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 primary source materials that can be excellent sources for research on military operations. Some examples of primary and secondary sources include the items listed below.
The Combined Arms Research Library (CARL) Digital Library contains a great deal of information on Operation Cobra. Resources in this library include both secondary and primary sources. Below are examples of the type of information you can get online. Follow this link to search for your area of interest: CARL Digital Library.
Primary Sources:
Secondary Sources:
The US Army Maneuver Center of Excellence is the successor to both the U.S. Army Infantry School and U.S. Army Armor School, and operates the Donovan Research Library. If you are consulting this research guide for an HI 302 class, some records here may overlap closely, or duplicate, records provided for an HI 302 class but you may find additional useful records as well.
Donovan Research Library WWII Student Paper Collection This collection of personal experience monographs and student papers describe combat operations, actions and campaigns of some of the fiercist fighting fought in Ardennes, Normandy, Rhineland, the Philippine Islands and others. The content does not represent an official view or publication only the opinions of the authors who wrote them.nt an official view or publication only the opinions of the authors who wrote them.
Donovan Research Library Historical Microfilm Documents Collection
This historical microfilm collection of After Action Reports, Case Studies, Unit Actions dates from pre-World War II to post Vietnam. This collection is in no way a complete collection but reflects what is housed in both the MCoE HQ Donovan Research Library. Items are currently being assessed and cataloged. Additional items to this collection will be posted in the near future.
In the years immediately following the end of World War II, U.S. authorities in Europe interrogated captured Axis officers (primarily German) regarding their wartime experiences. In addition, U.S. Army historical agencies encouraged some German officers, while those officers were held as prisoners of war, to write narratives about their wartime experiences. These narratives were then submitted to U.S. authorities. After the release of most Wehrmacht prisoners in the late 1940s, some German officer veterans continued work in U.S. Army historical programs to produce additional written narratives of similar scope. Many (though not all) of the initial interrogation transcriptions and written narratives were translated into English. They are an invaluable source for primary source perspectives from the opposing side. Today they are held in the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), but in recent years, a great many have been made available digitally by a database called Fold3. The Fold3 database groups them into a specific collection titled Foreign Military Studies. USMA users can access this digital collection via the link below.
Locating German Officer Narratives Within the Foreign Military Studies Collection
Although one can search the Foreign Military Studies Collection directly within Fold3 using the Fold3 database's own search functions, some users may find it more productive to consult a separately-published catalog and index to the Foreign Military Studies collection prepared in 1954 by the historical services of Headquarters, United States Army, Europe. A web version of that published index is available.
Part I of this guide is a catalog of all the narratives. Each listing in the catalog contains an alpha-numeric identifier (e.g. D-063, T-2, etc.), a title, the name of the German officer who authored it, and a short description. You may browse the description or try a simple search of the webpage for the term "Sicily". Because the catalog is provided here in the form of a static webpage, searching the page for the term "Sicily", using your browser's "find" function may be convenient. You can also use Part II, an index to the catalog in Part I. You will have to read the instructions carefully for using the index but depending upon your topic this can be a valuable investment of time. You may indeed find additional results beyond what you discover just by searching the catalog directly. Note carefully that some narratives are available only in German but do not be discouraged if you are searching only for narratives translated into English, as several useful ones are available.
Once you find a listing in the catalog or index of a narrative of interest, take careful note of the alphanumeric "code" at the beginning. You will need this to retrieve it from the Fold3 database described above. Go to the Foreign Military Studies section of the Fold3 database, and find the menu for the grouping starting with the letter in your listing; you can then browse to the correct narrative.
Part II of it is an index by subject, name of campaign, name of (German) unit, and name of German officer. Once you find a citation in this index consisting of a letter and number code (e.g. D-063, T-2), use that citation to browse to the correct location directly in the Fold3 database online version of Foreign Military Studies, described and linked above.
Army officers (as well as officers from the other services) while attending military service schools such as the Command and General Staff College (CGSC), the Army War College, etc. as students have long written research papers on operational military history topics just as you are doing now. Many U.S. Army officers attending military service schools during the late 1940s-early 1950s were World War II veterans and sometimes when writing on a World War II topic were able to draw on personal experience. This means that some of those papers contain primary source evidence. Not all do, of course, and therefore one must scrutinize carefully the nature and evidence employed. Yet many of these can be valuable. Student papers from the Command and General Staff College can be found in the Combined Arms Research Library Digital Library. Student papers from former Infantry School and Armor School can be found in the digital collections of the Donovan Research Library at Fort Benning. Note that collections of students papers at each library include those written by World War II veterans *and* papers written by officer students in later decades up to the present day. Some of the latter may be about the Normandy campaign and might be included in your search. Although those would be secondary sources, they might still be relevant to your research. Learn to look carefully at all results and judge what might be useful to your own scholarly inquiry.
This collection contains a number of papers written by Infantry School students who had earlier served in the Normandy campaign. (Many of the Infantry School papers are already identified for you and made available on the HI 302 Share Drive under the folder "Monographs", but you may find it helpful to consult this list when starting your research.
Some student papers written during the late 1940s by officers attending the U.S. Army Armor School may be relevant to Normandy, but in the case of the Armor School papers relevance to the Normandy campaign may or may not be evident from the title and deeper initial research may be required for some.
This collection contains student papers, many by officers who fought in World War II and then attended the CGSC in the late 1940s. Keyword searching by "Normandy" may be useful. Note that sometimes the relevance to the Sicily campaign may not be evident from the title of the paper and some preliminary investigation into its contents may be required to determine whether it is relevant to particular topic. This collection has some strengths on combat support and combat service support operations during the Normandy campaign.
