U.S. Army 91st Division troops leave a French village where they had been billeted before heading to the front during the Meuse-Argonne offensive.
Photo Credit: HARRY A. WILLIAMS / LOS ANGELES TIMES
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The Los Angeles Times' photography blog, Framework, http://goo.gl/Jff51s recently splashed with a superb collection of photos of the U.S. Army's 91st Infantry Division, which included soldiers from California and many other Western states during World War I. The ``Wild West Division'' as they were affectionately christened, represents a distinctive significance to the Times’; since one of their own gifted writers, Harry A. Williams, the paper’s former sports writer, traveled to Europe as a special correspondent.
In fact, according to Mr. Williams obituary, he made headlines during the Great War, when he and Larry MacPhail, former big league club executive, came up with a bold plot to kidnap Kaiser Wilhelm while they were overseas and turn him over to the Allied forces-so he could be tried for war crimes. Despite the admirable effort, the plot failed.
After the armistice was signed, he remained in France as sports editor for the Paris edition of the New York Herald. In 1920, he began covering baseball for the New York Globe, but returned to the Times in 1921, where he would remain until he was elected president of the Pacific Coast League (PCL), a minor-league baseball league operating in the Western, Midwestern, and Southeastern United States.
During a reunion of the U.S. Army's 91st Infantry Division in 1921, Williams wrote a tender retrospective piece in the Times, chronicling how this courageous division as it set out in the cold damp landscape of the Argonne-Meuse sector, produced, arguably, the greatest bombardment of the war.
Williams wrote: ``Inside of three days these largely unskilled soldiers from farm and factory, from store and range, had defeated two Prussian divisions, pierced the presumable impregnable German defense to a depth of fifteen kilometers, and with other equally valiant American divisions, had set in motion the drive which ended in Sedan…''
Before landing at the Times as a boxing, baseball, and feature writer, Mr. Williams was sports editor of the Los Angeles Evening Express and the Los Angeles Tribune. A native of Des Moines Iowa, Williams died in his Los Angeles home in 1953 at the age of 74.
-Bill Lucey
July 11, 2014
It is good to recall the memories of the time when LA's army went to the war through this article. The shared details are also nice and i would like to pass through them to my dad after my https://www.goldenbustours.com/cheap-tours-holiday-packages-travel-deals-from-toronto/
Posted by: Kaylie | 12/24/2018 at 04:34 AM
How can I see the phenomenal collection of the 91st Wild West Infantry Division WW1 photos shot by Harry A. Williams of the LA Times? My Grandfather was in the 91st in WW1. He's gone, but my Dad is getting old, and I'd like to surprise him with a look at photos because my Grandfather NEVER talked about the war, only to say "War is HELL!:
Posted by: Kathy Poulos | 11/29/2020 at 09:17 PM