Bibliographical Note

 

The bulk of the information used in the preparation of this volume came from the records and manuscript histories of Army agencies, units, and installations, accumulated in the two decades before December 1941 and during American participation in World War II. The records of Army (including Army Air Forces) agencies are described in Federal Records of World War II, Volume II, Military Agencies, prepared by the General Services Administration, National Archives and Records Service, The National Archives (Washington, 1951 ), to which the reader is referred for more detailed information about the numerous agencies concerned and their accumulation of records.

 

Records and manuscript histories used and cited in this work are now mostly to be found in the collections of four agencies. In the Washington, D.C. area, the Office of Military Archives of the National Archives and Records Service holds most of the pre-1940 retired Army records in the main building of the National Archives; in its World War II Reference Branch in Alexandria, Virginia, the same agency holds most of the post-1939 retired records of Army headquarters agencies and the operational records of Army ground combat units that saw action overseas. Many records of the Army Air Forces, unpublished Air Forces manuscript histories, and operational records and histories of Air units are kept by the Air University at Maxwell Field, Alabama. Records of overseas commands cited in the concluding chapters are currently deposited in the regional National Archives records center at Kansas City, Missouri. Unpublished Army historical manuscripts and some other sources of information are, as indicated in the footnotes, in the custody of the General Reference Branch of the Office of the Chief of Military History.

 

The reader is referred to the footnotes for guidance to the wide variety of record groups used, only the most important of which are mentioned here. For both the prewar and World War II periods, the central decimal file maintained by The Adjutant General's Office (AG) is the most useful, but to get the full story of the formulation and application of policy the records of the offices of the Secretary of War and of the Chief of Staff, as well as those of the military staffs that operated under their direction, must also be consulted. The most important are the records of the Assistant Secretary of War (ASW), the Chief of Staff (OCS to 1942, WDCSA thereafter), and, among the General Staff divisions, those of the Operations Division (OPD), the Personnel Division (G- 1) , and the Organization and Training Division (G-3) . Records of the three major commands, the Army Ground Forces (AGF), the Army Air Forces (AAF), and the Army Service Forces (bearing many separate symbol identifications, since ASF had no central file) are of major value for studying the preparation of Negro troops for service overseas. For the activities and performance of particular Negro units in the United States and overseas, the records and manuscript histories of individual units, both of the Negro units concerned and of the larger units to which these were attached, have been drawn on extensively.

 

Printed materials used fall into five categories. All Army historians must of necessity use official War Department publications-Army regulations, general orders, circulars, bulletins, memorandums, technical manuals, and so forth. For the actions and reactions of the Congress, the Congressional Record and printed records of Hearings of Congressional committees are obvious sources.

 

The footnotes indicate how widely the author has made use of information and editorial comment from newspapers, including the major New York and Washington dailies and the Negro press of both North and South. He has used periodicals even more extensively than newspapers, and especially articles in service and professional journals. The last category consists of printed works in book form which, although rather frequently cited throughout the work, were of distinctly minor importance in compiling this record of the experience of the Army with Negroes, and of Negroes with the Army during World War II.

page created 15 January 2002

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