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THE AFTERMATH OF WORLD WAR I

charge centers. In January 1919 Pershing sent home the divisions that had been skeletonized or had performed replacement functions. Combat divisions followed, beginning with the 92d, the Army's only black division. A year after the armistice the Army had demobilized fifty-five of its sixty-two divisions, including all the National Guard and National Army units (Table 7). Before the units left service, the War Department gave the American people the opportunity to show their appreciation to the men who had fought in the war. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington held divisional parades and over five hundred regiments marched through the streets of their hometowns.

After November 1919 only the 1st through the 7th Divisions and a few smaller units remained active. All were Regular Army units. These divisions retained their wartime configurations, but personnel authorizations for fiscal year 1920 prevented full manning. Divisional regiments had the strengths prescribed in the prewar tables of organization issued on 3 May 1917, and the ammunition, supply, and sanitary trains had only enough men to care for their equipment. Within only a year, the mighty combat force the Army had struggled to build during 1917–18 had vanished without any plans to replace it. The helter-skelter pace of demobilization and the lack of any sound transitional planning greatly undermined efforts to create an effective peacetime force. A student of demobilization, Frederic L. Paxon, characterized this situation as worse than a "madhouse in which the crazy might be incarcerated. They were at large."