Guardians of the Pass

Predicted to fail and outnumbered and outgunned, the National Guardsmen who withstood the last German onslaught of World War IThe Champagne-Marne Defensive in July 1918 occurred at a crucial moment in World War I and proved to be the turning point of the war. The Germans prepared for a final offensive that would defeat the French Army and threaten Paris, causing the French to sue for peace. Fought on two fronts west and east of the strategic French city of Rheims, the Germans put the weight of their offensive on the eastern front where two German armies totaling twenty-five divisions would attempt to break through the Allied lines. Defending that sector were two French divisions and one American division, the 42nd—the Rainbow Division—a unit created from National Guard units from twenty-six states. Untested and new, many in the American Expeditionary Force and French Fourth Army doubted the Rainbow’s ability to hold back the surprise German onslaught and prepared for the worst. However, these National Guardsmen, along with their French allies, not only held their ground, they also handed the enemy a devastating defeat that proved crucial to the outcome of the war. Relying on first-person accounts and other primary sources, historian Robert Thompson returns the reader to the battlefield at the soldier’s level, where these young men faced a terrible war of poison-gas bombardments, incendiary shells, heavy machine guns, and an experienced, well-trained adversary. The men of the 42nd did not break, and withstood one of the most concentrated offensives of World War I. Narrative history at its best, Guardians of the Pass: America’s Rainbow Division Against the Final German Offensive of World War I reveals how soldiers from the United States first earned their international reputation for being among the finest in the world.