2^nd Cavalry Division

The 2d Cavalry Division occupied an unusual and revealing place in the wartime U.S. Army. Though carried on the Army’s rolls from 1921, it was not activated until April 1941 at Fort Riley, Kansas, under the Protective Mobilization Plan. From the outset, it never reached full strength, lacking much of the organic support and service structure expected in a complete cavalry division. Its early wartime organization was also distinctive: the 3d Cavalry Brigade contained the 2d and 14th Cavalry, while the 4th Cavalry Brigade contained the 9th and 10th Cavalry, the latter two being Black regiments. The result was a racially mixed division at a moment when the Army remained overwhelmingly segregated. Training in 1941 combined traditional horse cavalry methods with limited mechanized elements, and the division took part in major Louisiana and Kansas maneuvers before Pearl Harbor shifted attention toward continental defense.

After Pearl Harbor, the division’s white 3d Brigade was sent to Arizona for border defense, while the Black 4th Brigade continued training under difficult conditions and constant personnel turnover. In July 1942, as the Army expanded its armored force, the white elements of the division were inactivated and used in the creation of the 9th Armored Division. The Black regiments remained in service, however, and in February 1943 the 2d Cavalry Division was reactivated as an all-Black formation, with headquarters at Fort Clark, Texas. Its new structure paired the 9th and 27th Cavalry in the 5th Cavalry Brigade and the 10th and 28th Cavalry in the 4th Cavalry Brigade, split between Texas and Camp Lockett, California.

That reconstituted division never saw combat as a division. Despite months of training, the War Department concluded there was no need for a second cavalry division and instead decided to use its manpower for service units. In early 1944 the division was dismounted, shipped overseas, and sent to North Africa, where its elements were broken up almost immediately. The 2d Cavalry Division was formally inactivated on 10 May 1944 off the North African coast. Its history therefore ended not in battle, but as a casualty of Army manpower policy and the racial assumptions that shaped the employment of Black troops during the war.