Bibliography Note and Guide to Footnotes
 
This volume was written from several groups of records kept by the War Department before and during World War II, interpreted with the help of a number of other sources, principally service histories and published memoirs. From these sources may be established long and fairly complete series of official transactions in 1942 dealing with strategic planning. For 1941 arid earlier years, when strategic planning was only loosely related to the development of national policy arid to current operations, the sequence of official transactions was very often broken, and much of the: evidence will be found, if at all, in other sources than those used by the authors.
 
Official Records
 
Documents of several kinds were used in preparing this volume : (1) studies and other papers drawn tip for use within the War Department; (2) correspondence of the War Department with the Navy Department arid the British joint Staff Mission; (3) messages to and from Army commanders in the field; (4) minutes of meetings of the joint Board and the joint arid Combined Chiefs of Staff and their subcommittees, and papers circulated for consideration at these meetings: and (5) various records pertaining to the President meetings at the White House, War Department correspondence with the President, and the President's own correspondence on military affairs with other heads of government). Each of the several sets of records in which these documents were found and consulted will be kept intact and in due course will be transferred to The National Archives of the United States. These records are described in Federal Records of World War II, Volume II, Military Agencies, prepared by the General Services Administration, Archives and Records Service, The National Archives (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1951 ). ( Hereafter cited as Federal Rcds.)
 
The principal record groups used in preparing this volume arc those kept by the following offices: ( 1 ) Office of the Chief of Staff and the divisions of the War Department General Staff (Federal Rcds, pp. 92-151) ; (2) Headquarters, Army Air Forces ('Federal Rcds, pp. 151-234) ; (3 ) Headquarter, Army Service Forces (Federal Rcds, pp. 253-302); and (4) Office of The Adjutant General (Federal Rcds, pp. 63-67) .
 
Most of the material for this volume was taken from the files of the Operations Division (and its predecessor, the War Plans Division) of the War Department General Staff, in particular: ( 1 ) the official central correspondence file of the War Plans Division (W PD) ; (2) the official central correspondence file of the Operations Division (OPD) ; (3) the W PD and OPD Message (:enter file; (4) the plans file of the Strategy and Policy Group, OPD (ABC); and (5) the informal high-policy file of the Executive Office, OPD (Exec). The Strategy and
[397]

Policy Group records contain a virtually complete set of papers issued by the joint and Combined Chiefs of Staff and their subcommittees, with OPD drafts, comments, and related papers, and constitute one of the most important collections of World War I I records on matters of joint and combined strategic planning and policy. The Executive Office files, informally arranged, Contain documents on policy and planning that were of particular interest to the Assistant Chief of Staff, OPD. Many of them are to be found now here else in. War Department files. All these files, with the exception of the Executive Office files (still in the custody of the G-3 Division of the General Staff) were located at the time of writing in the Departmental Records Branch, Adjutant General's Office ; DRB AGO). Formal strategic plans are Registered Documents (Regd Docs), of the G-3 Division. Such plans are held by G-3 unless they have been declared obsolete, in which case they arc located in a special collection of the Classified Files, Adjutant General's Office.
 
Certain topics treated briefly in this history were based on such extensive research that meticulous documentation became too lengthy for publication. The studies prepared were organized into a special file, numbered chronologically, and are cited by name and number, for example, "Strategic Plans Unit Study I." Occasional reference is also made to the OPD History Unit File, which consists of documents collected by- Dr. Ray S. Cline for the volume, Washington Command Post: The Operations Division, in the series, UNITED STATES ARMY IN WORLD WAR II. Both the Strategic Plans Unit File and the OPD History Unit File are now in the custody of the Office of the Chief of Military History, and will some day be retired to the Departmental Records Branch, .AGO.
 
In the annotation of these sources, the type of Communication is always indicated. Normally four other kinds of descriptive information are presented-originator, addressee, date, arid subject. A file reference is not given for all documentation that May be readily located and positively identified without one AG letters, messages in the Classified 'Message (:enter series, and minutes and papers of the JCS and CCS and their subordinate committees. AG letters can best be located by the Adjutant General's Office by the numbers of the letters; the classified messages can be located by date arid classified message number in any of Several file series; the JCS and CCS papers and minutes can be found by the numbers assigned to them by the JCS and CCS; and Joint Board papers and minutes can be located by the joint Board subject. number and serial number. The official file of the JCS and the CCS is under the control of the JCS, as is the official set of joint Board papers and minutes. (Federal Rcds, pp. 2--14. )
 
Other Records
 
The authors have compared and supplemented their findings in the records with accounts in other officially sponsored histories dealing with the United States armed forces in World War II. The Navy has not undertaken any comparable research into strategic planning, but valuable work has been done on Navy plans in the classified monographs prepared in the Historical Section of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by Capt. Tracy B. Kittredge, USNR, and Lt. Grace Persons Hayes. The authors have also consulted and cited the narratives of naval operations written by the skilled hand of Samuel Eliot 1Iorison in the series HISTORY OF UNITED STATES NAVAL OPERATIONS Iii WORLD WAR II. For the
[398]

operations of the Army Air Forces, the indispensable secondary source is the series published by the Air Force, THE ARMY AIR FORCES IN WORLD WAR II, edited by Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate. These volumes also contain concise summaries of the strategic planning back of the operations described.
Finally, the authors have repeatedly used, often in manuscript form, the work of their colleagues writing the history of the UNITED STATES ARMY IN WORLD WAR II, especially the manuscript, The Logistics of Global Warfare, by Richard M. Leighton and Robert 1V. Coakley arid the volume, Stillwell's Mission to China, by Charles F. Romanus and Riley Sunderland (Washington, Government Printing Office, 19;12) .
This volume could hardly have been written without the help of published works drawing on the recollections of prominent participants and official records to which the authors did not have access, notably:
Churchill, Winston S., The Second World War: Their Finest Hour (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1949) .
Churchill, Winston S., The Second World War: The Grand Alliance (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 19:10) .
Churchill, Winston S., The Second World War: The Hinge of Fate (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1950) .
Sherwood, Robert E. Roosevelt and Hopkins, An Intimate History (rev. ed., New York, Harper & Brothers, 1950) .
Stimson, Henry L. and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1948) .
A typescript copy of the original manuscript of the present volume, bearing the title, "Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, 1939- 42," and containing unabridged footnotes, has been deposited in OCMH Files where it may be consulted by students of the subject.
[399]


Page created 10 January 2002

Return to the Table of Contents