Military Review English Edition March-April 2016 | Page 136

find America and World War I (again, augmented with
modern road maps) to be a superb guide.
Curtis S. King, PhD, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

THE GREAT CALL-UP: The Guard, the Border, and
the Mexican Revolution
Charles H. Harris III and Louis R. Sadler, University
of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma, 2015,
576 pages

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emembrance of the federal mobilization of the
National Guard for service along the Mexican
border in 1916 has largely been conflated with
the concurrent Punitive Expedition into Mexico, and
overshadowed by the entrance of the United States
into the Great War. Charles Harris and Louis Sadler
aim to correct this oversight with their detailed study
of the National Guard’s service on the border. The
border crisis is often seen as a sideshow to the Punitive
Expedition, even though around one hundred fifty thousand guardsmen served on the border, while
around twelve thousand soldiers served in the Punitive
Expedition. Therefore, Harris and Sadler question
which was the main effort and which was the sideshow.
They dismiss the common misperception that movement of National Guard units from every state to the
border was an overreaction to a few bandit raids on
Texas towns in the aftermath of the raid by Francisco
“Pancho” Villa on Columbus, New Mexico.
Instead, they argue that the government of Mexican
President Venustiano Carranza was sponsoring raids along
the border, and that it was involved in the Plan of San Diego,
a proposed uprising of Hispanics within the Border States.
They show that the threat of war was very real. In that light,
the mobilization was part of a successful American effort to
demonstrate the ability to mass large numbers of troops on
the border to deter the Carranza government.
Against that background, the volume tells the story
of the mobilization of the Guard and its service along
the border. The book is in two sections: the first section
is an overview of the border crisis from early 1916 until
the removal of most National Guard units by February
1917. The second section centers on the experience of
National Guard units from specific states to specific
sections of the border. Drawing mainly on newspaper
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accounts, War Department records, and state records,
the authors describe the process of mobilization and the
service on the border, with chapters moving in geographical order from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean.
The book’s organization is effective if encyclopedic,
although tighter editing could have avoided some repetition. What emerges is the span of readiness of units, from
barely functional to well organized and ready for service.
The Army, however, tried to hold National Guard units to
standards that Regular Army units could not meet, and it
tended to denigrate the competency of the Guard formations in an attempt to force Congress to institute universal
military training. While on the border, Guard units began
ambitious programs that not only gave guardsmen toughening and training but also gave Regular Army officers
experience handling larger formations.
The border call-up provided important practical experience to regular officers who would soon be handling
similarly sized formations in Europe. The presence of
two guard divisions (New York and Pennsylvania), plus
enough Guard and Regular units to make another seven
provisional divisions, allowed regular officers to create
corps and conduct large-scale training exercises.
The Great Call-Up is a welcome addition to the
historiography of the National Guard and the evolution
of the U.S. Army. Harris and Sadler have caused us to
look anew at the border crisis and the call-up. They
have brought a long-needed recognition of the importance of the call-up to an understanding of the border
and relations between the United States and Mexico
during the second decade of the twentieth century, the
evolution of the National Guard, and the preparation
of the U.S. Army for entrance into the Great War.
Barry M. Stentiford, PhD,
Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

THINKING BEYOND BOUNDARIES:
Transnational Challenges to U.S. Foreign Policy
Hugh Liebert, John Griswold, and Isaiah Wilson
III, eds., Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore,
2015, 256 pages

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hinking Beyond Boundaries: Transnational
Challenges to U.S. Foreign Policy is a compilation of eighteen papers into three
March-April 2016  MILITARY REVIEW