New Frontiers: A Digital History Project about Clemson Men in WWII

One of my first projects in graduate school is to create a thematic research collection based on items in Clemson’s Special Collections and Archives. While I’m no stranger to the world of archives, I hadn’t heard of a thematic research collection, or TRC, before. It’s similar to a digital exhibit, because the archival items are the focus, but it does more than that. TRCs are designed to facilitate scholarship by presenting carefully selected digitized items along with contextual information and sources. TRCs don’t necessarily make an argument as would a scholarly monograph; they simply bring together in one place often widely distributed sources and provide the tools for other scholars to conduct research.

For my TRC, I chose to look at the experiences of Clemson students during World War II. The war is a favorite topic of mine; I’ve been studying it since I was in middle school and I’m sure I’ve only scratched the surface. I think it’s important to remember those men and women who sacrificed their lives in order to defend their countries against the regimes of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. It is a shame that millions of people, including Jews, Poles, Russians, and Chinese, were killed before the Allies could bring this conflict to an end. Let us hope that our generation never sees such a war.

Over the last few weeks I’ve had to modify my research questions for this project. Originally I wanted to demonstrate that the unique environment of Clemson, with its dual nature as an agricultural/engineering and military college, instilled important values in the cadets and shaped them into leaders on the battlefield in WWII. However, I have yet to find evidence that Clemson prepared its cadets better than other land-grant colleges or that the environment was really unique. I think it would require more research than what I can do in one semester to make that argument. While many Clemson men were decorated in the war, it’s not clear that it was because they went to Clemson as opposed to another school. Clemson cadets seem representative of the general population in our armed forces in WWII. They were not “military men”; they went to Clemson to get an education and enter the workforce. When war came, they did their duty, often heroically, but not because they enjoyed it.

Therefore my project will focus more on the experiences of the cadets. It will show, in four parts, how Clemson students viewed the war before the United States entered it; how their sentiments changed due to Pearl Harbor; how active service affected them; and how the Clemson community memorialized those who were killed. The working title is “Service and Sacrifice: Clemson Men in World War II.”

One of my primary sources for this project will be the Clemson student newspaper, The Tiger, which has been digitized on the TigerPrints website. Out of approximately 60 issues from the years 1938-1945 that are relevant to my project, I will select the ones that best convey the sentiments of the student body. For example, several editorials expressed an isolationist view of the war, but this changed somewhat as Britain suffered under German bombardment and especially when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The Tiger also featured many articles about alumni who had been killed in action or became POWs, as well as about those who distinguished themselves in battle. My Photoshop skills have come in handy to create the clippings.

For the wartime experiences of Clemson men, I will focus primarily on their own testimonies and artifacts. I’ve already visited Special Collections and Archives to look through the William Cline Collection, which Clemson recently acquired. Cline ’41 was a white officer who commanded a segregated tank platoon in Italy. This unit was part of the 758th Tank Battalion in the 92nd “Buffalo” Infantry Division. His collection, which was donated by his son, contains a priceless trove of letters and photographs. My main difficulty here is to select only a few items from this abundance of fascinating material. Another collection that I plan to use is the Manny Lawton Papers. Lawton ’40 served as battalion military advisor with the Philippine Army until Allied forces surrendered to the Japanese. He survived the Bataan Death March and spent 3.5 years as a prisoner of the Japanese. There is much intriguing material here too, but I intend to select one or more annotated manuscripts of his memoir, Some Survived, for my project.

Although this is a new kind of project for me, I would say that I feel pretty good about it at this point. Earlier I had the feeling that I was behind in working on it, but I made quite a bit of progress last week. Visiting the archives to look at the William Cline Collection was a turning point. It was great to finally have some digitized archival material other than PDFs of The Tiger. I spent three hours last Tuesday just looking through Cline’s letters and scrapbooks, in the course of which I made a startling discovery that promises to lead to a bigger project in future. Hopefully I can go back soon, maybe next week. After that I want to review the Lawton Papers. I suppose the greatest challenge right now is time management. Sometimes more urgent assignments take priority and I have to put this one on hold. I still need to do additional secondary source research to contextualize the archival items I’ve found.

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