By the autumn of 1914, a peculiar kind of chaos had taken hold of American commercial markets. British government buyers - War Office agents, Admiralty procurement officers, Treasury representatives, and several others sent over independently - were all purchasing on the same market, occasionally bidding against each other for the same contracts, and driving prices up for everyone. France had its own missions. Russia sent representatives in 1915. Belgium, Serbia, Italy, and Greece followed later. The result was a stampede.
The Allies needed everything. The assumptions about war duration that had governed pre-war planning - six weeks, at most, before the German army either won or was stopped - had proven comically wrong. “Be back home by Christmas” evaporated with the gun powder smoke in the trenches. The Western Front had hardened into mud and wire by December 1914, and what this kind of war consumed was staggering: shells by the million, rifles by the hundred thousand, horses by the trainload, plus the uniforms and boots and belts and food to keep men in the field, and the copper and steel to make the ammunition to keep the guns firing. Almost none of this was available in sufficient quantity in Britain or France. The workshops of the world were working at capacity just keeping their armies supplied, and it was not enough. America, still neutral, was the obvious source. The problem was how to buy there systematically - cheaply enough, and quickly enough, to matter.
The problem was obvious, and the powers that be came up with a decent solution. In January 1915, the British government signed an agreement with J.P. Morgan & Company - a leading American bank with solid UK connections, designating the firm as the official purchasing agent for Allied war supplies in the United States, at a commission of one per cent on all transactions. Morgan created a dedicated Export Department staffed by around 150 specialists. To run it, the firm chose Edward R. Stettinius.
The choice was not obvious on paper. Stettinius was born in St. Louis in 1865, the son of a wholesale grocer. He dropped out of school at sixteen when the family needed money, and spent the next two decades grinding through positions at a grocery firm, a hat and cap company, a bank, and the Chicago Board of Trade, where he attempted wheat speculation and concluded, after a while, that exchange trading was not his particular talent. What eventually made his reputation was the Stirling Boiler Company, where he arrived as treasurer during the financial panic of 1893. As conditions deteriorated, he kept absorbing responsibilities until he was essentially running the operation. He helped engineer the merger that created Babcock & Wilcox, one of the largest industrial manufacturing companies in the country. By 1909, he was president of the Diamond Match Company. He was not a glamorous figure. He was a man who knew how to move large quantities of manufactured goods under difficult conditions. That, as it turned out, was exactly what was needed.
The Export Department his team ran became, for two years, the largest single buyer of goods in the world. By 1916, it was handling up to $10 million in contracts per day - across roughly 4,000 prime contracts at any given time. Between January 1915 and America’s formal entry into the war in April 1917, Stettinius’s operation procured more than $3 billion worth of Allied supplies at 1913 prices, sixty per cent of it arms and munitions. The list of what they bought reads like an inventory of industrial civilisation: horses and mules, rifles and artillery shells, copper and lead, wheat and canned beef, rope and cotton, coal and iron and steel, locomotives and lorries, chemical compounds, machine tools, hats and boots and leather belts. Each purchase required not just a contract but insurance, tracking, and shipping - getting combustible and perishable goods across an Atlantic still being hunted by German submarines. Most of the staff were in the office past midnight. Stettinius rarely left before them.
The impact was substantial. By the summer of 1916, American factories were supplying three-quarters of the British Army’s light artillery shells. By early 1917, U.S. plants were producing 15,000 British and Russian rifles daily, alongside machine guns, gunpowder, and small arms ammunition at a scale that European arsenals could not have matched alone. The individual Allied ministries, left to their own devices, had been competing against each other and paying over the odds for the privilege. Stettinius consolidated that purchasing and put it on a systematic footing. The Allied ability to sustain the war of attrition on the Western Front rested, in ways that rarely feature in the accounts of the period, on the logistics he organised and ran.
When the United States entered the war in April 1917, Stettinius moved to the War Department, where he took charge of procurement and production for the American Army. On 6 April 1918, he became Assistant Secretary of War. The Army awarded him the Distinguished Service Medal when it was over.
He returned to Morgan afterwards, spent his remaining years restructuring large companies, and died in 1925 at the age of sixty, at his estate on Long Island. His son, Edward Stettinius Jr., became Secretary of State under Franklin Roosevelt and helped establish the United Nations. His daughter Betty married Juan Trippe, who founded Pan Am. The family moved in very large circles. The father is almost unknown.
Wars are remembered by the men who fought them with weapons. The man who supplied those weapons - in quantities that kept the Western Front running for two years, by trainload, across a hostile ocean - has no monument and no entry in most general histories. He is known today, to the few who know him at all, as a footnote to his son’s career in diplomacy. That seems about right for a man whose greatest accomplishment was making sure the shells arrived on time.