The Guard is drafted, and the 3rd Regiment becomes artillery

1917

The First World War reorganized South Bend's Guard line out of the infantry altogether: The Indiana National Guard was drafted into federal service on 5 August 1917 and reassigned at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, into the 38th Division. In that conversion the state regiments changed arms: the 1st Infantry became the 151st Infantry, the 2nd Infantry the 152nd Infantry, the 3rd Infantry — South Bend's regiment of 1898 — became the 137th Field Artillery, the 4th Infantry became the 139th Field Artillery, and the 1st Battalion of Engineers became the 113th Engineers. The statement is a regiment-level one and is printed at that size: the conversion record used here follows regiments, and it does not trace Company F of South Bend, as a company, into any particular battery of the 137th, so none is claimed. In the division's infantry, Indiana's two regiments — the new 151st and 152nd — formed the 76th Brigade, the ancestor of the brigade under which South Bend's battalion serves today. What matters for this city's standing record is the pattern the conversion set: from 1917 forward, South Bend's military presence would be a changing set of companies and detachments of state regiments whose headquarters sat elsewhere — artillery, then engineers, then infantry again — rather than a regiment of its own. The 38th Division those regiments entered is the division Indiana's Guard still serves in, and the regiments named here — the 151st, the 152nd's line, the 113th — are the three whose South Bend threads this section follows to the present day.

Sources:

1. Trissal, Public Men of Indiana (1922) — the 5 August 1917 draft of the Indiana Guard into federal service and the Camp Shelby reassignment table: 1st Infantry to 151st, 2nd to 152nd, 3rd to 137th Field Artillery, 4th to 139th Field Artillery, 1st Battalion Engineers to 113th Engineers, in the 38th Division.
2. Military Department of Indiana, 76th Mobile Brigade Combat Team page (in.gov) — the 38th Division's Indiana regiments in 1917, the 151st and 152nd forming the 76th Brigade, as the state's own brigade history states it.