Quotes About War Department

The U.S. War Department had even pondered tunneling beneath the seabed: a detailed study deemed the project "feasible," requiring one year and 15,000 men to excavate 55,000 tons of spoil. Wiser heads questioned "the strategic and functional" complexities, such as the inconvenience of the entire German Seventh Army waiting for the first tunneler to emerge. The study was shelved.

It takes some effort to grasp just how small the American government and its military were before the Great War. Fewer than twenty officers served on the Army General Staff in Washington. The planning staff was only half that size. And yet the War Department, together with the Post Office, accounted for well over half of the federal payroll.)

But months, and not a few lives, were lost because the Army insisted on pushing ahead on its own design without once asking if the professional experts might do it better. It would take some time before American companies learned to challenge the War Department on how to design and build the weapons it wanted

But whenever the War Department supplies the funding, part the curtains and you'll see the needs of conflict masquerading as the needs of science.

the troops should be housed in quarters that were thoroughly ventilated and disinfected. As a crowning touch of lunacy to the recommendations, the War Department advised that the soldiers avoid moving about in the sun, making every effort to move outdoors only in the coolest part of the day. It was certain that none of these medical people had ever been in a war.