Demobilization: our industrial and military demobilization after the armistice, 1918-1920

At a few minutes past ten o’clock of the morning of November 11, 1918, the Secretary of War in Washington received from General Pershing a communication informing the Government that eleven o’clock a.m. that day, French time, an armistice with Germany had gone into effect. No message more momentous had ever come to the American War Department. The World War was at an end. It was peace. It was victory.
Over there on that American front which had penetrated the supposedly impregnable Argonne a...