two flotillas of destroyers were at once sent to Queenstown to assist in chasing and sinking submarines, and were placed under the command of Admiral William S. Sims. Battleships and cruisers followed, though by no means with the expedition nor in the numbers desired by Sims, who believed that by using practically the entire naval force at once the submarine could be exterminated and the war ended.

At home, the Navy Department entered upon a process of expansion which increased its personnel from 65,000 to 497,000 when the armistice was signed. A rapid development in naval construction was planned, with emphasis upon destroyers. The effects of this programme became visible within a year; during the first nine months of 1918 no less than eighty-three destroyers were launched, as against sixty-two for the preceding nine years. Submarine chasers of a special design were built and many private yachts taken over and adapted to the war against the submarine. During the course of the war two battleships and twenty-eight submarines were completed. Expansion in naval shipbuilding plans was paralleled by the construction of giant docks; by camps sufficient for the training of two hundred thousand men; and by a

ΙΟ

naval aircraft factory from which a seaplane was turned out seven months after work on the factory was begun. Naval aviators returning from the Channel coasts superintended flying schools and undertook the patrol of our Atlantic seaboard.

If much of these military preparations was not translated into accomplishment before the war ended, it was because the United States was preparing wisely for a long struggle and it seemed necessary that the foundations should be broad and deep. "America was straining her energies towards a goal," said the Director of Munitions, "toward the realization of an ambition which, in the production of munitions, dropped the year 1918 almost out of consideration altogether, which indeed did not bring the full weight of American men and matériel into the struggle even in 1919, but which left it for 1920, if the enemy had not yet succumbed to the growing American power, to witness the maximum strength of the United States in the field." It was the knowledge of this preparation which, to some extent, helped to convince the German General Staff of the futility of further resistance and thus to bring the war to an early end.

The dependence of the United States upon the

Allies for equipment and munitions does not deserve the vitriolic anathemas of certain critics. The country did not enter the struggle as if it expected to fight the war single-handed. Distribution of labor and supplies between the United States and the Allies was merely a wise and economic measure. At their own request, the Allies were furnished with that which they most needed

money, food, and man-power. In return they provided the United States with the artillery and machine guns which they could spare and which they could manufacture more cheaply and rapidly. Finally there is the outstanding fact, of which America may always be proud, that this heterogeneous democracy, organized, so far as organization existed, for the pursuits 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 uncoördinated, 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.