The 109th and 110th Infantry regiments were brigaded together under the designation of the 55th Infantry Brigade. The 111th and 112th regiments became the 56th Infantry Brigade and the three artillery regiments and the trench mortar battery became the 53d Artillery Brigade.
There were other Pennsylvanians—many thousands of them—in the war, but no other organization so represented every locality and every stratum of society.
© International Film Service.
France At Last! Iron Division Debarking
After months of vexatious delays, the Pennsylvania Guardsmen acknowledged their welcome on French soil with expansive smiles which showed their pleasure at having come thus far on the Great Adventure.
And so the division went to France. The movement to a port of embarkation began in April, 1918, and the convoy carrying the eager soldiers arrived in a French port May 18th. The troops were separated by organizations, brigaded with British troops in training areas and entered upon the final phases of their instruction. The men were discouraged by their exceptionally long period of preparation. They felt within themselves that they were ready for the front line, and the evident hesitation of the military authorities to put them there was distressing. Many of them began to doubt that they would see actual fighting. They had longed and waited for so many months that it is no exaggeration, on the word of men who have returned, to say that their very dreams were colored with the keen desire to try their mettle on the enemy.
According to the system worked out by the high command for bringing new troops up to front line caliber, they should then have gone into their own camp within sound of the guns, but behind the actual "zone of operations." There the division should have been reassembled and gotten to functioning properly and smoothly as a division, and then have been moved up by easy stages. It should have occupied one billet area after another, each closer to the lines, until it should actually have been under artillery fire behind the fighting line. Then, with its nerves tautened and having learned, possibly through some losses, how best to take care of and protect itself, it would at last have been sent into the front line, but even then not without some misgivings and it would have been carefully watched to see that it reacted properly to the new conditions.
In the progress of this customary routine, the work of assembling the division was begun a few miles northwest of Paris. Division headquarters was established at Gonesse, a little over ten miles from the heart of Paris. The infantry regiments and the engineers were scattered through a myriad of villages in the vicinity, billeted in houses, stables, buildings of any kind that could be turned to adequate shelters.