35th Division

The 35th Infantry Division was the wartime formation to which the 129th Field Artillery was attached, placing Harry S. Truman’s artillery service within a larger American force sent to France. The book’s account connects the division chiefly to the preparations and movement of inexperienced troops toward the front, rather than to a detailed record of the division’s operations.

Formation and Assignment

Truman returned to the National Guard in 1917 and set about organizing an artillery battery. He had been out of the Guard for nearly six years, was thirty-three—two years above the age limit under the new Selective Service Act—and had eyesight far below the usual service standard. Yet he passed the Army examination and was elected a first lieutenant by the men of his unit, an office he had never before been elected to.

The unit initially known as the 2nd Missouri Field Artillery became the 129th Field Artillery, part of the 60th Brigade attached to the 35th Infantry Division. This link situates the Missouri artillerymen within a larger divisional and brigade structure, although the account gives no fuller description of the division’s command or internal organization.

Training and the Road to the Front

The artillerymen drilled in Kansas City, including in the streets opposite Union Station and inside Convention Hall. As the war intensified, the American high command faced pressure to get forces to the front quickly. In the spring of 1918, German numerical superiority on the Western Front and the renewed advance toward the Marne made the need for American support increasingly urgent. More than 250,000 Americans were sent forward to support French forces under Ferdinand Foch, despite John J. Pershing’s preference for keeping American troops under a separate national command.

The 129th Field Artillery’s journey toward the front took it through a landscape marked by the war: past Paris, the Marne, and Château-Thierry, then onward toward the Vosges Mountains near the Swiss border. The high command had selected this comparatively quiet sector as a place where inexperienced troops could gain experience holding the lines before a larger American offensive. The account thus places the division’s attachment to the artillery regiment in the wider effort to prepare green American forces for combat.

The Division in the Wider War

The 35th Infantry Division appears against a turning point in the Western Front campaign. At the Second Battle of the Marne in July 1918, American forces fought alongside the Allies as German forces launched a major offensive toward Paris. Within three days, from July 15 to July 18, the momentum shifted. The account presents the Americans’ arrival and combat contribution as decisive to the change in the campaign, while not attributing a particular action at the battle to the 35th Infantry Division itself.

The division’s significance in this narrative is therefore organizational and contextual: it was the formation to which Truman’s artillery regiment was attached as American troops moved from training toward the front. The evidence emphasizes the division’s place in that transition and in the broader American reinforcement of the Allied effort, rather than supplying a separate operational history.