The History of the NGAUS
By COL Donald Perkins (ret.)
The National Guard Association of the United States (NGAUS) and the Army and
Air National Guard are one and inseparable. All of the National Guard’s legislative achievements have been made possible by, and through, the efforts of the NGAUS. If the Guard were to cease to exist, the NGAUS would soon disappear. If the NGAUS were to become moribund or die, the Guard, for want of a unified voice in the Congress of the United States, would wither and die.
Prior to the establishment of the NGAUS, the organized militia of the several states -- or as it is now known, the National Guard -- received almost no federal support and little from the states themselves. Its units were often handsomely uniformed -- because members often paid for those handsome uniforms -- and well-drilled for parades and other public spectacles, but often poorly armed, equipped and trained for war.
For this reason, a group of state military officers met in 1878 in St. Louis, Mo., to create the NGAUS. Their stated purpose was to provide united representation before the Congress with the aim of increasing the value and efficiency of the
Guard. Specifically, their aim was to see that the citizen military force created by the Constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 16) to repel invasion, suppress insurrection and enforce the laws of the United States was manned, trained, equipped and ready when called upon.
Many of the officers who participated in that historic meeting had served on active service in the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War. In fact, the first elected president of the NGAUS was GEN P.G.T. Beauregard was one of the most senior officers in the Confederate Army. None of those officers could have realized the benefits their organizational efforts would provide the Guard.
Their first efforts were directed at reforming the Militia Act of 1792, the basic law

governing the operations of the Guard. Many of the provisions of the act were out of date less than a century after its promulgation. For instance, it required each militia man to provide himself with a musket or firelock. Obviously obsolete, the members of the NGAUS wanted a law that would more effectively direct and support their efforts.
The NGAUS quickly discovered that its objectives were not easily attained. In fact, the Militia Act of 1792 was not superseded until 1903. The mobilization of
1898 for the Spanish-American War showed the defects of the Militia Act. One
Guard officer who served during the war was Sen. Charles Dick, a major general in the Ohio National Guard. Through his efforts, the Dick Acts of 1903 and 1908 provided secure funding for the Guard. The first act provided the Guard with $1 million annual budget and the second act increased the budget to $2 million. The
Dick Acts directed that regular Army officers be sent to each state to serve as officer instructors of the National Guard to advise and assist Guard units in training according to current Army doctrine. Weapons from active Army sources were made available to the Guard.
The National Defense Acts of 1916, 1920 and 1933 followed, all of which included NGAUS input. In 1916, the Militia Bureau was created as a War
Department staff agency to administer the federal programs established for the
Guard (which was still called the organized militia in some states). The Militia
Bureau was headed by a regular Army major general, not an experienced Guard officer.
Two situations developed during the World War I mobilization that contributed to the National Defense Act of 1920. One problem the NGAUS wanted to eliminate was the drafting of Guardsmen during World War I. When the Congress declared war on Germany in April 1917, President Wilson immediately called the Guard to active duty. The call as defined in the Constitution provides for Guard mobilization to repel invasion, which certainly would be appropriate if Mexico or

Canada had sent troops across our borders, but Germany was fighting the allies in Europe. Invasion was not the problem. In 1898, Guard units had been called to active duty and then were allowed to volunteer en masse, and be sworn in, not as the 1st Regiment, Ohio National Guard, but as the 1st Regiment, Ohio
Volunteers. That solved the problem of sending Guardsmen to Cuba or the
Philippines, but it proved cumbersome. The solution in 1917 was for the president to call the Guard into federal service, then, using the newly passed
Selective Service law, draft mobilized Guard units into the Army. But this created a problem for the Guard. While hundreds of thousands of patriotic Americans were besieging recruiting offices to volunteer to serve in the war, the Guardsmen were considered draftees, and draftees were -- in the mind of the public -- men who were forced to enter the military, possibly against their will. For this reason,
Guardsmen hated being called draftees.
The other problem was that all Guardsmen were discharged from their National
Guard enlistments as a result of the draft. Drafted men were no longer
Guardsmen. That step destroyed the Guard as an institution. After World War I, the only legal members of the Guard were the very few officers and enlisted men who, for one reason or another, had been released from the call of the Guard.
As a result of NGAUS efforts, language in the National Defense Act of 1920 ensured that Guardsmen were not to be discharged from Guard obligations to the states when drafted into the Army. They were still to be drafted, and that continued to annoy members of an organization consisting entirely of volunteers.
An important provision of the act that the NGAUS worked strenuously to have included in the bill was the requirement that the chief of the National Guard
Bureau be an officer of the Guard. Also included was specific language that, with the Army, the Guard was part of the first line of defense of our nation.
With the help of the NGAUS, the National Defense Act of 1933 was written to create a new reserve component of the Army. The act states that the Guard is a

component of the Army at all times, not just during war. The new component was called the National Guard of the United States with each member belonging simultaneously to the Guard of his state and to the National Guard of the United
States, a federal reserve force. From that time forward, Guardsmen could be
“ordered” into federal service in their National Guard of the United States role.
Although the NGAUS worked long and hard to maintain the strength and readiness of the Guard, the tenor of the times was such that their efforts were often for naught. The United States had withdrawn into isolationism, secure in the knowledge that the troubles in Europe and Asia were of no concern to this country. Active Army and Guard strengths were reduced. Pay was cut as the nation slipped into the Great Depression which caused reductions in the budgets of the Army and the Guard. Only the onset of war in Europe forced the federal government to start rebuilding its sadly neglected ground forces. In 1940, the
Congress passed the first ever peacetime Selective Service Act, and the
President ordered the Guard into active service for a year’s training. Guard units aggressively recruited men to fill their ranks. As those units were mobilized, the
Guard’s more than 300,000 men doubled the size of the Army. The Guard’s 18 infantry divisions, 80 separate regiments and 29 flying squadrons were an immediate and significant contribution to the armed might of the United States.
The mobilization of the Guard brought with it a problem which had existed to some extent in World War I. Dedicated Guardsmen tended to remain in Guard service for as long as possible. Thus, many of the members of the Guard were significantly older than their active Army counterparts. The Army began to purge these officers from their units and replace them with younger regular Army officers. This was done by moving them to administrative positions which did not require field service, or by discharging them back to civilian life. The NGAUS quickly recognized that many removals were ordered simply to provide opportunities for regular officers to win wartime promotions in Guard divisions,

regiments and flying squadrons.
In 1940, MG Edward Martin, commander of Pennsylvania’s 28th Infantry
Division, was elected NGAUS president. Shortly thereafter, the 1940 peacetime
Guard mobilization began. With most of the elected officers of the NGAUS on active duty, the Association’s activities were curtailed. With the turmoil of mobilization, faster combat training and division, corps and army maneuvers, little could be accomplished by our active duty Association officers. However, the
Army efforts to push Guard general officers out of their commands, and even out of active service, soon provided the Association with a body of senior leaders who were back in the states and available for Association duties.
Martin found himself back in Pennsylvania where he was soon caught up in politics and decided to run for governor of the keystone state. In 1943, he was elected for the first of several terms. MG Ellard A. Walsh, commander of the 34th
Infantry Division, was forced to leave his post because he was found unfit for combat service during a physical examination. Refusing an assignment in an active Army administrative post, he returned to Minnesota where he resumed the position of adjutant general of the state. Although MG Milton A. Reckord, commander of the 29th Infantry Division, was forced out of that position, he agreed to remain on active duty as commander of an Army service command.
Despite that, he found time to continue working to maintain the viability of the
NGAUS.
In 1943, Martin found that being a candidate and later governor kept him from applying himself to the job of NGAUS president. He called a meeting of senior officers in Harrisburg, Penn., where it was agreed that Walsh would become the
NGAUS president as Martin stepped down. Walsh had served a one-year term as president from 1927 to 1928, and he knew the difficulty of making the NGAUS function efficiently on an ad hoc basis, without a headquarters or permanent staff. He agreed to accept the Association presidency provided that a national

headquarters was established and staffed in the Washington area. His goal could never be reached based on an annual assessment on the states of $3 per 100
Guardsmen. At that rate, pre-war revenues had averaged from $6,000 to $8,000 per year, far from enough to provide a headquarters and staff. However, Walsh wasted little time in setting his reorganization plans in motion.
He spent much of his time fighting what he called the “American Samurai,” those
Regular Army officers in the War Department and the Army staff who were determined to eliminate the Guard as a wartime force. In its place they wanted a federal reserve which they hoped would consist of paper divisions with reserve officer members limited to the grade of lieutenant colonel. Upon wartime mobilization, Regular Army professionals would step in to fill the colonel and general officer slots in the paper divisions. Walsh fought those objectives through speeches, articles and letters to major newspapers and magazines which exposed these efforts. His opposition put the War Department on the defensive.
As a result, Army Chief of Staff GEN George Marshall recalled a retired brigadier general, John McAuley Palmer, to determine the post-war Guard and Reserve role in the Army. Palmer was a strong supporter of the Guard and Reserve. His efforts resulted in the publication of War Department Circular No. 347 on August
24, 1944, which included a reconstituted Guard that would continue as part of the first line of defense.
Later that year, Reckord, who had been called to Europe by GEN Dwight
Eisenhower in 1943 to serve as his provost marshal general, was returned to the
United States to work with Palmer on the post-war Guard and Reserve project.
Reckord and Palmer had served together in the 29th Infantry Division in World
War I; Reckord commanded an infantry regiment while McAuley served as chief of staff. Together, Reckord and Palmer saw to the re-establishment of the prewar “Section 5 Committee” on which Guardsmen and regulars served together to

tackle the many problems of the post-war Army and Guard.
As the war came to an end in 1945, a post-war Guard structure was created to include 27 infantry and armored divisions and 12 tactical air wings. The total number of Guard units would be 4,875 in 4,000 American communities. Much post-war planning was based on the passage of a universal military training act that required all physically fit 18-year-old men to report for six months of active duty military training followed by a mandatory period of eight years in a Guard or
Reserve unit. Assuming the act would pass, the Guard post-war strength was initially set at 650,000. The NGAUS worked long and hard to get the bill adopted, but post-war America decided the law was not needed in peacetime.
By 1944, Walsh’s efforts to establish a NGAUS national headquarters achieved some success. He rented a small apartment in Washington and hired a secretary. This was the first permanent headquarters of the NGAUS. In 1946 at the NGAUS General Conference in Buffalo, N.Y., a new constitution was adopted. The fundamental change in the constitution was an Association funded by annual dues of individual members. Initial efforts to get all federally recognized Guard officers and warrant officers to enroll as individual members of the NGAUS were not very successful. Federal recognition was a slow process in the post-war Guard, and by July 1948, only about 25,000 officers had been so recognized. And only about half of the federally recognized officers had joined. In that early time, many officers and warrant officers did not understand the need for a strong Washington lobbying effort to preserve and improve the National
Guard. By 1949, the enrollment of many more members put the NGAUS on more secure financial footing.
In 1944, the 66th General Conference in Baltimore called for establishment of a retirement system for Guard members and all other reserve forces. In 1948, the president signed Public Law 810, establishing a retirement system after listening

to the lobby efforts of governors and Guardsmen.
In 1947, the Congress agreed that a separate service for the air arm of the military was warranted. With the creation of the U.S. Air Force, the tactical air wings of the National Guard became the Air National Guard. That brought 49,500 officers and men in 514 units which operated out of 79 air bases into the new Air
Force structure. This, in turn, changed the National Guard Bureau into a Joint
Bureau in which the Bureau Chief reported to both the secretary and chief of staff of the Army and the Air Force.
Later that year, senior officers and members of the Officer’s Reserve Corps, proposed a merger of the Army Guard and the Army Reserve into a single
Federal Reserve. The secretary of defense appointed a joint committee to develop a “rounded federal reserve program, fully integrated with the national security program, as a whole.” The joint committee was headed by Assistant
Secretary of the Army Gordon Gray. As a result, the joint committee became known as “the Gray Board.” The potential loss of the Guard’s state role brought the NGAUS into a major battle that lasted almost two years. Mobilizing the support of the governors, and that of many members of Congress, a Guard with dual federal and state responsibilities was preserved when the Gray Board
Report was not adopted.
Meanwhile, General Walsh’s term as president was extended several times. He finally insisted on retiring in 1954. He was able to leave knowing he successfully established a NGAUS that is even more powerful today.