Comment of the day: The obstacles to digitizing records of the Korean War

Posted By Thomas E. Ricks Monday, May 2, 2011 - 5:35 AM Share

This note was posted over the weekend by Hal Barker of the Korean War Project in the discussion of Friday's post about Army War College papers.

I was particularly interested in it because until last year, I knew almost nothing about the Korean War. I now wonder if it eventually will be seen as more historically significant than the Vietnam War. It was the first hot conflict of the Cold War. It was the emergence of Communist China as a major power. It introduced us to limited war in the nuclear era.

CMH has a substantial series of After Action Reports and monographs, but no mandate to digitize these records. Same with Carlisle Barracks. Korean War records are scattered at many government locations. Researching the Korean War has formidable obstacles.

At the Korean War Project, we recently obtained a set of Marine Corps digital records in a proprietary format created in 1999 but almost unusable for research. We now have over 30,000 pages of those Marine records converted to PDF and will have them online next week. As part of this work, we discovered after the Marine Corps digitized the records, they sent the files to NARA. Through a bureaucratic error, the Marine records were reclassified and cannot be accessed by the public to this day, many years later.

Recently, DOD started a multi-million dollar research project to digitize Korean War Command Reports and Unit Histories. Over 100,000 pages of these records are digitized but have been declared off limits under FOIA under an arcane and unsupportable interpretation of the "Agency Records" case law. Many government agencies consider public records as private property, and use a FOIA denial to create a brick wall requiring a federal court battle to obtain simple public records available at NARA for a quarter a page.

On the good side, we recently obtained access to 30 boxes of Korean War Second Infantry Division records independently obtained in paper form by a veterans group. When these records are digitized, it will be the first time the most blooded Division from Korea will have records online for intense research free of charge.

Who would have thought DOD would deny access to digital Korean War records? This is one of the many reasons why Korea has often been called the Forgotten War.

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EXPLORE:HISTORY, MILITARY
 

JIM GOURLEY

3:34 PM ET

May 2, 2011

Wait Till You Want the History of the GWOT

I was on Rear-D for my last unit's deployment before I got out. The historian at the Campbell museum approached me at one point and asked if I'd get him all our returning unit's hard drives so that the museum staff could download the data prior to getting them wiped. Turns out the museum staff has TS clearance and a secure storage area. I never knew, and I'm sure that we never gave them the data from the previous deployments.

I told the units about it. None of them did it.

Map graphics. Op-orders. Daily briefings. AARs. Intel assessments. PAO videos. Inter-unit magazines. Literally TERABYTES of data that might be as invaluable to retracing the 101st's legacy as the Bastogne road sign, gone.

I think we'll regret that in 50 years. Beyond not having anything from our history that we can touch, we won't even have anything we can retrieve on a screen.

 

HUNTER

3:53 PM ET

May 2, 2011

We did it

I'm not sure what the agency was but we are repeatedly hounded to provide unit history for the multiple assorted Guard deployments of the last 10 years.

We provided as much non-classified information to these agencies as we could. I don't recall if we provided any SIPR side stuff. But I drew the line when they directed each of my subordinate companies to supply their own history. (We got each notice by UIC). We told them that the material supplied at SQDN level would encompass all subordinate commands and would have to suffice.

Part of the reason they force this issue is to do exactly what you say JG in reconstructing unit movements. This is, in part, because the Gulf War Syndrome forced the hand of the commanders to join with the historians in order to determine what units were where. They did this in order to see if there was a specific environmental issue (e.g. oil fires, sand fleas, chemical release, depleted uranium, anything, etc.) that might have caused the Syndrome.

There is a urban legend that states that many commanders in the Gulf War were ordered to collect at a site and reconstruct the troop movements on a warehouse sized map of Iraq to fulfill this purpose. Supposedly even people who had retired were 'forced' to attend. May be apocryphal.

 

RUFF JUSTICE

11:11 PM ET

May 2, 2011

Korea Research

During my stint at ILE (CGSC) in 2008-2009 I wrote my MMAS Thesis on MacArthur's G2, MG Charles Willoughby... aside from digging into this guy's sordid past as a right wing wacko who was a critical enabler for MacA's ego, I learned that the history department at Leavenworth is pretty darn good. While I'd already knocked out an online masters, the PhDs at CGSC were critical mentors who pointed me in the right direction for research on Korea, dissected my analysis and taught me to write again (after 15 years out of Academia). One of the best finds during my research forays was an original copy of an interrogation report on one of the first Chinese Communist prisoners taken by the 8th Army. While the tactical interrogation clearly revealed this trooper's Chinese origin, Willoughby's report cast doubt on it and undermined the premise that there might be an major intervention underway by China into the Korean conflict.

The Truman library was a key asset... may thanks to the folks there and the good doctors of history at Leavenworth.

 

TOM RICKS

7:37 AM ET

May 3, 2011

Ruff, did you read Willoughby's letters?

Last winter while doing research at Carlisle, I drove down to Gettysburg College, which has Willoughby's papers. His letters are a hoot! While the Chinese were coming into Korea, he was busy lobbying Congress to let Franco's Spain join NATO--despite a message from the Army chief telling him to knock it off.
Best,
Tom

 

FG42

6:40 AM ET

May 3, 2011

"Who would have thought DOD

"Who would have thought DOD would deny access to digital Korean War records? This is one of the many reasons why Korea has often been called the Forgotten War."

Indeed. I've been researching in Hanoi the bombing of North Vietnam for more than 3 years now. Good news: my research has received permission from the Ministry of Defense and the Foreign Ministry. Bad news: records from that period nearly 40 years ago are still classified by the Vietnamese military. I've ranted and raved about this for 3 years, but I see now that our own DoD isn't much better. Guess I can't complain too much.

 

BARATOS

11:06 PM ET

May 4, 2011

Whenever I start to get tired

Whenever I start to get tired of reading almost exclusively military history, I sit down with a book on the Korean War. I skip to the Chinese intervention. I read about Chosin and Kunu-ri and Yongsan-Dong and all the other places we fought and lost at with the same eagerness that I did when I first learned about these places so long ago.

I think back to my grandfather then, and sometimes I pull out the records I salvaged of his service. I think his service at Chosin was probably the crowning achievement of my family.

When North Korea finally implodes, I fully intend to go to that reservoir and pay my respects to all the brave people who fought there.

 

Thomas E. Ricks covered the U.S. military for the Washington Post from 2000 through 2008.

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