Uncensored: A Crowdsourced History of the American GI in World War II

During the Second World War, the U.S. Army created an in-house behavioral and social science research unit, the Army Research Branch (ARB) that surveyed and interviewed half a million military personnel stationed across the U.S. and at points around the globe. The mission of the Army’s research operation was to identify ways of improving the organization while also helping the nation’s approximately 16 million “citizen-soldiers” adjust to life in the Army. The attitudes, behaviors, opinions, preferences, backgrounds, and activities of these service member were recorded and analyzed in remarkable detail. Did soldiers use prophylaxes? What did soldiers stationed in New Guinea prefer for recreation: boxing gloves or basketballs? How often did soldiers visit the USO, read Yank, or visit a rec room? What did military personnel think of their food and radio programming, the material used in their uniforms, and their accommodations? How did they feel about their training, leave, assignments, and commanders?

At the outset, the Secretary of War Henry Stimson proscribed the use of these newfangled social scientific techniques for eliciting the soldier’s “opinion.” Yet by war’s end, the information ARB provided the Army reached every echelon, influencing not only radio programming and orientation films, but major War Department policies, including the “point system” used during troop demobilization. It also underwrote the desegregation of the U.S. Armed Forces after the war, helping to propel the civil rights movement. ARB social and behavioral scientists carried out their investigations in Bermuda, Iceland, India-Burma, Italy, the Middle East, Panama, the Persian Gulf, across the Pacific, and into the combat zones of the European Theater of Operations. Their studies reveal a citizen-soldier army that not only suffered, endured, and sacrificed, that pined for the warmth and security of hearth and home and that special someone. They also captured the voices of American GIs who looked to the Army to improve their lot in life, to become better educated, develop valuable skills for postwar employment—and, in the case of African Americans, to secure racial equality.

After the war, tens upon tens of thousands of IBM punch cards containing individual soldier responses were saved by Samuel Stouffer, ARB’s research director. These were eventually transferred to magnetic tape, then finally to ASCII formatted computer data files. Many of the surveys administered by ARB contained an open-ended question, prompting the soldier to write whatever they wanted. These anonymous handwritten responses, as one can imagine, covered the gamut of a soldier’s wartime experiences. A large collection of these uncensored verbatims were also preserved after the war in a separate location, on 44 microfilm rolls, amounting to about 72,000 pages.

This visual presentation introduces an interdisciplinary NEH-funded digital initiative that is using crowdsourcing, coupled with machine-automated and human-intelligence analysis, to reunite these long-orphaned sources and to harvest their remarkable, and indeed unparalleled, insights into the wartime experiences of American service personnel. AHA attendees will not only learn about the project and what the soldiers had to say, but also about how they—and their students—can contribute.