Part 2 (2/2)
Each zone possessed its own warehouses and supply and transportation organization, and in each the entire operating organization came under a single head, the Zone Manager, whose responsibility for his own particular area was similar to that of the Commissioner's authority for all France. The Zone Manager had on his staff representatives of any of the headquarters departments which might function in his area.
The scheme was simple, and it worked. Correspondence was free between headquarters at Paris and the individual workers in the field, but copies of all instructions were also sent to the Zone Managers--in some cases to district managers also--so that they might be properly informed and all the operations coordinated.
The nine zones of military operations with their headquarters were as follows:
Northern Havre Northwestern Brest Western St. Nazaire Southwestern Bordeaux Southern Ma.r.s.eilles North Intermediate Tours South Intermediate Lyons Northeastern Paris Eastern Neufchateau
Now consider, if you will, the workings of the seven great central bureaus, in so far at least as they concern the province of this book.
The scheme for the Department of Requirements, as you may see from the table that I have just given, included not only the Bureau of Supplies, Transportation, Construction, and Manufacture--which we will consider in separate chapters--and Permits and Pa.s.ses, but a section of General Insurance, to be responsible for all insurance matters except life insurance for Red Cross workers, which fell within the province of the Bureau of Personnel. The Medical and Surgical Department had its functions definitely outlined. It was stated that it was to be in charge of all the medical and surgical problems of the American Red Cross in France (except those specifically a.s.signed to the Medical Research and Intelligence Department); that it was to formulate policies and to undertake a general supervision of medical and surgical activities.
Moreover, it was to maintain the necessary contact with the United States Army and Navy authorities, so that the Red Cross could be prepared to render prompt service in the event of medical or surgical emergencies. It was to be responsible for the determination of all medical and surgical American Red Cross standards; for decisions regarding supplies and manufactures for medical and surgical purposes; and for judgment regarding medical requisition. These things were set down with great exactness, and it was well that they should be; for the position of the Red Cross in regard to the medical departments of both the army and the navy has ever been a delicate as well as an intricate and helpful one. So it was, too, that it was determined that each of the nine zone organizations should include a Medical and Surgical Department representative who should report to the Zone Manager and be responsible for executing for him all the medical and surgical instructions received from headquarters as well as for the study and development of medical and surgical opportunities within the zone. It was further set down that this zone representative should be in charge of Red Cross hospital administration within its territory and should direct its operations at the American Red Cross hospitals, dispensaries, infirmaries, convalescent homes, and all similar activities.
The work of the Army and Navy Department also was expanded in great detail. And, inasmuch as all of its work comes so closely within the province of this book, I shall follow some of that detail. For instance, the plan of its organization set down not only the Bureaus of Canteens, the Home and Hospital Service, Outpost Service and Army Field Service, but also laid down the definite plans of action to be followed by each of these bureaus. Starting with the first of them, the Bureau of Canteens was to be responsible, through the zone organizations, for the development of this service--always so dear to the heart of the doughboy--throughout all France, for the inspection of its operations including reviews of its operating costs and for all activities regarding plans for the supplies, construction, and equipment of the canteens. The Headquarters Bureau of this work at Paris was to develop instructions and formulate policies for the operation of these stations, but in the zones their actual operation was to fall under the jurisdiction of the local representatives of the Army and Navy Department who in turn, of course, reported direct to the Zone Manager controlling supplies and transportation movement in and out of the district.
The Bureau of Home and Hospital Service was divided into three sections--great sections because of the vastness of the work that it might be called upon to perform for an army of two million, or perhaps even four million men. These were the Home Communication Section, the Home Service Section, and the Section of General Service at Military Hospitals. The task of the first of these sections--which presently we shall see amplified--was to obtain and transmit to the United States or to authorized army and navy officials in France and also to relatives in the United States, such information as might possibly be obtained in regard to dead, wounded, missing, or prisoner American soldiers or sailors. It was to be supplemental to and not in duplication of the service of the quartermaster of the United States Army. As a part of its work the section was to render aid in registering and photographing the graves of our soldiers and sailors.
At headquarters in Paris the work of the Home Communication Section was to be concerned with general executive direction, the determination of policies, the issuance of instructions, and the actual transcribing and forwarding of the reports to America. In the zones its activities were brought under the zone Army and Navy Bureau. Its actual work was planned to be conducted through searchers in the field, in camps, and in hospitals.
The Home Service work, while in a sense similar to that of the Home Communication Section, in another sense was quite the reverse. For while the first of these two services concerned itself with supplying the anxious mother back home with information regarding the boy from whom she had not heard for so long a time, it was the task of the Home Service also, through its representatives in the field, camps, or in hospitals (in many instances the selfsame representatives as those of the Home Communication) so far as possible to relieve the anxieties of soldiers regarding affairs at home.
The third section of the Home and Hospital Service bore the rather imposing t.i.tle of Section of General Service at Military Hospitals. Its task was to a.s.sist in furnis.h.i.+ng medical and surgical supplies to army and navy hospitals in accordance with the plans of the Medical and Surgical Department, to distribute general comforts to our sick and wounded, to erect and operate recreation huts at the hospitals, and even to develop gardens at the hospitals for furnis.h.i.+ng fresh vegetables to patients--a part of the program which, because of the sudden ending of the war, was never quite realized. Furthermore, the work of this Section contemplated the operation of nurses' homes and huts. All of these activities were to be under the chief representative at the hospital whose task it was to correlate and direct all the operations.
Alongside of Home and Hospital Service in the army and navy stood the Bureaus of Outpost Service and of Army Field Service. In the plan for the first of these, the American Red Cross would endeavor to maintain at as many points as was consistently possible outposts at which supplies would be kept and comforts and necessities distributed to men in the line. From these points, as well as from points even in advance of their locations, emergency sustenance and comforts were to be given men at advanced dressing stations and at every other point along the front where our troops might actually be reached.
In the Army Field Service, the American Red Cross was to have, with each army division, a representative to cooperate with the Army Medical Corps to furnish supplementary medical and surgical supplies, to distribute supplies and comforts to troops, to perform such canteen service as was possible in emergencies, and for a general cooperation with the men working in the Home Communication and the Home services.
If I have taken much of your time with the rather lengthy details of this final war-time plan of organization of the American Red Cross in France, it is because one cannot well understand the results of a great machine such as it became--with more than six thousand uniformed workers in the field, the hospitals, the canteens, and the headquarters of France--without looking a little bit beneath its hoodings and its coverings and seeing something of the actual working of its mechanism.
I like, myself, to think first of the Red Cross in its vast humanitarian aspects; and yet the business side of the great organization, so far as I have had the opportunity of seeing into it, has fascinated me. To go behind the scenes of the greatest helping hand of all time and there see system, precision, and order, is a mighty privilege. The Headquarters building of the American Red Cross in the city of Was.h.i.+ngton is a monumental structure--an architectural triumph in white marble, planned as a great and enduring memorial long before the coming of the war. Even in the busiest days of 1918 its beautiful and restful exterior gave little evidence of the whirl of industry within and behind, for far to the rear of the main Headquarters building, designed, as I have just said, with no immediate thought of war, stretched great, plain emergency buildings, each a hive of offices and each peopled with hundreds of clerks, with desks and typewriters and telephones--all in coordination and all a part of the paraphernalia that goes to the making of the cogs and wheels and shafts and cylinders of the great modern machine of business of to-day.
Behind this building there were many other such headquarters structures--buildings here and there across the face of the United States and in some of the great capitals of Europe--Paris, London, Rome, Geneva, for instance. Of these, none more important, none busier than the headquarters of the American Red Cross in France, in the six-storied Hotel Regina, Paris, in its turn a veritable hive of offices and peopled with more clerks, more desks, more typewriters, more telephones, and all this paraphernalia coordinated as we have just seen, by modern and detailed business system.
Again behind these headquarters buildings still others; concentration warehouses in each of America's forty-eight states, to say nothing of her Federal capital; warehouses at ports of embarkation; warehouses at ports of debarkation; at central points in France, and points behind the firing line; huts, canteens, in some cases entire hospitals, motor trucks, camionettes, supplies in the hundreds of thousands of tons to go from the warehouses into the camions and back again into the warehouses, and ten thousand workers, six thousand in France alone. What a mess it all would have been without a coordinated system, definitely laid down and definitely followed!
To have builded such a machine, to have laid down so huge and so definite a plan in the days before the war would seemingly have been a matter of long years. But we now know that the Red Cross is an emergency organization. In emergency it was developed--not in years, but in months, nay, even in weeks.
”We had to build an organization--and operate it all the time that we were building it,” one of the Was.h.i.+ngton officers of the organization once told me. ”We had to start to get actual materials and supplies for field relief work of every sort at the very hour and minute that we were sending our first working commission to France and were struggling to get a competent field relief organization. In every direction raw and inexperienced human material confronted us. We were raw and inexperienced ourselves. And yet, as we confronted the big problem and turned it over between us, we saw light. We began to realize certain definite things. We realized, for instance, that when we needed an executive to supervise the turning out of many hundreds of millions of hospital dressings, we did not, after all, need a nurse or a doctor, but a man or a woman who had the experience or the technique to turn out dressings in huge quant.i.ties. We needed an executive. We found such a man in the person of a lumberman out in the Middle West. We brought him to Was.h.i.+ngton and there he made good on the job.”
These experiences were paralleled in Paris even through the exigencies of the situation, the extreme emergency which at all times confronted our Red Cross there, until the fateful eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 had been met and long since pa.s.sed. It therefore was not always possible to pick executives with such care and discrimination as would be possible in the United States; in fact the best results were obtained by the more or less firmly fixed method of finding the personnel here--generally in response to definite cable requests from Paris--and sending it to France, but not always. Occasionally the reverse was true. Men already overseas were thrust quite unexpectedly into posts of great trust and great responsibility--posts requiring broad and instant initiative--and in those posts developed abilities which they, themselves, had not realized they possessed.
In fact it is worth stating that the zone plan of organization contemplated this very possibility, and so gave to each Zone Manager great autonomy and freedom of action. In no other way would it have been possible to obtain immediate and efficient results, particularly in a war-beset land where communication of every sort, by train, by motor car, by post, by telegraph, and by telephone, was so greatly overburdened. The very autonomy of the final organization plan was largely responsible for its success. It was one of the lubricants which made the big business machine of the American Red Cross in France function so well.
Have you ever stood beside a fairly complex machine--a linotype or a silk loom or a paper machine, for instance--and after examining its intricacy of cams and cogs and shafts, wondered how it turned out its product with such precision and rapidity? So it is with the big business machine of the American Red Cross. You might stand close to any one of its many, many individual activities--the sewing room of a chapter house here in the United States, a base hospital behind the front in France, a transport receiving its medical supplies--and wonder truly at the coordination of such huge activities; for they did coordinate. The big machine functioned, and as a rule functioned very well indeed. And because it did function so very well the largest single humanitarian effort in the history of the world was carried forward to success with a minimum of friction and loss of precious energy.
So much, if you please, for practical business methods in an international emergency.
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