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Show 106 Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters rial either had no place in an Army history or it reflected personal opinion rather than fact. Fortunately, however, the headquarters history with its half truths and omissions was not the only account of the activities of the Fifteenth Army." The field teams, 'Organized in the same manner as the teams in the 4th I H (with whom they received their training during the Roer-Rhine push), gathered material as they saw it and sent it back to the Historical Section ETOUSA, without referring it to the G 3 Section. The history of the Fif teenth Army based on that material, will differ greatly from the history written by the operations and training section of the head quarters. The former will be as accurate as trained historians could make it; the latter will be as inaccurate as befuddled militarism could construe it. All in all, however, the Information and Historical Services did a creditable job of gathering the combat history of World War II. Today, in the Historical Records Section in Washington are approximately 2,000 combat interviews, containing the testi mony of more than 8,000 front line officers and men as to the detailed tactics and course of events 'Or particular engagements. These documents are supplemented by four large volumes of Ninth Army History written by the 4th I t1 H, and by After Action Reports whose style and completeness were generally super vised, through channels, by the I H Services. This material, together with a tremendous number of journals, war diaries, peri odic reports, etc., has already been utilized in the nublication of an Order of Battle of the United States Army, an account of the ac tivities of the Provisional Engineer Special Brigade Group in Oper ation Neptune, and fifteen case studies of especially interesting combat activities of regiments, battalions, and small units. Two examples of these latter publications, which run from twenty-five to fifty pages, are the Action at Fort Montbareq, the famous strong point at Brest which was reduced in the latter part of September 1944, and the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment in the Normandy Drop. These publications represent only a begin ning of pamphlets and books which the War Department will eventually publish. And the material upon which they draw will in time be used in the writing 'Of the official history of the Euro pean phase of World War II. |
