The Challenge of Writing History with Incomplete Documents

How much information is not available on WWII

I posted this on a few of my social media sites so for some of the readers it may be a but redundant but I find it is an intriguing subject that has not been discussed widely and may have major impacts on all of our WWII historical research.

It is a common misconception that official historical records for WWI and WWII are available in the various archives. This is not accurate. A fascinating part of my research for my Master's thesis was into the location of records pertaining to WWII glider pilots. I was so fortunate that excellent active duty military historians, museum curators and archive personnel were so generous with their time and knowledge and I learned of some of the pitfalls a historian could fall into by assuming this. So here is the records situation.

Starting at the end of WWI (1914 - 1918) the Army was tasked with collecting all the official records and documents that would eventually be published. The idea was, and one that is most important, that this would allow the actions and operations taken in WWI to be collated, examined and analyzed by military leaders. In the future, and in the event of another war ( WWII 1939 - 1945) this could be an incredible resource.

Historians could also analyze the actions and operations and write histories for the citizens of the United States who were paid for the war and sent their family members to fight it. The idea was that the historians job was (and I believe still is) to shine a hard light on the subject to expose the successes, cracks, inefficiencies and possible improvements to a given situation as well as provide lessons that could possibly be learned to prevent a repeat situation and perhaps avoid history repeating itself. For an eye opening view of war statistics visit https://scottmanning.com/.../world-war-i-troop-statistics/

However, as often happens at the end of a war, there was incredible war fatigue - we entered the roaring 20's to celebrate the end of the war of all wars, and there was little interest in organizing and publishing on any front. Consequently, as I discuss in the Introduction of my book, we went into WWII without any organized and printed references of our military decisions, actions and analysis of them to refer to. I think this is in part, what made those who experienced WWI so valuable in WWII. Believe it or not, it was in 1948 - after WWII ended - that the historical societies such as the Air Force Historical Society and the Army War College collected and organized the histories and published them despite some being tasked much earlier to do so.

This is only one factor that impacted what information was retained as WWII closed down and troops/commands drew down and closed up operation at home and overseas. I was quoted by multiple persons in the field that the estimate is 13% of the paperwork generated in WWII was kept. Add to that 1) illegible or damaged documents 2) the purging of documents in the repositories since they could not hold everything and 3) the fire at the St. Louis Records Center, 4) thefts from the archives 5)the loss of veterans personal documents and it is apparent that in many regards we are working with only a small fraction of the information that was once available.

I often hear people ready to stand their ground on their research but all our research is fluid - it is entirely possible that only a few documents making an appearance could change any analysis.