Abstract
The student of World War II, even if he confines his study to a limited period or a narrow aspect of the purely military side of the war, is confronted with an enormous body of records and an imposing array of published works and official documents. The testimony, exhibits, and other data assembled by the Joint Congressional Committee investigating the Pearl Harbor attack, for example, filled 39 thick volumes; the published record of the Nürnberg Trials, 56 volumes. For the World War II years alone, the Army, it has been estimated, retained more than 17,000 tons of records, and also possesses an undetermined but large quantity of prewar records essential to an understanding of the wartime period. When to this total is added the extant records of the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marine Corps, the result is a truly staggering mass of paper calculated to dismay rather than hearten the historian.
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