No, sorry, I don't. And unfortunately for the one's I have seen in the CMH collection, such as Marshall's Bastogne book, the draft pages have been scattered willy-nilly between boxes.Mori wrote:If you know any way to read the draft manuscripts with annotations, baring travelling to NARA, I'd be extremely interested.
Sorry, I should have been more precise. Yes, the further one gets into the war, the fewer the references to original documents. That was for a very simple reason, the Heer retired documents from field units to the Potsdam archives on a bi-annual basis, however, when those of the second six months of 1944 were to be retired, things were a bit of a shambles, so are hit or miss. The events of the campaign in France also had an effect; most of the corps and divisional records are missing, and the records of 7. Armee and Panzergruppe West/5. Panzerarmee abruptly end in mid-August, before beginning again in fragmentary form in the fall.There is no doubt on the quality of the Green Books. They were written by very professional scholars and it is truly exceptionnal when any of what they described is faulty (in the sense: not based on a precise & well-understood source). We can trust Weinberg's advice: they are the best starting point to understand the military campaigns.
That said, I don't exactly see the "heavy references" you mention. And when it comes to the German side, such references are almost always FMS. I did not study all Green Books, but take MacDonald's Last Offensive, Clarke's Riveria to the Rhine, and Cole's The Ardennes. MacDonald routinely gives his (German) sources: they are FMS or a synthesis by Magna E. Bauer. Clarke does not share as many sources as MacDonald, but when he does, they are FMS. That's occasionally frustrating because Clarke could access Ultra intercepts - which makes his book one of the very best - but does not tell which one he precisely refers to. Cole's sources are almost only FMS, the only other notable German source being the OKW KTB and the records of the Malmedy trial.
There is another problem you comment touches on, which is the notorious history of Riviera to the Rhine. It was begun by Robert Ross Smith as part of the original Office of the Chief of Military History writing staff in the 1960's, but then he was transferred to the staff of PACOM to begin work on the history of the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, OCMH staff and budgets were steadily reduced and it was renamed the Center for Military History as a field operating agency under the general staff supervision of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Military Operations (later the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Plans), instead of as a Special Staff under the Chief of Staff. It was then during the period 1973-1983 that the "Old Guard" retired and emphasis was redirected at preparing a Vietnam history and Riviera to the Rhine was turned over to Clarke for completion. Shortly thereafter, CMH also lost control of the Military History Institute at Carlisle Barracks, which came under the purview of the Army War College. The end result of the turnovers, discontent in OCMH/CMH, and other factors was that Riviera to the Rhine was the last major operational study done in the Green Books series and it is reportedly rife with errors - apparently partly because by the time the first draft was completed there were no major participants left to review it. One specific error I know of was the description of the heroic death in combat during NORDWIND of one of the tank battalion commanders, who wrote to CMH to let them know he was actually very much alive after reading the book in 1994.
The other problem is that while Clarke could refer to ULTRA in his work, by then budget cuts meant that he was essentially a "one-man-band" and had to do all his own research as well as integrate his materiel into Smith's original draft sections. The result was the uneven referencing to ULTRA documentation.
As late as 1989-1990, Doc Cole and Mac MacDonald were still very disgruntled with the loss of professionalism in the transition from OCMH to CMH.
Oh, and the Vietnam history? It's still being written. Supposedly. It got so bad after the first Gulf War that the Chief of Staff decided to bypass the sclerotic CMH production cycle and appointed the Desert Storm Special Study Group under General Bob Scales to write the history independently of CMH after realizing Riviera to the Rhine was being published forty years after work began on it and not a single operational narrative volume on Vietnam had been completed twenty years after the end of the war.
:roll: Again to be more precise, the use of original documents can best be seen in the volumes dealing with the war in the Mediterranean, especially Tunisia, Sicily, and the first volume on the Italian Campaign. Ditto for Cross Channel Attack, but then less so afterwards. Because of the lack of documents and documentary continuity in the latter volumes on Northwest Europe, Cole, MacDonald, et al relied more on the research work of Magna Bauer, Charles V. P. von Luttichau, and Royce L. Thompson, who synthesized quite a bit of data from the fragmentary documentation available.Let me again repeat that the strength of scholarship in these Green Books does not make that problematic. But I wouldn't claim these works leverage more than FMS to describe the German side. Even if millions of pages of captured archives were at walking distance, they were not used for these books. A very simple reason could be that MacDonald, Cole or Clarke do not speak German. Strength of the Green books is first and before all on the Americans - as it is supposed to be.
Part of it was when the British historians were writing, Montgomery was still very much a presence shadowing their work. However, they also did not have the resources OCMH had during the 1940s and 1950s and had a much less ambitious scope of work.About the British official history: Ellis considers himself a source, which is... a problem. But he is quite a serious historian too and what he writes is usually based on first class primary material. However, he tends to only select what serves the British army best... Problem is not that he does not give the sources of information, but the way he selects them.
intelligence histories of various campaigns. They of course were not available to the authors of the original official histories anymore than they were to CMH/OCMH in the States with the exception of Riviera to the Rhine. The thing is, the authors of the official histories could have easily referenced from the Cabinet histories, but did not. While the source might have still been secret on publication, the reference would not necessarily be secret if it did not refer to sources and methods.
ULTRA interception is an effective way to fill the gaps in the German documents, when these documents did not make it to NARA/BAMA. I believe that's the most important value of ULTRA archives: it is often all that remain of German original reports, such as strength and supply reports, intelligence reports, operational orders, air reconnaissance results, train movements etc.