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3 “Rainbow—There’s the Name for the Division” 31 I n the spring and summer of 1917, the United States was not prepared for a world war. It had a standing army of fewer than six thousand officers and not more than one hundred and twenty thousand men. The National Guard had almost as many troops—a total of 101,174 citizen-soldiers under state control. Of that number, 66,594 had seen service on the Mexican border. New York had shipped the most men to the southwest, the only state to provide a whole division. Maj. Gen. John O’Ryan estimated the size of the division at nineteen thousand officers and men—more than a quarter of the National Guard troops that had been encamped along the banks of the Rio Grande. Only one other state at the time, Pennsylvania, had the manpower to field a complete division. When war had been declared, nearly every National Guard regiment was woefully undermanned. Getting these state militias ready to sail for France and the blood-soaked Western Front would take months, a year at least—maybe longer. The United States government knew that the Allies wanted troops sent quickly to shore up weakened lines of defense, even if they were untrained and underequipped. Bodies were what they wanted. France was so tired of the killing that its own soldiers were in a state of mutiny. Former President Teddy Roosevelt offered to raise a volunteer division, akin to his old Rough Riders, and get it overseas in short order. Thousands of men from every walk of life wanted to be part of Colonel Roosevelt’s division. While Congress debated his tempting offer, which his bitter rival, President Wilson, summarily turned down, Gen. John Pershing took command of the American army. One of his first tasks was to scrape together a fighting outfit all his own—starting with the First Division. Units of the First were in 32 DUFFY’S WAR Paris before the Fourth of July. The first four divisions of what were known as the American Expeditionary Forces were soldiers from the regular army. In those days, the size of a United States division had been increased to about thirty thousand men. After unfit veterans had been culled from the rolls and able-bodied recruits added, those four divisions were all the federal troops Pershing had at the ready. He looked warily to the National Guard to supply him men while he built up his own armies. In too many instances, however, the Guard was in deplorable shape—so much so that only a few division commanders made it through the war without being replaced. Because the Empire state could immediately offer a full division officered by many of the country’s influential businessmen and because it had earned a reputation for discipline while serving on the border, the War Department believed that the New Yorkers were ideally suited to be the first of the guard to head for the war zone. The only other state with troops in consideration was Pennsylvania , although New England could have combined troops from its six states and offered a division of its own. Yet the fact that there were no other states with division-sized guard outfits posed a potential public-relations problem for the War Department. “If we sent the New York National Guard Division first, we might have encountered two kinds of comment,” Secretary of War Newton Baker recalled when explaining how the federal government handled the National Guard. “First, from the people of New York who might have said why send our boys first; or, we might have had comment from other states charging that we were preferring New York and giving it first chance.” Pondering this dilemma, Baker sought counsel from one of his military aides. A brash, headstrong young major from West Point, Douglas MacArthur had been with Baker only a short time and served as his press censor. He suggested a multistate division, made up of surplus units within the National Guard. Baker liked the idea and called for Brig. Gen. William Mann, then the foremost expert on the nation’s militia. Mann mulled over the idea and told Baker and MacArthur there were enough Guard units around the country to piece a division together. Twenty-six states and the District of Columbia could be represented, he said. Baker recollected what MacArthur said about the makeup of the proposed division, “Fine, [it] will stretch over the whole...

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