Christopher M. Rein - Mobilizing the South: The Thirty-First Infantry Division, Race, and World War II

This study could not have been completed without the assistance of mentors, advisers, and colleagues throughout my career as a historian, and especially the archivists who continued to tend to their vital charges throughout a pandemic and who worked tirelessly and creatively to ensure their collections remained accessible. I was fortunate to receive a 2020 General and Mrs. Matthew B. Ridgway Research Grant from the US Armys Heritage and Education Center to use the archives housed at the Army War College in Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. This is a must-visit archive for any work related to the World War IIera Army, and the book benefited from the wide variety of soldier perspectives it has captured in its holdings. Dr. Kurt Piehler, director of the Institute for the Study of World War II and the Human Experience at Florida State University, provided a Cundy Travel Grant to visit Tallahassee to use the collections there. The collections proved surprisingly rich for this project, and contained the files of one of the units first historians, Mrs. Marion Hess, the wife of a 31st Division soldier. Keara Seabold digitized several of the institutes holdings and made the visit much more productive. The grant also enabled me to visit the Florida State Archives; I appreciate Matthew Storeys assistance there. Alison Simpson, command historian of the Florida National Guard, provided digitized copies of documents and several very useful referrals. Mary Lee Eggart again provided expert assistance with the maps, which remain essential for understanding military history. The anonymous reviewers at the University of Alabama Press invested much more into this project than I deserved, and I benefited greatly from their critiques and suggestions. My colleague and good friend John Grenier generously read several chapters and tried to save me from weak topic sentences and excessive use of the passive voice. Any remaining instances, along with all other errors, are entirely my own fault.

My interests in the region and period date to my time as a faculty member at the US Air Force Academy, where I had the opportunity to team-teach the history departments offering on World War II with then captain and now Colonel Jon Klug. I was honored that Jeanne Heidler thought I was worthy of teaching an upper-level course on the American South. Both experiences shaped my thinking about the conflict and the region. Im especially grateful for the opportunity to escort a delegation of cadets on an exchange visit to the Australian Defence Forces Academy (ADFA) which included a visit to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, my first and thus far only visit to the Southwest Pacific Theater. Our Australian hosts ensured that the famous hospitality American servicemen first received seventy years earlier has not diminished in the least. I continued my exploration of World War II during my time as a doctoral candidate in the history department at the University of Kansas, under the expert direction of my adviser, mentor, and friend, Dr. Adrian Lewis. In the departments twentieth-century seminar, Dr. Jeff Moran introduced me to Beth Bailey and David Farbers book, The First Strange Place, which got me thinking deeply about race and the Pacific War. Committee members Ted Wilson, Bill Tsutsui, and the late Roger Spiller did much to improve my thinking of military and environmental history in general, and of World War II in particular.

My interest in this project began with an inquiry into the Armys ability to mobilize its active and reserve components for large-scale combat operations, a contemporary doctrinal focus during my time as a research historian at the Armys Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The Army has historically struggled to effectively integrate citizen soldiers into regular formations, but has been most effective when it has successfully done so. Colleagues at Fort Leavenworth, including Don Wright and Tom Hanson, created a stimulating academic environment, and Eric Burke, who arrived after I left, did much to improve my awareness of and thinking about unit culture. Im also grateful to Bradley Hollingsworth for sharing an advance copy of his SAMS monograph on the Battle of Ole Miss.

But these ideas would have remained just that without a tremendous constellation of archives and repositories in which to explore them.