US Army order of battle, 1919-1941 : volume 1.

When thumbing through this work, I suspect many people would wonder what prompted somebody to put together a reference work that details the history of the US Army in peacetime, especially during a period that seems relatively uneventful. To explain, I have to go back a ways. This work is the result of over 19 years of research and writing that attempts to document adequately the organizations, commanders, and activities of the US Army from 1919 to 1941 in what is commonly known as "the interwar years." The genesis of this project was my entry into the world of military insignia collecting when I was a teenager in 1972. At that time, I had little interest in the Army. In my mind, I was headed for Annapolis and a naval career. I joined the Army Junior Reserve Officers' Training Course (ROTC) program at Baker High School in Columbus, Georgia, and there met Tom Stafford. At Tom's house, I encountered a distinctive unit insignia (commonly referred to as "crests") collection that his father, a retired sergeant major, had assembled over many years. I was fascinated by Sergeant Major Stafford's collection. Upon inquiry, however, Tom's father did not seem to know much about the history of the pre-World War II units in his "crest" collection that, for some reason, were the kinds of insignia to which I was particularly drawn. I started my own collection and wanted to know everything I could about those units. As I collected by attending militaria shows and traded insignia with many former soldiers of the World War II and Korean War eras, I discovered that, other than Regular Army units, the collectors did not seem to know much about most of the older National Guard and Organized Reserve units either. I started digging for information at the Infantry School library at Fort Benning, Georgia. I found some information on National Guard units, but could find almost nothing about the Organized Reserve. Those units seemed to have been lost to Army history. It was almost as if the units and their officers and men hardly even existed. The conundrum was also keen for the four, virtually unknown, cavalry divisions in the National Guard during that period. I read everything I could find about these Reserve Component units, but everywhere I looked, I seemed to come up with very little. In 1990, while attending the Inspector General's course at Fort Belvoir, VA, I decided to go to the National Archives in Suitland, MD, to see what I could find on these old outfits. There I discovered a treasure trove of documents in Record Group 394 that laid out much of the organization and activities of the interwar Army. I also discovered that here was an Army that was indeed genuine, composed of real people and units and not merely the "paper army" that I had come to believe was the Organized Reserve. I also learned that the Army was busier with training, maneuvers, and emergency duties than I imagined. The Regular Army was involved in a wide variety of duties that included activities as diverse as martial law duty in labor strikes to engineer surveys of the Nicaragua Canal project and deployments to Shanghai, China. I found that the National Guard was intended to be a much larger organization than what actually existed during this period; each state was allotted many more units than they could actually organize due to lack of funding by Congress and the sagging interest in military service after World War I. I discovered that members of the third component, the Organized Reserve, were an amazing collection of men who willingly participated in monthly training meetings without pay or retirement benefits. Unlike the National Guardsmen who were also paid for drills, these men were paid only for their attendance at the annual 2-week summer training camp. Yet, year after year, the Organized Reserve continued to grow, and it was this group of soldiers, especially the officers, who made possible the creation of the huge US Army of World War II. All of these men served at a time when the military, and especially the Army, was given short shrift by the Nation. Yet the men and the units to which they belonged continued to soldier on, almost forgotten yet still proud to do the job that so many others deigned to do. Here was a story that needed to be told, and I decided at that point that I would do it. In completing this work, it is my hope that this information will be found useful by command historians, especially unit historians, for all three components of the US Army, in helping them to tell the story of these organizations. Many of the units whose histories are contained herein still exist today, and it is important to make this kind of information available, especially now due to the reorganization of the Army to the modular tables of organization. To break with these long and storied histories is like throwing away a combat multiplier. The Army has already done that to some degree with units at the division level and above. Not one division, corps, or army, for example, has a history dating before 1917, except the 28th Division of the Pennsylvania National Guard (though the 27th Infantry Brigade of the New York National Guard carries the lineage of the pre-World War I predecessor of the 27th Division). The lineage of those proud divisions, corps, and armies of the Civil War and Spanish American War are no longer found in the Active force. The US Army has a great history, and its men and units made that history both in times of war and peace. The historical connection between yesterday's generation of soldiers and today's soldiers are the units themselves. That connection should never be broken lightly. Soldiers should have the opportunity to know what their predecessors did and accomplished, even in peacetime. I hope this work contributes to that goal.

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