Ohio History Journal

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WILLIAM M

WILLIAM M. DONNELLY

 

Keeping the Buckeye in the Buckeye

Division: Major General Robert S.

Beightler and the 37th Infantry

Division, 1940-1945

 

 

 

On 15 October 1940 Major General Robert S. Beightler and the 37th

Infantry Division of the Ohio National Guard reported for what was supposed

to be a one-year tour of Federal service. Five years later Beightler and the

Buckeye Division returned to Ohio. Its original mission had been to expand

to full wartime strength and train draftees from Ohio at Camp Shelby,

Mississippi. The Buckeyes accomplished that mission and performed well in

the Louisiana Maneuvers of 1941.          These achievements led     the  War

Department to select the 37th to be one of the first American divisions de-

ployed overseas after Pearl Harbor. The division arrived on Fiji in June 1942,

trained there and on Guadalcanal, after which it fought two island jungle cam-

paigns against the Japanese on New Georgia and Bougainville in 1943-1944.

The 37th then landed on the island of Luzon in the Philippines in January

1945, engaging the Japanese in bitter street fighting during the liberation of

Manila. The division then conducted a combined arms attack through the is-

land's northern mountains to the coast.1      In 592 days of combat, the

Buckeyes earned a reputation as one of the best Army divisions in the Pacific,

at a cost of 1,834 dead and 8,218 wounded.2

 

 

 

William M. Donnelly is a Ph.D candidate in American history at The Ohio State University.

 

1. Stanley Frankel, The 37th Infantry Division in World War II (Washington, D.C., 1948);

Christopher R. Gabel, The U.S. Army GHQ Maneuvers of 1941 (Washington, D.C., 1991): John

Miller, Jr., Cartwheel: The Reduction of Rabaul (Washington, D.C., 1959); Robert Ross Smith,

Triumph in the Philippines (Washington, D.C., 1963); Major General Robert S. Beightler,

"Report on the Activities of the 37th Infantry Division 1940-1945" (n.p., n.d., copy in Box 63/9,

Ohio Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio).

2. Frankel, The 37th Infantry Division in World War 11, 387. On the 37th's reputation, see

Frankel, The 37th Infantry Division in World War II; Beightler, "Report on the Activities of the

37th Infantry Division"; Geoffrey Perret There's a War to be Won: The United States Army in

World War II (New York, 1991), 237-38, 489-93, 498; the memoirs of a member of the 37th's

band, Frank F. Mathias, G.I. Jive: An Army Bandsman in World War II (Lexington, Ky., 1982);

Bruce Jacobs, "Tensions Between the Army National Guard and the Regular Army", Military

Review, (October, 1993), 5-17; Army Times, 14 October 1944, 10. Beightler noted that "a

reputation for getting things done certainly gives us an abundance of opportunities to justify and

rejustify it." Letter, 12 May 1945, Beightler to Major General Dudley J. Hard (a retired Ohio

National Guard officer), Box 1, Folder 2, Robert S. Beightler Papers, Ohio Historical Society