165th Infantry, 42d Division, in trenches, June 1918
became a more mobile, flexible command. The concept also took advantage of the limited number of American divisions in the theater, shifting them among army corps as needed. Eventually, Pershing organized seven army corps.
To maintain them, the 39th, 40th, 41st, 76th, 83d, and 85th Divisions served as depot organizations. The 31st Division was slated to become the seventh depot division but never acted in that role, having been broken up for needed replacements. Because depot divisions needed only cadres to operate, most of the personnel, except for men in the field artillery brigades, were also distributed to combat divisions as replacements. After additional training, the field artillery brigades assigned to the 41st, 76th, 83d, and 85th Divisions saw combat primarily as army corps artillery. Those assigned to the 39th and 40th were still training when the fighting ended.[1]
When the Services of Supply reorganized the 83d and 85th Divisions as depot units, some of their elements were used as special expeditionary forces. The 332d Infantry and 331st Field Hospital, elements of the 83d Division, participated in the Vittorio Veneto campaign on the Italian front during October and November 1918. The 339th Infantry; the 1st Battalion, 310th Engineers; the 337th Ambulance Company; and the 337th Field Hospital of the 85th constituted the American contingent of the Murmansk Expedition, which served under British command in North Russia from September 1918 to July 1919.[2]
- ↑ Hunter Liggett, AEF, Ten Years Ago in France (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1928), p. 28 General Headquarters, Armies, pp. 193, 220, 237, 268, 290, 316, and 329; Divisions, pp. 251, 269, 293, 363–64, 379.
- ↑ General Headquarters, Armies, pp. 381–83; Joel R. Moore, "The North Russian Expedition," Infantry Journal 29 (Jul 1926): 1–21; Richard K. Kolb, "Polar Bears vs. Bols," 78 VFW Magazine (Jan 1991): 16–20; Divisions, p. 363.
