For the first time, The American Soldier in World War II project is making available and accessible a truly unique collection of historical records: 65,000 pages of uncensored commentaries written by U.S. soldiers in their own hands.

The US Army of the Second World War was a "citizen-soldier" force. Only a fraction of the roughly sixteen million men and women who served had any prior military experience. For some, the transition came easily, for others with great difficulty.

Early on, the War Department created an in-house social and behavioral sciences research unit. The mission of the Army's Research Branch was to help facilitate this transition and more generally to improve troop morale. A well-adjusted soldier was not only more content, but also more efficient and effective.

Tasked with bolstering morale, Army researchers administered "attitude surveys" to military personnel stateside and around the globe, from Alaska to Panama to the Persian Gulf. Over the course of the conflict, these scholars studied the backgrounds, habits, personalities, experiences, and opinions of approximately half a million service members and War Department-employed civilians.

Free from the threat of censorship or censure, not only did soldiers respond to multiple-choice survey questions, but they wrote as well tens of thousands of pages of commentary that touched upon myriad facets of their experiences in uniform.

Until now, the only way the public could read these first-person handwritten narratives was to visit the nation's capital region. But thanks to modern technology and the power of the crowd, this will soon no longer be the case.

Over the past two years, more than 4,700 volunteers on the planet's largest, most popular crowdsourcing platform, Zooniverse.org, have been hard at work transcribing, annotated, and tagging these forthright, poignant, passionate, and humorous wartime records.

Owing to the hard work and dedication of our civic-minded Zooniverse contributors, we have successfully completed our two-year transcription drive ahead of schedule and in time for the 75th anniversary of VE Day.

To celebrate and commemorate the occasion and to thank the many Zooniverse members who have played such a vital role in our success, the project’s team has organized a virtual May 8, 75^th-anniversary program, complete with individual and group interviews and short messages from project stakeholders, public humanities advocates, and our dedicated community members.

We're so grateful for our team and contributors, and we're excited to continue onto the next step in this multi-year digital history project, that of designing and building an open access website filled with these now-accessible historical treasures. We are targeting a Spring 2021 public launch, so stay tuned.

Until then, enjoy the program. And again, for those of you have contributed, thank you many times over.