Today’s post is written by Dr. Greg Bradsher. On May 10, 1966 J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, wrote Alex Rosen, head of the Bureau’s General Investigation Division, thanking him for a gift certificate to a Washington, D.C. nursery.  The gift was in honor of Hoover’s anniversary as director.  “I shall derive [...]

Today’s post is written by Dr. Greg Bradsher. On September 7, 1946, the OMG (Office of Military Government) for Greater Hesse informed OMGUS (Office of Military Government, U.S.) that the Marburg Central Collecting Point closed its career on August 19, when the military guard was relieved following transfer to the church of its last charge, the [...]

Today’s post is written by Dr. Greg Bradsher and is a follow up to Tuesday’s post. On May 9, 1945, CIC Agent Allen, a driver, and three of Hitler’s stenographers went to the Hintersee area to look for the location where stenographic notes and transcripts of Hitler’s conferences had been burned.  They found a large hold in [...]

Today’s post is written by Dr. Greg Bradsher. This past spring knowing my colleague Sylvia Naylor was doing archival descriptive work on the exhibits used at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, I showed her one of the more interesting files, USA Exhibit 787.  Sylvia did indeed find it interesting.  This exhibit consisted of charred fragments [...]

Marines skateboarding into combat… sounds like something out of a Back to the Future sequel, right? Well, as a matter of fact, the U.S. military experimented with using skateboards in combat situations. In the March 1999 exercises known as Urban Warrior ’99, the military experimented with the potential use of skateboards to detect trip wires [...]

Today’s post is written by Dr. Greg Bradsher. T/Sgt. Edward Mitsukado, a Nisei interpreter with the 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional), code-named Galahad and usually referred to as Merrill’s Marauders (named after Brig. Gen. Frank Merrill, its commander) “Somewhere in Burma” in mid-June 1944 decided to write a letter to the Commandant of the Military Intelligence Service [...]

Today’s post is written by Dr. Greg Bradsher.   During the first days of August 2012, at Archives II, I looked at three archival boxes that were labeled as Captured Korean Documents.  They were Japanese documents, bound together in small groups of pages by the Allied Translator and Interrogator Section (ATIS) of MacArthur’s General Headquarters, [...]

This post was written by Harry B. Kidd, a volunteer at Archives II, for the volunteer newsletter, The Columns. In the spring of 1918, the German Army launched a major offensive in the hope of achieving a quick victory before the full weight of American Forces could be brought to the line.  Beginning in May [...]

“This is an American soldier – he is your friend.”  So read the leaflet prepared by the United States for use in Vietnam.  Underneath that caption, it pictured several American infantrymen advancing into combat. The time, however, was not the 1960s; it was mid-1945 and World War II in the Pacific was drawing to a [...]

Today’s post is written by Archives II volunteer Jan Hodges. Do you know what a shellback ceremony is? Chances are that unless you’re a Navy man or a relative, you probably don’t. It’s a ritual conducted aboard ship after it crosses the equator. And not just any old ceremony–one that becomes part of the sailor’s permanent record. The Reference Unit [...]