Introduction

Most students know about the Pogue Library, as a History major this building becomes a second home while feverishly working on a project, for other students outside of the history department it's where there are a lot of old books, a lot of history about the area in and around Murray, and there's a room with a lot of war books about World War I through II and some others the United States have been involved in. Yet not too many students know why this library is named or whom it is named after most don't know that its namesake is based on one the Jackson’s Purchases own. But, why was this library named after him? What did he accomplish that a university would name a Library after him. As you read on you will get a glimpse of his early life, his time in the Army, the importance of his journals, and his accomplishments after the Army. You will also be introduced to a few other readings that came out of World War II and how they compare to what I read from Pogue’s diary and how he differed from those particular writings.

During his time in Europe he like many men who had History backgrounds were assigned to the Army Historical Unit under the G2 (for the non-military in the room this usually means that they were part of the Army main staff, this would be the area that would be the heads of a Division.) These men like Mr. Pogue all had formal education and at least had doctorates in their field of studies, thus making most of them Army Officers. Unfortunately, our friend Mr. Pogue would not get such a luxury, he was an enlisted man, therefore he worked for a living. (Military Humor) Now, there is a huge difference in treatment between an enlisted soldier and an officer and from reading the diary of Mr. Pogue it is painstakingly obvious who was treated better. In a way it's still the same way today. The enlisted soldier and Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) were and are the "backbone" of the military and the officers get the accolades of the work done by these men.

Now, that we got that difference between what an officer does and what enlisted soldiers do, let us look at the reason we are here. Forrest C. Pogue wrote in journals about his life after being drafted into the Army. But he was not the only man to do so, many men wrote in journals during the war. I myself wrote in one while on my first tour in Iraq. The importance of my journal compared to that of Pogue’s was drastically different, mine was for me and my sons to read while Pogue’s would have a much further audience and mean more to future generations like myself.

The ETOUSA (European Theater of Operations, U.S. Army) as it was seen in Pogue’s journal was the unit that the field Historians were assigned to. Through the 18th of and 30th of July was an important time for Pogue. This is when his headquarters had finally made into theater, according to his journal this was D+42 through D+54. During this time the journal of the men belonging to the Historical section of ETOUSA would now become very important. In one of his entries he stated the following:

“The nineteenth was extremely busy because corps headquarters, angry at conflicting instructions on combat history issued by Headquarters, ETOUSA and First Army, had canceled its circulars on the matter. Headquarters, ETOUSA, was requiring journals to be sent in by units promptly at the end of each month, while army and corps headquarters were requiring after-action reports that required the use of journals.”^[1]

As from this part of his journal we see the emphasis from the Army that these historians' journals were vital to the mission of gathering what was needed for each unit's History and the overall history of World War II. These men were very protective of their journals that according to Pogue an agreement was reached but most of the men just made duplicates to send up. The Historical section were now acknowledged as a legit unit and no longer had to get their equipment from various units, they would now have their own jeeps and equipment, others could now be up for promotion. This took some special orders to establish this kind of legitimacy.^[2] During this time Pogue had spent time working and revising his writing on the landing of Omaha beach in those pivotal hours of American and British troops landing on Normandy. In one of Pogue's journal entries (D+86) as he was wrapping up his writings about Normandy and as Paris was being liberated, he talks about a certain incident that he witnessed,

“We were stopped near Saint-Denis by the press of the crowd and found a group taunting a girl who had been friendly to German soldiers. Her head had been shaved and Free French soldiers were escorting her down the streets while the crowd hooted. She, and sister sufferers we saw later got our sympathy no matter what they had done. For their look, in the hands of their tormentors, was that of a hunted animal. It seemed to me that nothing made a person look so naked to the world, nothing was so overwhelmingly brutal in its humiliation, then this forcible shaving of heads. Neither did I like the placards on nearby shops that said here is the house of a Boche, or supplier of the Boche. It smelled too much of the Here is a Jew signs I had seen in Germany in 1938”^[3]

This was in my opinion a very significant entry for it started to show what was going on to the people as the Germans began retreating and Allies were making their way through France. These incidents were happening all over the place that Germans were once rooted and started losing their foothold in Europe. It happened in the cities and villages and at times it was worse for the women who ended up having children from German soldiers.

At another time in Pogue’s journal was the fast pace at which the war was traveling that he states that's when most journal entries were meager. Meaning that there just wasn’t enough to put all the details in. It's true some things were fueled by adrenaline and gathering information or writing in the moment was going be a tough time and once the adrenaline subsides trying to remember everything that happen can be a pretty daunting task.

Pogue finally made it back to V Corps and the front in November (D+162), in this period Pogue has begun his interviews of the men of V Corps and other units as they were fighting their way into Germany. His journals mention news coming those who were battling in Bastogne and while he himself wrote from the flank which would be known as the Battle of the Bulge. During the last weeks of his journal he was receiving news from the Pacific, the savageness that was Iwo Jima, and the bombing of Tokyo. Finally came the time when he Himself and the rest of the Allied forces crossed the Rhine. As the Allies followed the Armor Divisions across Germany, they met the Russians in Berlin.

^[1] Pogue, Forrest C. Pogue's War : Diaries of a WWII Combat Historian. 2001.

^[2] Pogue, Forrest C. Pogue's War : Diaries of a WWII Combat Historian. 2001

^[3] Pogue, Forrest C. Pogue's War : Diaries of a WWII Combat Historian. 2001

Once the War was over Forrest C. Pogue left the Army with the rank of Master Sergeant. He would later garner accolades with his writing of what would be known in the Army as the “Green Books” which was the Army history of World War II. Pogue wrote on the US Supreme Command which describes how General Dwight D. Eisenhower's command group came to be and the decisions he and they had to make in order to be successful.

Pogue was a contributing author to The Meaning of Yalta, Eisenhower: A Centenary Assessment. Command Decisions (1959), Total War and Cold War (1962), D-Day: The Normandy Invasion in Retrospect (1970), The Continuing Revolution (1975), and The War Lords (1976). The author of the four volume biography of General George C. Marshall.^[1]

In 1954 Forrest C. Pogue returned to Kentucky as a professor and by 1956 after a phone call became the director of the newly established George C. Marshall Research Foundation. This job was demanding that Pogue had to wear multiple hats not as a historian but as a librarian, archivist, curator and interviewer.^[1] He was a guest speaker at multiple colleges and other institutions later in his career and sat on various boards within historical societies and served as president for both the Oral History Association and the American Military Institute. After eighteen years at the Marshall Foundation, Pogue was invited to be the head of the Eisenhower Institute for Historical Research, where he advised scholars while wrapping up the fourth volume to his Marshall collection.^[2] He said this of himself’

“It’s been an unusual type of public history career.”^[3]

^[1] Pogue, Forrest C., and Holly C. Shulman. "Forrest C. Pogue and the Birth of Public History in the Army." The Public Historian 15, no. 1 (1993): 27-46.

^[2] Pogue, Forrest C., and Holly C. Shulman. "Forrest C. Pogue and the Birth of Public History in the Army." The Public Historian 15, no. 1 (1993): 27-46.

^[3] Pogue, Forrest C., and Holly C. Shulman. "Forrest C. Pogue and the Birth of Public History in the Army." The Public Historian 15, no. 1 (1993): 27-46.

Many of the readings are from articles and books and each comes from someone else's perspective. The articles of Forrest C. Pogue were colleagues who later became his friends; the other books are from men who had either written down their own stories of what they lived through during the time in World War II. Pogue’s diaries are that of a “Combat Historian” who became a history teacher and was sent to war to write what he saw and what other men saw and put all together that future generations would later read to get an understanding of what many these young men and women did.

Pogue, Forrest C. Pogue's War : Diaries of a WWII Combat Historian. 2001

This book is an outstanding source that I used throughout this project and would highly recommend to anyone who wanted to know the perspective of an historian writing on history as it was happening in that moment. The Forward was written by Stephen E. Ambrose, yes that Stephen E. Ambrose who wrote Band of Brothers.

Coffman, Edward M. "Memories of Forrest C. Pogue, Oral History Pioneer and One of Kentucky's Greatest Historians." The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 104, no. 3/4 (2006)

This article is great because it's about Mr. Coffman talking about his mentor and his friend. In the article he makes a quote from Marshall to Pogue,

“You will succeed if you remember to deal with our stories with the understanding of what we knew at the time, what we had to do with, and what we attempted to do in a limited time” Coffman goes on to say that Marshall was not a Historian and never heard of “presentism” but he realized how damaging it was to project agendas and current beliefs on the people and events of the past.

Pogue, Forrest C., and Holly C. Shulman. "Forrest C. Pogue and the Birth of Public History in the Army." The Public Historian 15, no. 1 (1993): 27-46.

Holly C. Shulman's article is an interview she conducted with Pogue during 1990-1991 She was interested in the beginnings of Army public history and was wanting to Dr. Pogue to discuss the ways World War 2 transformed those goals.

Pogue, Forrest C., and the United States. Department of the Army. Office of Military History, Issuing Body. The Supreme Command. United States Army in World War II. European Theater of Operations. 1989.

This is the Big Green Book of the US Army. It's a part of a much larger collection of books that deals with the Army’s history in World War II.

Schiess Avila, Judith., Nez, Chester. Code Talker: The First and Only Memoir By One of the Original Navajo Code Talkers of WWII. United Kingdom: Penguin Publishing Group, 2011.

This book is a different view from the Pacific campaign with the Marine Corps but it gives the perspective of a Navajo whose ancestors may have not agreed with a government but he still served his country proudly and with others came up with a system that led the Allies winning in the Pacific.

Graziano, Luciano C., A Patriot’s Memoirs of World War II: Through my eyes, heart and soul. LifeRich Publishing, 2018.

The story of Luciano Graziano is a story of a man with immigrant parents having to leave his education in the eighth grade to help his family and when the time came he would go on to serve in the military. This book is his story.