The American Soldier in World War II is a project to make a remarkable collection of written reflections on war and military service by American soldiers who served during the Second World War available to scholars and to the public.

In its efforts to mobilize, train, equip, and lead the largest fighting force in the nation's history, the US War Department created an in-house Army Research Branch staffed and advised by the country's leading social and behavioral scientists. To help create a more efficient and effective fighting force, the Branch surveyed approximately half a million individuals over the course of the war.

Plenty of soldiers wondered if anyone would actually read their answers, let alone heed their advice. But many thousands took advantage of the unique opportunity these surveys provided them to talk back to command, to share what they were feeling and had experienced, how they thought they could best serve the nation and how the Army could be improved, along with their hopes and fears for the future.

The Branch's research team collected, analyzed, and summarized the soldiers' responses in "real time" for the War Department's benefit. After the war, the director of the research team, Samuel Stouffer, led an effort to reanalyze the data, publishing the results in an authoritative four-volume series known collectively as The American Soldier studies.

The Branch's survey data sets were transferred from IBM cards to tape, then were eventually converted to ASCII computer files, as technologies for preserving quantitative data evolved across the 20th century. The Branch's research team also preserved tens of thousands of commentaries soldiers' wrote by hand in response to a "free-comment" prompt that appeared at the end of most surveys. In 1947, the US Army preserved these pages by photographing them to microfilm.

These poignant, proud, candid, and passion-filled pages have long remained available only to those who could travel to the nation's capital to read them on a microfilm reader at the National Archives.

In cooperation with the National Archives, The American Soldier in World War II project is rendering these unparalleled sources digitally accessible to scholars, students, and public for the very first time.

Since our project's May 8th, VE Day 2018 launch, thousands of Zooniverse "citizen archivists" on the planet's most popular crowdsourcing platform have been busy transcribing, annotating, and tagging each page in triplicate to produce the most accurate results.

In the spring of 2021, these documents, along with accompanying survey data, will be provided on an open access website being designed by the leading web design agency, Cast Iron Coding. When complete, this digital archive will offer site visitors the most comprehensive and detailed portrait of the largest army in the nation's history.

Support for this project has been generously provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities (PW-253766-17 and PW-264049-19) and by the National Archives and Records Administration, which digitized the microfilm reels. The Social Science Research Council – an international, independent nonprofit organization – has also granted the project usage rights to the original research published in the 1949-50 four volumes.