Sick of ongoing and continual historical inaccuracies, this new ongoing thread will catalog them.
First installment, from the Daily Beast regarding Governor DeSantis to join those states that have a State Guard.
Here's the quote:
Back at the start of World War II, the federal government authorized the states to form military units to fill in for the National Guard, which had been incorporated into the U.S military to fight in Europe and the Pacific.
First of all, allow me to note that I think this effort to form a 200-man Florida State Guard is silly, so I'm not commenting on that.
But state guards weren't "authorized" by the Federal Government during World War Two. They had existed long before that. Their actual origin is World War One.
Prior to World War One there was a Federally inspired controversy over whether National Guardsmen could be deployed overseas. The thought has always been that they could be, and in fact during the Spanish American War they were. The problem originated in Woodrow Wilson's pacifistic administration in which the Attorney General of the United States came up with the opinion out of the blue that the National Guard could not be deployed outside of the United States when it was mustered. That's why the Guard, while Federalized, did not go into Mexico during the Punitive Expedition.
This, of course, caused an immediate crisis when World War One came as half of the American military strength was found in the Guard. This was solved by simply conscripting the entire National Guard in mass.
Be that as it may, it also caused some states to form State Guards which they expressly formed as being state militia's outside of the National Guard system. It was a serious move as some of the units were very good ones. Massachusetts and Rhode Island were notable in this effort. Texas, which retain a real border crisis with Mexico during the Great War, did as well.
During the war, however, State Guard units started to pop up to take the place of the then conscripted National Guardsmen for the duration of the war. Most were disbanded after the war, but some, like Massachusetts and Rhode Islands, kept on keeping on. During the Second World War almost every, nad perhaps every, state looked back to this example and formed State Guard units once again. Most were, quite frankly, fairly sad affairs and at least one ended up taking its military mission and the fear of the Germans too seriously and ended up killing a fellow at a guarded bridge.
Be that as it may, following the war most states, seeing no point in the maintaining these units any further now that the Guard was back home, disbanded them. But some kept them. In recent years, in some places, notably places with notably right wing politics, there's been a minor effort to recreate them.
And also, the National Guard wasn't "incorporated into the U.S. military" during World War Two. Since the Dick Act of 1906, it's been part of the U.S. military, with it officially being a reserve of its respective branches.
