The U.S. Army in World War I - Complete History of the U.S. Army in the Great War, Including the Mobilization, The Main Battles & All Official Documents of the U.S. Government during the War

The War Effort in the United States

Pershing and his staff understood that they would be limited in what they could realistically do in 1918 because the U.S. Army was in no position to make its weight felt in the near future. In April 1917 the Regular Army had an aggregate strength of 127,588 officers and men. The National Guard could count another 80,446 on federal service (out of a total strength of 181,620), and the Philippine Scouts contributed another 5,523 soldiers available for regular service. The total of 213,557 men (9,693 officers; 203,864 enlisted) was minute compared to the armies already fighting in Europe. The small Army barely had enough artillery and machine guns to support itself, and before the formation of the 1st Division in June not a single unit of that size existed. Although service in the Philippines and Mexico had given many of the officers and men of the small Regular Army important field skills and experience, it had done little to prepare them for large-scale planning, the maneuvering of divisions and corps, and the other logistical and administrative challenges of this new war. The task of managing the Army’s necessary expansion into a large, modern force fell largely to Secretary Baker.

Baker seemed out of place heading America’s war effort. A longtime friend of President Wilson, Baker had been appointed secretary of war in the spring of 1916, despite his pacifistic attitudes. Although as a progressive mayor of Cleveland he had changed that city’s government into an efficient organization, as secretary of war he would often pursue a moderate, uncontroversial course rather than strike out on a new path. Yet in the bureaucratic chaos that ensued after the United States’ entry into the war, Baker proved an unflappable leader who was flexible enough to force change if he had the correct tools.

The War Department started off by addressing the means to raise an army for service in the war. It drafted legislation for what would be the Selective Service Act, enacted on 18 May 1917, which enabled the United States to obtain the necessary manpower for the conflict while avoiding the difficulties and inequities with conscription that the Union had experienced during the Civil War. The result was a model system. Based on the principle of universal obligation, it eliminated substitutes, most exemptions and bounties, and assured that conscripts would serve for the duration of the emergency. Initially, all males between the ages of twenty-one and thirty had to register; later the range expanded to include males from eighteen to forty-five. At the national level, the Office of the Provost Marshal General under Maj. Gen. Enoch Crowder established policy and issued general directives. The administration of the draft, however, was left to boards composed of local citizens, who could grant selective exemptions based on essential occupations and family obligations.

The Selective Service Act was hugely successful. The Army’s prewar strength of a little over 200,000 men grew to almost 4.2 million by November 1918. About two-thirds of this number was raised through conscription. The Selective Service process proved so successful at satisfying the Army’s needs while ensuring that essential civilian occupations remained filled that voluntary enlistments ended in August 1918. For the rest of the war, conscription remained the sole means of filling the Army’s ranks.

The act also established the broad framework for the Army’s structure. It outlined three components of the Army: the Regular Army, the National Guard, and the National Army. As time passed these distinctions lost much of their meaning as new soldiers filled out all three elements. By mid-1918 the War Department changed the designation of all land forces to one “United States Army.” The most significant remaining distinction was in the numerical designations; Regular Army divisions were numbered from 1 to 25, those originating from the National Guard were 26 through 75, and the National Army formations went from 76 upward.

Just how big an army the United States needed depended in large measure on General Pershing’s plans and recommendations to meet the operational situation in France. In the General Organization Project of July 1917, Pershing and his staff called for a field army of about one million men to be sent to France before the end of 1918. The War Department in turn translated Pershing’s proposal into a plan to send thirty divisions with supporting services—almost 1.4 million men—to Europe by 1919. As the Germans launched their spring offensives in 1918 and the AEF began more active operations, Pershing increased his estimates. In June 1918 he would ask for three million men with sixty-six divisions in France by May 1919. He raised this estimate to eighty divisions by April 1919, followed shortly (under pressure from the Allies) by a request for one hundred divisions by July of the same year. Although the War Department questioned whether one hundred divisions could be sent to France by mid-1919 and even whether that many would be needed, it produced plans to raise ninety-eight divisions, with eighty of them to be in France by the summer of 1919. These plans increased the original goal for divisions in France by the end of 1918 from thirty to fifty-two. In the end the Army actually would form sixty-two divisions, of which forty-three went overseas.

To train these divisions the Army would eventually establish thirty-two camps throughout the United States. How much training incoming soldiers needed before going overseas had long been a matter of debate, but in 1917 the War Department settled on four months. It established a sixteen-week program that emphasized training soldiers by military specialty such as riflemen, artillery gunners, supply or personnel clerks, or medical specialists. Division commanders at each camp had latitude to train their men progressively from individual to battalion level with a primary focus on individual and small-unit skills. Initially, much to the dismay of Pershing and his staff in France, this training only emphasized trench, or positional, warfare and excluded rifle marksmanship and other elements of a more open and mobile warfare. Moreover, there was no time for larger units to come together to train as combined-arms teams. Until the end of the war, the training managers at the War Department had various degrees of success as the department worked to establish a consistent training regimen and to move away from the emphasis on trench warfare. The Army, however, was never able to implement an effective method for combined-arms training at the regiment and division levels before the units deployed. It would remain for the AEF in France to either complete the training of the incoming divisions or, more commonly, to send them into combat not fully prepared.

The training of replacements also remained problematic throughout the war. As early as the late summer of 1917, Pershing knew that sooner or later he would have to deal with the problem of replacing combat losses in his divisions. He complained to the War Department that he did not have the resources—especially time—to train replacements and instead recommended that a stateside division be assigned the mission of providing trained replacements to each of his corps in France. The War Department did not act on his proposal and did little on its own to resolve the problem until early 1918. A major obstacle to a replacement training system was the Wilson administration’s concern that the establishment of replacement training centers would imply that the government anticipated wholesale American losses. Nevertheless, several centers were established in April 1918 to train infantry, artillery, and machine gun replacements. Though the Army continued to make progress on creating a viable program, the replacements overwhelmed the nascent system; again, it was left up to the deployed forces to deal with the problem.

The mobilization and training of manpower had been a major concern of a century of American military thought, but in World War I the demands of arming, equipping, and supplying a threemillion-man Army meant that American industry also had to be mobilized. The National Defense Act of 1916 had to a degree anticipated this need with the creation of the Council of National Defense to provide a central point for the coordination of military industrial needs. Even before America’s entry into the war, the council had created the Munitions Standards Board to establish standards for the production of ordnance. Soon, however, it became apparent that the enormous materiel requirements of industrialized warfare would need careful management; thus the Munitions Standards Board grew in stages to become the War Industries Board. With both civilian and military representatives, it had broad powers to coordinate all purchasing by the Army and Navy, to establish production priorities, to create new plants and convert existing ones to priority uses, and to coordinate the activities of various civilian war agencies. Under the vigorous leadership of industrialist Bernard Baruch, the War Industries Board would become the chief agency of economic and industrial mobilization for the war. In general, the Army’s liaison with civilian mobilization agencies was coordinated through Baruch’s board; however, it maintained separate liaison with the administration’s Shipping and Railway War Boards that...