Oral History Interview with Edward M. Coffman

RUSSELL HARRIS: Interview between Russell Harris, Kentucky Historical Society and Edward M. Coffman, January twelfth two thousand, in Frankfort, Kentucky. It would be helpful to recount the nuts and bolts of your career, you know in the piece I did for The Register, about the interview with Doctor Rowland. There was a page of introduction that gave a brief, very brief outline of what Doctor Rowland had, where he had taught, where he had been visiting Professor and so on. If we could briefly go over that for you, that would help me write the introduction.

EDWARD M. COFFMAN: Sure.

HARRIS: Okay, you were born in Hopkinsville.

COFFMAN: Yes, nineteen twenty-nine.

HARRIS: Twenty-nine. Okay and you went to the University of Kentucky. 1:00COFFMAN: In forty-seven, I was a Journalism major. I graduated in fifty-one. I had taken ROTC. [Noise] Fort Benning, in the ROTC Summer Camp. And in the summer of nineteen fifty. So, when I graduated in nineteen fifty-one, I was called up, within a matter of a couple months. And I spent twenty-three months on active duty as an infantry officer in the United States and Japan and Korea. I didn’t see combat, but I was in the Seventh Cavalry Regiment, the First Cavalry Division. Probably the most dangerous thing I did, was I took over a platoon of combat veterans, who had been in that platoon in combat. Because when I joined the Seventh Cavalry, they had come out of Korea. And I joined them as a replacement officer in Japan. And then we went back to Korea, but we were in 2:00the rear areas, around Taykoo. And then while I was in the Army, I decided that what I really wanted to do, was go into history. So, I had saved money, then the G.I. Bill came through and I had planned to go back to Graduate School, and do a degree in History here at U.K. . So I came back to U. K. in fifty-three, when I got out of the Army, and got my Ph.D. here under Doctor Clark, Doc Clark. And then my first job I got when I was still AVD, was at Memphis State University. And I was there from fifty-seven to fifty-eight. Then I got a grant to finish my degree, so I finished the degree in fifty-nine and went 3:00back and spent another year at Memphis State. And then I went to work for Forrest Pogh( ), as his research assistant on the Marshall biography. And I spent a year with him, in Washington, sixty, sixty-one. It was while I was there, I was interviewed about the job in Madison. And then was in Madison from nineteen sixty-one until I retired in nineteen ninety-two. But I did have various visiting professorships. I was the Eisenhower Professor at Kansas State University.

HARRIS: Uh huh, what year was that?

COFFMAN: That was sixty-nine, seventy. And then seventy-seven, seventy-eight, I was the visiting professor at West Point. Then in eighty-six, no, eighty-two, eighty-three, 4:00I was visiting professor at the Air Force Academy. And then eighty-six, eighty-seven, I was at the Army War College. And then in ninety, ninety-one, I was at the Army’s Command and General Staff School.

HARRIS: Leavenworth.

COFFMAN: Leavenworth. And I think I was very pleased, and it helped me, but I was also very pleased; I got a Guggenhiem Fellowship in the early seventies to help me with this book, I’m still working on the second volume of, on the old Army.

HARRIS: You were, you gave the Harmon Lectures...

COFFMAN: Yes, I gave the Harmon Lecture at the Air Force Academy. I can’t remember when that was, seventy-six, I think.

HARRIS: You were on several editorial boards.

COFFMAN: Yes.

HARRIS: Could you name those? 5:00COFFMAN: Well, I was on the editorial board, I’ve forgotten what all I was on. Dick Cole’s project to reprint a lot of books. Seems the press has gone out of existence, but that was an interesting project, rare Military History Books. Of course I did things, I was on the editorial board of the Journalist’s Society of Military History, American Military Institute for three years. I was the head of it, in fact I just left as chair of that board.

HARRIS: You were president...

COFFMAN: I was president of the American Military Institute. I was chairman of the Department of Army Military History Committee. I served on that a couple of times. I was chairman of it for a while. And let me see, what else? I was a member of the, the National Historical Commission Publications and Records. That was interesting too. That’s about all I can think of. 6:00HARRIS: I was looking at a book that I had used extensively, Earl Zinkey’s(*), U. S Army and the Occupation of Post-War Germany. And I noticed you were on the Advisory Commission to the Army Historical Society.

COFFMAN: In the seventies, yeah. Yeah that’s the Department of Army, Historical Advisory Committee. I was on that in the seventies and then I came back on it in the eighties, into the nineties. I was chairman of it. Actually I followed Charlie Rowlands there. Charlie was chairman of, I think until, eighty-nine. I think it was eighty-nine. And then I was the one that took over.

HARRIS: Your career and Doctor Rowlands’ have crossed paths several times.

COFFMAN: Yes. He’s a great guy.

HARRIS: I would be interested later on, if you have time, in pursuing 7:00that idea you had about Forrest Pough(*) and the talks you and Charlie gave, Doctor Rowlands gave. Okay. If it would be convenient for you to do so after we, after this is finished, it would help me if you could send me a copy of your vitae, so I could get this...

COFFMAN: Okay, if you have some scrap paper I’ll write a note to myself. 8:00HARRIS: Unless I have it at home. Here...

COFFMAN: You go by James R. ?

HARRIS: Yeah.

COFFMAN: ( ) work for a while. Go ahead.

HARRIS: If I could have your vitae, it would help me write the introduction 9:00and if it would be possible, a photograph of yourself, would be helpful to the article.

COFFMAN: Okay.

HARRIS: I’d planned an article, a length of probably five or six photos would be sufficient to illustrate. So, one of you and depending on what topics come up in the talk.

COFFMAN: Okay.

HARRIS: There might be others, 10:00 pictures.

COFFMAN: I’ll send you that one. It’s a good picture. Fred took me. I was giving George Hugate a copy of my book. And George was a hundred and four years old, World War One veteran. Would that be a good idea? It’s a good picture of both of us.

HARRIS: Sure, yeah. Okay, since you mentioned World War One, like I said, I’d like to, I keyed the talk with Doctor Rowland to the re-publication, to the publication of the American Iliad by the press. And they’ve recently come out with The War to End All Wars. I’d like to start the talk with that, 11:00and then go on to other things. I’ve read War ( ) as an undergraduate and was very impressed then. I re-read it, and was even more impressed.

COFFMAN: Thank you.

HARRIS: When you wrote it, did you originally conceive of the book as a conscious counterpoint to the sort of battle studies and leader biographies that too often characterize Military history?

COFFMAN: Yes, I did. Yes, I thought I had a more comprehensive view of military history, that included not just the strategy and tactics, and essentially the account of the leaders and all that. I wanted to develop not only the campaigns, trying to take them down actually to what was happening to soldiers, the guys actually at the front, as well as, the logistics, how that worked. And then also, training and life in the camps and the spirit. I wanted to get that across. 12:00In discussing the battles, what I consciously tried to do, was develop what the overall idea was at the very highest level, and then carry it down to how it was actually executed, what actually happened to the people, who would try to carry it out, the problems they had.

HARRIS: I noticed that out of the eleven chapters, five of them were devoted to planning and organization and administration...

COFFMAN: Yes, yes.

HARRIS: ...and mobilization. And four were to operations.

COFFMAN: That’s right.

HARRIS: I believe it was in your introduction, you said something like you wanted to present the various levels of the military experience.

COFFMAN: That’s right.

HARRIS: What did you see 13:00at the time, as the connections between the levels?

COFFMAN: Well the first book I had done on World War One, was on the Chief of Staff of the Army, Peyton C. March. And of course that is essentially, the World War One part, is a logistical and administrative study of how they organized or how the Army plugged into the Industrial mobilization. And how March’s dealings with people like Baruq(*) and General Gold(*), who was the Army counterpart in charge of Logistics. As well as shipping, how they ran the shipping program. How they trained, mobilized and got people, enough people to make a difference in the war. And how they got them to France. So I felt like I had already covered that fairly well, although I spent, I think, about a chapter or so, in the World War One book going over that again. But then I realized the planning and the background of all of this, the arguments over whether or not our people would simply be re-enforcements, replacements for the French and British, or if they would fight as a separate army. How they trained, not just in the States, but over there. 14:00How they were supplied and all of that. I felt like it was part of the whole picture. I think frequently the American role in the war has been covered and indeed overlooked, because the Americans actually were in large scale combat just a few months, from the summer of nineteen eighteen, until November. So, a lot of people dealing with World War One, Keegan in his recent book, virtually ignores....He says, well the Americans, the American re-enforcement won the war. But that’s it, he doesn’t talk about any of the battles, or anything. And I think that’s sort of, certainly from the European set, well that’s sort of a general view. That I think now most of them recognize the weight of the American re-enforcement. Everybody was scrapping the bottom of the barrel, when all of a sudden the Americans came in, sent two million people over there. That makes a tremendous difference. 15:00But they don’t really go into, how did they get the two million? How did they get them over there? And then what did they actually do, once they got over there?

HARRIS: There’s multiple dimensions to the fact of a soldier standing on a battlefield.

COFFMAN: Oh, yes, yes. I mean....The soldier of the battlefield sees, at best, an area of a hundred yards or so. And that’s his concern, that something might be....one of the incidents, I think it was in the Muse-Argonne somewhere, where a unit, I think it was the Thirty-Second Division. They had, they were not supposed to take the position. They didn’t tell them that, but the plan was, they would send them, and then they were depending on someone else to carry the day. And those guys took the hill. They actually got up on it, and they were in a position where they could envelop, just go right down the line on the Germans. No one had told them that they weren’t expected to, but then I got into an account. I was studying the battle and I could see what the plans were, and then I had an account of this guy, who had been one of the company officers in the fight. And he was talking about how excited they were. They got on top of the hill, and they were doing all of this. And 16:00they won a big victory. They weren’t expected to, but as I say, no one told them that. But it is a very different viewpoint as you go up. Well, I mean, it is demonstrated by that great movie, All Quiet on the Western Front. What happens in All Quiet on the Western Front at the end? The hero is killed. And yet in the larger picture, nothing happened that day. In his situation it was a hundred percent, I mean that was it, he was killed. But that’s one of the things you run into.

HARRIS: Yeah. In addition to the difference in perspective, like you were talking about, there’s the fact that ace American soldiers standing in the middle of France ready to fight, also entails all the planning and mobilization behind this...

COFFMAN: Yes, that’s right, that’s right. Because all that has to lead up to that one guy there. 17:00There are statistics, I don’t remember them, they vary from war to war, about how many people are in the service, backing up the one guy at the front. It comes to mind, ten or eleven, now it is probably twenty or thirty or whatever. But there’s this enormous backup leading up to that guy who actually gets out there and fights, faces the enemy.

HARRIS: It wouldn’t be a distortion to carry that on to the whole society really, the culture.

COFFMAN: Yeah, that’s right. 18:00HARRIS: When you look at these multiple levels of the military experience, a historian has a lot of opportunities to explore the relations between the man standing on the battlefield and the, if you go all the way back to the other end of the process, to the cultural attitudes that put him there.

COFFMAN: Sure, sure. Well you can right a book on the various agencies, you know, Red Cross, Salvation Army, YMCA, organizations like that, that I just refer to sort of in passing. But someone could really develop that entirely, or the medical care. The one history of the war that was completed, was the massive, fifteen volume study, the medical history of the war. And that is absolutely fascinating. I really 19:00got into that. But on the other hand, what comes out in this, I use it a lot in regard to flu epidemic and all of that. But I didn’t really go into it that much, because that was just a part of it, as far as I was concerned.

HARRIS: One of the things that struck me about it was how terribly American the AES experience was, the ways that it reflected 20:00American cultures, and what weaknesses. Could you cite a few examples?

COFFMAN: What you have, when you have essentially a Army of civilians, who are temporarily in uniform. The Army only had around a hundred and twenty-five thousand, roughly, when the war began, the regular Army. There maybe another eighty-five to a hundred thousand in the National Guard. [Coughs] Excuse me, who are civilian soldiers. The Army is three quarters of a million, nineteen months later. And the Navy and Marine Corps don’t increase that much. They were not as large. I think the Navy had sixty thousand or so, and the Marines had five or six thousand, but still sixty-five 21:00thousand to a million is quite a bit. So there was this tremendous increase. These are people who are civilians. They are coming into the military. They’re coming in a rush basis, some of them are not really trained all that much. The training program, just since I did this book, a man named Doug Johnson, did a really interesting dissertation on the training they had, and why that was so fouled up and never really was completed in most cases. And then within a matter of months they were transported. They were in action. So in effect, you don’t have regular, professional soldiers, who spent their lives, their adult lives in the military, going into action in most cases. There are some of them, now these people carry their views that they grew up with, on the farm or in the cities, over there. And they’re seeing everything from the perspective of an American civilian. Sergeant York is one of the greatest examples, because Sergeant York really came from a rural background, that actually was disappearing. It wasn’t gone by any means, but it was disappearing at the time. Because what is it? Nineteen twenty census is the first time there’s 22:00more urban than rural, considering urban towns of two thousand.

HARRIS: Yeah.

COFFMAN: ...than rural background. York is someone coming almost out of the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century in effect. But there are people like that. I remember I talk about that in the book, about where there were many cases where they put these draftees on trains. It was the first time in the guy’s life that he had ever been on a train. The first time that he had ever been out of the county. There’s a marvelous story about where this one guy went up and asked the people, does the world go as far in the other direction as it goes in this direction. They had gone about a hundred miles or so. So you have that. And then you have the street smart, sometimes urban type, who couldn’t even speak English. And he’s in one of the draftee division of the Seventy-Seventh, 23:00New York. So it really does represent the various strains of American life. And then you’ve got the college educated kids for the most part, who go to officer training school, so you’ve got that group in there too.

HARRIS: Yeah, my great-uncle was in the Second Division, and he was a recent immigrant from Latvia. He had come over as a boy, and he spoke fluent German. And he had cousins on the other side of the line, so it was an odd experience for him.

COFFMAN: It was.

HARRIS: But like you say, the American experience was extremely varied, but it reflected American society.

COFFMAN: That’s right, it did.

HARRIS: You mentioned the few professional soldiers 24:00in the American Army. Pershing was certainly one of them.

COFFMAN: Yes. [Laughing] HARRIS: And it seemed like everything about the AES experience, Pershing left his stamp on it.

COFFMAN: That’s true, that’s true.

HARRIS: From early planning up to operations. I know your study was a lot broader than just a biography of Pershing, but speaking as a historian and a writer, how did you keep from letting Pershing dominate the story?

COFFMAN: Well, it goes back to the point that you made earlier about different levels. He certainly dominated at one level and his stamp was on the Army, 25:00there’s no question about it. But Pershing was not as intimately involved as even some of the soldiers, I think. There’s a marvelous story that Pershing told on himself, that he was visiting wounded, and he went up to this one soldier lying in bed, and he asked him, where were you hit? And the guy said, well I was hit up near so and so, you know where the road makes a bend, something like...as if Pershing. Well, Pershing had never been to up near so and so, where the road, you know. That guy’s company had been there, but Pershing probably had never even seen the place. But the guy thought well, Pershing must know where it was. So Pershing did have that control as it was. And he did a marvelous job in building the great administrative infra-structure, and in picking good 26:00men, who stayed with him and had enormous respect for him. One of the things that struck me about Pershing, was he could inspire tremendous confidence and trust in people. A man who was his G-3, his operations officer, was a guy named Fox Connor. Some people say he was his brain, and he was the strategist. He was the guy who worked out plans, campaign plans. Fox Connor was injured in the thirties, in a freak accident. His wife was very wealthy and they were on this fabulous estate in the Adirondacks. They were putting a road through and a log truck got stuck and threw a log up and it hit him in the head. So, he lived a few years after that, but he was kind of dough. 27:00He was ill and was being taken on a stretcher through one of the railroad stations in New York when Pearl Harbor happened. And they were talking about that. This is nineteen forty-one. His first thing is, take me to the General, he’ll need me, take me to the General. Well, General John J. Pershing is half senile and he’s in Walter Reed. But I mean, Bam [snaps his fingers] take me to the General. His people were immensely loyal to him. And for the most part they were outstanding men. So he picked very good people.

HARRIS: And most of them were professionals.

COFFMAN: Yes.

HARRIS: That’s something that sometimes gets overlooked, is that there was a very competent hard core of professional soldiers at the...

COFFMAN: Very well trained, very well trained. And something that the Europeans, 28:00Europeans tend to look down on Americans anyway as being, not being cosmopolitan, or unsophisticated. Pershing had spent time in Europe. He traveled over there a lot. ( ) had been to the United States. Pershing had spent time over there. Pershing had spent considerable time in the Philippines. Pershing had been in Japan. He’d traveled a great deal. A lot of these soldiers were like that. A lot of them had really been around quite a bit. And of course, very well trained. These guys, the Army educational system had kicked off around the turn of the century. And the key people had gone through that and they were outstanding. They were well trained. I would match them against anything certainly the Allies had. I would almost go so far as to say I’d match them against the Germans. The Germans had a tremendous military system. 29:00Leavenworth taught these men and taught them well. The War College was a pretty good place.

HARRIS: I think a lot of Americans buy into that sense of European superiority. And I think they tend to overlook the fact that there were highly competent professionals in the American establishment.

COFFMAN: Yes there were. This is kind of a switch, even young officers, colonels, a colonel at that time would have seen action in the Philippines probably. A small unit, guerilla type action or something, but they would have seen, they would have lived in a hostile environment for a while, been involved in that. He would also probably have gone, if he was really a top notch officer. He would have gone to the Command and General Staff College. He would probably have gone maybe, it wasn’t called back then, but in fact Leavenworth, that’s what it was. The Army 30:00Service School, school of the ( ), the Staff College, and he may have gone to the War College, although as a Colonel, he might not. But you taking about people like George C. Marshall, which truly some of the greatest American of the twentieth century. And I’m telling you, anyone who looks at this very carefully would have to think about that a long time. Because Marshall’s really a tremendous figure. Marshall is a key person. He’s key to a lot of this planning. Marshall is outstanding, but there are other people around him, 31:00who are very good.

HARRIS: Marshall was sort of Pershing’s shadow for a long time.

COFFMAN: Yes, that was after the war though. Pershing picked him up as his Aide, and they were very close, very close.

HARRIS: You were talking about this combat experience that Americans had, just as a personal note, I remember my great-uncle talking about his sergeant. His sergeant was almost ready to retire, and he had seen action in the Philippines, and had been, he had actually been in the expedition of relieving the King.

COFFMAN: The Boxer HARRIS: Yeah, in the Boxer Rebellion.

COFFMAN: Hundred and Ninth Infantry. ( ) was your great-uncle in the Ninth Infantry?

HARRIS: Yes, he was.

END OF TAPE 1, EDWARD M. COFFMAN, SIDE A BEGINNING OF TAPE 1, EDWARD M. COFFMAN, SIDE B COFFMAN: He probably would not have found that the case, or he wouldn’t have run into any one like that, if he’d been in the National Guard 32:00or National Army Division.

HARRIS: Right.

COFFMAN: This is a distinction that they made initially, but it became so intermixed in the end. They tried to keep regulars and people who were in the National Guard and people, the draftees, separate, but that became impossible. And even then, in the regular divisions, initially, a lot of guys were volunteering. For example, with the First Division, which was organized and called the First Division in the spring of nineteen seventeen, when they went to France, probably as many as sixty to seventy percent of the soldiers had been in the Army less than three months. Now Sergeants were something else. But now some of the guys that became Sergeants, they didn’t qualify for something. The officers were young West Pointers or people like that probably. And as this went on 33:00the Second Division was another regular division, the Third, the Fourth, the Fifth. They had a numerical thing, I think, the regular divisions were the first, seven or eight. Then from twenty-six up to forty-two or three, they were National Guard, and then from, what was it, seventy something up to ninety-one, they were draftees. However, by the summer of nineteen eighteen they were so mixed up with the draftee replacements going in, like the First Division that fought the last part of the war had a heavy number of replacements that had come from the Thirty-Second Division, the National Guard Division from Wisconsin and Michigan. They sent a whole draft over there. So they were so mixed up, but you would still have in some of these old Divisions, you would have an old soldier like that, who had been a Sergeant or been a soldier for fifteen or twenty years. 34:00HARRIS: My uncle was always very proud of the fact...

COFFMAN: Should have been.

HARRIS: ...that the Second was a regular Division.

COFFMAN: That’s right. The Second was a very good Division of the Ninth Infantry, it’s a famous old regiment.

HARRIS: He made me learn at a very early age, the Ninth Infantry and the Second Division was...anyway getting back to Pershing. He was not immune to being a reflector of American values and culture. His policies it seemed to me, anyway, were quintessentially American, the idea of offensive strategy and tank disruption, and the resistance to amalgamizing.

COFFMAN: Amalgamation, that’s true, that’s true.

HARRIS: Amalgamizing into the European armies.

COFFMAN: That’s right. 35:00HARRIS: Did any, those are pretty simple things, was there anything else about him that struck you as particularly American in his policies?

COFFMAN: Well, he was very conscious of trying to maintain American sovereignty. And he realized that if you allowed American forces to be used merely as replacements, that the American role in the war would simply be that of logistical support, as far as most would be concerned, because our individual soldiers would be so scattered. The Ninth Infantry wouldn’t be able to add a battle streamer that they were at Chateau T( ) or whatever, and so on. And he was acutely aware that, that would probably lessen our clout at the Peace Table, if, you know, well what did you do? Well how could you tell? I mean, you know, 36:00Billy Jones from Hopkinsville, Kentucky, actually was in the Royal Welsh Fusileers, rather than the Ninth Infantry Division Regiment. He was acutely aware of that, and he was also very proud of the American Army. And of course the Europeans were arguing, you people haven’t really seen combat, you don’t know what it is really like over here. And you don’t have the command and staff to lead all those units. And they were right, we hadn’t seen combat over there, we didn’t have a large, now we tried to get around that in a peculiar way, that lead to problems of understanding. Since we had so few people, we thought were really capable of being staff and commanders, we made our Divisions, which was really the basic fighting unit, the Division, double the size of European divisions. So when 37:00you see an American Division, well that’s twenty-five, twenty-eight thousand people. German and French and British Divisions were almost like maybe ten. And we did that because we didn’t think we had enough people. And by and large I think, I mean there were failures, no question about it, but by and large I am impressed at how well they did.

HARRIS: The offensive mindedness seems to be our, not exactly constant, but frequent thing in American strategy.

COFFMAN: That’s right. Well Pershing saw you got to break the stalemate. And of course the Allies would look at him and say, well what do you think we’ve been trying to do for four years? And they had launched great offensives. The British Offensive, one reason the British sort of push off, don’t really open up their 38:00ships and all that to bring a lot of Americans over in nineteen seventeen. Is they assumed, Haig assumed he could be in the water in nineteen seventeen with his Offensive. And of course, he got involved in the horror of ( ), where my goodness he lost more people in three or four months than the Americans lost in the entire war. And the French of course, had tried that. They tried that ( ) Offensive early on, and then just collapsed. They had mutinies and all sorts of problems. And yet what they pointed out, I ran across this account by the religious mystic, I guess you’d call it at ( ) with the stretcher man, worked in a medical unit with the French. He talked about how the Americans, and he wasn’t the only one, other people said it. They look like we did, three or four years ago, they have the elan, they have the spirit, they are really ready to go and get them. And of course, one aspect of this, you took pretty heavy casualties. Well the other thing, as I was going through this, I was really struck that in the last stage of the war, after we’d been over there in combat for some time, we were really getting battle savvy, I mean these guys really knew how to do things. Just small things like maybe when you get ready to attack, you don’t wait in the trenches for someone to blow a whistle and go over the top. You get all the people up there and they’re lying down maybe twenty or thirty yards ahead of the trenches, so they just 39:00pop up and go, rather then sit in the trench, try to get over and all of that. And other things they were doing that you could really see, for example the one time I thought we really effectively used gas, was toward the end of the war when we knocked out a group of Germans, interdictd(*) I think the technical term is, in a woods that they were threatening. They just poured a lot of gas in there. That was the one time that we really effectively used gas. People were afraid of gas, both sides. Your gas would kill you just as well it would kill a German.

HARRIS: You were speaking about the British commanders and some of the truly tragic decisions that Haig and others made. There’s 40:00a book out, a recent book out now, that puts an enormous amount of weight on the decisions of the leaders, the British leaders. Neal Ferguson’s Pity of War. He calls, somewhere in that, he calls the British decision to enter the war, the greatest error of the twentieth century, because it mobilized the war and prolonged it and so on. Basically he seems to be trying to place a good deal of war guilt on the British instead of the Germans.

COFFMAN: He’s trying to sell a lot of books actually.

HARRIS: Yeah.

COFFMAN: He writes two or three books that size a year, so his research he’s building on is not that strong. There have been several very good studies. 41:00There’s a man in Canada, he’s a friend of mine, I can’t think of his name, but he’s done some very good books on the British, actually fighting the war. There’s another book that came out last year by a man named Paul Harris at Sandhurst, who talks about the greatest Army in the world in the Fall of nineteen eighteen. It was the British Army. And he points out that they actually gained more ground and everything in the Fall Offensive, which is absolutely true, absolutely true. But why were the British able to gain so much ground in the Fall of nineteen eighteen? One reason is, there are two million Americans sitting here and those civilian Americans are occupying some Germans. So in other words, pressure is being relieved, so that they can make this move. Yeah, I might agree, sure the British Army might very well have been the best Army as such 42:00in the Fall of nineteen eighteen. But I don’t think that belittles the American part in the war at all.

HARRIS: You mentioned Keegan’s recent book, First World War, do you think that is a decent book?

COFFMAN: I have to confess, I really haven’t read, like in Ferguson’s case, I haven’t read that book. I’ve read about Ferguson, I’ve heard his thesis and so on, and I do know he’s the type of guy who writes one or two books a year. And he always tries to fix up a great controversy. He’s one of the few historians around who gets major advances, he has five or six books. So, he’s in that old British tradition of ( ) Taylor, who will come out and say, well Churchill was the big loser in World War Two and then watch everyone jump up and down and scream, you know. Meanwhile he’s on talk shows, but... I haven’t read Keegan’s book either, I’ve glanced through it. I looked particularly to see if, how 43:00he covered the American military campaigns, and saw that he did. Keegan is a brilliant military essayist. He really is very good. I don’t consider Keegan a scholar. I don’t think people do consider him that, that’s not to say he doesn’t write good Military history, and write fascinating Military history. The other day I read The Face of Battle, that’s a brilliant book. Now various scholars on Asswar and Hassam(*) and this guy’s Waterloo, said well, he didn’t get it exactly right. That may be true, but still the overall thing is. I haven’t read the book and I can’t really pass judgement.

HARRIS: I saw Keegan give a lecture about well, for one thing his new book, on T.V., and somebody asked him about Ferguson’s book, what he thought of it, of that 44:00thesis of British war guilt and so on. And I love what Keegan said, he said, I’ve read Neal’s book and he said I’m pointing out we are great friends, but after all, in the final analysis it is a naughty book. [Laughter] COFFMAN: Well you know, I think, certainly in America and maybe in Europe as well, maybe even Ferguson is reflecting that, there is sort of the feeling that if the Germans hadn’t won, counter factual history, if the Germans had lost in World War One, then the assumption is, that they wouldn’t have lost, or they would have at least 45:00gotten a draw if the Americans hadn’t intervened. With this event there wouldn’t have been a Hitler ( ) power, so there wouldn’t have been a Nazism. But when I was doing my research and even later, I had a fascinating experience. I gave a talk on World War One at the French Institute in nineteen eighty-seven. And there were three World War One veterans there. And one of them, very tall, striking looking man, sitting right on the front row, not as far as me over there. And he got up and asked this question, after somebody got up and said what would have happened if we hadn’t intervened? Would this have been ( ). And I do think the Allies couldn’t have won the war without us. I do believe that. On the other hand, if you want to argue, these people 46:00argue we shouldn’t have been over there....The man happened to be Hamilton Fitch, who longtime congressman, who won a silver star as a Captain in France. And who, of course, was the congressman that Roosevelt ( ). Fritz Fischer, the German historian, you know about twenty years ago, pointed out that actually the holdings, the plans and the holdings of the German leaders of the early part of the century, certainly as far as territorial acquisition and all that, were very similar. It was the eastern question and all of that was very similar, which of course didn’t make him overly popular in Germany.

HARRIS: Yeah. I noticed that was one of the things that Fischer’s book, he even said that the Treaty of Versailles was not harsh enough, 47:00which is sort of like what you said about Taylor and Churchill, you know just saying it and then watch people jump.

COFFMAN: I met Fischer once, I was at a conference and we were together at a party. It was fascinating, he was telling about, he was six years old when the war began in nineteen forty-two and at the little village where he lived, the town crier stood in the center of the village and beat his drum, and the people gathered around and he read the declaration of war. This is something out of the medieval period, but he had seen that. He demonstrated the goose step, he learned when he was a little boy. That’s just like another world.

HARRIS: Very much so. Getting back to The War to End All Wars, 48:00it was published in nineteen sixty-eight, and the term “New Military History”, may not have been current at that time, I don’t recall. But looking back on it now, it seems like it, at least it anticipated a lot of the themes that became the New Military History in the seventies and later. Do you think that is a fair characterization of the book?

COFFMAN: Yes, I think it was. I was very much impressed when I went to Madison, that people tend to think of Military History as simply Trumpet, Trumpet history, historian battles and this that and the other. Or at Madison typical thing, you’re in military, you’re in the Civil War, aren’t you?

HARRIS: Uh hmm.

COFFMAN: Of course, they have a Civil War centennial....And I was very conscious that 49:00there was so much, that Military History was so rich and there were so many areas you could go in all different directions, even in terms of Trumpet, Trumpet and discussing history of battles, to do as Keegan later, you know Keegan’s book, Face of Battle, made a tremendous hit. Again what Keegan talked about in Face of Battle was, you ought to study battle, not just at the leader’s perspective, but on down to what was actually happening. I did that in this book, eight years before, that’s what I did. I tried to carry it through. Now I didn’t do it as extensively, for example, as Steve Ambrose did in D-Day. I didn’t go into it, that much of elaborate detail, because after all this was a book of a hundred thousand words. And Ambrose spent what, probably, 50:00four or five thousand words on one day, that’s so he can really go into detail. I had a lot stuff from people. I talked to a lot of people. And got, and then there were memoirs, there were some diaries, not that many letters. In the first place they were censored. But the memoirs and diaries and interviews later.

HARRIS: Like most terms in history, a fairly complicated subject, the term “New Military History” means different things to different people.

COFFMAN: Yes.

HARRIS: What’s your definition?

COFFMAN: My definition of it, is it’s a view of military history that takes into consideration the social, political, economic ramifications 51:00of the Military, as well as the very battle as such. The whole experience in fact, from the private to the general.

HARRIS: A lot of critics called, somewhere along the line they call it, war without combat, because a lot of studies were devoted to subjects away from the battlefield.

COFFMAN: Sure, I’ve done that. That’s right.

HARRIS: But good military writing, good Military History has always been about more than just the killing, all the way back to the Greeks.

COFFMAN: Sure. There are a lot of things involved, the logistics. I was really struck, I had a conversation with a guy who’s head of the Logistics part of the teaching at the Command and General Staff College. 52:00And these guys out there, even, I don’t know, pay people, logisticians, but a lot of, logistics is sort of a dull thing, they’re not that interested in it. And yet it is, and he was complaining about that, or that it tends to get short shrift. But you have, you know, the point that the Army travels on its stomach and all that. And if that doesn’t work, the supply collapses, you’ve just a bunch of people running around trying to find something to eat. In fact I told him they ought to really assign that, right at the General Science school there is a memoir of a guy who was in one of the German regiments in Napoleon’s Army in the Russian campaign. And it’s a graphic account of the retreat, and of course these are guys just attempting to do anything to survive. What’s their problem? It’s not that the Russians are stronger militarily, it’s not that someone is moving his flank right. This is just an armed mob trying 53:00to find something to eat and protect themselves from the cold because one, they don’t have proper food, they don’t have proper clothing. I think that logistics and supply that run an army.

HARRIS: Uh huh. Yeah it is, there are so many different dimensions to the experience.

COFFMAN: That’s right.

HARRIS: I am reluctant to keep coming back to Keegan, but in The Face of Battle, I remember he made a point out of calling Military History a humane study.

COFFMAN: It is, it is. That’s the thing, and I’ve noticed over the years, one thing that I differ from a lot of people interested in Military History is, I’m not that interested 54:00in technology as such. I’m not that interested in machines. I’m not that interested per se in weapons. I can understand and should know what a weapon will do. I’m a graduate of the Infantry School. I fired every weapon, from a rifle up to a tank gun. I mean you pull ( ) on a cannon, all these mortars. I held a mortar in my hand and fired, thrown grenades, and all that, so I understand weapons very well. I’m not into them. It doesn’t really mean that much to me. You know you get an ( ), what I’m really interested in is the people, and how people respond to this challenge, that’s one of the greatest challenges that you ever run into, perhaps the greatest. Because we hear some much palaver about sports, but in the 55:00military, in the battlefield, this is no game. I mean other guys are out to kill you, and this is really it. And how people respond to this at various levels, you know the commander and the responsibility he has, and the level of responsibility and the level of perspective changes all around. It really is fascinating to me.

HARRIS: As far as the different responses to challenges, is what fascinates me about it.

COFFMAN: Yeah.

HARRIS: It seems like, almost like not just the perception of reality, but reality changes depending on what part of the military experience you are looking at.

COFFMAN: Well like I was fascinated 56:00doing the air chapter, because as a kid, I’m old enough to remember those old pulp magazines on the war aces and all that. I knew who Eddie Rickenbacker was by the time I could walk, probably. Talking to some of those people, who had been fighter pilots, one thing about it as they look back, it was the most exciting thing in their lives. I mean, that is often dangerous, that is a chancy business, particularly if you don’t have a parachute. But the excitement, and they can communicate that to you. One of the best interviews I ever had, and I still keep in touch with his widow, and I kept in touch with him for probably just twenty-five years, was one of the first American Aces, Doug Campbell. And it was just fascinating to hear him talk about that. I was just thinking about that yesterday, describing these air combats, describing when you went on these 57:00flights you had to keep your head moving all the time and slightly focus your eyes because there might just be a spot. That was a fascinating personal experience for me to talk to those guys. And it was fascinating to talk these soldiers at various levels. I tried to talk to Chiefs of Staff, Divisions, they were the young colonels. In each Division I talked to at least two of those. I talked to some of the generals, but they were getting pretty long in the tooth.

HARRIS: Well, going back to my uncle the foot soldier [Laughs], the great-uncle. The war experience was the most interesting thing in his life. And he lived to be eighty-two 58:00and saw people walk on the moon, but still his time in France was what informed his life. He talked about it to his dying day. He had a brief contact with the air war that you were mentioning and he said that at ( ). He was coming out of a trench, he had just gotten his head and shoulders above the ground when a German tri-plane came...

COFFMAN: Came over.

HARRIS: And strafed, and was not more than three feet off the ground. Things like that he talked about for decades afterwards, it was just so intense an experience that he, 59:00it was like he kept returning to it to try to find out what there was about it that was so...

COFFMAN: Something, because I deal with this reading memoirs, all the time. This is the one time in most people’s lives that they’re pulled out of their normal thing. Like as I’ve gotten older, I wasn’t in combat, but I think a lot about the two years I spent in the Army, because I was doing things, going places, thrown into I wouldn’t have done otherwise. It was the one time you were taken out your normal life pattern. And of course if you did get into combat or something like that, that’s the one time in your life you were really up against it, the supreme test. And it’s something you can’t help but return to.

HARRIS: Yeah, he, my uncle was wounded severely 60:00at the very end of the war, and that of course effected him from then on, but I think even little things, like shaving in the field without a mirror, which he told me about again and again. [Laughing] That colored his later life. He was so close to the edge virtually all the time that life seemed more intense. He appreciated it more. At least that’s what I gathered from his, listening to recollection after recollection.

COFFMAN: It’s very vivid. Time and again, I did talk to one fella 61:00( ), so I met him. I didn’t get any, he wasn’t an historical source, but in the thirties he had written a memoir of his experiences and he was in the first company to take casualties, F Company, Sixteenth Infantry, he helped carry out the first guys. And he had been in ( ), he had been in all these actions. When I was trying to talk to him, it was clear that he didn’t remember that much. But he did tell me that he still had nightmares about seeing the yellow clouds of gas. At that point it had been about fifty years since the war. But things about that are so vivid in people’s minds. 62:00HARRIS: And they don’t forget either, my uncle could remember details, but being a skeptical teenager, I ran to various books to check out and they were exactly as he had just told me and that was decades later. It seems like any sort of experience that could be that deeply etched into somebody’s life, not just a memory but everything about their life has to be worth studying.

COFFMAN: Well it is interesting to me, because if you think about things that happened in, well let’s say the Depression. A lot of people were affected by the Depression. I’m old enough to have memories of the Depression. 63:00END OF TAPE ONE, EDWARD M. COFFMAN RUSSELL HARRIS: Interview between Russell Harris, Kentucky Historical Society and Edward M. Coffman, January twelfth, 64:00two thousand in Frankfort Kentucky. Interview between Russell Harris, Kentucky Historical Society and Edward M. Coffman, January twelfth, two thousand in Frankfort, Kentucky, tape two.

COFFMAN: If someone is considering something that might have happened in civilian life, say the Depression, that makes a great impact on you, but it is not as tightly focussed, and the challenge is not as intense, although people are going hungry, there were all sorts of problems, I think as a wartime type deal. More than likely whatever happened to them was, they were trying to kill you. One of the problems about this, I'll tell you a story that I think basically makes the point. I attended a conference a couple of years ago, that was essentially a Sociology conference. And they were discussing the Military and Sociology. In the course of a full day, no one mentioned combat. [Whispering] And there was this British officer there from the Irish Guards, 65:00who's writing a manual for the British Army. And he got up and said, in the final analysis, the Military is about fighting, killing, and dying. There is not that much in civilian life that is that intense, you know. Perhaps the closest you can come to it, and that's perhaps one reason why this intense fascination with hospital soap operas on T.V., you know, in an emergency room or something like that. But these people are dealing with this, some of them deal with it very well. I mean I've talked to a lot of soldiers. I like soldiers. I've talked to a lot of them over a long time. And some of them are very effective at it. Some of them like it. It doesn't....others, you know I've talked to some that it bothered, but most of them, that's the way it was, it was either 66:00him or me. But I think things in civilian life, going to college, everyone has their memories of college, but I don't think they are as intense as this.

HARRIS: It's a....

COFFMAN: It's a very human experience. I think many people just try to deny it. Today in colleges, for example, they're are eliminating Military histories as if it doesn't exist. Look at the books that sell though, the popular books, Ambrose's book, Keegan's books, all that. Military history is probably, if not the most popular, history genre, but it is certainly one of them.

HARRIS: One thing is, not only because it is so intense, and so near the edge of life and death. I think it's such a constant in history. 67:00It is not just an aberration that occurs every so often. It's a...you know.

COFFMAN: Well we've been very fortunate, and we tend to forget things, but ( ) made a marvelous comment in one of his books about Colonial America. And he said, the thing you have to remember that on the frontier, you lived on the battlefield. Now those people were acutely aware of that. But then within a generation or so, the children, they hadn't known that, their grandchildren, they hadn't known that. But actually, in the days of the active Indian wars, a lot was going on and you were living in a hostile environment all the time.

HARRIS: That's sort of, it's easy to see in the frontier environment, 68:00how the war would, how a war would affect every institution, every value and every part of society. But it's not so easy to see in later centuries, when the military experience and the civilian role are not so closely intermixed.

COFFMAN: That's right. Because, for example, presumably a guy would be out there living in a little cabin, in the middle of nowhere. If he didn't know how to shoot and he wasn't armed...now even though people are armed to the teeth, there really isn't that much reason as that, you know you wouldn't think. Of course, the other side of the ( ) I was reading something this morning. Increasingly opinion makers, leaders and all that, have had no military experience, so many of these people are making all sorts of comments, what the Military should do, what it should be like and all that, but they don't have any personal experience 69:00with it.

HARRIS: Yeah.

COFFMAN: That's a tricky business.

HARRIS: It's a dangerous situation, when decision makers have, are so far removed from the experience, ( ) like McNamara and his kids.

COFFMAN: Exactly.

HARRIS: Speaking of McNamara, when War to End All Wars came out, the Viet Nam War was raging.

COFFMAN: Yes.

HARRIS: And you were at Wisconsin, which just two years later became the scene of a deadly confrontation between anti-war protest, anti-war protest and the war. Wisconsin was not a pro-war 70:00environment to put it mildly.

COFFMAN: Yeah.

HARRIS: How did that effect you personally, or as a historian?

COFFMAN: Well, actually, during the war period, during the sixties, my classes, I probably had more people in American Military, I did have more people taking American Military History, which was a one semester course, and I taught it both semesters for a year, than I had later. Because people, some people were interested in it. And I really didn't have...when there were problems on campus, at no time was I ever singled out for protest 71:00or disruption or anything like this. My class was disrupted a couple of times, but that was just as an ancillary thing. I was in a building that was closed down, and they cut off electricity. And I was in this room without windows, that was scary, two hundred people or so, and one of the protesters just strolled through and went out the door. But I was never singled out. Neither I nor the Diplomatic historians. One of the curious things about the protest, I've thought about that a lot, the first person whose class was disrupted in the History department. And the History department was sort of the core of the radical movement, the History and the English. The first person disrupted was the most radical guy in the History department, Artie Goldburg, he was the first guy who's class was disrupted. And of course you begin 72:00to get into these things of slices of various extremes of radicalism, you know. No, it was a chancy thing, you didn't know what to expect anytime you went to campus. But I would have to say I was never singled out for any of that.

HARRIS: The seventies were a particularly, I was in Graduate School during that time.

COFFMAN: Where were you?

HARRIS: Western. This won't be in the interview, won't be printed, but I went, undergraduate at Western and then I started, I was in Doctorate studies at Emory. And then ( ), so I had to 73:00resign and...

COFFMAN: go back to Western.

HARRIS: I finished Grad School at Western.

COFFMAN: I know Dick Traveler.

HARRIS: Oh yeah?

COFFMAN: We were in Graduate School together.

HARRIS: He was one of Clark's students too.

COFFMAN: Uh huh.

HARRIS: Anyway, what I was saying was, right at that time, the new Social History was very fashionable.

COFFMAN: Still is.

HARRIS: Well, yeah. And a lot of the devotees had some considerable skepticism, you might even say disdain for anything Military History.

COFFMAN: Sure.

HARRIS: And you know, they considered it an aberration, you know, that it was just four years out of a century, why bother with it. Did you encounter that kind of an attitude? 74:00COFFMAN: Oh sure, sure. Not to my face as a rule, but it was clear most people. I do think, certainly the historians of the sixties, the people of that era were much more tolerant than the new groups of political correctioness and the new Social History, everything is new Social History now, you know. I mean, they're trying to weed out Diplomatic and Political history as well as Military, even though....I did a lot of Social history in this book.

HARRIS: Uh hmm.

COFFMAN: And of course, I'm doing Social History in my book on the Army, but uh....I'll tell you an incident that this mindset. I once told 75:00one of my radical friends, that a friend of mine said he belonged to more minorities than anyone he knew. He was a Jew, he was Episcopalian, he was a Southerner and he was a professional ( ), a professional Military officer. Well, my radical friend that I was telling that to, would only accept one of those as a minority. If you were a Jew, a Jew was a recognized minority. Episcopalians are not a minority, officially, under political correctness, Southerners are a minority, and the Military, the Military officers are. In fact sometimes jokingly, I would say, we were supposed to have, each student was supposed to take at least one course in minority studies. I'd say you all are in Military History, the Military is a minority. It is much maligned and attacked and all of that minority...but that doesn't count 76:00in the world of political correctness.

HARRIS: So this attitude was always there, did they...

COFFMAN: Oh sure, and even in older academics they tended to look down on Military History, or many of them did, but I certainly found those people very supportive. At least when I went to Madison, the famous historians, Curty(*), whom I kept up with, corresponded with, would visit. He lived to be ninety-seven, and someone I consider to be a close friend. He was a great man. Jensen, Jensen, who never talked about the war in his American Revolution class, was a very close supporter and friend. Tasseltide(*), whose studies of the Civil War, was political, was a very good friend. These men were pretty much....and 77:00Tasseltide(*) of course, is Ambrose's mentor.

HARRIS: You knew Ambrose?

COFFMAN: I was on his Doctoral committee. I was a ( ) on his doctoral committee.

HARRIS: There were quite a few celebrities at Wisconsin in those years.

COFFMAN: Williams, Williams was very supportive, William Macklvey Williams. Williams, of course had a Military background, his father was Air Force, an Air Service pilot. He was killed. He got an appointment to Annapolis, as son of a deceased veteran. And then he graduates from the Naval Academy. He would always say that the Naval Academy was the best possible training for an historian, because it gave you a scientific/engineering point of view. Williams was very helpful, you know ( ) on the Siberian ( ). I consider him...these people were very...I admired them. And 78:00they certainly did everything to help me.

HARRIS: That's interesting because I got into a lot of, at the other end, Skinkle, as a graduate student I got into a lot of intense discussions, you might call them arguments with other graduate students, who were Social History advocates. I call them automatons. [Laughing] COFFMAN: Well, when I was here for example, I never had a course in Military History in my life. But I was always interested in the Military. And I would write my term papers, like in Mert England's course in Social and Cultural History, my term paper was on Garrison life in America, in the Indian War period. It became my first published article. And of course, I did my 79:00dissertation in Frontier history. My paper was on the First American Regiment in the seventeen eighties, that came out of the Northwest Territory using the trade route. My dissertation was on a man that I'm pretty sure probably no one in the History department every heard of ( ) Zumark(*). And the other graduate students, they thought it was sort of nutty to do that, you know, because most of them were doing political stuff. For one reason the collections were here, over at the U.K. Library, so it was at hand. If you got in the Military, now Weinberg was on the Faculty, and Weinberg had worked in the archives. He gave me advice about that, but uh....and certainly Doctor Clark was certainly very, you know he was glad 80:00to have me working on that. But there wasn't that much Military history around in schools.

HARRIS: You mean in the fifties? What was it something like four percent of American Universities and colleges offer Military history courses?

COFFMAN: I forgot, I looked up those figures for an article. But I was really struck by that, that actually it wasn't until the sixties that it started booming, really or started picking up a lot.

HARRIS: Yeah it's a....the sixties through the nineties, were really sort of the flowering of Military history.

COFFMAN: Yes.

HARRIS: Which is...

COFFMAN: Well, the thing about it is, the Military, certainly the Army, a lot of people had really been imbued with this. For example, the man who commands 81:00American troops in Europe, has a Ph.D. in American History from the University of Wisconsin.

HARRIS: What's his name?

COFFMAN: Montgomery C. Miggs.

HARRIS: Miggs.

COFFMAN: Four star general, US( ) Commander. He's not the NATO Commander. He's the Commander of the United States Army in Europe. But the man who commands the Boston Military District, if you watched the Memorial Day Ceremonies where Clinton put the flowers on...this guy who's that much taller than he is was standing next to him. Major General Bob Ivany, Ph.D. in European History from Wisconsin.

HARRIS: What was the name again?

COFFMAN: Ivany, I V A N Y. So a lot of these guys are scattered around. Bob's even published a book, ( ) a scholar. He had a contract for another one he had to give up, because he was one of, the biggest heroes in Desert Storm War. His Brigade was literally annihilated. His Brigade was the only one to meet 82:00an Iraqi Brigade head on, one on one. And they just annihilated them.

HARRIS: I've read quite a lot ( ) about it. I'm very impressed with the scholarly levels of the Military. Their schools are topnotch and their, so many of the officer corps have advanced degrees in History and goodness only knows what field. It's the kind of military I don't think the world has seen.

COFFMAN: No, and they are not really aware of it, that's true.

HARRIS: Anyway, to get back....lost 83:00my place. I was talking about the military scholarly establishment, which is world class. They had a long history to build up to that level, a long history of institutional achievement. One of the hallmarks of that historical development was the Green series.

COFFMAN: That's right.

HARRIS: It uh, the work I've done on the Green series, is, you know, the course is seventy some odd volumes. They are not uniform, but 84:00you know, their objectivity and attention to detail, and meticulous research, never fails to impress me. What I have never fully understood is, how it happened. I mean how did the generals and the scholars who were involved, how did they pull this off and avoid so much of the apology, and just simple celebratory writing that many official histories fall into?

COFFMAN: Well, one of the things....Eisenhower was a key player in this, because Eisenhower was Chief of Staff right after the war. Now the History Program started during the war, of course. Well, they had always had a History committee, but during the war itself they brought in various scholars, all that. They were working on it, while the war was going on. But after the war, Eisenhower, as Chief of Staff, 85:00said I want this, I want this story told and I want it told as objectively as possible. He was Chief of Staff for a year or two, right after Marshall. So that was probably the genesis of really getting this in the way it came. The other thing is, as Military historians and as generals go, you could learn as much, if not more, from failure, than you can from success. So you ought not to gild the lily, you should really tell what happened, because otherwise someone is going to come along and they'll read it, and - from the Military standpoint, one of the things about the Military interest in history, is lessons learned. What can we learn from this? Now historians tend to pooh-pooh that and they tend to, well things are so complex and ambiguous, how can you learn. Yet the Military is convinced that you can learn. And actually the way that they develop it, 86:00they've got a very good point. Like if you are a Second Lieutenant and you are studying Tactics of a Platoon or a Company, there are certain set things that you should know and should do. You should be ingrained, trained in doing that. Well, what has happened in past actions ( ) study these closely. Marshall, for example, oversaw the publishing of the Infantry In Battle, where they took small unit actions in World War One, and studied them in great detail. And showed if you are in this sort of situation, this is the solution. As you go up the level, now I've been impressed with this, at the Army War College what you deal with is the ambiguities of the plan, how complex it is, and how all the various factors play into it. And the Army is very cognizant of this. So, going back to the Green Series as such, they had very strong backing. 87:00They had very good people. The Green Series is really a monument to history. The Air Force and the Navy handle it differently. They have their, the Air Force even though it was part of the Army, had its history people too. And then after the war, they had these two civilian historians, Craven and Kate, one was a European historian, the other was a Colonial historian. And they put together this collection. And the Air Force history is only five volumes, and it has chapters by various people. Al Goldberg, one of the primary writers, he's currently, he's in his seventies, but he's currently the Historian of the Department of Defense. He's still active. The Navy, of course, had various people write things. And then ( ) Morris, the Harvard guy, they put him in overall charge, and then he brought it under his rubric in May. 88:00And they had fifteen volumes. But they don't match what the Army did in great detail, not just in the study of campaigns, but in the logistics and the special branches and all of that.

HARRIS: It seemed like one of the, to me, it seemed to me like one of the things that helped the Green Series was the use of civilian scholars.

COFFMAN: Yes. Yes, that's true, that's true. They really had some very good people, Forrest Pough(*), you know, did one of the, he did the one on ( ) commands. Mark Watson, who was a newspaper man, actually did the thing on the Chief of Staff. And let's see, very distinguished ( ) did the one on the Operations Division, which is very good. Aside 89:00from the various campaigns, well they had very good people.

HARRIS: Some of some later academic stars got their start in the Green Series.

COFFMAN: Lou Morning(*).

HARRIS: Bill Wiley.

COFFMAN: Yeah, Bill Wiley. Bill probably did the bulk of that while he was in the early war. He was in the early, he was a historian ( ) a bit later. And then later, of course had a very distinguished career. Some of them like Charlie McDonald, ( ) stayed with the government for a long time and then retired and started writing popularly.

HARRIS: Yeah, it holds on.

COFFMAN: Yes it does.

HARRIS: Some of the volumes were, are now approaching forty years old.

COFFMAN: That's right.

HARRIS: And they're, like you say, it's just the facts.

COFFMAN: That's right. And they were supposed to be 90:00in part, it would be stretching it to say a guide, but they were also supposed to illustrate what's available to the records, you know so they won't ( ) all those things. Well, actually there is a report from the Three Hundred and Eighty-Fourth Infantry Regiment, you know that will really go with the ( ).

HARRIS: Yeah, I admire those footnotes, they're a marvelous guide, or at least a starting point.

COFFMAN: Yeah.

HARRIS: And knowing all that, you know, when I look at them on the shelf, I still marvel that it came off, I mean Europeans haven't approached it.

COFFMAN: No, the closest thing is the Germans, and the Brits to a certain extent had sort of a General Staff History, they did. 91:00And that was more narrowly focussed, but it certainly was, I mean it was discussing the campaigns. Of course, the one thing that was very much on people's minds, when they inaugurated this series, was they thought the British had blown it in World War One. Because the British overall official history of the war really does whitewash a great many of the generals and all of that. And they were very conscious of that. And they didn't want to have something that would be considered, you know, just a whitewash.

HARRIS: Well it certainly, it certainly is not that. You mentioned Forrest Pough(*), I know you knew him personally, but a lot of our readers probably are not that aware of him. 92:00Could you describe his enormous contribution, briefly?

COFFMAN: Yes, Forrest, who was born and grew up around L ( ) county, around Eddyville. Forrest was a whiz, I think he graduated, he was around seventeen or eighteen when he graduated from college. And then I think he got his Master's by the time he was twenty or so, at U.K.. Then he got ( ) on school. He got a degree, spent time in France, got a degree from Clark, in as I recall, sort of European Diplomatic history or something like that. He was teaching at Murrary, and the war came along and he was drafted. Well, Forrest was, he was thirty, two or three years old. And he got picked up by Bill Wiley and he worked with Bill. Forrest was a soldier. 93:00Then he got involved, was sent over as part of the interview teams that they developed to go out and talk to men about combat. His first interviews are transports off Omaha, is a regular ( ). He interviewed Charlie Roland at one point. Then he came back, but they kept him for a while, to, well actually they discharged him and kept him on to start working up the Supreme Command. And he eventually wrote that book on the Supreme Command, which was great. It was one of the earliest volumes. He was the first one, he set the pace for using interviews. It was a pioneering work in oral history, because up to that point, people didn't talk about oral history as a source. They would cite it. But he pointedly lists the people that he interviewed in 94:00the bibliography to that book. Then he was picked to write the official biography, the authorized biography of General Marshall. And he interviewed him extensively and went around interviewing a bunch of people associated with Marshall. So Forrest Pough(*) really was the great pioneer in World War Two history and did the monumental works in the Marshall book and in the, his book in the Green Series. In fact, I used to tell students, if you want to find out about World War Two, read the books on Marshall and those two books on the war. Because Marshall was right there, right at the top, so he is telling you what went on. And Pough(*) in there will stop there and talk and analyze the Pearl Harbor controversy. And he will deal, you'll get a view from the catbird seat of what's going 95:00on in the entire war. He was an indefatigable researcher. He uh....

END OF TAPE TWO, EDWARD M. COFFMAN, SIDE A BEGINNING OF TAPE TWO, EDWARD M. COFFMAN, SIDE B COFFMAN: ...passing the time of day with people like General Bradley, who he knew very well. He was a marvelous historian, one of the most congenial, collegial, helpful people. When I worked with him, I was going out doing research. But then once a month or so I would go over and give him a report, and we would sit and talk for three or four hours. The conversations would range all over the globe. I did keep notes on one conversation I had with him. In this paper I mentioned, I referred to it. I just jotted down when we talked about ( ) of things. He was that way. I saw him just a few months before he died. Forrest was almost 96:00blind, but in his manner, very friendly, he was just a great guy. He used to send students up and really it was like a seminar. They would just go in and talk to him. He was always very receptive toward people, very friendly with them. Great historian, great man.

HARRIS: He was indeed. You saw that short piece I did on, essentially...

COFFMAN: Yes, right, right.

HARRIS: on him.

COFFMAN: You'd met him and spent some time with him.

HARRIS: When I made the call, he was at the Smithsonian, at that time. He had this office number, so I called it, just hoping to set up a later interview, and he answered the phone. 97:00[Laughing] I didn't know it was the number to his desk, but anyway. I said, yada, yada, Doctor Pough(*), and he said, "Well, this is Pough(*). What do you want to know?" [Laughter] And so we had a long and very friendly conversation. He didn't know me from Adam to a fox.

COFFMAN: He was so open to that, and that was a marvelous setup there. When he was over there, I'm sure in part that was a great setup where he was available if people, like you, just wanted, you could go and talk to him. Because his office over in....he lived, he had an apartment and then he had an office that was separate, a different apartment over in Riverhouse. And then, my goodness that office, it was a good size apartment, I'd say one room 98:00was probably about half the size of this room, and then there was a bedroom and bath and all that. It was just filled with books, filled with books, stacked up....Forrest had a desk next to the window, and there was a chair and a desk and that was about it, the rest was all books. That was his office.

HARRIS: He was a remarkable man.

COFFMAN: Yes he was.

HARRIS: You said you were one of his research associates? Anyway. Could you describe your work?

COFFMAN: Yes.

HARRIS: Who you interviewed?

COFFMAN: Yes. What I did for him, he was working on the first volume of the Marshall book. Marshall had been dead a couple of years or so, this was sixty, sixty-one. And my job was to go in the archives and look up everything on Marshall in the records, except 99:00for World War One. Marshall was involved with the CCC. He had two other people, one was a man named Miles Market, who worked in the National Archives and was with the Army ( ). Miles would come over for an hour or two and look through World War One stuff. And I was usually in there and Miles and I would discuss this. Miles would tell me what he was doing. But Miles was the one going through the World War One records. And Mrs. Pratt, who had been, her advice as research assistant, was a diplomatic expert, but, and she was working on the State Department period. But she worked on CCC. And I was working in the same area with her, so I would talk to her. I would sort of supervise that. But I simply would look up everything about him in the old Army. And then occasionally there was something, if something would come up, I would go 100:00and he wanted me to check out something in the Library of Congress or one of Marshall's Kentucky ancestors who lived up around Washington and Mason county. And then I had a period where I was having trouble with my eyes, about a week. I don't know what was wrong with them, but anyway, I just couldn't read, itching and all that. So he said, well why don't you go out and interview, so he gave me a list of people to go and interview. So I interviewed a guy, who had been his driver. I interviewed a man, an officer, who had been with him in the Eighth Infantry at Fort ( ). I interviewed two or three other people. I didn't interview four people only. I followed and went with him down in Seattle, down in Vancouver barracks, we got a Brigade, and this fellow had been an officer. I think I talked to another person, I’ve forgotten who it was. But it was a great experience.

HARRIS: Did you interview any generals? 101:00COFFMAN: Yes, I did. I had forgotten about that. I interviewed, I was the other person, a couple of generals who had known him at Fort Benning. One of them was named Hyatt(*), I've forgotten the other one, but I interviewed him. I was doing other work on my own at the time. And I interviewed a lot of people for my work. I interviewed a lot of generals. I interviewed MacArthur, he and I are only, as far as I know, the only two scholars who really ever interviewed MacArthur. Sander A. Marxson(*) met MacArthur once, but I don't know if he really interviewed him. But Forrest and I both interviewed him in December of sixty.

HARRIS: Sixty? What was that like?

COFFMAN: That was very interesting. 102:00When I interviewed him, I went up, he had an apartment in the Waldorf-Astoria Towers, and it stretched from one side of the tower to the other. And Mrs. MacArthur met me at the door and she was leaving, and he and I were the only people there. We were in this huge apartment, the two of us. And he answered all my questions. He was very forthcoming. He was a great person to talk to, because I have, and I'm sure you have too, talked with people or interviewed them, and you ask them a question and they answer with yes [Laughter] or no. MacArthur would elaborate, he'd tell you a story for three or four ( ), so it was great. I finally ran out of questions. I mean I asked him all my questions and he was very forthcoming, so it was a very interesting interview.

HARRIS: What was it, was this in connection with? 103:00COFFMAN: March.

HARRIS: March?

COFFMAN: N. C. March.

HARRIS: He had...

COFFMAN: He had known March and been associated with him really. March had been his father's Aide. And so he had heard of him at West Point.

HARRIS: Did they have any contact during World War One?

COFFMAN: No, because he was in France about that, I talked to him I believe about France. Talked to him about Pershing and ( ) and how they argued ( ) and all that, which he certainly knew. Let's see he didn't talk, he didn't answer my question on the Army Reorganization. And that was sort of odd, because I wanted to get his views on that, but he responded that I had nothing to do with that. He's right, he didn't have anything to do with it, but I was trying to get his views on it. And he talked very freely about 104:00individuals, Billy Mitchell, Drum, Pershing.

HARRIS: Did the famous MacArthur ego come into play?

COFFMAN: Not really. He told me something, but I'm surprised I haven't told you about that, it's in a book that I'm now writing. As far as I know, no one ever has come across the fact that he thought about resigning. He was telling me he thought about resigning. And I said to him, well General that would have been a great loss. MacArthur looked at me and said, "Maybe." [Laughter] It was interesting because MacArthur at this time was eighty, not sure he was eighty on his birthday. And he was still, I'd say if you walked in the room, you would think here was a man maybe in his sixties or so, very hale, very fit. 105:00His hair was still dark. He was bald, but he always combed over. He was shorter than I am, that was a shock. But he was very, you know, obviously a fit person. But his voice had gotten hoarse, just like mine over the years. And so instead of hearing that voice, that I heard so often over the radio or newsreels, it was about like mine is now. And occasionally it would come out, you've heard that record or tape of his speech he made a couple of years later at West Point, very hoarse. He was a great person to interview.

HARRIS: That's interesting. This was in nineteen sixty?

COFFMAN: Sixty.

HARRIS: That was...

COFFMAN: I did interview, 106:00this was sort of in connection with Pough's work, but also mine. Pough asked me to just do a project on the Army Reorganization. So that fit in very much, because I have a chapter or two on that in my book on March. That's actually more crucial in my study on March than it was to his. But I just spent about a month on ( ). I read all of the House hearings on that, or Senate hearings. I went through the papers on that. And then I went around and talked to some of the soldiers involved, including Richard D. Floyd(*), who is really one of the great unknown people. Have you ever heard of Benjamin D. Floyd(*)?

HARRIS: I've heard of him.

COFFMAN: He's the father of the Air Force.

HARRIS: Yeah.

COFFMAN: And I went out and spent an hour with him. He flew in the first, he and a man named ( ), were the officers who flew test flights with the 107:00Wrights at Fort Myer, when the Army bought it's first plane. He commanded the first aero squadron. He was the first commander of an air unit. He commanded the air flights for a while. Then finally he and Mitchell had their rounds. When the war was over, he was a general in August nineteen seventeen. Mitchell became a general in October nineteen eighteen, yet Mitchell was retained in his rank. Floyd(*) was reduced to a Captain or a Major, but then later Floyd(*) became ( ) rank. But I interviewed Floyd(*).

HARRIS: Was he, did he give you details?

COFFMAN: Oh yes, he had great memories of things. Floyd was a very remarkable man. He started out life as a plumber's apprentice. He had an eighth grade education. He was working as a plumber. The Spanish-American War came along, he enlisted, served with the volunteers, 108:00then he enlisted in the regular Army. He was commissioned from the ranks, but he saw a lot of combat in the Philippines. Still had his old Hawk ( ) pistol with notches in it, for those killed. In fact I asked him, how in the world did you fly that plane, you know get up in one those, oversized kites? And he said, he took out the pistol and said after the Phillipines, that was all downhill. He fell out of the plane once. You know for a while he was the only pilot. He hadn't really learned how to fly yet. And he would actually correspond with Orville Wright back and forth. He had the plane down in Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio, one Army plane, one pilot and four or five enlisted men. Corporal, what was his name, became the first Army enlisted pilot. There were two or three 109:00other soldiers, and a civilian mechanic named Oswald Simmons. In fact, I have an autographed picture of the Army Air Force and he’s the pilot and the plane. That was it. And then he organized and commanded the first Aero squadron that went down to Mexico with Pershing. Really fascinating. And ( ) HARRIS: It was like discovering a gold mine for you.

COFFMAN: Oh yeah.

HARRIS: When you interview someone like that.

COFFMAN: That was great. I spent an hour with him. He was living at the Bachelor Officers Quarters at Edwards Air Force Base. Later, Colonel Bl( ), who's written several very good things on the Air Force. He was one of them. Dolittle Raiders got to him and did a lengthy memoir based on talking to him and everything. It's very good, 110:00it came out around sixty-three or four, I guess, maybe it was sixty-five.

HARRIS: Nineteen sixty-one was when Walter Ellis's(*) famous pamphlet for the AHA Service Center for teachers came out.

COFFMAN: Yes.

HARRIS: Later, when I eventually read it, that threw me for a loop, when he said in a Nuclear Age, Military History has largely lost its function.

COFFMAN: Yes.

HARRIS: Did....I'm sure you read it long before I did. What was your reaction to that statement?

COFFMAN: I'm a great admirer of Walter ( ). I never met him, I saw him at a Organization of Military Historians 111:00meeting. It was a crowd of about one hundred and fifty people. I thought his ( ) was the single most brilliant book on American Military History. I used that every semester I taught Military History, because it set up the concepts you could really play off in your lectures and citing the other thing to fit in. On the other hand, I think what he did, and that's very much in keeping, you talk about reflecting, this was the problem with the whole McNamara approach to Military History. These guys and the Military, the civilian Military thinktank assumed that the Nuclear Age was entirely different, therefore that past military experience had no relevance, is one reason why we got into such a debacle in Viet Nam. Because they thought 112:00the parameters had changed, everything had changed. And of course, I hear talk about that, I remember talking to someone the other day about war in cyberspace and all that. It will never be the same. Somewhere, somehow, there is still going to be some soldiers there with rifles with bayonets on them, because that's, in the face off, that's where it is going to happen. Now people might be zapping each other at speeds beyond the sound of aircraft, but there still has to be a zappee and a zapper, you know. And you have to have, sooner or later, be outside of a laboratory, somebody's going to have to faceoff. And this is the thing people overlook. For example, how many times have nuclear weapons been used since nineteen forty-five? Zippo. And how have those wars been fought? In many respects, if our people going into Viet Nam, had studied closely 113:00the Philippine Insurrection, now known as the Phillipine American War, they could have learned a whale of a lot about Guerilla war, how it is fought and all that. I had the experience of talking to some of the guys who had been in the Phillipine Insurrection and the Viet Nam War, oh yes they're much like ( ). They're making big mistakes. But of course, those people were completely oblivious.

HARRIS: For a digression, somewhere I noticed that, in my research for this, that during the Viet Nam War itself, Army historians were ordered to analyze Viet Nam operations for lessons learned or basically just how does this apply 114:00to tactics, how does this apply to the strategy we've already adopted? Was that, was that the nadir of the Army's use of military history? It seemed like to me that it was. They were totally misusing it.

COFFMAN: Yes, in this respect. Several of the things, when I was working on that article, I was struck by the fact that they stopped teaching Military history. They used to concentrate on that, it was a large part of their course, certainly at the War College, or had been back then at the War College. They spent easily twelve, thirteen, fourteen percent of the course was Military History, Civil War, specifically, prior to World War One. And they were still 115:00going on staff runs. They were really studying closely a lot of Civil War Battles up until nineteen forty at the Army War College. In fact, they stopped one of the staff write ups of that day, because they thought it would be bad publicity, if we found out that our lead soldiers were studying the Civil War in the middle of the Blitzkrieg. Maxwell D. Taylor was a student at that time, and in his memoirs he says, I though that was stupid then, and then looking back on it twenty-five years later, I still think that was pretty stupid. But you can see, some people argue or say, that the reason they did, they just assumed well we won the biggest war in history, we won it, we were wherever they were, so we'll just forget about history. We'd only think of World War Two. And we were in World War Two, so we already know it, 116:00why bother. Well that's one, another approach, with nuclear weapons things have changed so much, that history has no relevance. So in effect that puts us in the area of abstraction, which is basically Political Science with this area of abstraction, none of this has any relevance, Past has no relevance. So, in that respect, it wasn't there. At the same time, guys on the ground, you know, Westmoreland for example, has been greatly criticized. When Westmoreland got out of Viet Nam, one of the first things he did was start pushing for Military History and study it. The Military History Institute up at Carlisle Barracks, it's now their repository, the Army Repository for private papers and ( ) a lot of stuff as well. That's a key Army Research Center, really got going in that period. And then later, 117:00I'm not that up, but the Army did a study, lessons learned and war problems, and all that. And then certainly in the last fifteen, twenty, thirty years, they pay a lot more attention to history. The History at West Point is a very strong department. It is a very good department. Twenty years ago they set up the Cavet Studies Institute, which is the History department of the Command and General Staff College. When I was there, and hopefully it is still that way, that was the one course that every student at the Command and General Staff College took. ( ) every week ( ) at the Command and General Staff College. It was a full year course. Other things would be four or five weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, but he took Military History every week he was there. But the War College, 118:00they are very strong in Military History.

HARRIS: Maybe Westmoreland did learn something from Viet Nam.

COFFMAN: Yes, yes.

HARRIS: Back to Millis(*) for a second, in addition to what he said about Military History having lost its function in the Nuclear Age, his other, his corollary was that historians should turn from the study of war to, study of a war, to the study of war itself.

COFFMAN: Uh huh, which is a good point.

HARRIS: What's your evaluation of that?

COFFMAN: That's a good point, except that could sort of get up into the area of LaLa Land. I noticed when I tried to go around talking to a lot of people. When I started asking some old generals who, these guys are not, they are very sharp men. And when I would ask them abstract questions, 119:00it was just out the window. They were just floored, what's that got to do with anything? Or they would come in with a very stock answer that didn't really...

HARRIS: What sort of abstract question?

COFFMAN: Uh, I can't even remember a good one, maybe the impact of the spirit of American military tradition or something like that. Well, how do you answer something like that? You know. It was a dumb question. So I just started asking nuts and bolts questions. But I think, it is an interesting comment. It certainly is a comment on Military History in academies, that the person picked to write the essay for the American Historical Association, is a journalist. ( 120:00) And he didn't come from that background. I've read those books he wrote, the Spanish-American War History, which is a nice history as far as it goes. He did the book on the road to war, but he was essentially a journalist all that time. Now what he did, I'll admit, his conceptions were brilliant, the way he divided up all those things. But it sort of raveled out at the end. And you can see throughout, here's a guy, perhaps that's maybe one reason why he didn't make sure a degree of things. In so many of these things, there wasn't a lot written, a lot of that. At the time I came along, I was struck by the fact there were probably, there was virtually nothing scholarly done on World War One. Virtually nothing. There had been tons of stuff on the Civil War. It was really a very good history as far as it went, but it was, 121:00you know, limited to the Civil War. There's virtually nothing on the Spanish-American War, absolutely nothing except one book by an army officer, Sexton on the Phillipine Insurrection, the Phillipine-American War.

HARRIS: Yeah, I've gotten interested in that recently. It's slim pickings.

COFFMAN: Bradley has a new book coming out on it. Bradley's the best author on it. I've enormous respect for him. He did that book, that case studies, you talk about ( ) and stuff, case studies, how the, which would have been something, if ( ) people learned from it a great deal. About how in different areas in the Phillipines, different methods were, because the areas were different, the locales were different, what was going on during the Insurrection 122:00was different. That's, that's, I didn't know that, until I read the book. Because they hadn't done that much ( ). I remember when I was in the archives, when I worked for Pough(*), I spent years researching in the archives. And I've been there before doing research on my own. I lived there for a year, when I was working on Marshall, he'd been over there for the last stages of the Insurrection. And I wanted to see some Insurrection material. They ushered me into a room, a small room, and it was filled floor to ceiling, with such a stack, not in filing cabinets, but just stacked with a rough type twine around it all. And I got messages from Caliban, this little place where Marshall was as an officer. And they finally dug those out. Nobody had ever put the facts together. Nobody had ever used them. And then along came 123:00Lynn, and Lynn really started working his way through it. He did that book on ( ). It was fascinating. He's got this new book coming out on the Insurrection, should be coming out sometime this year. He's finished it.

HARRIS: I'll have to read that when it comes out.

COFFMAN: He's at the War College this year teaching.

HARRIS: Oh, okay. Millis(*) might have been a little too gassy in what he advocated, but there's something to be said for seeing war and anything connected with it in the broadest possible terms.

COFFMAN: Yes.

HARRIS: And the inter-relationships 124:00between the culture and the military operations.

COFFMAN: Yes. And Politics.

HARRIS: Yeah.

COFFMAN: And economics, which is what he does. ( ) HARRIS: It seems like The Old Army, your book, is a good example of that too. Could you explain a little bit for the readers what your objective in that book was?

COFFMAN: My objective was to really provide a portrait of the old Army, not just as Goneau, Spalding and most recently, Whitely had done. This is institutional history of the Army, which is certainly needed, and you absolutely have to have. But I was supplementing that 125:00by pointing out, these are the people of the Army, these are the officers, these are the soldiers, these are the wives, these are the little kids. This is the Army they knew. Why were they in the Army? Why did they choose that as a career? What did they actually do, day to day? What was it like on an Army Post? What were they doing all those years between posts? And I ran across several surprising things. The first thing that I ran across that really did surprise me is that actually, as far as American History is concerned, if indeed war is considered at all, you consider the wars, you forget about the peacetime Military, generally it is completely forgotten. Yet, when I did that study, it struck me, that at any given time from the end of the Revolutionary War into the nineteen twenties, 126:00there were some American soldiers in a hostile environment, that they were actually fighting somebody. They were in a hostile environment. Beginning with the Indian Wars, which were brought up to, actually the last Indian War, at the age I'm talking about, with this book that I'm currently working on, the last actual fight took place in the Fall of eighteen ninety-eight, where people were killed, not at Wounded Knee. That took place several years later. And then there were the Mexican Border peasants, there were the Philippines. They were fighting Moros(*). Pershing went in and fought Moros(*) in nineteen thirteen. Then they were fighting the Mexicans along the Mexican border. I interviewed a man, who is still living, who participated, I interviewed two, who participated in a mounted cavalry charge in nineteen nineteen. ( ) Seventh Cavalry, across the border. Then after the war, there were combat 127:00patrols along the border.

END OF TAPE TWO, EDWARD M. COFFMAN COFFMAN: For example, when you are dealing with the Army on the frontier. The Army is out there pioneering. This is what Paul Fruka(*) did in War Acts and Bayonet he got across the critical role that the Army played in the Frontier, in the lives they lead. They're farming, they're living off the land, their people are experiencing the pioneer/frontier experience, so you get that in that early period.

HARRIS: The old Army is one of several old armies that you...

COFFMAN: That's right.

HARRIS: That you explore. The old Army I guess, which is the peacetime Army just before...

COFFMAN: The last war. 128:00HARRIS: Whatever war you are talking about.

COFFMAN: That's right.

HARRIS: The uh, you covered an enormous span of years in that book.

COFFMAN: Seventeen eighty-four to eighteen ninety-eight.

HARRIS: From farmer really up to Nelson Riles(*).

COFFMAN: That's right.

HARRIS: So you're, that pamphlet you showed me, you sent me, discussed some of the research problems you had.

COFFMAN: Yes.

HARRIS: In covering such a large span of years. Could you talk about some of those problems and some of the good things that you discovered looking at things longitudinally?

COFFMAN: Yes, one of the things that really strikes you, is that the earlier period, the Antebellum period, prior to the Civil War, you are dealing with relatively small collections of private papers 129:00and that sort, even government documents are small compared to what they would become later. As John K. Mann, who's done some great work in the early Army period, prior to the Civil War, as Mann pointed out in his book on the War of 1812 before the Seminole Wars, you could literally look at ever piece of paper available on the Seminole Wars if you wanted to. You can't do that on the Civil War, you can't do that once you get more modern. So you can have these finite sets of papers, where people really did write good letters to each other and talk about a lot of things. As you get into the other period, you begin to run into these vast sources, literally hundreds of boxes of material, that you just have to go in and try to find. There's an old story, I don't know if it is true or not, but for example, the Army filing system, they had their decimal system, numbers. Supposedly one group was told to destroy all the key documents, 130:00the key policy documents, and let us say the key policy documents had the numbers, I don't remember exactly, let's say one to five. Well, whoever was destroying them forgot and destroyed everything but the numbers ninety-five to a hundred. So, a lot of stuff is missing. To my knowledge there are no papers from Fort Benning ( ), no records, except whatever got into very top records, base records. Now there are good records from Camp Morfa(*), Texas.

HARRIS: Camp what?

COFFMAN: Camp Morfa(*), Texas. But they're not from Fort Benning. There's dealings, real estate dealings, and then there's the standard, the Morning reports and all of that, but for some of them, that's just disappeared. And a lot of that is happening, they're just thrown away, there's too much. So it's a, in that talk I gave, I made the difference, 131:00doing research in that early period as compared to the modern, sort of like the difference, eluding it to a rare book dealer and also dealing with the supermarket of books at Walden's or Borders or something like that. You still can find a lot of good personal letters. I've even seen good personal letters. I have some good personal letters, guys wrote me from Desert Storm. So, you can still find things like that, but they're more different.

HARRIS: What a, as a historian, what are the benefits of looking at a subject like the Military over two centuries, instead of just say, a short, limited time period?

COFFMAN: I'd say 132:00the big benefit is some advice I got from Russell Wikley(*), who is certainly the Doyen of American Military History. My original concept of this study of the peacetime Army was to write a small volume the size of The War to End All Wars, thirty thousand words, and it would concentrate on the twentieth century. And I would try to build it, as much as I could, around questionnaires and interviews with people to supplement what I could find in published reports, that was my basic concept. The earlier period I figured had been determined, there were enough things around, Paul Lucas' book was excellent. He did another one for the 133:00McMillan series, that was very...

HARRIS: Sword of the Republic?

COFFMAN: Yes. There were books, Don Ricky's books on the forty miles a day, beats a day, the private soldier. There's another one under his name, I think he did a good book on women and children during that period. ( ) There's enough published stuff and also I did set myself the discipline of going through and reading all the Army Annual Reports, taking notes on them, which I still use. I did that in nineteen seventy-four and I was on the Guggenheim. I spent several months going through the Army Annual Reports and taking notes on that. So for each year I have a file about that thick, Xerox's and stuff, that I go back, and I still use those things. So, I figured that's, I would build the thing on these published things from the nineteenth century. And then I would have it livened up and I would 134:00be emphasizing the present. And when I'm talking to Wikley(*), Wikley(*) said, you really should pay more attention to the nineteenth century, because that's when all these things were established. You really shouldn't give it short shrift. That combined with the fact, as I went around at West Point, in particular, at Madison, the Draper Collection, they're marvelous collections, about the old Army. There was Draper, where I'm pulling in stuff on the Frontier, he was pulling in things like an Army officer's wife being captured in the War of eighteen, it was her stuff. There's memoirs of people growing up in the Army. There's memoirs of soldiers. There are letters from Army officers and all that, at the turn of the century. There's marvelous stuff that really hadn't been used that much. So, then I just scrapped my original plan, and instead 135:00of writing a book of a hundred thousand words, sans footnotes, popular type thing on the Army seventeen eighty-four to nineteen forty-one, I ended up writing a book of a hundred and fifty thousand words, plus footnotes on the Army up to eighteen ninety-eight. And this book will be as long, if not longer.

HARRIS: When you look at something over a time period that spans generations, you can see things that you can't see...

COFFMAN: That's true. And you get little details, charming little things almost. In this book I am doing now, I will pick up some of the same people, who were in the other one. One example, this one woman in her reminiscence wrote about escaping bandits or Indians, literally riding for her life out at a little frontier post. 136:00( ) riding for her life as Insurrectors fire. She's out on a carriage ride. So, you know, the same people are there. This old black soldier I knew, and interviewed extensively. He was in the Frontier and then he's out in the Philippines. And certainly, you know, the meaning of ( ), the meaning of arguments, for example, Glen Palmer, I'm not going to deal with that as much. I've dealt with that in my book on March. But when John McCauley Palmer comes up with this idea of Universal Military Training, he's not original with it, but he tries for something like the Swiss Army system, United States and all that. He is dealing with and arguing against a policy set up by Avery Upton. 137:00Upton actually developed that in the eighteen seventies. Upton committed suicide in eighty-one. The book wasn't published until nineteen oh three. But Upton's Military Policy would be around, as a matter of fact, you earlier were talking about, I was talking about abstractions. I asked an officer about military policy or something. Here's a very sharp man, retired Lt. General and he said, wait a minute, when I asked him about military policy. Here's a man that graduated from West Point maybe in nineteen twenty. [Coughing fit] Excuse me. Had been a general in World War Two, and when I asked him about military policy, he paused, went into his library and pulled out Upton's book and said, this is all you need to know. 138:00MacArthur at one point later, would be questioned, not by me, about the use of military policy, and he pulled out Upton. Avery Upton's book, Avery Upton died in nineteen, in eighteen eighty-one. His book was published in nineteen oh three. And yet Palmer's arguing against that in nineteen nineteen, nineteen twenty. Now you might well question the value of applying a Swiss Military organizational solution to America's Military situation. I mean, that is an entirely different Army. But the thing is the person he's dealing with ( ), who goes with the old Army.

HARRIS: The only thing new about history is, the only thing new is, forgot what I was going to say, is it keeps turning back on itself.

COFFMAN: That's right, 139:00that's right. One of the most profound statements ever made was that, and it's often quoted from Faulkner, "the past isn't dead, it's not even past." I'm astounded how these things will keep coming back at you.

HARRIS: Things like that are hard to get into written form.

COFFMAN: They really are.

HARRIS: What was, in a group like this, what was the most difficult part of the old Army to research and write?

COFFMAN: That's an interesting question, because uh, the most difficult thing....Let's 140:00put it this way, what I always considered the single most significant, crucial test that a historian has to apply to himself, is he being honest and true to the people of the time? Is he getting it right? When I say something that this is what's happening in barracks, is that something that just happened once or is that something that probably happened more than once? That's probably enough to use it as an example. What enables you to do that, is to have enough information to say, well yes that probably happened that way. And I have to say, although goodness knows, by the very nature of our trade, a historian can't say, a guy writing about the ancient Greeks certainly couldn't have experienced it. But my own experience in the military has helped me sometimes, because I can picture that, 141:00I can understand something happening. Yeah, I saw something similar to that. And then talking to people a lot helps you do that, that sort of validates what you're finding and things. One of the problems I'm running into is in the twentieth century as opposed to the nineteenth cen....well, Army records really begin in great detail, Army reports begin around, roughly eighteen forty, forty-one. But they stopped having such detailed reports in the twenties and thirties, so the overall published War Department Annual report is not as detailed. So you don't get as much information from it. You will get still quite a bit about medical things, but others it's not as detailed. So, that is sort of a problem, even today. Another problem is when you are trying 142:00to get across something. You're trying to talk about what was the life of officers like or, how do you pick out, because on the one hand not everyone wrote. You do have some very good memoirs, or you have collections of papers and all that. The only thing, my approach, I try to be as much of, like a vacuum cleaner as possible, and just pick up a lot of different stuff. And a lot of it is just serendipity, a lot of it just falls out of the sky and hits you over the head, type of thing you run into.

HARRIS: For example?

COFFMAN: Well, I'm thinking about this new book. Curiously, the best accounts of what it was like to be a soldier in the Army, enlisted man, in the period prior to World War Two, 143:00One, excuse me, One, come from two black men. Now, one of them wrote a book, George Skyler, and it's in there. The other one was a guy that I was at West Point....And I was sent, they used to have a black cavalry detachment, and someone said, well there's Sergeant Banks, he's the oldest, living ( ) officer. Sergeant Banks just knocked the socks off. I went to the library and taped him for about, for an hour or two, fabulously detailed interview. Then I sent him my questionnaire. He sent the questionnaire back. He not only answered, he added a lot of papers. Then another officer, a young officer there, he sent me a copy of that. That was one of the most 144:00complete detailed, everything, what training was like. And even though, blacks and whites training was essentially the same. He was a black man, and he had certain experiences when he was a cowboy trooper. (*Buffalo soldier?) HARRIS: What years are you talking about?

COFFMAN: He was in the Army from nineteen eleven to nineteen forty-two.

HARRIS: Oh, okay.

COFFMAN: I'm talking about what basic training was like, what it was like at the ( ) Fort Hayes, up in Columbus. He was from Lexington, Kentucky, that's where he was from. He was in a black community, and he was working at Saint Joseph's Hospital when he enlisted in the Army. This guy was just marvelous. Last time I saw him, a month or so before he died, two or three years later, I got some good information from him. But things like, people like that, just really make it come together. In going through my notes, as I do now, I'm going through stuff I did twenty plus years ago, 145:00notes I took, twenty-five years ago, interviews I made, twenty-five years ago. I'm astounded at the type of information I got from them. It's, what's difficult is deciding what to use. The most difficult thing, is how do you leave out stuff? In some respects it's easy, and you've read books like that, and I have to, where very obviously the guy put in every single thing he had.

HARRIS: Oh yeah.

COFFMAN: Because there is a tendency to do that, you know, that's such a great story, or he really tells all those things. Well you can't do that. You have to keep in mind some sort of balance.

HARRIS: That's, not only does the historian has to make a judgement about his own notes, 146:00about what's important, what's not. In doing a longitudinally, a longitudinal study, you can see what events were important and what wasn't.

COFFMAN: That's right, that's right.

HARRIS: May have seemed critical at the time, but it turned out not to have any great significance.

COFFMAN: Yeah.

HARRIS: You mentioned the Buffalo soldiers. It seems to me that is a perfect example of the way the old Army, their experience is a perfect example of the way the old Army reflected civilian cultures, values and politics and policies. And the way the Buffalo soldiers had been treated in history since their service, is a good example of how the Army colors, 147:00the way the larger culture interprets the past.

COFFMAN: Yes, that's a fascinating story, because one respect, certainly the very concept of segregation was reflected, the law of the land and the culture of the period or what society. At the same time, the black soldiers of the Army, pretty much had the same experiences as other soldiers. That's an interesting thing. Now, they would tend to stay in longer. The reason they stayed in longer, is their possibilities for advancement and for placement was better in the Army than it was on the outside, even though they couldn't be officers. Although eventually they could become officers. I interviewed the first black ever to pass the examination and be commissioned from the ranks, General Benjamin O. Nightus(*), the first black general. Interviewed ( ), 148:00Ben Davis Jr.. So they had a place, they had position. George Skyler tells how he grew up in New York, Syracuse, I think. And he was telling about as a kid, growing up in a Northern city, the only black people he ever saw in any positions of authority were some black non-coms that came in a unit, Twenty-Fourth Infantry or something, came in for a fair or something. He was really impressed by that. And these people had their own society. And they were, to a certain extent it blows your mind. I have a picture of Sergeant Banks in a polo team. They were a polo team. You don't think of blacks playing polo. You think of the Prince of Wales playing polo. They had a polo team. I've got other pictures of blacks playing tennis in their tennis togs in Georgia. ( ) 149:00on an Army Post. That's different.

HARRIS: What year? What year was that?

COFFMAN: That was in the twenties.

HARRIS: Twenties.

COFFMAN: That's...you know they were on an Army Post. They were different. Now, what happened, is with Jim Crow and the renewal of these things, and the black troops did very well. They were considered very good troops. But there was always this qualification, white officers. You know, Pershing, Pershing had been in a ( ) Tenth Calvary.

HARRIS: They called him "Black Jack".

COFFMAN: "Black Jack". But in the twentieth century you begin to get this push involved. For example in the twenties and thirties, when the Army was really under the gun, budget, when they were cutting things. They started really cutting black enlistments, holding it down. 150:00So, the blacks instead of being ten percent of the strength of the Army, they were down to maybe five percent, lower than that. And you begin to have the black troops not really functioning as regular units, but more as service troops, looking after the horses, acting as servants and all of that. Even though they're in the Tenth Cavalry or Ninth Cavalry, Twenty-fourth Infantry. The Twenty-Fourth Infantry school troops at Benning, their function was just to do the peon work. The Twenty-Ninth Infantry is the regiment that really functions as a model regiment and shows this is the company that ( ) or the black troops are the ones pulling the targets, or they're the ones carrying the load and all that. At Fort Reilly or Fort Leavenworth the blacks are service troops there, they're taking care of the horses there, that sort of thing. At West Point there's a cavalry 151:00detachment and they are, you know, they....Prior to World War One, I would say, those black units had very good records and were considered good troops. After that they are sort of pushed to the back.

HARRIS: Many of the Ninth Cavalry came from Kentucky.

COFFMAN: That's right, that's right. In fact in my book, I was looking where they came from. They tried to recruit them from the upper South, the Free Blacks, very rarely would they recruit Deep South people. Now this changes. In the twentieth century, the details aren't that clear, from the sources I found. Maybe if I had spent another twenty-five years doing research I could have located these things. But it was relatively easy, it was easier 152:00to find in the nineteenth century.

HARRIS: It just seems to me that the truly, I don't know what the word would be. What was it some general said about the black troops? Everything a man could do, they did.

COFFMAN: Yeah, yeah. They did, they were very good troops. Of course, what happened, we have seen, I've seen, you've seen, for many years this was just sort of pushed aside, people didn't talk about it very much. Then within the last twenty-five or thirty years people are ( ). Two of the students at Madison wrote dissertations that were topnotch on this, one of them's never been published and it's a thousand fifty pages on blacks in the Army from eighteen sixty-six 153:00to eighteen ninety. Marvin Fletcher did the book. He was my first Ph.D., did the book on eighteen ninety-one to nineteen seventeen. Just excellent. And then Marvin and I went down and talked to old General Davis, and he later did Davis' biography. These are really basic books on Black Military History. But this is something that really just started coming up since the sixties.

HARRIS: There's an interesting example of how the Black Military experience has affected academic culture.

COFFMAN: Yes.

HARRIS: Its....Anyway, it's sort of reciprocal. I mean, they, ironically reciprocal, the black regiments were so effected, so severely effected by cultural mores and now 154:00it's like they're returning to favor. [Laughing] They, they affect academic interpretations of histories.

COFFMAN: Sure. And of course, what happens to others. At times, you think the pendulum has gone the other way. You'll visit museums out West. There might have been ten or fifteen white regiments stationed there, but they'll feature the one black regiment, almost to the point that a kid coming might think that the blacks were the only troops on the Frontier. Well, actually they were ten percent. Actually they were higher than that, because of the Artillery used on the Frontier. But there were a lot of very good white regiments.

HARRIS: The Frontier Military is an endlessly fascinating subject for historians, as well as for movies and television.

COFFMAN: Well it knocked me out. 155:00When I wrote a term paper for ( )Matlin class in Social and Cultural History on the Frontier Army, I ran across, I think I saw it or read it on microfilm, I've forgotten, but it's at the U.K. Library. A little memoir written by a soldier named McConnell. And he sort of summed the whole thing up. He had been in the Army in the Civil War, then he served a term in the Army under enlistment in Texas after the war. And he wrote this little memoir back then. Fascinating book. And he talks about, the Army is sort of a microcosm of society generally. What you see at a small Garrison, the relationship of people, the problems, the joys, the ups and downs and all of this, you will see in a small community. Of course, he is absolutely right. 156:00HARRIS: There's tiny, little Forts scattered all over the Western half of the continent.

COFFMAN: Well, I'll give you an example. I interviewed this man, Charles T. Roberts. Roberts, the reason I interviewed him was because he was Chief of Staff of the Eighty-First Division in World War One. And I was doing my book on World War One. And I wanted to talk to these young Colonels who had been Chiefs of Staff. And that was very worthwhile, it was very interesting. But he had far greater claims to fame, so two or three years later, I went back and talked to him again. He had lived on these little Army Posts as a kid. His father had been Crook( ), so he had lived, he had been there, when Geronimo surrendered. The famous picture ( ), there's a twelve year old boy in a big, black hat sitting next 157:00( ). That's Charlie Roberts. And Roberts won a Medal of Honor in Cuba. He was captured in the Philippine Insurrection and held prisoner for a while. So he had a long...so I went and talked to him about this. One of the things I got from him, that really knocked me out, was in talking to him, he told me that when he was a boy at the Division Headquarters, Crooks Headquarters, in Fort Bowie, in Arizona, in the eighteen eighties, many times there weren't many more than seventy-five or eighty soldiers at this department headquarters. That, you know, when I was in the Army, a full strength Rifle company was a hundred and ninety or so. And you were never at full strength, but you had fifty or sixty. 158:00They had eighty! That's not very many people. And then it really hit me and I looked at this, because you could see the breakdown, even in the twenties and thirties, there wouldn't be that all that many in Army Posts, two or three thousand would have been a big one.

HARRIS: Yeah, that was a major change after the Frontier closed and they concentrated on larger Posts.

COFFMAN: They started consolidating the Posts.

HARRIS: That changed the whole life for a soldier.

COFFMAN: That's right, changed the life of the soldier. Because, instead of spending all of his time maintaining the Post, simply getting enough fuel, food and all of that, they began training and things like that, began to get military exercises.

HARRIS: You really see a more professional Army after that.

COFFMAN: Yes, that's a key thing in the development of Professionalism.

HARRIS: They had more established 159:00journals and schools.

COFFMAN: That was one of the things I thought....

END OF TAPE THREE, EDWARD M. COFFMAN EDWARD M. COFFMAN: When people talked about professionalism, they generally talked about the uniforms. There’s a period, after the Spanish-American War, which is certainly there, very important. But in going through my, over this long period, it hit me that the Army was just exploding, the new Professionalism, where they denied it. Because they had a Commanding General, John M. Scofield, who was a very sharp man, been around a long time. He he’d even been Secretary of War for a while. And Scofield was very friendly with ( ). Then you had just the flat demographic, demographic truth, that you could consolidate Army Posts, so you could develop units, have units brought together. You could run exercises together. You could have maneuvers, and then combine 160:00that with the explosion of the Military publications. The development of The Leavenworth, which had actually started in eighteen eighty-one, but you have all these things beginning to come together in the early eighteen nineties, ten years, twelve years before they should have ( ).

HARRIS: Or is that, there’s that reservoir of experience that the Peyton Marsh’s career, and Pershing’s career was built on.

COFFMAN: That’s right.

HARRIS: That seems to be one advantage of these long term studies.

COFFMAN: That’s true.

HARRIS: You can see how the nineteen twenties built on the eighteen eighties.

COFFMAN: That’s right. That’s right. And the other thing was, given the long service then, you could retire after forty years. A guy commissioned in eighteen eighty-eight, for example, would be serving in the Army until nineteen twenty-eight, 161:00sometimes longer. You could stay forty or sixty-four in those days.

HARRIS: That’s a problem in itself.

COFFMAN: That’s right.

HARRIS: That’s a different subject.

COFFMAN: Well that’s right, because you had these overaged people.

HARRIS: Yeah, sort of a dead hand past would stultify tactics and information, training and everything else. I suppose that’s the subject for your second volume.

COFFMAN: Yes. Well, you could see, you see a big change, I think, in the Philippine Insurrection period, because you begin to get a lot of young, hot to trot officers coming out in the late nineties and so on. For example, the guys who were in key staff positions in France and the Antioch. I was really struck one time, I was going down the list of the West Point 162:00class of eighteen ninety-nine. There were about nineteen or twenty guys. There were only about maybe seventy or so in the class. But you looked and these were Chiefs of Staff, key staff positions, the AEF and all that, from this class. So, I knew a couple of these guys would talk to me. And I asked one of them, why is that? And he said, it’s the age thing, we were staff age, we were at that age. They had gone through these schools, ten years before. Pershing didn’t go to Fort Leavenworth. March didn’t go to Fort Leavenworth, these guys did. They were the trained guys.

HARRIS: Bunch of young Turks.

COFFMAN: Yeah.

HARRIS: It’s interesting to see the way a, to follow an institution over time, see how it changes.

COFFMAN: That’s right. And it of course, the other thing is you do have people, 163:00and I know people, over a period of time, interviewing them, I become friends with the families. Like a couple I talked to in Cincinnati. I still keep up with their sons. I mail letters to them, you know and correspond with them and see them and all that. You often hear people, if you’re ( ), but they remember the Army in the thirties. They remember what it was like in China in the Fifteenth Infantry. They remember what it was like in Fort Benning. And they remember World War Two, they were boys, one of them actually served in it. They were both wounded in Korea. One of them was later wounded also in Viet Nam. The span of the Army, covered their entire lives, 164:00seventy year span.

HARRIS: It’s almost like, studying the Army, or really many topics in Military History, is like studying something outside of time.

COFFMAN: It is. It is. I remember once, I brought in this father and son, both retired Army Colonels, to spend a couple of hours talking to myself, just answering questions. The elder Colonel had entered West Point in nineteen eighteen and been in the Army until nineteen fifty or so. His son had entered the Army in World War Two, and then had stayed in the Army up until the nineteen seventies. So, you had a period there that they were active duty Army officers, from nineteen nineteen up to around, you know, fifty plus years. So you’ve got a whole panorama 165:00with these two guys sitting there to ask them about. You ask them about individuals, the older Colonel was a very good ( ), very famous. And ( ), the guy said ( ) they had been classmates at West Point. The younger one had known all sorts of people, who were still prominent.

HARRIS: The reservoir of experiences is amazing.

COFFMAN: One thing about the Army is, even though the Army is very cognizant of trying to change and keep up. The Army is like a lot of institutions in civilian life. It’s very conscious of tradition, and that means something. I was in the Seventh Cavalry and that means something to me. I feel a kinship with people who were in the 166:00Seventh at anytime. And whenever I am in a group of old soldiers, and I say Seventh Cavalry, that means something. It’s not I was in the Seventeenth, I was in the Seventh.

HARRIS: Yeah, from Custer’s Little Big Horn to Viet Nam, the Seventh was...

COFFMAN: This guy back at Church, I was talking to him last night. He was in the Seventh Calvary in Viet Nam. Well, that gives us something in common, I was in the Seventh Cavalry twenty years before. His old man ( ) in Leavenworth. He was a seventeen year old kid in the Seventh Cavalry in nineteen eighteen and nineteen.

HARRIS: Sometimes it is easy for a historian to forget that when you study the Military, you are studying something that has been around for all of time.

COFFMAN: Sure.

HARRIS: That’s 167:00what makes these social historians dismiss it with a flick of the hand, seems so wrong. It is simply a part of human culture. It has always been there.

COFFMAN: Well, and it was a whole, over and over and over again, when I’ve talked to people, interviewing them or when I was reading their....Although I did talk to a few people who went back to the nineteenth century. But in reading memoirs from the earlier period. The one thing that comes out, every now and then, I found it, they’d say. ( ) They’d say, you know, it was like a family. It was family. This one old, black man, that I knew over a period of forty years, maybe thirty years. He had been in the Army 168:00from eighteen eighty-nine to nineteen thirteen, around that time. And he was telling me, that when he had Yellow fever, he had trouble with Cholera. The Regiment was going to the Philippines in nineteen, in eighteen ninety. They weren’t going to take him. They were told a limit of people they could take. And so they told him, we’re letting you go. And he said, don’t do this to me, that was my home. If you send me out, I don’t have anybody. You take me over there and if I die, at least the Army will bury me. And that was a very simplistic, very basic, the Army was home to a lot of them. And listening to these people, I remember one time sitting around listening to a group of Army wives 169:00or former daughters. Two of them starting talking about, yes I remember you, we were at, you know, the Philippines. You were dating and I remember your hair was so nice. This was nineteen eighty, something that she was talking, she, one of the younger girls...It’s fascinating to me.

HARRIS: Yeah, it is. It’s across generations.

COFFMAN: Yeah. And when you talk to other generations, they can tell, they have these stories that they heard from their fathers and grandfathers and so on.

HARRIS: Here at the History, Kentucky Historical Society, where of course, we’re cross generational, things like family history and 170:00many other subjects that cross generations. Our focus is on primarily Kentucky and so on. In the national Military experience, do you see a role for state military history? You know, given the fact that, this cognizant of these cross generational and broad cultural....

COFFMAN: Sure, sure. Because the Guard, the Militia/Guard has its strong traditions. Hopkinsville was a big guard town, and that should be remembered.

HARRIS: Yeah. 171:00COFFMAN: And those people, I can remember, we had a troop of Cavalry that was always parading. And my brother was in the Quartermaster. And that should be remembered. Mr. Fugate, the fellow I was thinking about, I’ll dig up a picture to send you. I interviewed him, and one of the most interesting parts about it, he had spent six years in the Kentucky National Guard, nineteen eleven to nineteen seventeen. He had been on the border, the Second Kentucky Infantry in nineteen sixteen. That is really interesting. This is a very nice Military museum.

HARRIS: You have a photo of him?

COFFMAN: Yeah, I’ll send it to you.

HARRIS: I’d like to run that, yeah. Well it’s not just the institutional Guard, but I was thinking of the broadest possible conception of the Military experience. 172:00COFFMAN: Sure. Well, in addition there’s the things like, men who are professional soldiers, who might be from the state, who have really, I don’t know ( ). One of Pershing’s classmates, who was a, he was at the tail end of the Indian War Period. He was in the Philippine Insurrections. He served all Theaters, Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines, and in the Spanish-American War, which was very unusual, for a very brief period there in ninety-eight, George B. Duncan. George B. Duncan took one of, when Pershing went to France, within a month or so they sent four regiments of Infantry over ( ) He became a Brigade Commander of the First Division. ( ) Seventy-Seventh Division ( ) Eighty-Second. He was from Lexington. His father was Mayor 173:00of Lexington during the Civil War. After he retired from the Army, he came back to Lexington. I went and I talked to him when I was a Freshman, he was eighty-plus years old. He’d been John M. Scofield’s Aide. I mean really a remarkable man. And a man like that should be remembered. Now, Stone writes about those people, you know, in his little book. And they should be remembered. ( ) who commanded Mr. Fugate’s ( ) on the corner, was the ( ) of the Army in World War Two, Major General G(*). He was the lead prosecutor in the ( ) Mitchell Court Martial. He was a major in twenty-four. That should be remembered. Those guys should be remembered. They should be remembered in the States.

HARRIS: Yeah, it seems like, I feel like I, 174:00from the perspective of the, that would include the civilian’s experiences as well, was also part of Kentucky’s experience.

COFFMAN: Sure.

HARRIS: Take World War Two for example, which I guess probably swept up civilians as much as any of them.

COFFMAN: That’s right.

HARRIS: That’s an experience that needs to be evaluated by historians.

COFFMAN: True, anyway you want to look at it. From the standpoint, like Alfred Kelly did in that book, Battle Fire, you know, where you get various Kentuckians who played roles, from Pearl Harbor through the end of the war and all that. So, certainly it is interesting, the impact of the war, like I have vivid memories of being a boy in Hopkinsville when Fort Campbell was built and how the soldiers would fill the streets from the Twelfth Armor Division. 175:00Just for you to know, Charles Schultz’s Division, of Peanut’s, he was at Fort Campbell.

HARRIS: Oh, he was?

COFFMAN: As a combat ( ). But sure, I think, now in the very widest things, that’s certainly a part of Military History. In fact, when I teach Military History or the type of Military History that I write about, I don’t deal with that. But certainly the impact of the war on communities and all of this, is an important thing.

HARRIS: One of the things I read was an essay by, I read recently, was an essay by Peter Borray(*)?

COFFMAN: Borray(*) HARRIS: Borray(*) He said that the new Military History, whether you are studying institutions or 176:00states or cultures, culture institutions in relationships, are good work based on really very old methods. And he recommended or he said that some methodological breakthrough, something new was needed. Of course, he didn’t define it. But do you see it that way?

COFFMAN: I do think a methodological breakthrough that is relatively recent, Oral History, has benefited new Military History tremendously. In talking to soldiers for example, or talking to your average Joe outside. I think that’s been one methodological departure. I have enormous respect for Borray(*). Borray(*), he wound up 177:00in the Institute ( ) at Princeton. I consider him a good friend. He is a brilliant man.

HARRIS: I read his book on understanding war conflicts. So, you see a role for Oral History in, even the Military History of fairly recent...

COFFMAN: Oh, sure, sure.

HARRIS: Fairly recent conflicts?

COFFMAN: Sure, because what, I don’t know if people write as many letters, they’re certainly using telephones and things like that, it helps to actually talk to somebody. To recapture, your uncle, your uncle....in that little pamphlet I get, that was a very revealing thing to me. Talking to H. Hamilton, because H(*) who 178:00had done such good work. Zachary Taylor in the eighteen fifties who compromised all that. I was used to working in a period where you could get collections of letters that were apparently, fairly a fine item, two or three or boxes. There would be fairly detailed letters, where guys really told you what was what. On the other hand, you start getting into the twentieth century, it is not there as a rule. Now there are isolated things, for example, the man who was Head of Army Ground Forces for World War Two, who is really one of the great, unknown figures in the war. Leslie J. McNair was killed in Normandy, you know, in the bombing of a culvert. McNair carried all the correspondence, either one or two boxes of his stuff, fascinating. Patton writing, after he slapped that soldier, to, well, you know, I was really putting on an act. 179:00That’s all that is. McNair writing back, I’d sort of cool it if I was you, and all that. You find some, but the type of thing that Holman expected to find, about ( ), talking about, we hear he could deal probably every box. He could probably run into any collection, everybody in Congress in the nineteenth century, might fill this room. On the other hand, Alvin Barkley’s stuff would more than fill this room. That type of ( ) wasn’t there. His constituents maybe, where he maybe, responded to about five thousand with the same letter.

HARRIS: Probably a staff person ordered it.

COFFMAN: Yeah, and signs it. You don’t find any single source that is so detailed and lays out things. You are not apt to, as you would in that earlier period. And by 180:00talking to people, you can sort of make sense out of it, pull it together.

HARRIS: An oral recollection can crystallize a lot of disparate factors that...

COFFMAN: Well, it can answer direct questions. For example, I was really struck when I was dealing with Peyton C. March. How many good administrative histories are there? Not very many. I had sat on any number of dissertations at Madison, where people were writing on political figures, and maybe the guy was Secretary of the Interior or whatever it was. And they added, he was a good administrator, they’d call it. No one ever explained what a good admin....No one ever explained what administration was. No one ever explained the function of a Bureaucracy, how it actually worked. One of the things I did, was I talked to people. I talked to 181:00one of the Executive Secretaries and had a couple of lengthy letters from another. And I asked him, how did the Chief of Staff make decisions? What papers did he see? How did that work? These guys explained, okay, I would go in every morning, I would go through their papers, I would pick out ten or fifteen, I would go in there and show him those. He would then make a formal decision right then or he would ask to look at them later. That’s really telling you how administration functions, how all of it works. How many times do you ever see that? I was able to get that, because I talked to the guys who actually did. None of the other people even thought about asking such a question.

HARRIS: That’s oral testimony.

COFFMAN: Yeah.

HARRIS: That’s the value of...

COFFMAN: Well one of them wrote it out to me, and he said, 182:00well I was told, I want to see papers on one, two, three, four, five, six topics. And then over a period of time, this is how he made decisions. I’ve never seen that anywhere. People don’t stop to think. That’s where the real nitty gritty, that’s how it is actually done.

HARRIS: So the thing uh, I’ve done some interviewing, and the problem for a historian addressing a large subject and using an oral testimony about part of it, is that the narrator usually sees a very small piece. And the historian’s problem is then taking this valuable inside information, like your clerk and... 183:00COFFMAN: These were Generals -

HARRIS: [Laughing] Generals.

COFFMAN: They were Colonels then, they became Generals. They were very high level.

HARRIS: I should say your distinguished administration ranks.

COFFMAN: Yeah. [Laughing] HARRIS: Anyway taking this individual point of view and applying it to, or integrating it into a larger theme, that’s a problem for me as a writer. Do you have any words of wisdom on how to try to do that?

COFFMAN: For a man whose name I can’t remember, but I was doing research at the Library of Congress years ago, forty years ago. I was at a desk next to a guy one time, and we were chit chatting. And he was telling me, 184:00it was the early sixties, I guess, he was telling me that one of his old professors told him, if you use war, that one out of ten notes you take, you are using too many. And I thought about it at the time, because I would spend, now this was pre-Xerox, so I would spend days typing out lengthy excerpts, or maybe a note. I remember one letter, that Frederick Palmer wrote, wrote Pershing telling him about what was going on in the U. S. in nineteen nineteen. I took a note on the letter. I went back the next year, I typed out about a half a page summary. Finally the third year I went back and just typed the whole thing, ( ) letter. Well, that took me two or three hours. Well, I think I probably quoted, maybe three words of that. But I had that letter. And when I was going over, 185:00I could then sit down and read the whole thing before I could decide what is the real essence of this. What really fits in to this whole paper? So I think, and that’s true of Oral History. I’ve often thought that Oral History is very time consuming, because you have to go to the trouble of contacting the person. You’ve got to go to the trouble of visiting, getting there, spending time and all of that, then it really should be transcribed to use well. That’s enormously time consuming, and then after you go through it all, you just pick out a little piece here or there, really not that much. But then you’ve got all these other stock ( ). The other thing you ought to make sure, that whoever you talk to, really knows what he’s talking about. Like I could have asked someone else at the War Department, who didn’t work directly with March, how did he do things. Oh, he was tough. Or they might go on. 186:00But these guys were physically there, they could tell me, because that was their job. And I think a lot of people, face it, a lot of Oral History at the most basic level is, tell me old man what you remember. And that’s it. Well, now that has a value, because the old man might remember a lot, when you are going over stuff. [Outside comments about room] HARRIS: We’ll be finished in, I’d say five minutes.

UNKNOWN: Okay, great. I’m down here.

COFFMAN: But to really concentrate the stuff, the stuff you really specifically want to know about and know that they have the background to give it to you. Which is like, I could ask a guy, what was your Company Commander like? Well, he would know that. He might not have ever even see the Division Commander, but he would know what his Company Commander was like. 187:00HARRIS: I broached sort of the same question to Doctor Pough(*), and he came out with, I think it was, I don’t remember now, three or five criteria that you apply to every piece of oral evidence you get. And you know, corroboration from other sources and the relevance, did he actually know what he is talking about. And you know, sometimes you just, something I have found, and Pough(*) said, gave me a specific warning about, he said sometimes your narrator will comment on something for which there is no corroboration.

COFFMAN: Sure.

HARRIS: And he was the only person there. He is the only one who has this knowledge. Then you just 188:00have to decide whether he has the habit of truth.

COFFMAN: Sure, or use your judgement, does that make sense, that he would say that.

HARRIS: Yeah, I thought that was a marvelous phrase, “the habit of truth”. [Laughing] COFFMAN: Yes, that is a marvelous phrase. And it is also, if it fits in. I’ll give you one example that I ran across. I was talking to this man, who was also in that office later. He was in the office, right outside the door. And I was asking about why would Baker and March come in with a recommendation for such a huge Army, when it seemed rather unlikely that the country would ever accept it. And the guy said, well you must remember, they were getting pushed from upstairs, or words to that effect. Well, I thought about that a long time, and I had never seen anything to indicate that Woodrow Wilson....I’d never really seen that much indication that Woodrow Wilson was even interested 189:00in the Military. Then I ran across a speech that Wilson made, in which he said, if we do not accept the recommendations, if we do not accept the treaty, we will have to build the biggest Army in the world to ( ).

HARRIS: There it was.

COFFMAN: There was the click, that basic click. And so there are things like that, you know. On the other hand, I got a letter from a guy, who went around painting top people in World War One and World War Two, both wars. And I wrote him a letter, asking do you remember about your time you spent with General Marshall, he would...General March. He would do these paintings in about thirty minutes or so, or do the sketch. And I got this letter back from him, and he was telling me about how General March cursed Pershing or did all these, made all sorts of decisions, poured out his heart to him and all that. 190:00That couldn’t be true, because March was a very cold, aloof type person. He wouldn’t have given this bird the time of day, probably. So this guy would just say well, I’ve heard this about March, I’ll throw it in, what does he know. So I just filed it, you know. And there are things like that. Another time I was talking to a guy and throughout the conversation he referred to China, he called Russia, China. This was nineteen sixty when I was talking to him. China was, he kept talking about China, when he was obviously was talking about Russia. He was interested in Russia and Siberia and all that in nineteen eighteen, nineteen nineteen. Well I put him with Russia, because that’s what he was talking about. So there are things like that.

HARRIS: So, to sum it up, Oral History is, 191:00there’s a role in Military History.

COFFMAN: Oh yeah.

END OF TAPE 4