His pet antipathy is toward "gonna" historians--scholars who are always "gonna" write the great work. He had promised F.D.R. that would write the naval history himself, with only necessary assistance, which was provided by former pupils and one Yale man (an already established naval historian). His unbeatable approach left the Navy Department-- and the world--a first-hand account of what happened at sea. His example proved the military value of a scholar.

Taylor in Intelligence

Another such example was that set by Charles H. Taylor, whose wartime activity almost resulted in a visit to Kirkland House by General Omar Bradley. Taylor went into the army in 1942, and was assigned to the editorial branch in Washington, where his job was to aid in collecting and disseminating intelligence reports and bulletins, writing reports on how to use captured weapons. He worked in this capacity with Tony Lanero, the Scotty Reston of his day as chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times.

When the army set up "G-2," an historical branch of military intelligence, Taylor was assigned to it for obvious reasons. Under Colonel Kemper, now headmaster of Andover, he helped develop a system of field men attached to GHQ, and ficial records through interviews with the troops. In the European Theatre alone there were over 200 field men attached to GMQ, and Taylor was one of them.

He spent three days with a paratroop battalion in Normandy a few weeks after they had been dropped, reconstructing the action one day for a case study along the lines of Max Weber's "ideal type" theory. Then followed ten days with a ranger battalion that had hit the Normandy beaches, including the wounded. He helped write a series of 16 monographs on landings, concentrating his efforts on the story of Omaha Beach. After the war, series on the workings of the engineers, the medics, the supply corps, and the general staff were prepared, modeled after the original case studies.

100-Volume History

The 80-100 volume army history of the war is still being written, Taylor reports, with about 50 now published. Now part of the army system, and utilized most recently in Korea, the "biggest thing of its kind in U.S. records" meant a great deal to him. "I am very proud to have been in on it," he says, recalling even today the tension of London under V-2 fire and buzz bomb attacks. He emphasizes the loneliness felt by each individual in combat, alone in a foxhole or behind a solitary bush, and relates that he then learned how difficult the piecing together of history actually is.

Taylor stated that "the American army is generally a civilian army in time of war, and plans never work out according to the way they're set up." Trying to record "not merely what was supposed to happen but what actually happened," Taylor and his group must have succeeded, as the fact that their case studies are still used in training in camps will testify.

According to Taylor, "one of the great public servants in the war" was his own colleague in the History Department, Coolidge Professor William L. Langer '15, who directed the Research and Analysis Branch, Office of Strategic Services. Starting in 1941 under "Wild Bill" Donovan, Langer helped organize what he calls a "super-university," a group of highly qualified experts on foreign affairs, experts that knew other countries inside out from personal experience and years of study. One of the first few in OSS--which was barely organized by Pearl Harbor--by the end of the war he had a staff of 1500 working under his guidance and direction.

"We tried to pull all the knowledge of crucial areas together," he recalls, citing the secret intelligence reports from behind the lines as well as economic and political information that the staff of experts prepared from published material. The biggest problem OSS had to face was securing the most important information without angering army and navy intelligence men. Such information as the most important bombing targets ("We couldn't tell the Air Force what to bomb, but we could tell them what the relative importance of targets was") and what railroads needed attack was provided by the "cloak and dagger boys" of OSS.

Allies Capture OSS

Of course, there were occasional mishaps, and Langer recalls with a smile the group of OSS men sent to Burma by way of the Mediterranean who were stopped by Allied forces in North Africa. Since they could not reveal their secret mission, they were compounded for a week until clearance from Washington came through.

Langer relates with a good deal of pride the map room rigged up for the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff by OSS. Still operating today, "it is one of the most impressive things to come out of the war," according to Langer. Using the latest methods in cartography, these clay relief maps with exaggerated elevations and terrain markings in paint proved most helpful to the armchair generals.

At the end of the war, the Research and Analysis Branch of OSS became part of the State Department; in fact, the research division of that department is a direct descendant of Langer's group, while the entire top level intelligence system (CIA) was sired by other branches of OSS. The work done by Langer and his group became instrumental in setting up governments of occupation, and it was not until 1946 that he returned to the University.

Harvard Men Vital