US Army Historical Section

In 1943 US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued an Executive Order requiring the various departments and special agencies of government to prepare histories of their activities. US Army Ground Forces therefore organised a historical program that required a historian for each army and part-time historical officials in units down to special battalions. Along with these efforts, the US Army Historical Section began to co-ordinate efforts to collect historical material abroad. These efforts were strengthened by US Army Chief of Staff Gen George Catlett Marshall's desire to have studies prepared on lessons learned from current campaigns. The Historical Section, G-2 Division, thus deployed combat historians to interview combat soldiers in order to fill gaps left by official US Army reports. By 1944, the Historical Section selected a small group of historians to go from the US War Department, Washington, DC, to Great Britain in time to be briefed on the plans for the proposed Allied invasion of North-West Europe. The most extensive effort to collect historical material in World War Two was made during and following Operation OVERLORD, the Allied invasion of the Normandy coast, France, 6 Jun 1944. It is from this material that the editors of this collection have drawn their text. Before the conclusion of Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force, US Gen Dwight David Eisenhower's drive from Normandy to Germany and Czechoslovakia, the US Army had five Information and Historical Sections at the five American armies, 1 Army, 3 Army, 7 Army, 9 Army, and 15 Army. By the end of the war, approximately seventy combat historians were engaged in collecting interviews and writing combat narratives. Although field interviews could not be taped, material was often gathered near the place and time of a significant action. Many of the combat interviews of World War Two were conducted in foxholes, cellars, or bomb shelters and recorded manually. Also, it should be noted that all the combat historians who conducted the interviews during World War Two were themselves in military service and familiar with the nature of unit training and weaponry.