Roster of the Rainbow division (Forty-Second) Major General Wm. A. Mann…

This is no coffee-table history or romanticized war narrative. It is something rarer and more valuable: a contemporaneous census of American sacrifice. Published in 1917, this roster records every officer and enlisted man of the 42nd Infantry Division, the legendary Rainbow Division, which drew National Guard units from across the nation and became the first American division to engage the German army in World War I. Compiled by Lieutenant Harold Stanley Johnson under the command of Major General William A. Mann, the book is simply a list of names, ranks, and assignments. But each entry represents a young American who left his life, his town, his family to cross an ocean and face the mechanized slaughter of the Western Front. For genealogists, military historians, and anyone curious about the actual human texture of America's entry into the Great War, this document is a doorway. It lets you find the private from Alabama, the sergeant from Oregon, the lieutenant from New York and imagine them, however briefly, as living men rather than statistics.