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See sidebar: Letters home; Quotes: The Rainbow Division . . . did not play a decisive role in the war. But they helped plug the Allied lines during the last great German offensive of 1918. - Yale historian Jay Winter
'Over There," the rousing 1917 song by George M. Cohan, was the most popular tune in America during World War I, and one of the most irresistibly patriotic ditties ever. It captured the confident, energetic spirit of the young nation that sent an army of 2 million men to Europe, to help tip the scales in favor of England and France against Germany in the main theater of the Great War.
The Yanks were coming, indeed. But before they went over there, they were over here - at training camps throughout Long Island.
The largest, Camp Upton in Yaphank, also figured into a song by another popular composer of that era. Irving Berlin, who had been drafted into the Army, wrote "Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning," while stationed there with the 20th Infantry. But for the 27,000 men in the Army's famous 42nd - aka Rainbow - Division, their time on Long Island was not celebrated with a song but by a monument erected by the veterans of the regiment after the war at the site of the now largely forgotten Camp Mills in Garden City.
Rainbow Division
About 10,000 people were there, on Oct. 12, 1941, for the unveiling of the monument to what had become known as "Garden City's Rainbow Division." There were speeches and parades. Many Rainbow Division veterans were in attendance, including Nassau County Judge Courtland Johnson, who served as master of ceremonies, and Col. William "Wild Bill" Donovan who, during World War II, would head the Office for Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to today's CIA. Three of the unit's most famous alums were absent: Gen. Douglas MacArthur (who had given the Rainbow Division, drawn from National Guard units representing 26 states, its nickname) was in the Philippines, preparing for a war against Japan. Father Francis Duffy, a regimental chaplain, had died in 1937, and was memorialized in a statue of his own that still stands in Manhattan's Times Square. The poet, Joyce Kilmer,...