USMA Library Homepage: Luzon: Additional Secondary Sources

Publications from the Center for Military History

The Mission of the Center for Military History (CMH): "To accurately collect, preserve, interpret, and express the Army's history and material culture to more broadly educate and develop our force, the military profession, and the nation." To that end, CMH publications include many scholarly secondary sources materials that can serve as excellent basis and context for research on military operations. Some examples are described below.

Robert Ross Smith, Triumph in the Philippines. Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 1993.
For a more detailed and in-depth study of the campaign, see this work by Albert N. Garland and Howard McGraw Smith, originally published by the U.S. Army Center of Military History in 1965 and republished in 1993. A print copy of this volume is on Reserve in Jefferson Library, and an additional electronic copy from Center of Military History available on the HI 302 share folder. This book is part of the CMH Series the U.S. Army in World War II (see link below for further description of the entire series).
U.S. Army in World War II series (the Army's official history of World War II - commonly referred to as the "Green Books")
This series, often called informally the "Green Books" or "Green Series" owing to their familiar green cloth bindings, is the U.S. Army's official history of World War II. Smith's work is part of this series, but other volumes may be useful to you as well , depending on your focus. It is divided into several subseries, and includes volumes not only on various campaigns but on organization, mobilization, and various special topics

Bibliographies of the Luzon Campaign

One type of resource very useful in the initial stages of doing research for a history paper is a bibliography. Many persons, upon hearing the word "bibliography" think only of a listing of sources at the end of a research paper, journal article, book, etc. While those are certainly examples of bibliographies, the term "bibliography" has a broader meaning. Bibliography etymologically means "writing about books". Practically that can encompass many things. One type of bibliography is a subject bibliography: a list of sources that the compiler of the bibliography (or "bibliographer") located, identified, and examined and judged were useful and relevant for research on a particular subject. Subject bibliographies come in many forms; some are compiled by historians, curators, archivists, librarians at a particular institution; other bibliographies are actually published as books themselves. An "annotated bibliography" not only lists works on a certain subject but provides the bibliographer's short evaluative statement on the work, commenting on strengths, weakness, how it might be useful, etc.

Bibliographies of all types are very important to military history, and subject bibliographies of the Pacific war in general, and the campaign to liberate Luzon in particular may be of great use to you in the initial stages of your research. They can help you identify additional secondary sources as well as primary sources that go beyond the ones which you have already been provided.

IMPORTANT: one of the most useful aspects of a subject bibliography is that it can help you identify works that would not be likely to appear in online searches. This is because a work might be *about* a certain subject even though keywords related to that subject do not appear in the title nor consistently enough in the text to generate a return in electronic search results. You should learn how to use both online searching of various databases *and* bibliographies in combination

See below for some examples.

Luzon, 1944-1945 Reference Bibliography. Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army Military History Institute, 2011.
Created by the U.S. Army Heritage & Education Center (USAHEC) Library, this bibliography lists both primary and secondary sources on the campaign in Luzon. It is an example of a subject bibliography -- meaning that it seeks to identify works that may be useful to a researcher on that topic, regardless of where copies of those works might be located. Therefore although this bibliography itself was created that USAHEC and although users at USMA and elsewhere may benefit from it, the fact that it lists something is not itself a guarantee that all listed items will be held in any one place. Indeed, some of the works listed might be available only elsewhere. On the other hand, just identifying the relevant works is useful because you can search the USMA Library catalog or databases to locate copies to consult. Note that this bibliography is especially useful for identifying articles about the Luzon campaign published in military service journals such as Armor, the Cavalry Journal, etc. as well as in more recent scholarly journals.

Sbrega, John J. The War Against Japan, 1941-1945: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1989.

Here is an example of a published, book-length annotated bibliography. Exploring Sbrega's work will give a sense of how an extensive annotated bibliography can help you identify both primary and secondary sources for your own research. The link above is to a record in the USMA Library's catalog for this book. You can use that record to locate it in the USMA Library.