Send the Alabamians: World War I Fighters in the Rainbow Division by Nimrod T. Frazer (review)

As Nimrod T. Frazer demonstrates in this gripping history of the 167th Infantry Regiment in World War I, collective memory–or, rather, collective forgetting–can be cruel. When the surviving members of this Alabama National Guard unit returned home from France in 1919 and were received as heroes, the Alabama press dubbed them the “Immortals.” Two factors seemed to guarantee that the regiment’s renown would live forever. First, the 167th participated with distinction–and sustained heavy losses–in virtually every major battle fought by the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) on the Western Front; second, the regiment formed part of the legendary 42nd “Rainbow” Division, which included among its ranks such luminaries as future five-star general Douglas McArthur, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, founder of the CIA, and Father Francis Duffy, the beloved combat chaplain whose imposing statue stands at the heart of Times Square.

However, the cultural staying power of these Rainbow Division celebrities failed to rub off on the 167th, and even the regiment’s hard-earned battle honors could not prevent its reputation from slipping into oblivion. Ironically, few Americans today–in Alabama or elsewhere–have ever heard of the men once heralded as the “Immortals.” The proud son of an Alabama doughboy who served in the 167th (and himself a decorated Korean War veteran), Frazer implies that some of this ignorance may derive from an anti-southern bias within the historiography of America and the Great War. But he is surely closer to the mark when noting that the 165th Infantry, the famed New York-based regiment that contained Donovan and Duffy, enjoyed distinct advantages, in terms of wartime press coverage, over other units in the 42nd Division. This factor–as opposed to any conscious neglect of white southern soldiers, “some of whom may have been racist and wild”–perhaps goes furthest in explaining why the New Yorkers of the 165th have survived in public memory while the Alabamians of the 167th have fallen into obscurity (at least until now).

In any event, Send the Alabamians is history told with welcome warmth and conviction, and the narrative may easily be forgiven its occasional lapses into regional defensiveness or Alabama boosterism. For the most part, this is a disciplined and meticulously researched account. Frazer opens the regiment’s history with the Mexican Border deployment of 1916, which gave the Alabama National Guardsmen an invaluable opportunity for immersive field training, and then moves on to its harrowing ordeals in France. Ironically, one of these ordeals, a ghastly three-day hike aptly nicknamed the “Valley Forge” march, demonstrated that misery for soldiers in the AEF was hardly limited to combat conditions. Conducted in late December 1917, amid the arctic temperatures that characterized one of the worst European winters on record, the march was like nothing the Alabamians had ever experienced before. These men hailed, after all, from a comparatively temperate climate, beyond which few of them had previously travelled. Equipped with inadequate boots, some poor soldiers in the 167th left behind “trails of blood” in the snow.

But even the privations of the “Valley Forge” march evoked nostalgia once the regiment entered the front line, where the odds of avoiding injury or death were grim at best. Frazer describes battles–Champagne-Marne, Aisne-Marne, St. Mihiel, the Meuse-Argonne–that frequently whittled rifle companies down to a quarter of their strength. Among other things, Send the Alabamians vividly reminds us of the ferocity and duration of these engagements, which typically lasted far longer than the Civil War battles experienced by the soldiers’ Confederate ancestors. During operations like the Aisne-Marne, the 167th Infantry spent literally weeks under fire, steadily hemorrhaging casualties each day. Drawn from the AEF’s depot divisions, replacements (some fellow southerners, some not) filled the gaps.

Send the Alabamians also corrects the popular misperception that trench warfare played a major role in...