Excerpt from The French Railroads and the War: Third Part, American Transportation
If it be true that we learn from experience and profit by our mistakes, it should be worth our while to review past, events and to draw from them lessons for future guidance.
The activities of some of our Army services in France during the Great War have been ably set forth by those who took a leading part in directing them and shaping their policies, but others have lacked unofficial historians willing to compile the necessary records and publish the reports. Among the latter is the Transportation Corps, which was responsible for the movement of our troops and supplies, from their arrival in France before November 11 1918, until their embarkation at the French ports after the signing of the armistice.
The French, however, are more methodical than are we, and reports compiled by officers previously trained for, and during the war in charge of, various services are now being published. Among them, on a recent visit to Paris, it was my good fortune to find the one which deals with the French railroads during the war.
The preface to this work was written by General Gassouin, who was the French Director General of Military Transportation during most of the year 1918, and to whose helpful cooperation much of the successful accomplishment of our Transportation Corps was due. The body of the report was prepared by Colonel Le Henaff and Captain Bornecque. The former, a regular Army officer who had been assigned to the study of military transportation for many years before the war, was the French representative on the Inter-Allied Transportation Committee, organized to coordinate the French, British, Italian, Belgian and American land transportation efforts, and was thus in constant touch with our problems of force and equipment as well as with our organization and methods. The latter, a university professor previous to the war, was in charge of the Army Postal Service and was probably more conversant with the location of our forces than any other officer in either the French or American Army. Both are, therefore, qualified to act as our critics.
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