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37 Army Hist. 1 (1996)

handle is hein.milandgov/aryhsy0037 and id is 1 raw text is: ARMY HISTORY THE PROFESSIONAL BULLETIN OF ARMY HISTORY PB-20-96-2 (No. 37) Washington, D.C. Spring 1996 The U.& Army Center of Military Hisory: A Brief History Terrence J. Gough The Center of Military History tracesits func- tional lineage to the Civil War era. An 1864 congressional authorization for the War Depart- ment to collect and publish the military records of the Civil War resulted in the appearance of 131 voiume of documents and maps between 1880 and 1901 -a collection that remains an essential source for the study of that great national conflict, In a separate project, the War Department be- tween 1870 and 1885 published a study (two volumes in six books) of the Union Army's medi- cal experience, the first official histories of the U.S. Arny. Although Army regulations based on the Gen- eral StafIf Act of 1903 recognized historical study as a proper staff function, and there was some historical activity over the next fifteen years. not until March 1918 was a Historical Branch orga- nized in e War Pl1n' Division (ever since this slow start. the Army has maintained a central historical office). The branch's projected con- prehensive. 65-volume history of U.S. Army par- ticipation in World War I never came to fruition because of postwar pe rsnnel reductions and Sec- retary of War Newton D. Baker's apprehension about controversy over economic, political, and diplomatic issues. He thought that the branch's work should be restricted to the collection, in- dexing, and preservation of records and the prepa- ration of such monographs as are purely military in charact r . Notwithstandin a tfiteen-volume history of the Medical Department's clinical and adminis- trative experience in World War I, published by that branch in the 1920s, Baker's opinion exer- cised a limiting inf uec over the A rmy's histon- cal work for a qur er of a century. The central historical office collected records in the United States and Europe for eventual publication. pre- pared about a dozen specialized studies of mili- tary operations in World War I. and began compil- ing and publishing a multivolume Army order of battle for the war. Nominally attached to the War College in Washington and redesignated the His- torical Section in 1921, the historical staff actu- ally continued its central role for Army headquar- ters and supervised all historical work in the War Department, In 1922 the section became respon- sible for determining the official lineages and battle honors of Army units. The section's staff, with a professional component composed mostly of military officers. spent an increasing portion of its time answering queries from the Army and the public about the recent war and earlier Army history. America's entry into World War I brought the Historical Section important and varied du- ties. To deal with the war'sexigencies ,the Army's leaders needed to know how their predecessors of twenty five years before had d alt with similr challenges. The Historical Section began re- sponding to requests for studies, producing the first one, Deficiencies in Transportation, 1917 1918 on 6 March 1942 and sixty one more hy the end of the war. Reference inquiries from War Department agencies rose from a stream of about a thousand in 1942 to a torrent of well over ten thousand in 1943. Units peppered the historians with questions-eighteen thousand in 1944 alone-about their organizations' history. Ini- tially, the Historical Section also had supervisory responsibility forhistorical officet that the Army's major commands established in 1942. Three- quarters of the section's enlarged staff nonethe-

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