COLUMN ONE : U.S. Again Looks to Reservists : For the 11th time since the end of World War II, National Guard and other units are being called to active duty. The tradition dates to the Revolution.

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, it had the best-armed, best-trained military reserve volunteer force in the country’s history, but a chagrined President Woodrow Wilson could find no authority for ordering the men to active duty.

To his embarrassment and theirs, he was forced to draft them all, one by one.

Since that great conflict was viewed for years as the “War to End All Wars,” nothing was done about bolstering the President’s authority until 1933. That year, Congress created the National Guard of the United States, enabling him to mobilize state guard units en masse.

For the 11th time since the end of World War II, guard and military reserve units across the country are being called to active duty, renewing the citizen-soldier tradition that reaches back to the American Revolution.

Girding for possible combat in the Middle East, President Bush has summoned them with extraordinary dispatch because the country’s regular all-volunteer armed forces now rely more heavily upon the reservists than they have at any time since Wilson’s day, seven decades ago.

Within hours of Bush’s decision to send troops to Saudi Arabia, flying tankers from the Tennessee Air National Guard’s 134th Air Refueling Group took off from a base outside Knoxville to refuel huge transports carrying the first American paratroopers to the desert.

They were joined by other KC-135 tankers from Michigan, Illinois, New Jersey and other states to help fuel history’s mightiest airlift.

Volunteers across a vast range of specialties followed the tanker crews to active duty, and combat units are among those expected to get their call soon.

Experts expect that the Georgia National Guard’s 48th Mechanized Infantry Brigade and Mississippi’s 155th Armored Brigade will be ordered to Saudi Arabia to fill out the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division and the 1st Cavalry Division, already sent.

The civilians who are being so rapidly brought under arms “are probably as prepared as they have ever been in our history,” says Col. Harry Summers, a retired officer and military historian.

Members of the Army, Navy and Air Force reserves and the National Guard may wear similar uniforms, but the organizations are quite different in structure and character.

The reserve units are essentially subsidiaries of their respective armed services. The National Guard units are modern-day counterparts of the old state militias, directly accountable to the governors of their respective states, yet linked to the national armed forces. Each organization has its own command structure and recruiting activities.

In times past, these citizen-soldiers have gone off to war under circumstances even more daunting than the current standoff with the Iraqi army.

Fifty years ago next week, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the first National Guard units to active duty more than three months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

It had to be a phased call-up, under the guise of a year’s training, because the country was without the weapons needed to arm them, barracks needed to house them and the trucks that were needed to move them. The first to go were members of the 44th Division from New Mexico and the 45th Division from Oklahoma.

In the ranks of the 44th was a young private named Bill Mauldin, whose cartoon characters, Willie and Joe, would later portray the life of the World War II dogface in the armed forces newspaper Stars and Stripes.

By the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, 8,000 citizen-soldiers were already on duty. By some accounts, it was a National Guard anti-aircraft outfit from New Mexico that fired the first American shots of World War II--when Japanese Zeros swept down on the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific fleet.

Before the war was over, 18 of the guardsmen who had been summoned by the President had won the Congressional Medal of Honor.

John W. Vessey Jr., who entered the conflict as a private in the Minnesota National Guard, was one of many who won battlefield commissions. When he returned to civilian life, it was nearly four decades later and he had become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Reservists had no time to prepare for Korea in 1950. Part-time Marines yet to enjoy the initiation of boot camp were called to duty within days of North Korea’s rampage across the 38th Parallel.

The greenest of them were pulled out of ranks at California’s Camp Pendleton and shipped off for their basic training, while others--hardly more seasoned--sailed for the war, taking target practice at floating sea bags.

Two months after some them had been plowing corn in Iowa, they waded ashore at Inchon to help pull off one of the tactical masterpieces of modern military history, the amphibious landing that initially turned the tide in the Korean War.

As deeply engrained as the citizen-soldier is in American tradition, the National Guard and reserves have at times been fiercely controversial institutions.

Some Army historians have criticized the National Guard for being slow to respond in Korea, but historian Summers argues, to the contrary, that “we would have lost the war in Korea at the outset if we had not been able to mobilize the guard and reserves.

During that war, however, no less a critic than Charles Wilson, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense, suggested that reservists and guardsmen were draft dodgers. Such charges flew again during Vietnam.

And when Indiana Sen. Dan Quayle was nominated for the vice presidency in 1988, his service in the Indiana National Guard during Vietnam was viewed as a monumental political liability.

Vietnam was indeed an unhappy period in the saga of the American citizen-soldier, and it continues to be debated. In one of his more controversial decisions in managing the conflict, President Lyndon B. Johnson chose to keep the reserves at home while sending draftees to fight in Asia. Reserve ranks were filled and long lines of young men waited for vacancies during the Vietnam years.

Among Johnson’s reasons was strong advice from Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, who reminded him that sending the reserves to Indochina would leave the country without a backup force to respond if the Soviet Union made a move on Western Europe.

Whatever the rationale, the decision did nothing for the image of the reservist as a modern-day Minuteman.

When three National Guard combat units were finally mobilized in May of 1968, they were left at Ft. Lewis, Wash., and Ft. Shafter, Hawaii, for a full year, then released without ever going to Vietnam.

The final blow for the guard’s image during the Vietnam experience came in May, 1970, when Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on anti-war demonstrators on the campus of Kent State University, killing four of them.

Yet, in the end, not even the unhappy experience of the Vietnam years permanently damaged the role of the citizen-soldier.

“It seems to me that the worst thing an honest-to-goodness draft dodger could do would be (to) join the National Guard or the reserves where there is the real potential to be called to combat duty,” says retired Maj. Gen. Bruce Jacobs, a onetime New York advertising man and New Jersey guardsman, who volunteered for Vietnam and remained on active duty. “I could think of much better ways to hide out if I wanted to hide out.”

In fact, the Vietnam War, rather than diminishing the role of the citizen-soldier, enhanced it, because it led the nation to abandon the draft and turn to a slimmed-down all-volunteer active force, which depends on the reserves for vital support. Regular Army forces are no longer prepared to fight even a small war without heavy involvement by reservists.

But in peacetime, the guards also have a state role. Their mobilizations this century come in addition to state service in a range of crises, from quelling urban riots to fighting fires and floods or helping to clean up after such natural disasters. Hence, guard units have developed a sense of state identity and pride that matches their federal service.

There are historical reasons that so-called “weekend warriors” have remained an integral part of the United States’ national security establishment.

“Going back to Colonial times, there was a desperate fear of standing armies,” says John K. Mahon, a Florida historian, author and expert on reserve forces. “History had shown that standing armies had overturned liberal governments.”

“And they are expensive. The United States in its youth was never willing to spend that money,” Mahon adds. “With two major moats on either side of us, the U.S. could have a cheap defense, which is what they wanted. Until after World War II, that concept prevailed.” Reservists today, while not so costly as standing armies, are hardly inexpensive. Because their major combat units are destined to “round out” active-duty forces, they use comparable equipment, not outdated hand-me-downs.

According to Summers, the Air National Guard and the Air Force Reserve constitute the fifth-largest Air Force in the world. The Army National Guard and Army reserve make up the world’s 11th-largest Army.

Fully 90% of the aeromedical evacuation units in the armed forces are reserve units. Of perhaps more interest in the Middle East, 50 of the Army’s 53 water-supply units are made up of reservists.

The reserve unit’s closer relationship with active-duty military forces during this era of high-tech warfare has made the role of the citizen-soldier more complex and demanding than ever before.

“You can now count the guard and reserves as an essential part of any expeditionary force used by the United States,” Mahon says. “They’ve trained all over the world, and when called they’ll do a credible job. But the strain on citizen-soldiers becomes greater and greater. It makes it hard to maintain civilian careers.

“If someone is now jerked out of his livelihood to be sent over there to Saudi Arabia for up to two years, that is a serious problem for a man with a family,” he says. “But under the laws and customs, that’s what he has to do--he has to respond to this summons.”

Times staff writers J. Michael Kennedy, in Houston, and John M. Broder, in Washington, contributed to this report.