The Preparation of Manuals

At the outset of the war, field manuals covering tactical and logistical aspects of chemical warfare had already been published. The only wartime addition to this series was the publication of six manuals covering field operations of chemical service units. 

Five CWS technical manuals had been published at the time of Pearl Harbor. These were  

Among the considerable number of CWS items then standardized, only the gas mask and chemical agents were discussed in War Department technical literature. It was therefore necessary, after war was under way, to publish technical descriptions of certain equipment already being supplied to troops. 

While the CWS publication agency in time acquired a polished professional approach in the production of attractive and useful manuals, it necessarily had to seek from others much of the substance which it incorporated into them. The source most generally drawn on, other than the Technical Command, was the Chemical Warfare School. The school over a number of years had developed a series of locally reproduced texts covering features of tactics and technique not included in the scanty list of official publications. Some of these, as appropriations permitted, were accepted and printed by the War Department as official texts. Thus three of the five CWS technical manuals available at the beginning of the war were based on texts originally developed for use at the Chemical Warfare School. This general type of procedure continued throughout the war the unofficial school texts 

The debate over official and unofficial texts persisted in some measure throughout the war. There was continuing complaint, even when a War Department manual was available, that the coverage was incomplete and had to be supplemented to meet local training needs. Often this was true. Yet ASF policy was that the soldier should be trained with the same document that would be available to him in the field and that no local publication should take the place of this official text. Any compromise with this policy would have been unfortunate, since uniformity in training was essential whether the training was done in Louisiana, in northern Ireland, or in Burma. 

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