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Guide to Historians: What is a Division?
One issue for civilians such as myself studying the Great War is understanding the meaning of military terms found in the original literature of the era. One of the most important terms for tracking the movement of armies across Europe is the idea of a division.
Europe, through much of its history, fought wars with large masses of men that were not divided into tactical units. This was because there was simply not enough people skilled in leadership and little formal training for soldiers through much of the middle ages. Starting though with the French reforms of Jean Martinet, units became increasingly organized around the ideal of a maneuver team (a modern term). Napoleon himself took this concept and defined it in practical terms with the invention of the division and the corps as tactical teams. The division, the the Napoleonic understand, was an indivisible unit of maneuver capable of providing its own logistics in the field for the period of a standard battle. A corps was a unit that could have one or more divisions assigned to it as an intermediate step to army command, while the older term regiment stood for a unit that trained to use the same weapon system in combat (at that time a rifle).
In the Great War a division started out with 4 infantry regiments, a single artillery regiment, and other units such as engineers and cavalry attached as needed. For example, the 2nd French Infantry Division was made up in August 1914 of the 8th, 33rd, 73rd, and 100th Infantry regiments, the 27th Countryside Artillery Regiment, the 6th Squadron of the 6th Chasseur Regiment, and two companies of engineers. Depending on the presence of reserve companies and attached subordinate units, regiments had around 4,000 soldiers at the start of the great war, giving the French division of 1914 as many as 20,000 men.
As the war went on the increasing firepower available to soldiers and the high casualty rate for infantry caused regiments on the western front to slim down. In November 1916 most French divisions lost 2 of their regiments to allow formation of new divisions, while regimental manpower levels could fall to 2,500 soldiers each. This meant a division in the line at the western front could fall to as small as 8,000 men. The trade off was that the newly formed divisions had the same amount of artillery and machine guns as the older divisions, allowing for more firepower available to fewer men. A corps by 1916 with two divisions would be smaller than a division was before the war.
A noted difference for this practice was the Americans, who joined the war in 1917. American divisions entered France with 4 complete regiments in two brigades, an oversized artillery compliment of 4 field artillery units, a regimental sized machine gun compliment, and a full-sized support train that reduced the need to task infantry to anything other than fighting. In practice, the size of American divisions caused problems for the French and Germans, as emotionally by 1917 a division had become a relatively small fighting unit, while American divisions had more firepower than a French or German Corps.
For historians reading maps, an infantry unit is symbolized by a rectangle with an X in it. Above the rectangle is a set of letters that indicate its size.
Symbols used to represent units
I - Company
II - Battalion
III - Regiment
X - Brigade
XX - Division
XXX - Corps
XXXX - Army
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