PROJECT JUSTIFICATION

Oral history is a relatively new field of scholarly endeavor, yet since the early 1930s it has made important contributions to our understanding of the past.

In the midst of the Great Depression, the Works Program Administration offered a new understanding of the ante-bellum South by hiring unemployed writers to interview and transcribe the stories of former slaves. During the Second World War, the U.S. Army's Historical Branch conducted after-action interviews with combat soldiers in the European theater to gain a better understanding of the nature of battle.

In the 1950s, Allan Nevins of Columbia University pioneered the use of oral history in an academic setting by interviewing leading political leaders, intellectuals, and other leaders. Historians and journalists in the 1960s began to conduct oral histories that focused on recounting the stories of "average" men and women in American society. Studs Terkel, the best know practitioner of this method of interviewing, has published a series of works dealing with race relations, the Great Depression, and World War II.

There are important reasons for using oral history as a tool to record the history of World War II. To begin with, the chaos of war often leads to the loss of letters and other written records. Harried war workers and combat soldiers often had little time or inclination to keep journals or save their correspondence. In the age of telecommunications, it remains especially important to use oral histories to record information that a century earlier would have been preserved in written form.

Oral history is invaluable to any effort to add human emotions, feelings, and thoughts to the historical record. Given the reticence of the World War II generation to talk about their experiences after returning home and their strong desire to resume their normal lives, many have only now begun to "talk" about the war. We know that the recent fiftieth anniversary commemorative events in Europe and the Pacific have encouraged many to participate in the Rutgers Oral History Archives of World War II.

A great deal has been written about the Second World War, but we still have surprisingly large gaps about this crucial period in our history. The strategic and diplomatic histories of this conflict are well documented, but we still know little about World War II from the perspective of the junior officer and average service man and woman. For the most part, historians of the naval and air war have failed to pay sufficient attention to the experiences of the typical sailor, airman, and war worker. Popular writers and historians have long been fascinated by the experiences of the combat G.I. in Europe and Marine in the Pacific, but far less attention has been paid to the vital role of support troops and to the less glamorous theaters, especially China, Burma, and India. In a sense, this oral history project seeks to understand the many different wars Americans experienced whether they served in the Army, Army Air Corps, Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, Merchant Marine or on the homefront in a factory, farm, hospital, or home.

In reference to the Civil War, Walt Whitman said that the "real war does not get into the history books," and this sentiment has been echoed about every war since then. If we are to learn from the mistakes and successes of the past, we must encourage individuals to offer as honest a remembrance of the past as possible. To this end, the project seeks to understand why the United States entered the Second World War and failed to retreat into isolationism after 1945. Most individuals interviewed will eagerly remember how Pearl Harbor united the nation, but they will need to be prodded to recall the bitter debates in the late 1930s and 1940s over the American response to German, Japanese, and Italian aggression.

There are a number of general oral histories of World War II, but our project has focused initially on a target group of college educated men who attended Rutgers College and women who attended the New Jersey College for Women. We are focusing on this group in order to gain a better understanding of the impact of World War II on American higher education. In 1941, recent college graduates made up the bulk of the junior officer corps, and they played a crucial role in the postwar economic boom. In unprecedented numbers, female graduates entered a range of traditionally "male" occupations during the labor shortage. By interviewing individuals from the G.I. Bill classes, we seek to examine the reintegration of veterans in American society and whether this program opened educational opportunities.

The alumni/alumnae of Rutgers and the New Jersey College for Women have played a crucial role in the history of New Jersey. Our archives will offer incomparable resources for scholars and the public seeking to understand the history of the state, especially in the 1930s and 1940s. We will provide a base for historians seeking to compare other states and regions to New Jersey.