How The U.S. Army Learned What Soldiers Really Thought

Glen J. Carpenter speaks with Dr. Ed Gitre of Virginia Tech about The American Soldier in World War II, a major digital history project built around wartime surveys and firsthand responses from American service members. Their conversation examines how the U.S. Army used social science to understand morale, training, propaganda, race, gender, civilian transition, and the everyday experience of soldiers during World War II.

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GCMF Legacy Lecture | The American Soldier in WWII

Age of Marshall is a podcast from the George C. Marshall Foundation exploring the people, events, and ideas that shaped Marshall’s world and the legacy of the soldier and statesman whose leadership helped define the 20th century.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Welcome to Age of Marshall from the George C. Marshall Foundation. I'm Glenn Carpenter. In this series, we explore the people, events, and ideas that shaped Marshall's world and the legacy of the soldier and statesman whose leadership helped define the 20th century. Age of Marshall was established through the generosity of Justine Monahan, whose support made the series possible. The George C. Marshall Foundation presents this series in honor of her memory and her dedicated service as a trustee. My guest today is Dr. Ed Gittry of Virginia Tech, where he directs The American Soldier in World War II, a major digital history project built around the voices and experiences of the men and women who served. Ed, welcome. Happy to be here. Thank you. Awesome. So how do you describe the American Soldier in World War II to somebody who's never heard of it?

SPEAKER_01 0:58

The American Soldier in World War II is a unique project. The aim of the project is to bring to the American public and to scholars, teachers, students, a unique perspective on the everyday life of American soldiers in World War II using a one-of-a-kind collection of resources that were collected by the world, the U.S. Army during World War II that capture their voices, alongside survey data that was collected as well from soldiers, having to do with all manner of morale, morale issues. And I'm sure we'll get into some of those details in the conversation.

SPEAKER_00 1:40

How was this project accomplished on your end? What did it entail? How long did it take?

SPEAKER_01 1:45

So the the project took quite a while from the moment which I first encountered the sources. I first encountered these sources at the National Archive way back in 2009. But it wasn't until 2014 when I arrived at Virginia Tech where I started to imagine how I might be able to transform those sources, which at that time existed only at the National Archive on microfilm reels. In fact, I think there was only one set, or at that time there was only one set. But in 2015 is when I started to have my students transcribe some of those firsthand accounts after I had a couple of microfilm reels digitized. So it was a long process. But once we got our first grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2017, things really sped up quickly, and we got both a foundations level grant, a kind of a planning grant, and then quickly right afterward, an implementation grant. So in 2019 to 2021 is when the bulk of the work took place in the project. So the project entailed getting the entire collection digitized in an agreement of cooperation with the National Archives up in College Park, getting them all digitized and transcribed by the public. In total, over about a two-year period, over 7,000 individuals from around the world really transcribed all these documents, about 65,000 pages worth of documents, a total of four times to get the best quality transcriptions from those. And then we I worked really closely with data scientists and a with a web design firm in Portland to put it all on the internet. And you go there now, you can see all these first-hand accounts, the transcriptions, as well as the images, as well as all the survey data associated with this unique project that the Army engaged in during World War II and then after.

SPEAKER_00 3:52

Thank you. So let's talk a little bit about the uh data itself. The surveys and the website, of course, bring together this quantitative data and uncensored kind of handwritten free responses from GIs. Why is that combination important?

SPEAKER_01 4:07

That's a great question. So, what makes the collection really unique is that it captures, it has both qualitative data. So these firsthand accounts that were written by the soldiers themselves, as well as quantitative survey data and data that was collected by the Army to improve policies, procedures, everything from kind of the quality of food to health care that was being provided, training of soldiers, leadership. So it had a direct impact on the way that the army modernized itself during World War II. So that makes it really unique. You go, you can zoom down into the everyday life of individual soldiers as well as zoom out and see at a kind of a holistic level certain trends and patterns and the attitudes and opinions of soldiers during World War II based on their experience.

SPEAKER_00 5:03

That's amazing. Well, was there any kind of official precedent to these surveys, or was it the first time that the US military had engaged in something like this?

SPEAKER_01 5:12

It was really, really unique. So there was research conducted with soldiers during World War II, particularly kind of IQ intelligence testing. So there was somewhat of a precedent. But really, what's really important to understand is that survey research itself really took off in the 1930s and became very modernized. And much more like we have surveys conducted today. So if you were to conduct a survey today of a particular population, you wouldn't have to survey everybody, but just a small sample. And those techniques and methods of survey research really got pioneered in that interwar period. So the Roosevelt administration used these procedures, used these techniques to conduct surveys in government agencies, but they also relied upon Fortune magazine roper surveys in order to gauge public opinion. And at first there was resistance to doing this inside the army. It seemed kind of risky to ask soldiers for their opinion. You might, you know, put ideas in their mind. But the the individual behind the project, Frederick Osborne, was really good friends, family friends with the Roosevelt family. And he he managed to very delicately insert himself and to make a case for it with George C. Marshall, the chief of staff, and got his approval. And they started to survey in 1941, right before Pearl Harbor. When they did it, there was nothing like this that had ever been done with an army before, to survey individual soldiers and then to use that data in order to inform what the army was doing, both on the home front, but also at the front lines.

SPEAKER_00 7:08

So are there any interpretive traps when you combine the two, either as an official or as a researcher?

SPEAKER_01 7:15

Yeah. The one thing that we really wanted to do in the beginning was it was kind of I it was it was something I wanted to do, but I knew might be incredibly difficult. And that was to connect the free responses with the rest of the survey data. And just to give you a little bit more detail on how this worked, is that a groups of about 50 or 60 men would enter into a mess hall or a theater, and they would be given a questionnaire and promised anonymity and were encouraged to be as frank as possible. And what they would do is they would open up the questionnaire and there would be a whole series of kind of multiple choice short answer questions. At the very end, they would be given a blank page for what's called a free response or free comment. And that's when I talk about those firsthand accounts, that's what I'm talking about, where they would write out their uh responses to this open prompt. And there were serial numbers that were used to track these questionnaires. And what I wanted to do was to be able to connect individual free responses with the rest of their responses on the questionnaire. And we came really close to doing that, but we were never able to do it with enough confidence, uh, certainly not with all of the surveys to be able to make those connections. So that's the one of the drawbacks. But for all intents and purposes, you don't need to have that connection in order to gain insight both at the micro and the macro level.

SPEAKER_00 8:52

What were the Army's research branch surveys actually trying to measure? What were kind of the expected outcomes of the project?

SPEAKER_01 8:59

Yeah, great question. So the the survey program, which was led by some of the leading social scientists, sociologists, and psychologists in the country, the they were embedded within the morale branch or division, and it changed the names over the course of the war. And really, what is morale? Well, the question is what isn't morale? And so what they would do is that they would ask a whole series of questions in these questionnaires. Some might be just demographic. They wanted to know about their family background, about their education. They might insert several questions having to do with their training. So they it they would ask a variety of questions in the questionnaire. The purpose of these surveys was to inform policies that were being made, but also services that were being provided. And it it started off as a small operation, but over the course of the war, they surveyed over a half a million men across the world. And so it became really quite ambitious by the end of the war. There was hesitancy in the beginning, because at that time the Secretary of War was opposed actually to any surveys of soldiers, even though George C. Marshall was in favor of it. So they had to kind of maneuver basically around the Secretary of War. But then when they started to see the value of it, and then there's this great story, and I won't get into the details, where the Secretary of War found it helpful for himself when he was dealing with Congress. They wanted to restrict the sale of alcohol. But there had been a survey conducted and they asked soldiers about their drinking habits, and it came to find out they weren't drinking as much as people thought, mainly beer. So he he when he got that information, he was able to use it very effectively to argue in behalf of the War Department and the status quo. But it wasn't just the Secretary of War, Marshall himself. He would rely upon the survey data in order to move policy along in order to influence command to say, hey, basically, this is what the soul, this is what the soldiers are saying, and I agree with it, and let's move in this direction. So it could be very effective from a leadership perspective. But it was really part and parcel of the modernization of the war department and the army specifically as a whole. The the information helped to modernize what they were doing with medical care. They were able to shorten the time of training, physical training at the very beginning of the war preparation. So it got used, and this data got used in a number of ways over the course of the war.

SPEAKER_00 11:55

So when you first found this repository of surveys, what were kind of the earliest wow moments for you?

SPEAKER_01 12:04

Yeah. Well, I had a wow moment within the first hour of discovering these documents. So historians have to work in microfilm and might, and I never met historian who likes to work with microfilm. It's really not very fun at all if you if you've not used it. It it's archaic technology by today's standards. And you just sit in front of a machine and you scroll through microfilm reel, which is sometimes very difficult to read. So it was a Saturday afternoon in the spring, and I didn't know what really was on these microfilm reels. It was just came up in a couple of boxes, about 44, I think it was 44 reels. But really, as soon as I started to read these handwritten documents, I knew that I had stumbled upon something that was truly unique. And I say that for a few reasons. One is it was quite clear that they took anonymity very seriously. They were really frank in their responses. Uh so much of the material that comes out of World War II, collected, written during World War II, was censored in one way or another, either self-censored or officially censored. This material was not. One of the things I really appreciate and loved about the material when I first read it is that these were collected during the war in kind of real time. And they aren't memoirs, they weren't written after the fact. They were, you know, men who were in the middle of their training, men not far from the combat lines. And so there was an immediate sea that came through those sources. Another thing that surprised me, I just happened to put one of the reels that I looked at and put on the machine happened to be responses from African Americans about their experiences in the military. And when I started to read through those, I was I was really struck by the diversity of experiences and opinions. And I, but basically, I knew that day that I had stumbled across a gold mine and nobody really had access. I mean, the historians who relied upon some of the summaries that were written later, they didn't even use them. In fact, I found out later that one of my really good friends, a historian down at Florida State, he sent a graduate student to find these free responses, and that graduate student couldn't find them. Oh no, because they're really hard to find. Yeah. So I was like, the public has got to get access to these sources because there's nothing like them in terms of that immediacy, but also the breath. When I I didn't know it at the time, but there was about 65,000 pages, which is just a lot of material to mine, both historians but also the public.

SPEAKER_00 15:03

So let's talk a little bit about those free responses. At a very broad level, where do where do they most strongly confirm historians' existing interpretations of the GI experience? And where do they most clearly challenge them?

SPEAKER_01 15:18

Yeah, historians of World War II are really aware of where the growing pains at the beginning of the war, the the army had to expand, all the service had to expand so rapidly, and there just weren't enough officers in order to lead this organization. And there was a lot of growing pains, particularly with the tension, there were particular tensions between enlisted men and their officers. So this was a really a civilian army, and so so many men came into the military and also women with expectations of how a modern organization should be run. And so you get the micro-level details of these draftees coming into the military, very well-educated professionals coming in and having to deal with these old-time or the regular army officers who had been around for a long time. And there was just lots of tension. The surveys helped to modernize the training and uh with the development of officer candidate training. But so those we we can confirm interpretations of that of those growing pains. So those things are confirmed, but there there are surprises in there. One of the things that I've come to appreciate is just how how difficult race relations were in the almost impossible position the war department was in at that time. And it was so delicate and and and combustible. And so reading these free responses, uh initially I thought, okay, you know, historians have to have access to these because they reveal the experiences of African-American soldiers that go well that goes well beyond the double V campaign, because that's been really the focus. So much of the scholarship is the double-v campaign. But this just one example. So we often think of kind of meritocracy from the perspective of white soldiers and kind of the middle class, the educated. But that's not just the case. It was also the case for African Americans who were coming in who were educated and had had professional experience. So that was really enlightening because there were certain assumptions that I made about meritocracy and arguments for meritocracy. But here I was reading responses from African-American soldiers who were like, I want meritocracy because I think that I could prove myself, I could make more of a contribution to the war effort. And this just makes sense to me.

SPEAKER_00 18:38

These these three responses are obviously unrestricted, uncensored. What do they kind of reveal about the emotional texture of service?

SPEAKER_01 18:48

That's a great question. Really the gamut. One of the things that my students appreciated when they were transcribing was just the humanity. And when you think about the humanity, immediately you might think of the stress, anxiety, fear at the front lines of being in combat. But I I had a student who came up to me once and they they wanted to show me a document. And it was funny. There was a soldier who was sick of eating spam, and there was very little to the the soldier's response. It was just spam, spam, basically paraphrasing spam, spam, spam. All I do is dream of spam, and the words just kept getting larger. He was just so sick of eating spam. And I just I loved it. I loved it because uh there was humor in there. Soldiers sometimes would draw cartoons, or there are cartoons that that show up in some of those pages. So they talked about you know, fears, hopes, expectations, really the gamut. And that's why I love them. You don't just get the the combat experience, but you get this the experiences, windows of insight into clerks, mechanics. Just it was such a massive organization, people having very different experiences, and you really do see the breadth of experience with the human experience of World War II.

SPEAKER_00 20:26

That's fascinating. Thank you. So I thought we've we've kind of skirted around it a little bit in previous responses, but how do soldiers talk about propaganda?

SPEAKER_01 20:36

One of the things that's really interesting to me is that we, I think today have a real idealized view of what media was like, newspaper reporting was like during World War II or that earlier period. I think people assumed that there was a lot more trust of the media during World War II and of that just kind of that generation. The generation that had only a few, you know, NBC, ABC starts off, they start off as radio, they become kind of the these national networks of broadcast. And we think during that period or these national broadcasts, that people trusted them because of their influence. They were national, they kind of capture the nation's uh the beat of the nation and people's opinions. And and and in response to that, took that that role very seriously. I I think that there is some truth to that, certainly, but one of the things that's surprised me was the distrust. There was a lot of distrust in what soldiers were being told by the media. And so there was that one side of of their experience, I would say, and the other is there were certain assumptions about the Effectiveness of the propaganda or the messaging. So one of the things that really alarmed George Marshall was there was a surveying done in 1942, and soldiers were asked to rank the effectiveness and the fighting ability of different armies. And one of the things that disturbed him was how low the opinion was of the Japanese army. And he saw that. He said, We have got to educate our men to appreciate, they need to appreciate what they're up against. And so a lot of as a result of that, there was a very concerted effort to use media, all kinds of media, in order to impact, affect, and to change the opinions of soldiers. And because they needed to know what they were up against. So when we see that kind of propaganda from World War II, we think to ourselves often, oh, this just reflects, reflects stereotypes of, say, the Japanese at the time. Well, there is truth to that, but also part of the reason there is there's so much propaganda, as it were, aimed at Japanese and depictions of Japanese was also to shape opinions about the Japanese army. So it it it's a kind it was a combination. So there's just a couple of examples, but it is true, and I think that the the project does confirm the scholarship about World War II was that there was a great emphasis on information as opposed to propaganda. And this comes out of the experience of World War I, in which quite a few Americans were turned off to propaganda because they thought they had been manipulated. So going into World War II in FDR's administration, there was a concerted effort. They used propaganda and they would use the language of propaganda, but so much of the work of this research branch was directed at information and education. And that's ultimately what this division became called, the information education division. And so it was to use information education in order to mold the opinion of soldiers.

SPEAKER_00 24:24

Marshall has this wonderful, wonderful quote. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the kinds of material that these people were asking for in their responses.

SPEAKER_01 24:37

Yeah, that's a that's a that's a really good question. If you, at the beginning of the war, early in the war effort, particularly during mobilization, there were two different views of morale, I say predominant views, on the general staffing. One side was argued that it was a matter of discipline and leadership. If you had good leaders, then you would have high morale. There was the other side of it, and Marshall, I mean Marshall Straddle, but he he was he was very attuned to the other side, and so was uh Frederick Osborne. He had served during World War I with the Red Cross, and he appreciated that the morale of the soldier wasn't just about leadership and about discipline, it was also about general care of the soldier, and just thinking about their everyday, daily experiences and what you this became really, really important during that period of mobilization because this was a citizen soldier army. This was a drafted army. And so the wall between the military and the home front came down. It was more porous as a result of that. And so what the research branch did, the morale division did, was try to bring creaturely comforts to the soldiers wherever they were in the world, because survey data showed that attending to their needs improved their morale. It wasn't just about leadership and discipline. So if you look at these surveys that were done, it's amazing the detail that they went into. It's just marketing research. They would go through and ask them about individual items in their rations. They asked them what broadcast were they listening to? And another way of thinking about this, if you're sending millions of books around the world or magazines, wouldn't you want to know what the soldiers want to read? This was costing a lot of money to provide soldiers with sports equipment, with books, magazines, broadcasts, etc. And so by the end of the war, if you think about kind of that media empire that was created by the army, it was really impressive in such a short period of time. So these surveys helped with that. So when Osborne thought about morale, he thought about the breadth of experience. And he had support for Marshall who appreciated that as well.

SPEAKER_00 27:23

What did the material suggest about how service members imagined the transition back to civilian life?

SPEAKER_01 27:30

That's a really good question. As historians for World War II know that so many of the decision makers were determined not to make the same mistakes that happened after the end of World War I, of not really preparing for that transition. So early in the war effort, this research branch was surveying soldiers and kind of preparing for the post-war world. So there's a lot of survey data that was collected during the war to help with that transition. So when you think about the GI Bill, uh the GI Bill, when they were working on the GI Bill, they used some of the survey data to determine how many veterans would want to continue with their education afterward and to go to university and college. So you have surveys having to do with their educational expectations, what kind of jobs did they want to go into? Did they want to return to farms? So that was a concern of how many soldiers having had this experience abroad would want to actually go back to the family farm. So there was quite a bit that was done. If you pull back a little bit, it was the the effort of transitioning was it was fragmented. Lots of different agencies were involved with it. So there wasn't one kind of coordinating body for to that kind of oversaw the entire transition. And a lot of it depended upon individual communities and families and loved ones in order to help with that transition. But certainly the army was thinking long and hard about this because a couple of different reasons. One is that the what Americans thought at home about the army largely would depend upon the experience of their sons and their family members in the service. And so that transition became even more critical as the war progressed, and they started thinking about the future because the Army started to plan for having universal military training afterward. And so they thought a lot about that transition because they needed the public to support continuing effectively the draft, this universal military training after the end of hostilities. So there was a lot of attention to that transition. Were women surveyed? Yes, they were surveyed. Now, when you asked me in the beginning about any gaps, this is one that is a little sensitive to for me, which is that they did survey nurses in wax. We do have the quantitative data, but unfortunately, they did not save the read the free responses for the women. Why I I that is an excellent question. I I really wish that we had those, not only for their inherent value, but also to compare their experiences to what the men wrote about having women in the service. I think when we talk about surprises, that truly was surprising to me. I expected for African-American soldiers to feel the pressure from Jim Crow and to have experienced races. There were very divergent views. There were a number of men who did not want the women, women in uniform in the service and had really had very strong opinions expressed in their survey responses. So I I wish I could compare and contrast views about women in the service by by hearing from the women as well. But we only have their multiple choice responses. But we do have that and several surveys.

SPEAKER_00 31:43

Excellent. So finally, what's one question that you think researchers should be asking now that this data set is publicly available and searchable?

SPEAKER_01 31:52

I think I don't think that there is one question. I know that there's one that I've been working on for a while, which is which is about Jim Crow and the Army during World II. And that has uh really surprised me. And I've learned a lot from looking at the survey data. I think there are we have really strong views about the citizen soldier and about the greatest generation. And so for in you have on the one side people who really want to hold up that view, and then the other the people who just want to debug the myth of the greatest generation. They call it a myth. And what I see here is something very much in the middle. And so for me, I don't think that there is one question in particular. I would love, I know some people uh who started to explore this the sources having to do with women in the service. I would love to see scholars tap, even though we don't have those free responses on women in the service. But as historians out there know, there was a debate about drafting women, and that did not go forward. And I think that we could learn a lot from these surveys about views about women. And so that is one question I'm not working on, but I think is really valuable when we think about the diversity of our armed forces in order to appreciate what was really happening in World War II and in how the army saw itself as reflective of the broader public. And there were a lot of growing pains and tensions over that, but realized that this was an all-out war, and we needed the support of African Americans, we needed the support of ultimately, you know, Japanese Americans served. It was really reflective of the broader society. So, questions about the broader society reflected in our army during World War II, there's still work to be done.

SPEAKER_00 33:50

All right. And Dr. Gittry, thank you so much for uh sitting down with me and talking about this, and I really appreciate it. All right, the website is American Soldier in World War II. Um, I highly encourage everybody to check it out. It's absolutely fascinating, and of course, we'll have a link down in the show description. Thank you for listening to Age of Marshall. To learn more about the George C. Marshall Foundation and its programs, and to support our mission, visit Marshall Foundation.org.