The Guard was soon to put its Mexican Border training to good use. In April 1917 the United States declared war on Germany. President Wilson, as his 1916 re-election campaign slogan pointed out, "had kept us out of war" for almost three years. But Germany's policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, designed to deny Britain resupply by sea, was sinking United States ships. Wilson felt he had no choice but to ask Congress for a declaration of war.
Some Guard units were still serving on the Mexican Border when war was declared, and the War Department began calling other units back into Federal service. A draft law was passed in May of 1917, and its framers were careful to avoid the inequities of the Civil War draft: there would be no buying of substitutes and no paying of bounties for enlistment. After some confusion over the coexistence of volunteering with the new draft, the Guard was ordered to recruit to full strength. "Join up and go with the hometown boys" cried the recruiters, and thousands did.
War-Time Reorganizations In order to prepare the new "National Army" of regulars, draftees, volunteers, and Guardsmen for war in Europe, the War Department made massive changes in force structure. General Pershing, who was to command the American forces overseas, wanted a very large division, twice as large as those of the Europeans. Pershing's new division was called "square" because it consisted of two massive infantry brigades of two regiments each.
National Guard divisions were assigned numbers 26-75 in the Army's new numbering system, although 50 divisions would never be formed from National Guard units. Divisions below 26 were for the Regular Army, with those above 75 assigned to the "National Army" divisions made up of draftees and volunteers. National Guard Infantry and Artillery regiments were given numbers 100-300. The same basic system is still in use today.
The formation of the new square division created havoc in the National Guard. Some infantry regiments went directly into the new divisions. Others were broken up into pieces to form the support elements which made up the "division trains," the trucks and horse-drawn wagons which carried all the division's non-combat support personnel and equipment. Infantry units were redesignated Engineer or Signal Corps; officers had little time to master new skills before being replaced by Regulars. Much of the Regular Army hierarchy had nothing but contempt for militia officers, and many higher-ranking Guardsmen at regimental, brigade, and division level were relieved. Only one National Guard division, New York's 27th, kept its pre-war commander.
"Lafayette, We Are Here" After three years of watching from the sidelines, Americans were eager to get into the fight. No sooner had the National Guard been federalized than politicians began lobbying the War Department to get their states' soldiers on the first ships to Europe. Major Douglas MacArthur, a young staff officer, suggested that a new National Guard division be created from the units left over in the conversion to the new square division. The units would be from a "rainbow" of different states, and would forestall sectional jealousies by being the first Guard division shipped overseas. President Wilson liked the idea, and Major MacArthur was promoted and made Chief of Staff of the new 42nd Rainbow Division. Two of its regiments, the 165th (the "Fighting 69th" from New York City) and the 167th (originally the 4th Alabama), had fought each other at Gettysburg, and the division's first weeks of basic training were a study in sociological contrasts.
But the Rainbow Division was not the first National Guard division to go overseas; that honor belongs to the 26th "Yankee" Division. Its crafty Regular Army commander, Major General Clarence Edwards, ignored orders sending the division to Camp Greene, North Carolina, for further training. The 26th went instead to New York City, where General Edwards had made a "deal" with the port commander. By the time the War Department discovered the trick, the men of the 26th were already boarding troopships.
The French greeted the mostly green and poorly-trained soldiers of the American Expeditionary Force with joy verging on hysteria. France and Britain were militarily and spiritually exhausted after three years of war. Casualties had been appalling, especially during the periodic offensives in which men were sent "over the top" of their trenches directly into the fire of enemy artillery and machine guns. The British lost 60,000 men in one day's fighting on the Somme in 1916; the French lost more than half a million during the Battle of Verdun. German casualties were just as heavy; the "Great War" wiped out almost an entire generation of European males.
Now, with a fresh ally on their side, the British and French could feel hopeful for the first time since 1915. The first American troops to parade through Paris were mobbed by crying and cheering Parisians who threw flowers and kisses at the troops; Pershing wrote that the column looked like "a moving flower garden." In what would become the most famous quote of the war, one of Pershing's staff officers declared "Lafayette, we are here."
The American Expeditionary Force marched out of Paris not toward the front, but to the Allies' rear lines, where General Pershing was determined they would train and drill until they were seasoned enough for combat. However, Pershing was under tremendous pressure from the British and French commanders to break up his divisions and brigades and assign American regiments and battalions to British and French units as fillers and replacements. Pershing adamantly refused: he commanded an American Army, and it would fight as a separate Army under American commanders.
American Troops Join the Fight The massive German offensive of March 1918 brought matters to a head. The German commander, Ludendorff, knew that Germany's only chance for victory was to strike before the Americans had time to build up their forces. Ludendorff abandoned the strategy of massed assault along a wide front for "infiltration" at weak points in the Allied lines. The Germans were within 56 miles of Paris when the Allied commanders finally convinced Pershing that if he did not give them American troops now, there would be no more war to fight. "All that I have is yours," Pershing told the Allied supreme commander, Marshall Foch, as he turned over to the Allies his four best-trained divisions, the 1st, 2nd, 26th, and 42nd. In later weeks, the 28th from Pennsylvania would be added to the list.
The New England Yankees of the 26th found themselves relieving the Big Red One in the trenches around the French town of Seicheprey, in what was known as the Saint Mihiel Salient. For the past two years it had been a quiet sector in the French lines, but things were about to change.
The Germans attacked Seicheprey itself, overrunning its outnumbered defenders. The battalion commander, a Connecticut Guardsman, organized a counterattack with headquarters clerks and kitchen workers--and 25 court-martial offenders left behind by the 1st Division, afterwards "adopted" into the 26th.
In Ramieres Wood the men of the 26th beat back successive German attacks with savage hand-to-hand fighting. After the action both sides claimed victory, but in the American Expeditionary Force's first sizable engagement, the Yankee Guardsmen of the 26th Division had shown that American soldiers could and would fight.
Along the Mame River, the Pennsylvanians of the 28th Division also found themselves under French command. Four companies from the 109th and 110th Infantry were deployed to fill in front-line positions held by the French. When the German attack across the Mame, led by the elite Prussian Guards, proved even more ferocious than expected, the French withdrew--without telling the Americans. Completely surrounded, scattered remnants of the four companies, fighting their way through the trees, managed to make their way back to the main American lines.
In this Second Battle of the Mame, the rest of the 28th Division suffered high casualties (80 percent in some companies), but the Pennsylvanians continued to fight. Within three days their counterattack had driven the Germans back across the Mame. Pershing was told in the middle of the battle how this green division was standing up to the elite of the German army. "They are men of iron," said the commander of the American Expeditionary Force.
Black Guardsmen in Combat Some United States units were to fight the entire war under foreign commanders. Eight regiments of black infantrymen had shipped out to France, three of them made up of Guardsmen. The United States Army was then strictly segregated, and most black enlistees and draftees served in all-black service units. But General Pershing, once a captain in the black 10th Cavalry, respected the fighting abilities of black troops; he wanted the black regiments organized into their provisional divisions, the 92nd and 93rd.
The War Department, however, was relectant, and only one black division was organized. The three National Guard regiments were placed under French control, where they distinguished themselves in combat. The 369th was awarded the Croix de Gueffe and the nickname "Hell Fighters from Harlem."
An American Offensive Throughout most of the summer, American units continued to fight under British and French command, and the German offensive was halted. By mid-summer, General Pershing had finally won his battle for a separate American Army responsible for its own geographic sector. The Americans cleared the Germans from the St. Mihiel Salient (already familiar to the men of the Yankee Division) in the largest American military operation since the end of the Civil War. After brilliant staff planning by Colonel George C. Marshall, Pershing's G-3, the Americans then turned west and attacked the heavily-fortified Hindenburg Line through the Argonne Forest.
It was rough terrain, even without the shellholes left by four years of artillery barrages. Men, horses, and motorized vehicles slipped and slid through the mud as they made their way to the front over terrible roads. The 72 pounds which the infantry men carrieed on their backs added to their misery. Once in the front lines, men not driven temporarily insane by the hours-long artillery barrages had to contend with rats, lice, and "trench foot," an affliction similar to frostbite caused by standing for days in the mud.
The American Expeditionary Force high command was eager to break the tactical impasse of trench warfare; Pershing had insisted that the American Expeditionary Force train for "maneuver warfare." But only the further development of the tank and other armored weapons would enable commanders to break the tactical deadlock imposed by the machine gun. Tanks were invented by the British during World War I (they chose the name "tank" for the top-secret new weapon because it sounded innocent and unmilitary) but their tactical possibilities were not realized.
It was the added numbers of the Americans, and their freshness and aggressiveness, which turned the tide for the Allies. The Germans were particularly demoralized by American successes. Many German military and political leaders had believed that because the United States was not a racially or culturally "pure" society, Americans would not make good soldiers. By the autumn of 1918 the German Army was being pushed back, and the German economy was suffering from the effects of a British naval blockade. The German political system, never very stable, could not handle the strain. When Woodrow Wilson presented his 14 points promising an honorable peace, the Germans accepted terms for an Armistice. On November 11, 1918, at 11 a.m., the Armistice went into effect. The First World War, the war Americans were told would be the "war to end all wars," was over.
The American Expeditionary Force at its height had 43 divisions in France. Seventeen of them, about 40% of the entire American Expeditionary Force, were National Guard divisions. The 30th Division, made up of Guardsmen from North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee, won the highest number of Medals of Honor in the American Expeditionary Force. The records of the German High Command, released after the war, listed eight American divisions as excellent or superior. Six of them were National Guard divisions.
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