A Close Look at the World War II Memorial

Video Overview

Historian Christopher Hamner introduces educators to the World War II Memorial in Washington, DC. He places the memorial in context: How does the story of its construction contrast with that of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial? Who was the World War II Memorial built for? What was its design intended to convey?

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The Vietnam Memorial
The World War II Memorial in Contrast
Audience and Symbolism
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Transcript Text

Christopher Hamner: We're standing right in front of the World War II Memorial; how many of you have visited it before? Okay, great. I want to talk a little bit about why it's here and what it looks like, and then give you some time to explore a little bit. But I don't think you can really understand why the memorial looks the way that it does without knowing a little bit about a totally different memorial—the Vietnam War Memorial. So how many of you have been to the Vietnam War Memorial? Okay, great, just about everybody. What have your experiences been? Teacher 1: Very somber. Christopher Hamner: Okay, somber, absolutely. Teacher 2: Dark. Christopher Hamner: Yeah, no, it's somber, it's dark. Teacher 3: Emotional because it has the little book with the names and relatives. Christopher Hamner: Yeah, I mean draws you in, it can be incredibly emotional because it has become a destination point for a lot of the people who served in the Vietnam conflict, people leave things there, they'll take rubbings of people they knew—it's interactive in a way that not many memorials are. It has its own really interesting story; the story of the Vietnam Memorial goes back to the mid-'70s. It was a project started by a veteran of the Vietnam conflict who saw the movie Deer Hunter, which took him back to his own experiences fighting in the war. He said he stayed up all night and that the next morning he told his wife that he was going to dedicate himself to raising money for a memorial to the people that he had served with in Vietnam. The monument that you think of as the Vietnam Memorial, which is the wall—that V-shaped wall that sort of starts low and rises to a peak of I think 6 or 7 feet and has the names inscribed on it—is actually only one of three Vietnam Memorials that are in the same place. And in 2012, we know this as one of the most moving monuments, a place where people will come from across the country to connect with it. It was incredibly controversial at first, and that's a part of the story that we often tune out. But it has a backstory. As they raised money they began to solicit designs for the memorial. And I talked to you guys this morning when we were at the Grant Memorial, and we've talked a lot of times about all sorts of historical sources, that things are made, they don't just appear, and they're designed by a person or a committee who wants to get an idea out there. The Vietnam Memorial is a little unusual in that they opened a design contest nationally. And somewhat atypically they did the jury review blind. Architecture—architects and designers could put forth a plan for what the memorial might look like, and then they submitted it. They all went out to a big hanger like at Dulles Airport. But all the information about who had designed it and who they were and what their background was was all stripped off, so that the judges were only looking at the idea itself. And the design that you know of as "The Design" was one of the last two dozen and then one of the last nine and then the last three and it was ultimately the one that was selected. The selection and the unveiling of the design—before it was even built—went off like a bombshell. One of the groups that was most opposed to it was Vietnam War veterans. They were opposed to a number of things. One was the design of it. It is a somber memorial, it is black, it is anti-heroic, I think, in some ways. Did anybody see as we were walking over here on Constitution, happen to look over at the statue of the gold arm holding up a sword with flames? Okay, so what was that? Anybody catch it? Teacher 4: St. Michael or something wasn't it? Teacher 5: World War I, was it Second Division? Christopher Hamner: It was a monument to the Second Infantry Division and its losses in the First World War. You saw the arm holding up the flaming sword and then a list of all the battles that the Second Division fought in. That's much more of a kind of typical, classic war memorial. You put up a leader, or you put up something—a lion or an eagle or wreathes or something that has classical overtones and celebrates the heroism—and that is not what the Vietnam Memorial is. It was designed very specifically. The designer said that it was designed to get people to interact with it; it has the names of all of the people that were killed during the decade or so of the conflict. How are they organized? Teacher 6: The middle is the earliest and then it goes out to the side. Christopher Hamner: They’re organized chronologically in the order that the people died. So you cannot go and just alphabetically find the person that you want to find. That design forces you to look at a lot more of it than you would if you could just go right to the person you were looking for. You have to look over all of the names, or a lot more of the names, and it forces you to engage with it. What's the finish like, can anybody remember? Multiple Teachers: It's reflective. Christopher Hamner: The finish of the black marble is highly reflective. So as you're looking at the names you can also see your own face reflected in it. That's by design too. None of this was done accidentally. It encourages you to put yourself in the middle of these people and to think about the sacrifice and to think about it in very personal terms. The other thing that became a big issue with the design was the identity of the designer itself. Her name was Maya Lin. She was a 20-year-old Yale architecture student—so she was very young to win such a prestigious national competition—she was female, and she was Asian. None of those things sat particularly well with a vocal group of Vietnam veterans who felt that everything about the memorial was wrong—the location of it, the tone of it, the somberness of it. You can absolutely see where they're coming from. If you look around at most war memorials and you see that they celebrate heroism and glory and sacrifice, you might think this is not how I want my time, my conflict, to be remembered. This isn't what I want people thinking about. That was a really legitimate point, but it opens up this whole question of: Who is the memorial for?

Christopher Hamner: So despite the fact that the Second World War was fought after—or before the Vietnam War by 25 years or so, the World War II Memorial was actually started 15 years after the Vietnam Memorial. To my eye, a big part of what the World War II Memorial is about is not being controversial. That they did not want to open a similar can of worms about how are we going to celebrate this, how are we going to commemorate it, who is it for? It bends over backwards and goes to great lengths not to be controversial. And in a way kind of just dilutes it to a point where it doesn't say anything controversial, but I also don't know that it says all that much. People have pointed out that it's very classically derived. Curiously it actually looks like a lot of the memorials that the German architect Albert Speer built in Berlin during the Second World War as part of the Nazi government. Which is weird, because it's a memorial that looks a little bit like the architecture of the country that it's built to celebrate the defeat of. But you notice it's got 50-some plinths and they each have wreaths. Has anybody who's seen this before noticed how the plinths are organized? Teacher 1: By state, that's all I know. Christopher Hamner: By state, so every state and then some of the U.S. protectorates, Guam, the Virgin Islands. When you’re standing you can take a little bit closer look, there's Wyoming, Washington, South Dakota, Nevada, Kansas, Minnesota. That's interesting as a historian in that the states really had nothing to do with the way the war was fought. In the Civil War that was more true, people went off with the people from their home state, from their home town. But the Second World War deliberately didn't do that. They mixed people from Iowa and Florida and Alabama and Massachusetts in the same units. So it's not like the states went forward to fight. And it's not like the state governments had much of a role in the Second World War. The Second World War was very much the federal government's achievement. So to organized the wreathed tributes, which are the big outer ring, why do you do that? Teacher 2: It could be honoring the dead from each state. Christopher Hamner: It could be. I'll buy that. Why not do it by the different military units that fought, you know, the First Division, the Second Division, the Fourth Division. Teacher 3: It could be just underscoring that it's the United States, as opposed to— Christopher Hamner: And the circle, I think, does that and pulls it together. Teacher 4: It sounds like they designed by committee. Christopher Hamner: Yes, which is exactly what this was. The committee was formed in the mid-1990s, there was a real push by members of Congress who were World War II veterans themselves, and who said—quite reasonably—that this generation is not going to be around forever; we need to celebrate and commemorate their sacrifice and their achievement while they're still here to appreciate it. Then the design went through a series of committee decisions, which the Vietnam Memorial didn't, you know the Vietnam Memorial is one person's vision. Partly the decisions here reflect a desire to make sure that there's just nothing controversial about it. If you put it in by state and there's really nothing to—that could possibly be controversial about that—because everybody came from a state or a protectorate—but at the same time it doesn't really say much about the war. It just sort of recognizes the fact that there were four dozen entities that are there. Then you've got the big arches—one represents the European Theatre, one represents the Pacific Theatre, the two big fountains, it's like the freedom palisade. But everything is, I think, kind of homogenized in a way to make sure that it's not too controversial. There's not much in there that would get somebody saying this is an inaccurate way to portray my experience. Teacher 5: The order of the states, is it like— Christopher Hamner: I have no idea, I have not been able to figure that out! Teacher 5: Well I was wondering is it the same thing like on the Lincoln Memorial. Teacher 6: No, there is an order and it's in the brochure. Teacher 7: It says they alternate to the right and left of the field of stars based on when they entered the Union. Delaware was the first state. Christopher Hamner: So it is the order that they entered, but it goes back and forth… Teacher 6: That's bizarre. Christopher Hamner: That's just weird. For those of you who were with us this summer when we talked about the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian. That was 1995, the big brouhaha about how are you going to display the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The Air and Space Museum is right over there. And remember, that was a hugely controversial issue, they never wound up mounting the exhibit, several people who had backed it lost their jobs. That's in the recent memory of the people who are putting this together. Who I think wanted to make a memorial that could be the center where people could gather, something that was inoffensive to veterans, and to the families of veterans. But as a result I just don't think there's all that much there.

Christopher Hamner: Make your way around the outside and then the inside. On the inside there are reliefs that portray different facets of going to war—from the bombing offensive over Europe to the home front. Interestingly, everything is covered. Again, I think the goal was to be really inclusive and to try to make sure that everyone's war experience was represented in some way. There are two Easter eggs. There's a little surprising piece of graffiti—if you look for it you can find it—that is the one thing that breaks the very somber, classical architecture, you've got wreathes, you've got eagles, you've got very somber-looking white marble plinths. There's two pieces of graffiti that are hard to find, but that are much more about—are they in the brochure? That's cheating—but they're much more reflective of the soldiers' experience. Then the other thing to check once you've gotten down into the lower level is the field of gold stars, which is an interesting—[it] kind of borrows a little bit from the Vietnam Wall. There were about 56,000 deaths in Vietnam; there were more than 400,000 deaths in the Second World War. So it's obviously not possible to put every name on the World War II Memorial. So what they did instead, as you can see from here, it's sort of directly behind me, there's a fountain with a gold star for every 500 deaths. So each star represents 500 people who lost their lives fighting the Second World War. To me it has a really interesting effect. When I'm here I often hang out by the fountain to listen to tourist responses. One of the ones I hear the most is my first response, which is, "That's not as many stars as I thought." 400,000 is a huge amount of loss of life and sacrifice, and each one represents 500 families who are missing a son or a father or a brother. But for some reason the number 500 divides it in and it doesn't seem like as much as I would have thought, which I think is exactly the opposite of the intention they wanted to have. I don't know exactly how they made that judgment, but you might want to walk down and see what response you get to that. As a historian I've always thought it's just weird to have it organized by the states. It's very interesting to me now when I come back and visit and I'll watch people interacting with it, especially World War II veterans make a beeline right for their home state and there will often be World War II veterans standing around acting as interpreters and they'll be wearing their uniforms and they'll often ask if you'd like to hear a little from them. And they go right for their home states too, so on some level it's worked a lot. It's just to me it just doesn’t resonate because that's one category that didn't organize the war in any way. It would be like a monument that said, this part of the monument is for guys from 5'0'' to 5'3'' and this part is from 5'3'' to 5'6''—it doesn't really say much. The other question to be asking yourself is who is this for? It was expedited in Congress and the fundraising and the construction with the thought that it was very important to have something memorializing the sacrifice of the veterans' generation while some of them were still alive. That's not always the reason we commemorate things, memorials go up for different reasons. The Vietnam Memorial is a really good example because there's a memorial that at first the most vocal opponents were Vietnam veterans themselves who said we do not want that, that does not represent us. And in the 1980s, they said, well, it's not just about you. It's about the whole country's experience in Vietnam and the way it affected everyone besides just the people who fought. You can think about which parts of this are for servicemen and -women, which parts are for their families, which parts are for just regular Americans, what part of it is teaching—which is a useful tool that monuments do—and which part is just commemoration or celebration. But the most interesting way to look at this is in conjunction with the Vietnam Memorial and the Korean Memorial, which is another interesting outlier. Those of you that have seen that, it's like a large field of slightly larger than life figures, but the real tone there is realism. It is not a sort of idealized version of the war which you often see, especially with Civil War monuments when you're driving around DC—you'll see the guy on horseback and he's got the gleaming gold braid and the horse is rearing back and they look larger than life. The Korean War these guys are slogging across a field, they're in their winter gear and they look tired. You can see the weight hanging in their shoulders, they're humping pieces of gear, some of them have mortar tubes and machine guns slung across their shoulders, and you can see the fatigue in their faces, you can see the exhaustion in their bodies. That's a really different kind of portrayal. There isn't that level of realism here, there isn't that level of representation and I don't think they're trying to have that here. So different memorials that are all talking about the same basic thing—which is what does this country do when it goes to war?—still have really different designs. You can learn a lot about where the country was at the time the memorial was being designed and built by taking a close look at what it looks like and thinking about how it might have looked different.

Veterans, Oral History, and the Library of Congress

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An oral history project with veterans is a great way to involve students in family, community, national, and global history. And it's a useful methodology for teaching how to work with historical evidence.

Far more than simple question and answer sessions, oral history is actually a systematized, disciplined effort to record, preserve, and interpret memories of historical significance. It helps students find out about the past, and encourages them to ask critical questions about who tells the story and how it's told. Good oral history projects require research into primary and secondary sources; they exercise planning and interpretive skills; and they ask students to unite mega and micro narratives. Kindergarten pupils can do it, and so can AP history students with learner-appropriate requirements for exercising historical thinking skills—it's an activity adaptable across the curriculum and across grade levels.

Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress helps bring oral history into the curriculum through the Veterans History Project (VHP), a massive and accessible example of the power of personal narrative. Created in 2000, the VHP collects and preserves the remembrances of American war veterans and civilian workers who supported them from World War I through today's Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts. These collections of firsthand accounts are archived in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

The Library of Congress Veteran's History Project is a powerful instructional tool.

Not all collections are digitized, but photos, documents, artifacts, and video or audio-recorded interviews (with transcripts) accompany each individual story that is online. Listen to a 50-minute interview and view 39 photographs from Corporal Frank Aceves, a Vietnam War veteran; visit the section Women at War to hear from the first woman Brigadier General in the U.S. Air Force; or check out stories from Buffalo Soldiers, members of only a handful of African American units allowed to serve in combat during World War II.

The Veterans History Project encourages high school students to consider adding to their archives, and they provide specific, detailed information about how to do so from planning through submission.

If you're thinking about developing materials in your own classroom to submit to the Library of Congress Veterans History Project, follow the Wiki Know-How Guide from Eastern Lebanon County High School. This wiki includes step-by-step directions and student work pages as well as examples of students' final projects.

The VHP and the History Channel joined forces to help teach about veterans.

In 2009, the History Channel, together with the Veterans History Project hosted a National Teach-in on Veterans History. The archived hour-long broadcast from the Library of Congress is available online.

The History Channel encourages students and teachers to engage with veterans through Take a Veteran to School Day and the project comes complete with Teacher Resources, from setting up the project to asking questions to sending follow-up thank you notes.

Take a Veteran to School Day is for all grade levels. The online video resources about Veterans Day are most useful from upper elementary through high school, and their materials also include PDFs of primary sources, how-to-do oral histories, and Spanish-language guides.

At the Clearinghouse

Making Sense of Oral History in the Clearinghouse under Best Practices is an excellent guide with examples for teachers and for advanced history students about how to create and interpret oral history interviews.

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

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In the words of Abraham Lincoln, the Department of Veteran Affairs exists "to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan."

Primarily intended for veterans, the Department of Veteran Affairs does, nonetheless, provide a number of fascinating statistical offerings.

The National Center for Veterans Analysis and Statistics presents demographic data on veteran ethnicity, branch of service, officer or enlisted status, and more within the nation and individual states; veteran data from the 2000 census; Veteran Affairs expenditure data and medical program information; studies on topics such as veteran employability; and special reports covering women, Alaskan, and Native American veterans, among other topics.

Perhaps most immediately relevant to classroom research is a PDF displaying war statistics, from the American Revolution through Desert Shield/Desert Storm. Data includes the total number of servicemembers, battle fatalities, non-mortal wounds, non-battle fatalities, and living veterans per war and in combination. The page also offers a list of the date of death; age; and name of the last remaining veteran, widow, and dependent (if known) of the American Revolution, War of 1812, Indian Wars, Mexican War, Civil War, and Spanish-American War.

The Department of Veteran's Affairs also makes several children's sites available. VA Kids, K-5th provides department information—the motto, history, seal, Veterans Health Administration, technology, research, and Veteran Benefits Administration; veteran facts; the history and display of the U.S. flag; and online games. Games require Flash 6. VA Kids, 6th-12th Grades offers similar materials, designed for a more mature student.

The Teacher's Page (under "Kids' Page") offers a Veterans Day teaching guide, stories of U.S. customs and symbols, and three other suggested resources.

Finally, the site contains a gallery of past Veterans Day posters, useful for examining iconography and changing print design trends and technology.

Teaching about Vietnam

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Thirty-five years ago in Vietnam on April 29, 1975, Irving Berlin's seasonally uncharacteristic, White Christmas hit the airwaves via Saigon's Armed Forces Radio. The North Vietnamese offensive against Saigon advanced, and the musical selection was a pre-arranged code to trigger a massive, dramatic American evacuation.

It became the largest helicopter evacuation in history—for 18 hours, heavily loaded Marine helicopters ferried 7,000 Americans and South Vietnamese evacuees from the American Embassy compound to the Tan Son Nhut airfield, ultimately to ships of the Seventh Fleet. Thousands more thronged the gates of the compound, hoping for a place on the airlift.

Teaching about the Vietnam era requires integrating competing narratives.

On April 30, Saigon fell, and in one sense, America's almost thirty-year involvement with war in Vietnam ended.

Sources and Teaching Models

The meanings and implications of the war in Vietnam are complex and still unresolved. Visceral response competes with the academic analysis to make sense of the era; emotion, memory, and personal experience loom large. Involvement in Iraq has intensified questions and invited contrast and comparison about just and unjust wars, about intervention and non-intervention, about containment, colonialism and post-colonialism, and about unilateral national foreign policy and international interests.

"Even today, many Americans still ask whether the American effort in Vietnam was a sin, a blunder, a necessary war, or a noble cause, or an idealistic, if failed, effort to protect the South Vietnamese from totalitarian government," historian Steve Mintz writes. (See the module Learn About the Vietnam War, part of the online U.S. history textbook, Digital History).

Online, materials continue to proliferate ranging from institutionally-based resources to personal websites from veterans and families. Finding materials becomes a question of selecting from a wealth of viable possibilities. The materials cited here address broad topics and issues of the era.

The National Archives, of course, and Presidential libraries are obvious and credible sources for essays and primary source documents. The Teachers section of the Library of Congress consolidates and extrapolates materials related to Vietnam such as selections from the Veterans Oral History Project. The search mechanism within the Teacher's pages help the selection of appropriate materials.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Foundation provides balanced resources and lesson plans.

Similarly, Edsitement offers a variety of lesson plans and links to primary resources, also best selected through Edsitement's search mechanism simply entering the term Vietnam.

Vietnam Veterans Memorial Foundation

Founded by Jan Scruggs, the force behind the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, DC—and an historical figure in his own right—The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Foundation (VVMF) website is worth a visit from educators and students. Materials offer multiple perspectives on the era, explaining and contextualizing the war socially, politically, and culturally, and then explore how we have negotiated the legacies of the Vietnam era.

For teachers the VVMF is a goldmine of balanced educational resources. Echoes from the Wall: History, Learning and Leadership Through the Lens of the Vietnam War is a free secondary school curriculum guide including lesson plans and primary source materials "is designed not only to educate students about the Vietnam War, but also to use the lessons of that chaotic period to imbue future leaders, sitting in classrooms today, with a heightened sense of responsibility, citizenship and service." Lesson plans and the Teachers Guide cover causes of the war, conflict on the home front, analysis of those who served, the perspective of the Vietnamese, and the aftereffects.

The Vietnam Memorial is a vital site of memory and meaning.

Students will find background essays on the history and meaning of the wall and an opportunity to search for names on the wall. If there's any downside to the VVMF site, it's the lack of images of the memorial itself; however, a segue to GreatBuildings.com from Architecture Week leads to 3d-models, aerial views, google earth linkups, and a variety of perspectives on the Memorial in the context of its location. GreatBuildings.com also includes biographical information and commentary from the site designer, then-21-year-old Maya Lin.

And to support teachers and their curricula, the Teach Vietnam Teachers Network, a national group of nearly 300 members, serves as a point of contact for educators in individual states who answer questions from other teachers about effective teaching of the Vietnam War and development of lesson plans commensurate with state standards. Teachers are invited to request additional materials including The Wall the Heals and Why Vietnam Still Matters (books of essays), posters, a video, and Teacher's Guide.
http://americanhistory.si.edu/militaryhistory/printable/section.asp?id=…

Elsewhere online

A lesson plan from Conflict and Consensus, a Montgomery County, Maryland, Teaching American History Grant program, Vietnam Primary Source Document Analysis guides students to examine the reasons for US involvement in Vietnam by analyzing primary source documents that relate to the Containment Doctrine.

Other online materials from Conflict and Consensus include videos of scholar analysis and classroom practice and teaching based upon examination of a Vietnam War cartoon. An additional lesson plan, Voices from the My Lai Massacre analyzing public perceptions of the event.

On AP Central, Professor Scott Kaufman from Francis Marion University in South Carolina offers Guide to Vietnam War Resources annotating diverse materials.

Vietnam War: Maps includes maps of selected battles, including the Tet Offensive and historic maps from the Department of State from 11BC through 1966. (Consider using eHistory essays cautiously, if at all; they appear with an accuracy disclaimer.)

Memorializing Veterans: Teaching with Place

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Photo, World War II - The Janesville 99 Memorial, May 9, 2009, cliff1066tm
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Veterans Day approaches! Last year, Teachinghistory.org introduced you to resources for collecting oral histories from veterans. Most of these resources still hold good—if you're interested in inviting a veteran into your classroom or leading your class in an oral history project, try History.com's Take a Veteran to School Day or the Library of Congress's Veterans History Project.

But what if you don't have the time or resources to arrange a speaker or manage oral history collection? What if your students are too young to appreciate a veteran's stories and their context? How can you honor the holiday and draw your students in?

How about teaching with monuments and memorials?

National Memorials

Everyone knows the Vietnam Veterans National Memorial, with its simple, iconic design, preserving the names of servicemen killed or missing in action. But what about the additions to the memorial? What prompted the creation of the two figural statues, The Three Servicemen and the Vietnam Women's Memorial? If you are far from Washington, D.C., your students can examine photographs (try Flickr Creative Commons for copyright-free images of many major memorials), read about the history of memorials, and draw their own conclusions.

What needs do the different pieces of the memorial fill? What do they say about Vietnam and its veterans? Who designed them? Who chose these designers? Where did the money to build them come from? When were they unveiled? What controversies have surrounded their design? Are there any special observances at these memorials on Veterans Day?

You could also look up other major DC memorials, built to remember very different wars and participants. Try the African American Civil War Memorial, District of Columbia War Memorial, Korean War Veterans Memorial, National Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism During World War II, or the National World War II Memorial.

Local Memorials

Or perhaps you'd like to engage students with material closer to home. Look around your town. Ask at your local historical society. What monuments and memorials does your area have? A memorial for the Civil War? Korean War? Vietnam War? World War II? When were these built? Why might your area have memorials for some wars but not others? Who maintains them? What do area residents think of them? How do they resemble or differ from other memorials to veterans from the same war? How and where is Veterans Day memorialized in your town? Are there any observations at these memorials?

High-school teacher James A. Percoco shares his own experience engaging students with memorials in this video, while 8th-grade teacher Amy Trenkle demonstrates teaching with monuments and memorials in action, in our blog, as she takes her class to visit the Columbus Memorial Fountain in Washington, D.C.

If you can't arrange a field trip to a memorial, but would still like to have students visit and analyze one, try designing an individual field trip (IFT) for students. James A. Percoco tells you how.

Still at a loss for resources? Search our Website Reviews for online exhibits and archives full of primary sources, or our Museums & Historic Sites database for sites in your area.

Military History

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The U.S. Armed Forces maintain multiple historical offices within each branch of the military and within smaller units of each of the services. Photographs, essays, and oral histories are among the digitized resources of each facility. These include the following:

The Naval Historical Center includes a number of online photographs, exhibits, art, artifacts, document collections, publications and information on naval history, heritage and traditions, as well as a guide to U.S Navy Museums across the United States. The Teacher Resource Page includes lesson plans and activities organized by grade level.

The U.S. Army Center for Military History features an overview of military history, exhibits, artwork and photography, artifacts, document collections, publications and a directory of Amy museums. An Artifact of the Month highlights items from collections in the Army Museum system. Complete issues of Army History may be downloaded as PDFs.

Air Force Link provides an overview of the Air Force's history, heritage, important people, airpower, images, milestones and art.

The U.S. Marine Corps History Division includes information on Marine customs and traditions, dates of historical significance, and biographies, as well as historical documents, orders and speeches.

Pearl Harbor Attack Map

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Avenge Pearl Harbor, Our Bullets Will Do It, c.1942-3, NARA, Flickr Commons
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This interactive website on the attack on Pearl Harbor provides a chronological overview of the day's events. Each major event on the day's timeline is shown on a map of Hawaii, giving the events a visual place within the harbor geography and allowing site visitors to see where ships were in relationship to each other.

On the map, each major occurrence can be selected as the "full story." These individual full story pages provide a short textual overview of the event alongside a looping archival image and video slideshow. Clicking progresses through the slideshow for users interested in quickly revisiting an image after it has passed or who simply want to go through the slideshow at a faster pace. Many of the events also offer eyewitness quotes.

One of the most praiseworthy aspects of the site is that these quotes are not all from U.S. sailors and commanders. The voices selected include two women—a nurse and the daughter of a military man—and several Japanese airmen, submariners, and commanders. By providing voices from both sides of the attack, National Geographic avoids dehumanizing the Japanese through the absence of their own stories.

Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical Project

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Photo, Portrait of Irene Parsons, circa 1945, University of North Carolina
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The Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical Project provides access to a wide variety of sources related to the role of women in the military. These document the female war experience, how male-female integration has changed the armed forces, and more.

Sources available through this collection include diaries, oral histories, uniforms, military patches, scrapbooks, posters, books or pamphlets, photographs, and letters. The oral histories alone number more than 300, and are available as transcripts.

There are three ways to access the site content. You can either run a keyword search; select a military branch or related organization—Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Marines, Navy, Red Cross, Cadet Nurse Corps, or foreign and/or civilian; or select a conflict—World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Post-Vietnam/1980s, or Gulf War/War on Terrorism. Selecting a branch or conflict will provide a list of the types of sources available, as well as how many of each there are. Select your source type of interest to see the individual items.

Experiencing War: Stories from the Veterans History Project

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This collection presents video and audio oral histories and additional material from American veterans of 20th-century wars. Materials include memoirs (some lengthy), letters, diaries, photo albums, scrapbooks, poetry, artwork, and official documents. The website currently provides digital materials from 4,351 veterans from World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf War, Afghanistan and the Iraq War, and other similar events. The 226 video interviews range from 25 minutes to two hours in length.

The material presented is part of a rapidly growing archive, the Veterans History Project, created by Congress in 2000 to collect stories from the 19 million living veterans. Other sections highlight World War I; World War II's forgotten theaters in China, Burma, and India; and 37 other unique war experiences.

Coming Home: A History of War Veterans

Description

According to Backstory: "Most news coverage of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan focuses on troop movements, suicide bombings, and the geopolitical developments at work. Only rarely do we hear the stories of individual men and women fighting there, and hardly ever do we hear what it’s like for those Americans when they return home.

Has it always been thus? How have veterans been treated in the aftermath of America’s previous wars? How much depends on the politics of the war – are vets only as popular as the wars they’ve fought in? These are some of the central questions on the table as we explore veterans’ experiences through three centuries of American life."