Talking about War: Reflections
on Doing Oral History and
Military History

Edward M. Coffman

Oral history goes naturally with military history. After all, veterans have told their war stories since time immemorial. William Alexander Percy, who saw combat in World War I, explained why war etches the memory of many veterans so deeply. It was "the only heroic thing we all did together. . . . it, somehow, had meaning, and daily life hasn't. It was part of a common endeavor and daily life is isolated and lonely."1	1
Wars have understandably received the most attention from military historians as human lives and the fate of nations hang in the balance. In an earlier essay in this series, "Oral History and the Story of America and World War II," Roger Horowitz deftly illustrated how oral history aided in our understanding of the military, political, and social aspects of that era.2 Since the 1940s, many historians have employed oral evidence in their works about recent conflicts and about the social and institutional developments in peace as well as war. Over the years, I have learned much from them and their work. In this essay, I reflect on how I used oral history in my scholarship on World War I and the peacetime American army. I shall also offer a brief guide to some of the rich oral history collections available to military historians.	2
Although World War II marked the beginning of the acceptance of oral history by scholars, journalists and some historians had asked participants about their actions long before that. Almost two and half millennia ago, the Athenian general Thucydides talked with other participants before he wrote his history of the Peloponnesian War. In the nineteenth century, Lyman C. Draper, the famed collector of trans-Appalachian frontier manuscripts, interviewed veterans of the various frontier wars and deposited his notes with the other documents in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Among many others over the years were two American war correspondents in World War I, Frederick Palmer and Thomas M. Johnson, who referred to their conversations with participants as sources for their books.3	3
The man most commonly associated with oral history in World War II is Samuel L. A. Marshall. A short, stocky, bumptious bulldog of a man who appreciated his nickname "Slam," Marshall was a Detroit newspaperman who had served in World War I and then built a reputation as a military analyst in the years before World War II. Slam returned to the army during the war and was a staff officer in the Pentagon when he was ordered to devise a better form of describing and analyzing small unit actions. Dispatched to the Pacific theater, he hit upon what he considered the solution during the invasion of Makin Atoll in November 1943. After one battle, he did what he and all other journalists do to determine the facts for their stories—he began asking questions of those who were there. He did vary the technique by talking with all of the survivors of a platoon as a group about what had happened and was delighted to find that after this session "the night's experience came clear as a crystal."4	4
Marshall used the same approach when he talked with groups of paratroopers after D day and with other soldiers later in World War II and during the Korean and Vietnam wars. After his death in 1977, scholars questioned his assertion in Men against Fire that many American infantrymen would not fire their weapons during World War II, as well as his group interview approach. Nevertheless, Night Drop, Pork Chop Hill, and his other books vividly convey the combat experience.5	. . .