The Last Word? Essays on Official History in the United States and British Commonwealth (review)

Reviewed by: The Last Word? Essays on Official History in the United States and British Commonwealth John M. Carland The Last Word? Essays on Official History in the United States and British Commonwealth. Edited by Jeffrey Grey. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. ISBN 0-313-31083-1. Notes. Index. Pp. xiii, 177. $69.95. This book represents the efforts of editor Jeffrey Grey and a distinguished group of official and ex-official military historians to bring into focus a significant but not much studied or appreciated field: official military history. Grey is to be congratulated for organizing and editing this collection. Each chapter is well done and substantially advances our knowledge and understanding of the field. All are recommended reading. Although space constraints do not permit a thorough examination of each chapter, suggestive snippets from a few will give the flavor of the work. In his "Canadian Official History: End of an Era?", S. F. Wise approvingly quotes Norman Hillmer, formerly of the Directorate of History, Canadian Department of National Defence, on what went wrong there: "The brutal fact is that very few knew or cared about the directorate of the late 70's and early 80's. . . . It was very much our fault because we developed a D[irectorate of] Hist[ory] which was increasingly an academic research establishment divorced from the real concerns of the men and women in uniform" (p. 18). In short, the debacle of the mid 1990s, when the official Canadian military history office almost disappeared due to personnel and budget cuts, came about because the agency lost sight of the need to be relevant. In stark contrast to the Wise-Hillmer view one might want to consider that of Charles Stacey, head of the Directorate of History until the mid-1960s. He believed that the official military historian "should not allow himself to become primarily a mere technician for a government department. If he abandons the primary mission of being a sort of public trustee of truth, he is in some degree downgrading his high vocation." In the case of the Office of the Chief of Military History, later the U.S. Army Center of Military History (CMH), Edward J. Drea tells how in late 1945 the head of the Army Historical Section, then under the War College, attempted to prohibit the writing of a history of the Army and World War II and instead publish documentary collections. Only timely intervention by well-placed individuals saved the organization's writing function. In this drama John McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War, played the patron, while Dr. James Phinney Baxter, President of Williams College and Chairman of the Army's Historical Advisory Committee, played the special advisor. Together they persuaded the powers-that-be that the history writing branch should be transferred to the Army special staff, out of harm's way and under the benevolent eye of the new chief of staff, Dwight D. Eisenhower. This notwithstanding, Drea also tells how in 1946 budget officers attempted to cut the history office's personnel by 50%, a figure later reduced to 25% through creative funding using nonappropriated funds. These articles speak generally to a similar set of challenges faced and responses made by historians, administrators, and political leaders to the demands of official military history in the twentieth century. Their aggregate [End Page 1316] effect is to generate a model of how the field originated and developed. The first requirement for the creation of an official academic historical program is a war. Next the nation's leaders have to conclude that the country or the military service or both will be better off with an official history. The reasons will be various: victories need to be commemorated, defeats explained, achievements praised, sacrifice memorialized, courage acknowledged, and lessons learned. In this environment, an official history office is established to manage the writing program and to recruit the scholars who will write the histories. Critical to the success of the enterprise will be a powerful patron, or, better still, patrons, who will protect and defend a history office against the depredations of budget officials and others who view such organizations as frills whose parts can be taken away—buildings...

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