Thursday, January 20, 1944. Crossing the Rapido, Trying to persuade the Poles.

The Battle of the Rapido River began in Italy when the 36th Infantry Division crossed the river at night.  They'd establish a beachhead, but things would not go well.  Within a couple of days, the 36th would have to withdraw back across the river.

The attack, widely regarded as producing a disaster, was ordered by Gen. Mark Clark over the objection of the 36th's commanding officer, Gen. Fred Walker, who had experience with a disastrous river crossing in World War One. 

Walker, who at 56 years of age was the oldest divisional commander in the Army at the time, was correct in his assessment.

The 36th Infantry Division assigned to the task was a division of the Texas National Guard.

Walker, who complained that Clark and Gen. Keys were ignorant of the difficulties of the assault, was in ill health at the time, but a very good officer.  Helping to make up for his physical condition was the fact that two of his sons were on his staff.  He was returned to the United States in June, where he went on to command the Infantry School.  In spite of ill health, he lived until 1969, dying at age 82.

Winston Churchill met with the Polish Government In Exile to attempt to convince the Poles to accept the Curzon Line for discussion purposes.  Churchill promised that he'd resist Soviet efforts, in exchange, to influence the makeup of the post-war government.

By radek.s - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1720759

The Curzon Line had been first proposed as a demarcation between the Second Polish Republic and the Soviet Union following World War One by Lord Curzon and Herbert James Paton, and it was based on demographics. Poles did live to the east of the line, but they became increasingly mixed with other populations in what has been termed, quite appropriate, as "the Bloodlands' in a fantastic book on the post World War One era of the region by Timothy D. Snyder.  Like every other imperial domain in Europe, Imperial Russia had regions of strong ethnic uniformity and others of mix ethnicity.  The region that became the westernmost region of Poland had a large Polish population, but also had a Belarusian population and a Ukrainian one, as well as many areas of Jewish populations.  From 1918 into the early 1920s, every country in the region, to include Lithuania, had fought to establish their borders.  Poland had been remarkably successful, throwing back a massive Red Army assault in the Russo Polish War, but even at that the Second Polish Republic did not extend as far to the east as it had originally sought to.

Ethnographic map of Poland, based on pre World War One census data.

None of the parties in Post World War One Eastern Europe were ready to accept the Curzon Line and so the proposal went nowhere at the time, contributing to the wars between Poland and the USSR (which would have occured anyhow), Poland and Ukraine, and Poland and Lithuania.   The result of those disputes resulted in the post-war border, but Communist Russia had always had an appetite that stretched into Germany.  The mixed population in the area to the east of the line, however, guaranteed that it would be uniquely subject to bloodletting, with the Soviets wanting the territory, the Germans wanting to eliminate the Slavs entirely, and the nationalist Ukrainians wanting to expel the Polish and Jewish population on lands that they had claimed or wanted to.  Every culture in the region, for that matter, disliked the native Jewish population in varying degrees.

With the Soviets crossing the frontier of pre-war Poland, the Polish Government In Exile became increasingly concerned that the Soviet Union would annex what it wanted and replace the Polish government with a Communist one.  It was completely correct in both of those fears.

A 40mm gun of the 251st Coastal Artillery (AA), 14th Corps, California National Guard, on Bougainville. Mt Bagana, 6560 feet, an active volcano, is in the background.

Today In Wyoming's History: January 20: 1944  Marjorie Woodsworth and Paul Kelly, motion picture actors, appeared at the University of Wyoming to open the 4th War Loan Drive.  Attribution:  Wyoming State Historical Society.

California National Guard and Mexican forces nearly clash, August 4, 1916

A Mexican sniper shot a California National Guardsman on this day in 1916 at the Santa Cruz River and members of the patrolling 14th California Infantry returned fire.  This nearly resulted in an engagement, but leadership on both sides managed to steer clear of that.

 D. C. Guard training for border duty.

This item is really interesting in that often the Guard's role in the story of the Punitive Expedition tends to be marginalized.  The suggestion often is that because they didn't cross the border, they didn't really do much. But they did.  There are several examples such as this of Guardsmen getting into combat with small parties of Mexican raiders.  This is simply the earliest example of that I ran across, and it may well be the very first.  As we have seen from newspaper entries from this past week the Guard did not all deploy to the border at one time.  Indeed, this was not accidental as Guard units came and went, reflecting their initial state of training and the desire to not overtax them, and to get them all trained.  Nearly the entire Guard served on the border during the crisis, but not all at once.

 California National Guard, 1906.  Note how much had changed in just a decade.  These soldiers look a lot more like soldiers from the Indian Wars than ones who would serve in World War One.

That meant, and not coincidentally, that stories like we saw in the Wyoming newspapers earlier this week were common.  Soldiers who were not fit for service were getting discharged.  That leads us to another aspect of this. The Punitive Expedition is often treated a bit in a vacuum but the newspaper articles we've been reading (and if you look at Reddits "100 Years Ago" subreddit you'll see this to be even more the case) show that as time went on the huge fear and expectation that we were going to war with Mexico rapidly declined over a period of a few weeks and, instead, the disaster of World War One loomed increasingly large.  It's hard not to believe that a large part of the purpose of Federalizing the Guard changed over those few weeks and Wilson, while he may have "kept us out of war", was preparing for one, including using the border crisis to bring the Guard up to fighting speed.

In Wyoming's case, that meant getting the  Guard up to full strength, amongst other things.  As we've seen, the Guard was recruiting to make its quota.  In California's case, however, it apparently deployed very rapidly, which makes sense.

California National Guard, 1906.