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Major General S. LeRoy Irwin, then Commanding General of the corps, was present at the initial
meetings and continued his interest and support to the very end of the project. Others who served as
subsequently on the Executive Committee were Major General Manton S. Eddy, Brigadier General
John M. Lentz, and Colonel Albert C. Lieber, Jr.
2. General Policy and Form of the Writing
It was decided from the earliest gatherings of the Executive Committee that an attempt must be
made to have the volume when completed a definitive history of XII Corps as a whole in World War II.
Although production had to be centralized and administered in the XII Corps Headquarters, the final
product should not be solely a "headquarters book." The historian was to make clear the indispensable
parts played by the great Corps divisions, the cavalry group, the artillery and engineer groups and
battalions, and all those other specialized organizations which joined forces to make up the
overwhelming might of a modern American Army Corps. If the headquarters is mentioned more often
throughout the narrative than other Corps units this is for two principal reasons. As the command group
for the corps it links all of the Corps units and often is used to represent the others in matters of general
experience. And since the narrative follows the simplest chronological plan, running without
interruption or reversal of flow from the activation of the corps on 29 August 42 to its in activation on
15 December 45, there were times, as on the trip across the Atlantic, when the headquarters was all the
XII Corps there was. Thus it happens that the only units for which a relatively complete story is told of
those "organic" to the XII Corps Headquarters. Nevertheless, though it has been impossible within the
scope of a single volume like this, to tell all the story of other units in a fighting force of such size and
complexity, it is hoped that the reader who was not in the XII Corps Headquarters and Headquarters
Company, or XII Corps Artillery Headquarters and Headquarters Battery, the signal battalion, or other
organic unit, will still not consider this an "headquarters book." He should find his unit, if it was a large
one, well represented in these pages. And if his was a smaller outfit, it should still be mentioned more
than once, and certainly be found in the station lists and unit rosters at the end of the volume. Such
references, together with the connecting thread of the headquarters experience, the photographs, and
illustrations like the end paper Battle Route and fold-out Zone or Advance maps, should give the reader
who served with any XII Corps unit at the very least, an approximation of his own experience during the
War in Europe.
It was also decided early to rewrite or otherwise change as little as possible material taken from
the sources on which the history is based. Whatever may be gained in uniformity by such rewriting,
there is almost sure to be a final loss in color and vigor, and in the sense of authenticity conveyed by the
words of the original document or interview. The question of annotation was discussed at length in
meetings by the Executive Committee, and it was decided not to clutter up the narrative with complete
references to sources. This was chiefly because the supporting documents for a work of this character
are so extremely limited in type that they may be usually cited in text preceding the quotation without
undue clumsiness and yet with sufficient fullness to enable any researcher to trace back a desired
quotation without difficulty. In nine cases out of ten they are derived from official documents to be
found on file in the Historical Records Division of The Adjutant General's Office of the War
Department; in all but a negligible remainder they are from published material available in public
libraries. For this reason it seemed almost unnecessary to use up space needed for matters of more
general interest on an elaborate bibliography. Complete annotation and a bibliography were
conscientiously kept as a matter of discipline to the stage of final review of the draft typescript. But in
the copy sent to the publisher footnotes were held to a minimum in the interest of smooth-flowing story.
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