War Department Records in the National ArchivesAuthor(s): Wayne C. GroverSource: The Journal of the American Military History Foundation, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Autumn,1937), p. 122Published by: Society for Military HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3038828 .

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122 AMERICAN MILITARY HISTORY

WAR DEPARTMENT RECORDS IN THE

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

The National Archives has recently received its first accession of records from the War Department, an important group embodying the files of three

key agencies whose task was the mobilization of morale and material during the World War. The records are those of the Council of National Defense, whose boards and committees were the nuclei of most of the super-agencies set up as the war progressed; the War Industries Board, the greatest of these; and the Committee on Public Information, the "voluntary censorship,, agency whose educational and propagandistic efforts covered most of Western

Europe, the Orient, and South America, as well as the United States. The records of the War Industries Board constitute the largest group. They in? clude minutes of meetings, rulings, reports, correspondence, questionnaires and compilations of data accumulated by the Board as a result of its supervi- sory functions in the establishment of priorities, conversion of plant facilities, the conservation of material, price-fixing, and kindred subjects. These docu? ments are, of course, indispensable sources for historians studying industrial mobilization problems of the World War. Together with the Council and Committee files, they tell a good part of the home-front story. Much of the material has been unexplored by historians. In fact, it has only recently been available for exploration.

Wayne C. Grover

THE MILITARY LIBRARY

A History of Sea Power, by William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott.

(Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company. 1937. Pp. 434.

$6.00.)

About half of this volume is devoted to the valiant deeds of the British

Navy, and easily half of this again to the British Navy in the World War. It tells in a pleasantly readable way and in excellent English of many of the

major battles of the British fleets, and it seems to be compiled from standard authorities without any serious attempt at tactical criticism or original research on the part of the authors. The account of the battle of Jutland is full and

good. There is not sufficient space in the remainder of the work to do much more than to make us acquainted with the names of persons and places con- nected with great events in the naval history of the rest of the world. It seems

something of a misnomer to title the book A History of Sea Power for it

gives a very inadequate account of the relationships between national policy, maritime communication, naval strategy and the joint operations of armies and navies. It deals mainly with fleet actions, and betrays no fundamental

knowledge of naval affairs.

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