World War II, 1939-1945

Department of War
Collects publications of the Department of War, including records of the Joint Chief of Staff, maps of troop movements, and reports dealing with occupation. Also included are several records from the NAACP dealing with African-Americans in the Armed Forces.

Department of State
Contains documents relating to the foreign affairs of the United States during the war, as well as intelligence gathered during the conflict.

Memoirs & Personal Writings
Lists the memoirs, correspondence, diaries, and speeches of several military and political leaders, as well as common soldiers and civilians.

Newspapers & Films
Includes papers published by the War Department, as well as informational films and propaganda created by the U.S. Government.

The Multi-Volume History of the US Army in World War II (also known as “Green Books”) are an excellent resource for many aspects of the military experience in WWII.  They include biographical information, organizational structure, and tactical and strategic overviews of various campaigns in the war.

These are available online at http://www.history.army.mil/html/bookshelves/collect/usaww2.html but each book is available as a PDF, so unfortunately there is no way to keyword search the entire set for the term you are looking for. 

Many of the volumes are also available in print in Strozier Library.  To find the call numbers, use this guide from Michigan State:

http://libguides.lib.msu.edu/GreenBooks

Click on different tabs to find different sets of volumes on different themes in the green books; identify the volume you are interested in; and look at the Michigan State call numbers (government docs or main stacks – if we have the book it should be under the same locating number in our library). 

From a quick search, they should all be in the area of D114 (D in government docs stands for “Defense” because they are organized by agency).

Each volume has an index so you can search the index for particular names (either in the print version or the pdf) but there is no comprehensive index for the entire set.