The Germans had expressed their belief that the war would be over soon, and that they were reluctant to continue fighting. In Jul 1918, during the Second Battle of the Marne, the I Corps commander, Lt Gen Hunter Liggett found that, although the 26th Division did not lack for heroism and fought valiantly, he could not depend on its commanders, especially Edwards, to subjugate his unit to Regular Army divisions.Įdwards’ final demise came in Oct 1918, when he reported an incident to Liggett involving information two of his soldiers had obtained from German soldiers with whom they had been fraternizing. Bullard was enraged, but Pershing always favored the 1st Division and reassured him, and nothing came of the incident. Edwards found fault with everything he saw, and accused the 1st Division of leaving behind classified documents.
Edwards made another enemy in Maj Gen Robert Lee Bullard during the 26th Division’s relief of the 1st Division near Toul in Apr 1918. ‘Blackjack’ Pershing, Commander-in-Chief of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) on the Western Front, particularly despised him. Going back to his days at West Point, Edwards had earned a reputation for being sharp-tongued and contentious. The division also became the first complete American and became the first to go into combat for 46 consecutive days at the Chemin-des-Dames in France in Feb 1918. The division, an Army National Guard formation, arrived on the Western Front in Sep 1917, the first complete American division to do so. In Aug 1917, four months after the American entry into the war, he was promoted to the rank of major general in the National Army and given the task of organizing the 26th Division. Upon the outbreak of WW-1, Edwards was in charge of the Department of the Northeast, comprising all the New England states. Maj GenClarence Ransom Edwards (– Feb 14, 1931) was a senior United States Army officer, known as the first Chief of the Bureau of Insular Affairs, and commander of the 26th Division in World War I. On August 13 1917, after the United States declared war on Germany, their ranks were augmented and together they formed the 26th Infantry Division. Most of these units were on the Mexican Border, during the trouble with Mexico in 1916. Such was the background of part of the troops that made up the New England National Guards on the eve of the First World War. During the Spanish American War, they again took to the field at Santiago. They played their pipes at Manassas, sounded the charge at Antietam and Chancellorsville and sang Garryowen in Glory at Mechanicsville as, heavily outnumbered, they held off Stonewall Jackson’s men. The 101st Infantry Regiment was originally designated the Massachusetts 9th Infantry and was first organized from a nucleus of Boston fighting Irishmen in 1861, during the Civil War. Later, generations of these New Englanders took part in the War of 1812, and every great American conflict since. Their descendants took part in the siege of Boston in 1776 as Minute Men. The oldest of the Yankee Division’s three infantry regiments, the 104th, stems back to the Springfield Train Band and Hampshire County Regiments whose troops served through the French and Indian Wars. Battery A of the 101st Field Artillery was one of the original artillery units in the Army and won fame as Battery Jones during the Civil War in fighting through the Wilderness, Petersburg, Cold Harbor and Richmond. Ancestors of the 101st Engineers unfurled the first American flag on Prospect Hill during the Revolutionary War. The 102nd Field Artillery Battalion traces its origin to one of the oldest military organizations in America, the Gloucester Militia. The lineage of the Yankee Division extends back to the beginning of the American citizen-soldier – the fighting colonial troops of the early Plymouth and Massachusetts colonies. The 26th Infantry Division (Yankee Division), has been a famous division for almost two centuries of American burgeoning and growth.