ts of peace, was able in the space of sixteen months, to
provide an army capable of fighting successfully one of the most
difficult campaigns of the war, and that which led directly to the
military defeat of Germany.

The ultimate success of President Wilson's war policies could hardly have
been achieved except by the process of centralization which he never lost
from view. His insistence upon centralized responsibility and control in
political matters was paralleled in the military field. Nothing
illustrates this principle better than the centralization of the American
Expeditionary Force under the absolute and unquestioned command of General
Pershing. The latter was given free rein. The jealousies which so weakened
the Union armies during the first years of the Civil War were ruthlessly
repressed. No generals were sent to France of whom he did not approve.
When the Allies threatened to appeal to Washington over Pershing's head,
President Wilson turned a deaf ear.

In the United States, the President sought similar centralization through
the General Staff. It was this body which prepared the different plans for
the Draft Act, the Pershing expedition, and finally for the gigantic task
of putting a million men in France by the summer of 1918. To the staff was
given the formulation of the training programme along the lines
recommended by Pershing. Always, however, it was hampered by the multiple
responsibility that characterized the old-style army machine with its
bureau chiefs competing with each other, with the navy, and with the
Allies. Quartermaster Department, Ordnance Department, Signal Corps, and
the other bureaus were uncooerdinated, and inevitable waste and
inefficiency followed all their operations. It was the crisis that arose
from the problem of supplies, in the winter of 1917, that furnished the
President with the opportunity to cut red-tape and secure the
centralization he desired. That opportunity came with the blanket powers
bestowed upon him by the Overman Act, the full significance of which can
only be appreciated after a consideration of the measures taken to
centralize the industrial resources of the nation.

CHAPTER VII

THE HOME FRONT

On May 18, 1917, President Wilson issued a proclamation in which are to
be found the following significant sentences:

In the sense in which we have been wont to think of armies there are
no armies in this struggle, there are entire nations armed.