Then out of the blue came Pancho Villa. He crossed our border March 9, 1916, raided the defenseless town of Columbus, New Mexico, and killed eleven civilians and nine soldiers. It looked like a horror for us. Not so good. But the tragedy was a blessing in disguise. It probably kept France from being German today. It gave an excuse to the President for rushing to the border a large part of the regular army and one hundred and fifty thousand National Guardsmen. There they received fine training in fundamentals. Their experience gave the foundation for the 1st, 2nd, 26th and 42nd Divisions--the first ones to be factors in France later. Not so bad. But it took a brutal act to compel us to do what we wouldn’t do under our own steam. Even so we were magnificently unready. And we jumped into the European War, April 6, 1917, because we were angry, inflamed, anxious to punish Germany at any cost. No catch phrases, no plottings of a few could possibly have pitched us into the struggle without that general hatred. And we had little with which to carry out the wholesale desire for force. Immediately we needed two hundred thousand officers. We hadn’t ten thousand trained ones to instruct them and at the same time lead our forces. In equipment we were worse off. We had a few out-of-date airplanes, only enough artillery ammunition for a two-day battle, no automatic rifles and comparatively few machine guns and ordinary rifles. Materially we lacked almost everything. Although we had the best rifle in the world, there was not anywhere near enough. We had to arm our men largely with British Enfields--unfamiliar to Americans--at best poor makeshifts. We couldn’t manufacture any of these things in time. In July 1917, Congress voted six hundred forty million dollars for airplanes. Nearly a year later we hadn’t any of our aircraft in Europe. Where had the money gone? An investigation was ordered. After seventeen thousand pages of testimony were taken down, it was found that aircraft couldn’t be built and shipped abroad in that time. Not so good.