When the U.S. Army began the conversion to brigade combat teams in 2004, it started to move cautiously away from the combined arms division, the Army’s building block for nearly ninety years. The first permanent divisions were created amid the crisis conditions of 1917, and the first among these new formations was the 1st Division, today’s 1st Infantry Division, the famous Big Red One.
Its formative experience preparing for combat on the Western Front in World War I challenged soldiers of that day in ways their counterparts of today might recognize—raw recruits manning a new organization; extreme personnel turbulence; unfamiliar technology; precarious relationships with allies; doctrinal uncertainty; harsh living and training conditions; and the prospect of imminent combat with a hardened and dangerous enemy. The organization they honed did more than break a path for the forty-two divisions of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) that followed—it set the foundation for the modern, permanently organized, combined arms divisions that characterized the U.S. Army for the rest of the twentieth century.
The idea of permanent divisions percolated throughout the U.S. Army for at least twenty years prior to 1917. The basic formation for more than a century had been the single arm regiment. Temporary “divisions” had been formed in the Civil War and the Spanish-American War to consolidate commanders’ span of control and to combine infantry and field artillery.
While the major European powers organized divisions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the U.S. Army had no similar compelling need as it policed the western frontier and America’s new colonial holdings. Wartime divisions were codified in the 1905 Field Service Regulations (FSR), but the central argument for forming permanent divisions between 1900 and 1917 was for the unlikely contingency of continental defense against a major power.
From 1910, instability in Mexico provided opportunities to experiment with divisions. In 1911, the War Department assembled a provisional “maneuver division” of Regular and National Guard units in San Antonio, Texas. The assembly itself required nearly the entire period of the call-up, from March to August. The event provided relevant experience, leading to a more efficient mobilization of the 2d Division in Texas in 1913 and deployment of a brigade to Vera Cruz, Mexico, in 1914. Meanwhile, an Army War College study recommended reorganizing the Regular Army as a “mobile army” of divisions ready for immediate service. Moreover, the 1914 FSR called the division the basic organization for offensive operations.
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| 16th Infantry Marching Into Mexico, 1916 |
The FSR further defined a division in modern terms: “A self-contained unit made up of all necessary arms and services, and complete in itself with every requirement for independent action incident to its operations.” The War College plan, however, was never completely adopted or funded. The onset of World War I in Europe led to the National Defense Act of 1916, which expanded both the Regular Army and the National Guard and called for the organization of both into permanent tactical brigades and divisions. Events overtook this plan as well. In response to Pancho Villa’s raid on Columbus, New Mexico, in March 1916, 8th Brigade, 3d Division, commander BG John J. Pershing received orders to organize a force to apprehend Villa’s gang.
Pershing assembled the “Punitive Expedition,” a provisional division of two cavalry and one infantry brigades and, for the next year, conducted the first modern division operations in the Army’s history. Although ultimately unsuccessful, the expedition integrated radio and telephone communications, airplanes, and partly motorized logistics with ground maneuver and provided Pershing and others a taste of the complexities of twentieth century warfare.
While Pershing led his expedition through the wilds of northern Mexico, events in Europe brought the United States into World War I. Germany’s leaders decided to strangle Great Britain with unrestricted submarine warfare and, clumsily, to arrange a Mexican attack on the United States in the event of the latter’s entry on the Allied side. President Woodrow Wilson requested and received a Congressional declaration of war on 6 April 1917. Great Britain and France immediately pressed for the deployment of an American division.
It is hard to exaggerate the crisis of 1917 for the American Army. Pershing’s expedition had only been withdrawn from Mexico in February, having consumed most of the Quartermaster’s meager stocks. The four extant divisions were administrative groupings, not trained, deployable units. There were no plans for manpower or industrial mobilization, no stocks of weapons and munitions, and no plans for transporting a significant military force over contested seas.
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| General Pershing and His Key Staff Arrive in France, 13 June 1918 |
No American officers had ever served in anything like the European divisions then fighting on the Western and Eastern Fronts. America’s new allies themselves were in near desperate straits: the British Somme Offensive of 1916 had failed; the French “Nivelle Offensive” was failing; and Russia was in the throes of revolution. The British and French delegations dispatched to the United States, which included France’s hero of the Marne battles Marshal Joseph Joffre, implored the American government for immediate assistance.
The Europeans, however, did not like the War College plans for American divisions nor the timetable for organizing them. Led by MAJ John McAuley Palmer, the War College planners posited a 28,000-man division of three brigades of three regiments of three battalions. Designed for continental defense, this division required nearly twenty miles of road space for movement and, in the Europeans’ view, lacked the integrated artillery, machine guns, and trench mortars necessary on the Western Front. Moreover, the War College plan called for raising and training such divisions in the United States before deploying them, a process that would delay the arrival of American troops in France to 1918 or even 1919.
The British in particular wanted instead the dispatch of American troops to the front as replacements for European formations, a prospect totally unacceptable to the Americans. Army Chief of Staff GEN Hugh L. Scott directed the planners to develop another division organization on the French model of two brigades of two infantry regiments that reflected the best advice of the British and French officers.
Meanwhile, recognizing the imperative of an American presence in France to bolster French morale, President Woodrow Wilson promised Joffre a division immediately. He directed Secretary of War Newton Baker and GEN Scott, who in turn ordered MG Pershing, now commander of the Army’s Southern Department, to select four infantry regiments and one artillery regiment for immediate “foreign service.”
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| A transport ship carrying soldiers of the First Expeditionary Division enters the harbor of St. Nazaire, France, 27 June 1917 |
Unsurprisingly, Pershing, designated to command the expeditionary force, selected Regular Army regiments with excellent records on the Punitive Expedition or along the Mexican border: the 16th, 18th, 26th, and 28th Infantry Regiments and the 5th and 6th Field Artillery Regiments. Pershing would later be promoted to general in October 1917 and appointed commander of the AEF.
As the infantry regiments prepared in great haste for their movement to Hoboken, New Jersey, and shipment overseas, they filled their vacant ranks with many enthusiastic but untrained volunteer recruits and “emergency” officers selected from the Officer Training Camps springing up around the country.
The new division’s commanding general, BG William L. Sibert, and brigade commanders BG Robert L. Bullard and BG Omar Bundy, like their hastily selected staff, met their commands for the first time at the port of Hoboken, New Jersey. There, on 8 June 1917, War Department orders established the headquarters of the First Expeditionary Division.
According to newly appointed general staff officer CPT George C. Marshall, “…the staff of the division…met for the first time aboard the boat [ the Tenadores…where] most of us were informed of the organization prescribed for the division…We found that the infantry regiments had been increased about threefold in strength and contained organizations previously unheard of, which were to be armed with implements entirely new to us.”
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| BG William Silbert, Initial Commander of the First Division |
Marshall’s confusion stemmed from the fact that the 1917 Provisional Tables of Organization for the First Division were only some two weeks old. Huddling with their French counterparts, Palmer’s team at the War College revised their organization of three brigades to a French model “square” organization of two brigades of two regiments. The basic division numbered about 14,000 troops, but the addition of artillery, machine guns, and trench mortars urged by the French, as well as an aviation unit, ample trains and special service troops brought the number up to about 24,000. Acting Chief of Staff GEN Tasker H. Bliss approved this organization only for the initial expeditionary force, recognizing that further changes may be desired by the AEF commander.
Bliss also knew that no more divisions would be deployed as hastily as the First; the War Department would need time to refine the organization of the follow-on divisions. Such refinement was indeed underway. While crossing the Atlantic, Pershing put his staff to work on organizing a one million man AEF. A similar effort was underway at the War Department, led by COL Chauncey Baker. The two efforts coordinated their conclusions in the General Organization Project, producing by August 1917 a plan for a 27,000-man division. However, the rationale for this division foreshadowed a doctrinal tension between the United States and the Europeans that continued throughout the war.
Whereas the French division organization was optimized for rotating forces in and out of trench works, the Americans wanted a robust division for sustained combat to force the enemy out of his trenches and into “open warfare.” The convoys carrying the First Expeditionary Division sailed from New York on 12 June 1917 and arrived largely without incident at St. Nazaire, France, between 26 and 30 June.
Company K, 28th Infantry Regiment, was the first organized unit to set foot on French soil. Billeted in a former prisoner-of-war camp dubbed Camp Number 1, and without motor transport or horses, the troops made daily marches of eighteen miles to the ground designated for drill. Almost immediately, officers were levied to Pershing’s headquarters in Paris or for duty elsewhere in the AEF infrastructure.
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| 16th Infantry in Paris, 4 July 1917 |
On 4 July, the 2d Battalion, 16th Infantry, paraded through Paris to the cheers of a war-weary public in need of good news, while the remainder of the division boarded trains for their first permanent encampment near Gondrecourt in Lorraine. On 6 July, the First Expeditionary Division was redesignated the 1st Division. The task that faced Sibert (promoted to major general on 27 June) and his officers upon arrival in their designated training area was daunting indeed.
They had to create, from the whole cloth of four infantry regiments manned mostly by untrained recruits, a combined arms division in which none of them had experience, according to an uncertain doctrine, to perform missions never before undertaken, against a seasoned enemy. Moreover, they had to do it in a manner that could be presented as an example to all follow-on divisions and as a showcase of American military competence to European observers and enemy intelligence.
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| A Few Weeks After Paris, 16th Infantry in Bayonet Training at Gondrecourt |
In a future posting, we will present the next section of Paul Herbert's article on the First Division in which he discusses how the "Fighting First" trained for battle on the Western Front.
Sources: Excerpted from "America’s First Division 90 years ago", U.S. Army Historical Foundation