In spite of the difficulties it imposed, the 1919 convoy picked up speed on day two, while also fixing bridges and fording streams.
So what was the big deal about this 1919 convoy anyhow. Just a road trip, right?
Well, no, it was a lot more than that.
Let's start with the state of, oddly enough, driving in the United States in general and the U.S. Army in particular.
Now, to be fair, training people to drive wasn't the point of the convoy. But as background to the convoy, at this point in our history, most people didn't drive.
Cars had been around for awhile, but the movie view of the past in which Model Ts suddenly appeared and all other form of transportation disappeared is completely inaccurate. Cars came on rapidly after the Model T. . . in towns. . . but they didn't suddenly become the universal norm overnight. That took some time.
Indeed, for those of us living today, cell phones might be a good analogy. The first cellular mobile phone was introduced by Motorola in 1973, but that mean that everyone was using them by 1974. Far from it. It wasn't until the 1990s that they seemingly were everywhere. I didn't have a hand held cell phone until work made it a necessity for me, and that was sometime in the 2000s, well after my wife had adopted a good, for the time, hand held cell phone. I didn't switch to a modern type Iphone until my work again made it necessity. I don't know how long ago that was, but I remember it replaced my Ipod, of which I've ever had one. I must be on the third, unfortunately, Iphone now.
Cars worked the same way. Younger people, I suspect, adopted them more readily than the older. I know that in rural areas of the East and Midwest they were not popular at all at first, and even a bit feared. But the Model T served in the role of Iphone and once it came in it made a big change. It was durable and relatively affordable, in an era in which average automobiles were actually hugely expensive.
But the Model T was only introduced in 1908, just a little over a decade prior to the date we're speaking of. That means that the vast majority of Americans were only just now really getting an exposure to driving. Most didn't know how to drive.
Driving, in fact, was a skill that was valued commercially. People who did know how to drive, which also meant they knew something about being a mechanic as well, were in commercial demand. It was the golden age of chauffeurs. And in military terms, that made it a valued special skill.
Which takes us back to the military.
It's well known that wars spur technology. World War One certainly spured truck production, but as far as technology goes, the technology remained more or less oddly the same.
Now, of course, the war was only four years long. But by the same token World War Two wasn't appreciably longer, and it had a huge impact on truck technology. Indeed, World War Two, not World War One, doomed the horse as a the prime mover of all armies.
And the horse was that prime mover during the Great War. The truck played a valuable role, but one secondary to the horse.
None the less, the military could see and appreciate that day was changing and indeed was coming to an end. For that matter, that had been obvious to the farsighted since prior to the war. That the day hadn't arrived was obvious, but that it was arriving was also obvious.
So the convoy existed in that world. Trucks and cars were on the cusp of being seriously reliable for long distances, and becoming common. Most Americans still didn't drive, but they would be soon.
The Army could see that, and it was getting ahead of the curve.
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