Washington Command Post: The Operations Division (United States Army in World War II: The War Department, Volume 2)

xvi, 413 pp. Green cloth, gilt titles. Includes 4 charts, 4 illustrations, 2 appendices, bibliographical note, glossaries, and index. "This is the history of the agency through which General George C. Marshall exercised his paramount authority over the Army's activities, at home and overseas, from 9 March 1942 to the end of the war... OPD was, in short, the organizational solution applied to the knottiest problem of high command, reconciling the requirements of administrative and operational decentralization with the necessity for effective supervision and unified control of worldwide operations" (United States Army in World War II Reader's Guide, pp. 4-6). Includes discussion of the development of American and Allied strategy, coordination of the zone of interior and active theaters in a war fought overseas, structure and functioning of the War Department, wartime Allied conferences, planning for specific operations and strategies (Bolero, Sledgehammer, etc.), the decision to use the atom bomb in Japan, etc.