The U.S. Army Combat Historian and Combat History Operations

World War I to the Vietnam War

By: Kathryn Roe Coker, Jason Wetzel

Narrated by: Mack Sanderson

How the US Army developed historical programs since World War I―sending combat historians into the fray to interview soldiers and collect documents for the benefit of history.

In World War I, Major General Pershing proposed the idea of establishing a historical office within the AEF headquarters. The War Department reorganized the general staff to include a historical branch. Evidence shows that soldiers acting as historians went "down range", albeit not into combat. By World War II, the situation had changed—whether it was S.L.A. Marshall's popping out of a billet in Sibret as shells exploded on the road; Forrest Pogue's typing "on a little camp desk under an apple tree"; Chester Starr's terrain reconnaissance in the Mediterranean theater; or Ken Hechler's command of a four-man historical team interviewing soldiers at the Remagen Bridge and searching through secret documents—the World War II combat historians were there behind and on the front lines with a notebook in one hand and their carbine in the other hand, ever ready to collect battlefield information.

Eight historical service detachments were deployed to Korea. The youngest commander, 1st Lieutenant Bevin Alexander, noted, "We were on the front lines the whole time.... We would interview the people afterwards and create a battle study...." After the Korean War, the duties of the combat historian further evolved as what became the Center of Military History published doctrine about military history detachments (MHDs). As America’s immersion in Vietnam escalated, there was concern regarding historical coverage. Chief of Military History Brigadier General Hal Pattison established a network of historical teams to collect information on the US Army in the war. A major development in the history program and in deploying MHDs came with the establishment of headquarters, US Army Vietnam (USARV) under General William C. Westmoreland’s command. In 1965, the history office was organized at Headquarters, U.S. Army Vietnam (USARV). MHDs were deployed across Vietnam, conducting combat after action interviews and collecting documents. This study focuses on US Army historical programs during combat operations from World War I to the Vietnam War with particular attention on the combat historians, those individuals deployed to a theater of war with the mission of documenting the actions of that theater for current and future historical use.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2023 Kathryn Roe Coker and Jason Wetzel (P)2023 Audible, Inc.

A brilliant narrator of an important story

Generals allegedly prepare only for the last war-although for more than a century this has rarely been true--but they can only prepare for any war by acquiring broad and deep knowledge of that last one, and the ones before it. For much of the twentieth century and beyond the U.S. Army made a remarkably sophisticated attempt to accumulate that knowledge during course of the wars it was currently fighting, and preserved that knowledge for its professional posterity. This includes the experience of combat, the failures and successes of strategies and tactics, and a great deal more. These scholars have written a serious work of specialized military history about what makes possible our broader military histories, and it is brilliantly narrated by Mack Sanderson, who makes a potentially arid subject bloom.