1919 The Armistice
Out of the first great registration and the two small ones supplementing it and from the Regular Army and the National Guard there had been sent overseas at the signing of the armistice, November 11th, 1918, a little more than 2,000,000 men and there were in the United States, ready for transportation to France, 1,600,000. The American Army totaled at that time 3,665,000. Those in the American training camps were being transported to France at the rate of from 200,000 to 300,000 per month and would all have been overseas by early spring of 1919. The plans were all ready for operation for calling into military service 3,000,000 more men from this registration, for training them in the American camps two or three months and then sending them to France for a final training period of six or eight weeks. If the war had continued until the summer of 1919, as it was then universally believed it would, the United States would have had ready for service at the front, within two years of its declaration of war, an army of between 6,000,000 and 7,000,000 men, taken from civilian life, trained, equipped and transported across the Atlantic Ocean within that time.
The tank, which was the answer to the machine gun, was one of the important new weapons evolved by the war, its basic idea having been suggested by the American farm caterpillar tractor. The United States adopted two types, one the smaller form used by the French Army, of which 4,000 were being made, and the other a modification and improvement of the large tank used by the British, with whom a joint program of tank construction was being carried out when the armistice was signed. It would have been taken across the ocean by hundreds during the winter and great companies of them would have plunged into the enemy's lines with the resumption of fighting in the spring of 1919.
A new poison gas was developed, far more deadly than any previously in use, and its manufacture carried on with the greatest secrecy. At the end of the war ten tons a day were being produced and it was estimated that a single ton dropped in bombs and containers upon a city of a million inhabitants would have killed them all. Three thousand tons of it were to be ready in the battle zone by March 1, 1919.
Knowledge of these preparations and surety of what would, therefore, happen in the early spring of 1919 are believed by military authorities to have been an important factor in the sudden collapse of the German military plans.
While the Peace Congress was assembling and preparing its terms, the enemy was held down by the drastic provisions of the Armistice concluded 11 November, and subsequently renewed with revisions in the interests of greater security. The Armistice provided. in substance, for a cessation of fighting and for the surrender of a carefully specified number of heavy cannon, machine guns, airplanes, railway engines and other material. Also, the enemy were to abandon the invaded countries of Belgium, northern France, Alsace- Lorraine and Luxemburg, and all German territories on the left bank of the Rhine as well. These were to be occupied by Allied troops who were to hold the principal Rhine crossings at Cologne, Coblenz, and Mayence with their bridgeheads for a radius of 18.6 miles on the right bank, while, for additional security, there was to be a neutral zone parallel to the river on this same right bank.
In their evacuation the Germans were strictly enjoined to spare all inhabitants and property, to reveal all mines or time bombs, poisoned wells and other means of destruction, and to give up the prisoners which they had captured during the war without any reciprocal assurance that their own would be delivered. In addition, they were to return deported civilians, together with all stocks, securities and paper money taken from invaded countries. They were to withdraw from Russia, Turkey, and Rumania, to abandon the treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest, and to restore the gold taken by the former treaty from Russia, which was to be held in trust by the Allies. Finally, they were to surrender practically the whole of their fleet, to allow freedom of access to the Baltic, and to assist in sweeping up the mines which they had indis- crim inately sown. To help the army of occupation in securing the terms of the Armistice, the blockade was to be maintained as long as necessary.
The preliminaries of peace, including a scheme for a League of Nations, were signed by the Congress of 'the Allies at Paris, 28 June, 1919.
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