Bibliographical Note

The authors obtained the bulk of the information used in the preparation of this volume from original records of the Army accumulated before and during American participation in World War II. These records are now in the custody of the World War II Records Division of the National Archives. The Army, Navy, and joint service records of the war 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 interested reader is referred for more detailed information about the numerous agencies concerned and their accumulation of records.

The files of the War Plans Division (WPD) of the War Department General Staff, generally for the period 1921 to March 1942 (more or less), were the starting point for research in the preparation of this work. As war approached the War Plans Division became the principal agency of the War Department for directing as well as for planning operations. Its files have been kept physically associated with the much larger collection of papers accumulated by the Operations Division (OPD), the Army's General Staff agency that planned military operations and served as the command post for directing them from March 1942 until the end of the war. The OPD decimal files have been used extensively. A number of special collections of OPD papers have also been of great value, notably the OPD Executive Office file (OPD Exec), the OPD collection relating to the attack on Pearl Harbor, operational files transferred to OPD from General Headquarters when it was abolished (OPD-GHQ), the OPD Diary maintained from March 1942 onward, the OPD message file (OPD Log), and a set of weekly status reports depicting the strength and projected reinforcement of all Army commands and bases from January 1942 until the autumn of 1944. A decimal file maintained by OPD's Strategy and Policy Group (ABC) has also provided considerable assistance, including access to minutes of meetings and relevant papers of the joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). A few minutes and papers of the older joint Army and Navy Board (JB) have also been used.

The small group of records accumulated by the Office of the Chief of Staff (referred to as OCS to March 1942 and WDCSA thereafter, in accordance with file designations), while very incomplete, contain much useful

[555]


information not readily found in other groups. Special items in this group that have been of particular assistance include the numerous binders of conference and miscellaneous notes for the 1939-42 period, two binders of notes on the Secretary of War's War Council meetings beginning in May 1941, and four binders that represent the Army file relating to Standing Liaison Committee (SLC) meetings between 1938 and 1943.

The authors found the central decimal files maintained by The Adjutant General's Office (AG) more valuable in the preparation of this volume than they were for its companion, The Framework of Hemisphere Defense. The theory that all official action papers would eventually reach the AG files broke down in practice to a considerable extent after 1939, but these files are nevertheless the most voluminous and comprehensive body of War Department records relating to the World War II period. The account of operations in the Aleutians to evict the Japanese depends very largely on unit reports and journals and other operational reports that form a part of The Adjutant General's records now in the custody of the Archives' World War II Records Division. Other departmental records used have included those of the Secretary of War (SW), of Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy (ASW), and of the Supply or G-4 Division of the General Staff. For reconstructing the story of the evacuation of the American Japanese, and of its planning, the files of the Office of the Provost Marshal General (PMG) were invaluable. The minutes of meetings of the War Department General Council from March 1942 onward were of considerable help, and a fairly complete set of these minutes has been kept in the General Reference Branch of the Office of the Chief of Military History (OCMH). The authors have also made extensive use of the files of General Headquarters United States Army (GHQ), and limited use of the records of the Army Ground Forces (AGF), which inherited GHQ's training function and most of its files.

To supplement the information available in the records of Army headquarters agencies, the authors drew upon the files of the operating commands and bases of the Army in the continental United States and elsewhere. Of these files, perhaps the most valuable for this work were those of the Western Defense Command (WDC). In addition to its central series of records, this command also accumulated large special collections, two of which were used extensively. For the story of Japanese evacuation, the files of the WDC's Civil Affairs Division (WDC-CAD) were essential, and the WDC files relating to military developments in Alaska (WDC-ADC) were found to be fuller and more informative for the early war period than the records of

[556]


the Alaska Defense Command (ADC) itself. The records of the Eastern Defense Command (EDC) while voluminous were much less rewarding as source material. Of the overseas command and base records consulted, those of the Iceland Base Command (IBC) were most extensively used.

In addition to their research in Army files, the authors obtained some help from pertinent records in the papers of President Roosevelt, now preserved in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library (FDRL) at Hyde Park, N. Y. This library contains also the papers of Mr. Harry Hopkins, used by the authors through the medium of the Calendar of Hopkins Papers prepared in connection with the writing of Sherwood's Roosevelt and Hopkins. They also used relevant portions of the lengthy diary kept by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, now accessible to scholars in the Sterling Memorial Library of Yale University. Critical and very helpful comments from reviewers of this volume, a number of whom provided additional information, are preserved in OCMH records.

For the story of enemy action toward the United States and its outposts, the authors have made extensive use, on the Pacific side, of the voluminous series of Japanese Monographs relating to World War II, prepared by former officers of the Japanese Army and Navy, and given limited distribution in the form of translated reproductions by the Office of the Chief of Military History. These monographs, the individual titles of which have been cited in footnotes, provided useful information on Japanese submarine activities along the west coast, the Pearl Harbor attack and its aftermath in Hawaii, and Japanese operations in the Aleutians. Some interrogations of former Japanese Army and Navy officers, contained in United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Interrogations of Japanese Officials, 2 volumes (Washington, 1946) have also been used. On the Atlantic side, where German submarine operations were the most notable enemy activity, the authors used as their primary source a translation of the War Logs of the German U-boat command, Befehlshaher der Unterseehoote (B.d.U. War Logs), covering the years 1941 through 1943. They made occasional use of the series reproduced in translation by the Office of Naval Information, Fuehyer Conferences on Matters Dealing With the German Navy (1947).

The service historical programs active during and after World War II, both in Washington and in field commands, left a very large number of unpublished narrative histories, many of which contain documentary appendices. Unless otherwise indicated, the historical manuscripts used in the preparation of this volume are kept in the General Reference Branch, OCMH, and these include copies of most of the narratives compiled by Army Air

[557]


Forces historians. Among the most useful have been the narrative histories dealing with the Western Defense Command, Hawaii (the AFMIDPAC history), Alaska and the Aleutian Campaign, the Caribbean Defense Command and all its appendages, and the North Atlantic bases including Greenland and Iceland. The reader is referred to footnotes of chapters dealing with these and other areas for full titles of the historical manuscripts used.

Among printed sources, the natural starting points for almost any Army history of events before and during World War II are the Annual Reports of the Secretary of War to the President and the Biennial Reports of General George C. Marshall as Chief of Staff. On what happened before 7 December 1941, the thirty-nine volumes of testimony and documents printed as Peal Harbor Attack: Hearings Before the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack and accompanying Report (Washington, 1946) contain a wealth of data and opinion that has fascinated a good many historians and others ever since their publication. The Report of the War Department Civil Defense Board (Washington, 1947) has much useful information about how the Army handled civilian defense in the continental United States. The War Department's Final Report: Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast, 1942 (Washington, 1943) is an official compilation that must be used with considerable caution in the light of other evidence.

Since Army records provided the authors' principal sources of information a lengthy listing of published secondary works, including periodical and newspaper references of which no note is taken here, would be misleading. In the series in which this work is published, UNITED STATES ARMY IN WORLD WAR II, the authors have of course drawn freely upon the previously published volume of the Western Hemisphere subseries, Stetson Conn and Byron Fairchild, The Framework of Hemisphere Defense (Washington, 1960). Other related works in the Army series worthy of special mention include: Mark Skinner Watson, Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Preparations (Washington, 1950) ; Maurice Matloff and Edwin M. Snell, Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, 1941-1942 (Washington, 1953); Richard M. Leighton and Robert W. Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy, 1940-1943 (Washington, 1955) ; and Stanley W. Dziuban, Military Relations Between the United States and Canada, 1939-1945 (Washington, 1959)

The authors have obtained much help on the air and naval aspects of the story from the series "The Army Air Forces in World War II," edited by Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, 7 volumes (Chicago; The University of Chicago Press, 1948-58) , especially from Volumes I, II, IV, and VI; and from the series "History of United States Naval Operations in World

[558]


War II," 14 volumes (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1947-1960), by Samuel Eliot Morison, notably from Vol. I, The Battle of the Atlantic, September 1939-May 1943 (1947), Vol. III, The Rising Sun in the Pacific, 1931-April 1942 (1948), Vol. IV, Coral Sea, Midway, and Submarine Actions, May 1942-August 1942 (1950), and Vol. VII, Aleutians, Gilberts and Marshalls, June 1942-April 1944 (1951). Much valuable information about and illustration of the Navy's work in building up the outposts of the United States can be found in the second of two volumes published by the Navy's Bureau of Yards and Docks, Building the Navy's Bases in World War II (Washington, 1947) .

On the diplomatic background of the war and of the military development of outlying bases the authors have used extensively the volumes by William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Challenge to Isolation, 1937-1940 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952) and The Undeclared War, 1940-1941 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1953). The quasi-autobiographical work, Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947) has been an invaluable guide to the part played by Secretary of War Stimson in developing the war effort of the Army; and several similar works, including Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948), Cordell Hull, Memoirs, 2 volumes (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1948), and Ernest J. King and Walter M. Whitehill, Fleet Admiral King (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1952), have been highly useful. Among many works published about the evacuation of Japanese Americans from the west coast in 1942, the two most useful were found to be Mortin Grodzins, Americans Betrayed: Politics and the Japanese Evacuation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1949), and Jacobus ten Brock, Edward N. Barnhart, and Floyd W. Watson, Prejudice, War and the Constitution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954). Gwenfread Allen, Hawaii's Wear Years (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1950), is a scholarly narrative of Hawaii's participation in the war as viewed locally, and Albert W. Lind, Hawaii's Japanese: An Experiment in Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946) is useful for analyzing what many considered the islands' chief problem in defense. Norman J. Padelford, The Panama Canal in Peace and War (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1942) is an excellent contemporary commentary on the problems associated with the defense of the Panama Canal. Finally, the first volume of the "Official History of the Canadian Army in the Second World War," Col. Charles P. Stacey's Six Years of War: The Army in Canada,

[559]


Britain anal the Pacific (Ottawa: E. Cloutier, Queen's Printer, 1955) relates the Canadian Army's efforts on behalf of North American defense that were integrated at several points with those of the United States Army.

[560]


page created 30 May 2002


Return to the Table of Contents