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General Scott
artillery, signal and engineer troops, and service units. A small division, some 13,000 infantrymen, would allow greater mobility and enhance the ability to exchange units in the line and maintain battle momentum. The French and the British had found that for each unit on line-army corps, division, brigade, regiment, battalion, or company-they needed a comparable unit prepared to relieve it without mixing organizations from various commands. The French had tried relief by army corps but had settled on relief by small divisions. Scott felt that his proposal would ease the difficulty of exchanging units on the battlefield.[1]
By 10 May 1917, Majs. John McAuley Palmer, Dan T. Moore, and Brunt Wells of the War College Division outlined a division of 17,700 men, which included about 11,000 infantrymen in accordance with Scott's idea. In part it resembled the French square division. Planners eliminated 1 infantry brigade and cut the number of infantry regiments from 9 to 4, thereby reducing the number of infantry battalions from 27 to 12. But regimental firepower increased, with the rifle company swelling from 153 officers and enlisted men to 204, and the number of regimental machine guns rising dramatically from 4 to 36. To accommodate the additional machine guns, Palmer, Moore, and Wells outlined a new infantry regimental structure that consisted of headquarters and supply companies and three battalions. Each battalion had one machine gun company and three rifle companies. Given the reduction in the number of infantry units, the proportion of artillery fire support per infantry regiment increased without altering the number of artillery regiments or pieces. The new division still fielded forty-eight 3-inch guns, now twelve pieces per infantry regiment. The division was also authorized a regiment of twenty-four 6-inch howitzers for general support, and twelve trench mortars of unspecified caliber completed the division's general fire support weapons.[2]
Cavalry suffered the largest cut, from a regiment to an element with the division headquarters, a change in line with British and French recommenda-
- ↑ Memo, WCD for CofS, 10 May 17, sub: Plans for a Possible Expeditionary Force to France, WCD file 10050, RG 165, NARA. The WCD 10050 file is replete with background material on the development of the new division.
- ↑ Memo, WCD, 10 May 1917, sub: Plans for a Possible Expeditionary Force to France; Draft of Memo prepared in May 1917, WCD for CofS, 7 Jul 1917, sub: The Organization of an American Army, WCD file 10050, RG 165, NARA. The French used two types of divisions in 1917, one fielding about 17,000 men based on two brigades of two infantry regiments each and the other of 14,000 organized around three infantry regiments.
