A study of the American army for the year succeeding our entry into the war is a study of the effects of broomstick preparedness. All who defend this type of preparedness are themselves, however amicable and well-meaning, broomstick apologists.
Over eighteen months have now passed since we admitted that we were at war, and over twenty months since the Germans frankly began war upon us. With our immense manpower, wealth, and resources, the natural fighting qualities of our men and the business energy and the mechanical efficiency of our people, we have now developed a force that has made us a highly important factor in the war. Seventeen months after we entered the war we at last had a sufficiency of well-trained troops to enable General Pershing for the first time to take part in the war with a separate army, an army such as the French and the English had. But this army was still very small in size, compared to either the French or British armies. Moreover it was able to act only because it had obtained from our allies the cannon, airplanes, tanks, machine-guns, and the gas necessary in modern warfare. Without what we have thus obtained from our allies we would have been absolutely helpless. But the gallantry and fighting efficiency of our men, and the fact that several hundred thousand are now fit for use at the front, have made us already of very real weight against the Germans, for when the scales are almost trembling in the balance a relatively small weight of effort will determine the outcome. Therefore, the large number of well meaning persons who are very forgetful, and who like to tickle their vanity by refusing to face what is unpleasant, tend already to say that our unpreparedness did not amount to anything after all, and that all things are all right, and that nobody must speak about the wrongs of the past. For this reason it is essential that our people should know just what our shortcomings were.
We cannot learn about these shortcomings from military officers. The administration by its treatment of General Wood has rendered it a work of the highest danger for any American army officer to tell the truth that ought to be told. General Wood, two years before we went into the war, and again one year before we went into the war, appeared before the Congressional Military Committees and set forth our needs. When at the end of last winter he returned from his stay in France, he told us what ought at once to be done. The administration in every case refused to profit by what he had testified, and yet in every case the events have made good everything he said. It is to General Wood that we owe primarily the Plattsburg officers' training-camps in 1915 and 1916. These Plattsburg training-camps did a work that cannot be overestimated, in providing officers; and it was the one really effective bit of preparation on our part. All that General Wood thus advised and thus did was of the very highest value to the country. Instead of rewarding him for it, the administration has punished him in the way hardest to bear for a gallant and patriotic soldier. This has represented not only a cruel injustice to him, but a deeply unpatriotic refusal to meet the country's needs.
Therefore, I am not at liberty to quote the first-hand testimony I have had as to some of the vital shortcomings in the administration of the War Department and the army during the first eighteen months of the war.
But in the camps I visited I saw some things so evident that no harm can come to any officer from my speaking of them; and there are some things which are now matters of common knowledge, although the War Department did everything it could to keep them from the knowledge of the people.
In the fall of 1917 the enormous majority of our men in the encampments were drilling with broomsticks or else with rudely whittled guns. As late as the beginning of December they had in the camps almost only wooden machine-guns and wooden field-cannon. In the camps I saw barrels mounted on sticks on which zealous captains were endeavoring to teach their men how to ride a horse. At that time we had one or two divisions of well-trained infantry in France- which would have been simply lapped up if placed against the army of any formidable military power. At that time, eight months after we had gone to war, the army we had gathered in the cantonments had neither the rifles, the machine-guns, the cannon, the tanks, nor +he airplanes which would have enabled them to make any fight at all against any army of any military power that could have landed on our shores. It would have been as helpless against an invading army as so many savages armed with stone-headed axes. We were wholly unable to defend ourselves a year after we had gone to war. We owed our safety only to the English, French, and Italian fleets and armies.
The cause was our refusal to prepare in advance. President Wilson's message of December, 1914, in which he ridiculed those who advocated preparedness, was part of the cause. We paid the price later with broomstick rifles, log-wood cannon, soldiers without shoes, and epidemics of pneumonia in the camps. We are paying the price now in shortage of coal and congestion of transportation, and in the double cost of necessary war-supplies. We are paying the price and shall pay the price in the shape of taxes and a national debt at least twice as large as would have been the case if with forethought and wisdom we had prepared in advance. We have paid the price in the
blood of tens of thousands of gallant men. The refusal to prepare, and the price we now pay because of the refusal, stand in the relation of cause and effect. The attitude of the War Department during the first months of the war was shown by the remark of one of the high officials to the effect that the delay of a few months was "a perfectly endurable delay." This remark was made with all the complacency of the butterfly on the fence to the toad under the harrow. Others paid with their blood for our delay. The German submarine note came on January 31, 1917; and within the next two months an alert and efficient War Department would have had every particle of its programme minutely mapped out and well on the way to execution. As a matter of fact, nothing was really begun until late in August.
Every American worth his salt feels exultant pride in the splendid courage and high efficiency of our soldiers in France. From General Pershing down they have made our country, and us who dwell therein, forever their debtors. It is well to pay these men the homage of words, but what really counts is the homage of deeds. It is a dreadful thing to send our fine and gallant boys to battle, and yet to deny them the formidable weapons and machines of war, the lack of which must be paid for by; pouring out their blood like water.
As a nation we cannot be acquitted of this wrong to our fighting men whom we have sent to the front. No finer fighting men were ever known, and their deeds are deeds of deathless honor. But our government, by its failure to prepare in advance and by its delay, waste, and mismanagement after the war began, has made a record that is not pleasant for Americans to contemplate. Let our people never forget that if we had chosen to prepare in advance we would probably have ended the war in ninety days after we entered it in 1917; and that if when General Leonard Wood returned from France at the close of last winter the administration had heeded his report and had done as he then advised and as every patriotic man of knowledge and insight then hoped, we would have been further advanced at the beginning of the summer than we are now at the end of the fall. Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time.
When, on February 3, we broke off diplomatic relations with Germany the war really began. From that moment avoidable, unwarranted delay was as inexcusable as it is now. The day before Mr. Elon Hooker had laid before the authorities at Washington an offer to turn over his entire plant to the service of the government, this being the plant better fitted than any other in the United States to undertake the manufacture of war gas and the development of new and more formidable kinds of gas on a gigantic scale. His request was refused. A year elapsed before any serious effort was made to undo any of the effects of the error. At the same time we had the means for building enormous quantities of excellent machine-guns. The War Department refused to avail itself of the opportunity and dallied for about eighteen months in developing a new type of gun, leaving us meanwhile without any. We dawdled in similar fashion over the tanks. We have not yet built any field-guns, and are still dependent upon what the French can give us. It is necessary merely to refer to the appalling delay in the air service where $640,000,000 were appropriated and largely expended without securing any tangible result whatever on the field of battle until we had been at war nearly a year and a half.
. . . After a year of war, when the great German drive began, our fighting army able to take part in the active work at the front was actually smaller than that of Belgium. In the next six months we were able to place in the field an army respectable in numbers and admirable in quality; and we were able to do this only because, in view of the breakdown of our shipping programme, the British furnished their ships, so that 60 per cent of the tonnage used in ferrying our soldiers across was British. But we were able to furnish only the men. We had only the field-artillery the French furnished us. We got uniforms from the English. We did not have a single fighting plane of American make, and naturally the French did not give us their best planes. We had very few American machine-guns or auto rifles. We had almost no gas. We had almost no tanks, and those we did have were furnished by our allies. We now have a few admirable naval guns, admirably handled, and a number of excellent bombing airplanes of our own manufacture.
The business efficiency of our people is great. Its manpower is great. Its resources are enormous. Had the administration, with an eye single to our country's needs, devoted its whole energy to speeding up the war, and abandoned all thought of politics during the war, the peace of overwhelming victory would by this time have been won. But this was not done. Never before in our history has the administration in power during a war drawn party lines as sharply as in the present war. No one but an active partisan adherent of the administration has been given any position of the slightest political responsibility; and the test in the appointment of even these, as established by President Wilson, in his messages concerning the election or reelection of congressmen, is loyalty to the administration rather than loyalty to the country....