Lest We Forget: World War I and New Mexico by David V. Holtby (review)

New Mexico is well known for its many contributions to the Allies' victory in World War II. From journalist Ernie Pyle and cartoonist Bill Mauldin to the soldiers in the Bataan Death March and the scientists of the Manhattan Project, few other states sacrificed so much in so many ways. Now, with his appropriately titled book, Lest We Forget, David Holtby reminds us how much New Mexico contributed to the Allies' success in World War I as well. His timing could not have been better as we celebrated the centennial of the Great War's conclusion in 1918.

Holtby documents New Mexico's role in the First World War with the use of sources uncovered in archives as far west as the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, California, and as far east as the National Archives in Washington, D.C. But the author discovered his most valuable source in the New Mexico State Records Center and Archives in Santa Fe. At the war's end, the New Mexico Board of Historical Service, led by Edgar Lee Hewett, sent questionnaires to the veterans who had served in the war from New Mexico. Veterans returned over 1,500 of the questionnaires, creating a thorough record of the war, expressed in clear, candid, authentic voices.

In a well-balanced book, Holtby uses these sources to describe the progress and setbacks New Mexicans experienced at each stage of the war. While 60 percent of the fifteen thousand New Mexicans who served in the armed forces were Euro-Americans and 40 percent were Nuevomexicanos, only seventy American Indians and fifty African Americans from New Mexico were allowed to serve in the nation's still-segregated armed forces. Most New Mexicans received their basic training at Camp Funston, Kansas, while Camp Cody in southern New Mexico trained thousands of men from the Midwest but relatively few from New Mexico. Once in Europe, New Mexicans served in all twenty-nine combat divisions of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF). Five hundred and two New Mexicans died in military service, but, as in most wars, more than half died of diseases or in accidents rather than in combat. A dozen New Mexicans, including three Nuevomexicanos and one American Indian, received the Distinguished Service Cross. Over a hundred New Mexicans served in Russia and Siberia in little-known campaigns in the aftermath of the war and the Bolshevik Revolution. Among the first to arrive in Europe, New Mexicans were among the last to leave, in September 1919.

Lest We Forget is equally balanced in its description of the home front in New Mexico. Governor Washington E. Lindsey established state and county Councils of Defense to help coordinate the state's war efforts. New Mexico organized one of the first women's auxiliaries in the country. With a severe shortage of farm labor, as many as five hundred women helped harvest crops on New Mexico farms. Individuals and whole groups bought far beyond their quota of war bonds, while contributing generously to the Red Cross. Civilians listened to four-minute men make short appeals for the support of various war-related issues and campaigns. As "sentinels of the kitchen," homemakers signed Hoover pledge cards, promising to follow government guidelines in voluntarily conserving and rationing precious food.

But all wars have their costs in lives, property, and the freedom of anyone fairly or unfairly identified with the enemy. In World War I, the latter included suspected German sympathizers and supposedly radical labor leaders. German sympathizers suffered extreme wartime intolerance. Even those who refused to purchase war bonds could face mob violence, as happened in 1918 when vigilantes tarred and feathered one man in Albuquerque and another in Carlsbad. Sadly, New Mexicans were hardly different from other Americans who often denied freedoms to dissidents in a war whose goal was to make the world safe for democracy and its guaranteed freedoms.

Just as New Mexicans fought in the...