Forged in Ohio, Tested in Hell: The 37th (Buckeye Division) in the Great War

In 1917, America didn’t have a massive standing army ready for France—so Ohio sent its communities. Steelworkers, farmers, clerks, and teachers mobilized together as the 37th Division, a National Guard force that would become known as the “Buckeye Division.” In this deep-dive episode, we follow their transformation from state armories to federal soldiers, shaped by the AEF’s massive “square division” doctrine, hardened in training, and carried across a U-boat-haunted Atlantic. Their first months in the trenches serve as a brutal apprenticeship—then comes the test: the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. We trace the chaos of the Montfaucon woods, the controversy that followed the stalled fight for the heights, and the grinding battle around Ivoiry—where Lieutenant Albert E. Baesel’s self-sacrifice earns a Medal of Honor. Finally, the Buckeyes are rushed north to fight under Belgium’s King Albert I, pushing through flooded Flanders to the freezing, bullet-swept Scheldt River—where volunteers swim into the darkness to help crack a fortified line and force a crossing. This is the story of a citizen-soldier division—born in Ohio, forged in mud, and remembered in the words that became their legacy: We’ll do it.