform their functions more effectively and expeditiously. At that time they became known collectively as the War Department Section of the War Department General Staff.45

The territorial departments of the Army were reorganized and increased from four to six after the declaration of war to assist the War Department in the administration of the Army and to mobilize the National Guard and Reserve forces. The departments were the Northeastern, Eastern, Southeastern, Central, Southern, and Western. The Southern Department was responsible for coping with the continued depredations of warring Mexican factions along the border, tying down between 30,000 to 130,000 men at various times in over 255 small posts. It was a major operation and supplying these men was an added strain on the already overburdened war economy. Overseas there were the Hawaiian and Philippine Departments to which a new Panama Canal Department was added in July 1917. The Philippine Department included a small detachment of 1,500 men stationed in China with headquarters at Tientsin. It was also responsible for assembling the 2,700 men assigned to General Graves' Siberian expedition in the summer of 1918. These departments all reported to the War Department. General Pershing reported directly to Secretary Baker also, not through the Chief of Staff.46

The General Staff planned, scheduled, and co-ordinated its programs for mobilizing, training, and transporting the Army overseas. So far as the supply bureaus were concerned there was little planning and no co-ordination. At the outbreak of war,

45

(1) Kreidberg and Henry, History of Military Mobilization, pp. 216, 290-92. (2) Order of Battle (1917-19), Z1, pp. 30-31. (3) Annual Report of the Chief of Staff, 1919, pp. 292-93. (4) Coffman, The Hilt of the Sword, pp. 41, 47. (5) Memo, Ralph Hayes for the Secretary of War, 29 Dec. 17. Baker Manuscripts, Box 255 (Hayes-Baker Correspondence).

40

(1) Kreidberg and Henry, History of Military Mobilization, pp. 221-22, 234. (2) Order of Battle (1917-19), ZI, pp. 549–675. (3) Report of the Chief of Staff, War Department Annual Report, 1919, pt. I, pp. 467–71. (4) Coffman, The Hilt of the Sword, pp. 113-18. (5) Beaver, Newton D. Baker and the American War Effort, pp. 185-87. (6) Memo, AGO, 3 Jan 17, sub: Strength of Troops on Mexican Border. Baker Manuscripts.

Secretary Baker simply issued "hunting licenses" to the bureaus and turned them loose on an unprepared economy. Baker and other responsible officials should have anticipated the chaos that inevitably followed. By July more than 150 War Department purchasing committees were competing with each other for scarce supplies in the open market.

Anticipating shortages, agencies and their personnel aggressively sought to corner the markets for critical items. The Adjutant General rubbed Mr. Baker's nose into the problem personally one day by boasting that he had cornered the American market for typewriters. "There is going to be the greatest competition for typewriters around here, and I have them. all." 47

Similarly the commander of the Rock Island Arsenal cornered the market for leather. "Well, that was wrong, you know," he later told Congress, "but I went on the proposition that it was up to me to look after my particular job, and I proceeded to do so." 48

Simply expressed this maxim has been part of the traditional American dogma of individualism. It applies to large organizations and small, government and private. It worked satisfactorily in a thinly populated, expanding rural America, but as many responsible industrialists had foreseen earlier competition could mean disaster during war in a mass urban industrial society.49

"50

As one severe critic bluntly put it, "The supply situation was as nearly a perfect mess as can be imagined. It seemed a hopeless tangle." 50 Among the bureaus were five, later nine, separate, independent systems for estimating requirements with no inventory controls to determine the

47 (1) Beaver, Newton D. Baker and the American War Effort, p. 62. (2) Quotation from Baker War College Lecture, p. 6.

48

49

Quoted in Dickinson, The Building of an Army, pp. 282-83.

** (1) Alfred D. Chandler, “The Large Industrial Corporation in the Making of the Modern American Economy," in Stephen E. Ambrose, ed., Institutions in Modern America: Structure and Process (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), pp. 71-101. (2) Robert E. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968). (3) Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1963). Of course, Kolko turned the industrialists' rational search for order upside down to fit a typical populist, agrarian conspiracy theory.

Hugh S. Johnson, The Blue Eagle From Egg to Earth (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1935), p. 90.

amount of supplies available in various depots. Some depots had more space to store supplies than they needed, while others did not have enough. There were five different sources of supply and property accountability, always a source of timeconsuming red tape, five different accounting systems, and as many incompatible statistical and reporting systems which were of use only to the bureau or depot concerned. For example, the War Department, according to Bernard Baruch, could not find out from the bureaus how much toluol, a basic ingredient of TNT, it needed.

There were no agencies anywhere in the department, or even within some bureaus, for determining industrial and transportation priorities similar to those the General Staff prepared for troop movement schedules. Competition among the bureaus for transportation caused bottlenecks that, by December 1917, imperiled the fuel supplies of war industries. Finally, the bureaus dealt directly with the War Industries Board, other civilian war agencies, and with Allied purchasing missions, but there was no one to represent the department as a whole. As Maj. Gen. George W. Burr, Director of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic, after the war told Congress, "The Bureau System did not work in an emergency, and it never will work." 51

Despite the growing evidence of impending industrial disaster Mr. Baker persisted throughout the fall of 1917 in opposing controls over industry, transportation, and over the bureaus. Ultimately in December a mammoth congestion of rail and ocean traffic developed in the New York area and the northeast generally. A particularly severe winter, which froze railswitches and even coal piled out in the open, and the menace to Atlantic shipping of German submarines made matters

worse.

For lack of effective controls a vast amount of freight clogged yards in Atlantic ports and eastern industrial areas with

51 (1) Baruch, The Public Years, pp. 43-62. (2) Report of the Chief of Staff, War Department Annual Report, 1919, pp. 245-47. (3) Risch, Quartermaster Support of the Army, pp. 609-13. (4) History of the Organization and Functions of the Central Statistical Office of the Chief of Staff, in Department of the Army World War II Statistics, c. 1947, pp. 1-2. Manuscript in OCMH. (5) Koistinen, "The IndustrialMilitary Complex," pp. 388-90. (6) Memo, Col Frederick B. Wells, Director of Storage, for Historical Branch (PS&T), 7 Mar 19, sub: Development of Storage. File 029 (Storage Div.), PS&T files, RG 165, NARS. (7) Testimony of General Burr, Army Reorganization Hearings, 1919-20, pp. 441-62. Quotation from p. 446.