Page:John Banks Wilson - Maneuver and Firepower (1998).djvu/123

 THE AFTERMATH OF WORLD WAR I when the 39th was reorganized in the postwar era Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana supported the unit. Subsequently, a joint board of Regular and Guard officers recommended that the division be renamed the 31st Division, a unit that during the war had raised troops from Florida, Alabama, and Georgia. Secretary Weeks approved the change, and on 1 July 1923 the 39th Division was replaced by the 31st Division.

The allocation and organization of the Guard cavalry divisions followed the same procedure as the infantry divisions. But in order to use all existing cavalry units, a fourth cavalry division was added to the force. In 1921 the formation of the 21st through 24th Cavalry Divisions began with the First, Second, and Third Army Areas supporting the 21st, 22d, and 24th Cavalry Divisions, respectively. The 23d was the nation's at-large cavalry division, supported by all army areas (Table 10). In a short time the divisions had the prescribed cavalry regiments and machine gun squadrons but not the majority of their support organizations.

The organization of the third component's units began in 1921 when the War Department published Special Regulations No. 46, General Policies and Regulations for the Organized Reserves. The regulations explained the procedures for administering, training, and mobilizing the Organized Reserves and provided a tentative outline for the corps area commanders to follow in organizing the units. Using the outline and a 6 April 1921 troop allotment for twenty-seven infantry divisions, corps area commanders set up planning boards to establish the units. In locating them, the boards considered the distribution and occupations of the population, attempting to station the units where they would be most likely to receive effective support. For example, a medical unit was not located in an area where there was no civilian medical facility. After determining the location of the units and giving the Guard some time to recruit, thus avoiding competition with it, officers began to organize the 76th through the 91st and the 94th through the 104th Divisions.

Recruiting the units proved to be slow. Regular Army advisers were armed with lists of potential reservists and little else. There were not enough recruiters, office space and equipment, or funds available to accomplish the work. Furthermore, a marked apathy toward the military prevailed throughout the nation. By March 1922, however, all twenty-seven infantry divisions had skeletal headquarters (see Table 9).

To complete the divisional forces in the Organized Reserves, the War Department added the 61st through the 66th Cavalry Divisions to the rolls of the Army on 15 October 1921. Corps area commanders followed the same procedures used previously for the infantry divisions in allotting and organizing them. Within a few months they too emerged as skeletal organizations (see Table 10).

Thus, in early 1923 the Army had 66 divisions in the mobilization force shared among three components—11 in the Regular Army (2 cavalry and 9 infantry), 22 in the National Guard (4 cavalry and 18 infantry), and 33 in Organized Reserves (6 cavalry and 27 infantry). In addition, three understrength