What are the “Green Books” and the “Blue Books?”
These are nicknames given by historians to two separate sets of military books. “The Green Books” are the official U.S. Army History of WW2 which were originally printed in hardback green covers. Many of them are available on the Center For Military History Website as PDF files. The “Blue Books” are specific to the 8th Infantry Division. They are a series of five yearbook sized (blue covers) histories of various elements of the division printed just after WW2. The five books are the headquarters and division special troops, one for each of the three infantry regiments, and one for the artillery units. They include not only capsule histories of the units in WW2 (found on the website under the specific unit) but also yearbook sized photos of most of the men that returned to the USA with the division. This means that any man who had left the unit before arriving back in the States (killed, wounded, transferred, discharged) is not pictured in the book.
