Military Oral History and War Oral History

From Conceptual Difference to Research Boundary

Abolfazl Hassanabadi (PhD)
Machine Translation edited by Mandana Karimi

2026-8-5

Introduction

In recent decades, oral history has become one of the most important methods of historical research. A method that, by relying on human narratives of lived experiences and individual memory, allows for the reconstruction of layers of the past that have not been recorded in official documents. Among the different branches of oral history, two areas of military oral history and war oral history have a special place. Although these two areas are similar in appearance, there are important conceptual, methodological, and practical differences between them in international research literature. The imposed war is one of the important events in contemporary history in Iran, the consequences of which have affected many aspects of people's lives and have had various political, social, cultural, and economic effects. In examining these effects, questions arise: What aspects of the war have received the most attention so far? What dimensions of it are more important? Is the military aspect of the war more important or the cultural and economic? Who should write the history of the war? Universities, military centers, or independent researchers; which are given priority?

One of the most important tools for documenting the history of the war is oral history. The necessity of recording and recording war memories has been one of the most important motivations for the formation and expansion of oral history in Iran. Today, military and government centers are most active in the field of oral history. A review of the centers involved in the oral history of the Sacred Defense shows that most of the activities are being carried out by military centers and their subsidiaries, such as the Sacred Defense Documents Organization, the Foundation for the Preservation of Sacred Defense Monuments and Values, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps War Studies and Research Center, the army, some military divisions, and martyrs' congresses.

After several decades of activity in the field of oral history of the war, it is time to pay more attention to the theoretical foundations and to make the boundaries between the research areas related to it more prominent. One of the important issues that should be given serious attention in this regard is the difference in identity components and methodological characteristics between military oral history and war oral history, which will be further examined below. In addition, the country's involvement in two wars in the past year has highlighted the need to pay attention to the topic of military oral history, the oral history of war, and the need to explain its boundaries. This article aims to explain these differences and provide a theoretical framework for their analysis.

Military Oral History

Military oral history is a specialized branch of oral history that focuses on recording and analyzing the narratives of military forces, commanders, unit personnel, and individuals associated with military structures. Kaufman considers military oral history as a tool for understanding command decisions, operations, and recording the professional experience of military forces. Military oral history began with World War II, when the American and British armies established diary-recording units to record the experiences of soldiers and commanders. Coffman shows that the US military has been using oral history as a tool for operational analysis since the 1940s. This oral history method involved structured interviews with commanders and troops, analysis of operations and decisions, use of official documents to supplement narratives, attention to hierarchy, confidentiality of information, and technical, tactical, and operational details. (Coffman, 1998)

Military oral history as an independent field expanded greatly after World War II. When armies and universities realized that a significant part of the war experience was not recorded in official documents and remained only in the memories of soldiers and commanders, Columbia University began extensive projects to record war narratives and established oral history as a scientific method. (Thompson, 2000)

From its inception, military oral history has been based on the assumption that “lived experience” can bridge the gap between official records and field reality. Because military records are usually formal, hierarchical, and controlled narratives, combining oral history with documentary sources provides a richer understanding of military history. Because explicit narratives contain explanations and reminders that are rarely recorded in military records. In addition, oral history can depict the atmosphere of a particular event or period in a way that is not possible in official records. Indeed, the knowledge of war, including operational, tactical, organizational, and experiential understanding of the battlefield, is one of the fundamental elements of military oral history, which was first applied in academic[1] and research centers and then, with the specialization of military historiography and the formation of related disciplines, it was applied more professionally. Professionalism in the field of war historiography has also specialized the approaches to the use of oral history. From this perspective, oral history is not used solely for collecting military information, but is a practical method for analyzing and understanding contradictions, and discovering and improving. Examples of professional work include the US Army Oral History Handbook, which was translated and published in several issues on the Oral History website.[2]

Oral History of War

Oral history of war is a broad field that, in addition to military forces, includes the narratives of civilians, women, children, immigrants, aid workers, doctors, journalists, and all those who have experienced war. Oral history of war has developed since the 1960s with the spread of social movements and cultural studies. Terkel emphasizes that in the oral history of war, in addition to operations, the human and social experiences and stories of all groups involved in it should be recorded. (Terkel, 2004)

Raynor shows in his studies that after World War II, researchers paid attention to recording the narratives of civilians, women and minorities. He also emphasizes in his studies on veterans that war narratives have moved towards psychological, identity and social experiences over time. (Raynor, 2022) In the oral history of war, using the capacity of semi-structured or open interviews and focusing on human lived experiences, an attempt is made to examine the different dimensions of the subject by considering the diversity of narratives (women, children, and civilians) and cultural, social and psychological analysis. The benefits of oral history of war include analyzing collective memory and identity, examining the psychological consequences of war, recording the experiences of different groups, combating historical distortion, and producing polyphonic narratives of war.

It is not clear exactly when in the world the direction and direction of military oral history and war became separate. However, the nature of the two was certainly not separate at first, and all dimensions were considered in military oral history projects, until gradually, as military oral history centers specialized and the scope of activities of centers that were engaged in the social and cultural studies of war expanded, the fields of work became separated. The most important reasons for this clarification of boundaries include the confidentiality of military information, limited access to commanders, organizational bias, formalized and controlled narratives, the elimination or censorship of some operational details, linear and structured narratives, and organization-oriented interviews in military oral history. While in the oral history of war, the emphasis is on highlighting human lived experience, open and nonlinear narratives, and human-oriented interviews. Before the separation, oral history experts such as Alessandro Portelli[3] discussed the history of war using oral history, which is considered one of the leading works of war history. In his narrative, Portelli points to the role of oral history in creating collective identity and social bonds, and with an emphasis on meaning in oral history, he believes that the war oral history interview should go beyond the level of ordinary questions and answers and reach a joint process of meaning production; where both the narrator and the interviewer are constructing history. This provides the basis for the creation of new narratives.

Table 1: Comparison of military oral history and war oral history

Table 2: Difference in the nature of military oral history and war oral history

Military oral history and war oral history in Iran

After the above definitions, the question arises as to what is the relationship between military oral history and war oral history in Iran and to what extent have its boundaries been defined. Sacred defense or war has been one of the most important components of the formation and development of oral history in Iran. A general review of the activities carried out in this field shows that over the past three decades of oral history activities, the direction of activities has moved towards specialization. Especially in the field of military oral history, the establishment of centers such as the Center for Sacred Defense Documents and Research, the Islamic Republic of Iran Army, the Center for Studies and Research of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the Foundation for the Preservation of Sacred Defense Works and Values ​​has provided a platform for work, and some works such as the Manual for Reading, Rewriting, and Publishing Sacred Defense Documents have been prepared. (Azizi, 2018) In addition to military centers, some archival centers such as the National Archives and Library Organization, and the Astan Quds Documents Center also operate as a project in the field of oral history of war. Institutions such as the Art Center and Soureh Mehr Publications are active in the field of publishing oral history literature of war. On the surface, a division of labor has been established between military and civilian centers in this field, but it is not possible to make a definitive statement about the content. This is because specific standards for the work have not yet been defined, and academic centers are not very willing to be effective in this field due to the lack of clarification of the boundaries of military oral history and the dominance of military thinking over the oral history of the war. Considering the holding of several conferences, including the specialized pathology of the oral history of the Holy Defense in the Fourth National Conference on Oral History and Resistance (2024), it seems that there is initial familiarity with the issues and problems of these two fields. However, in order to address the concerns of military institutions about distortion and bias in the perception of the Holy Defense and the active participation of civilian centers, more specialized meetings should be held in this field, and the required scientific content should be prepared from these meetings and a review of global experiences and presented in the form of articles and books. In addition, the definition of academic disciplines related to the nature of both fields should be separated and the ground should be provided for further research, especially in the field of oral history of the war. An issue that has become more important with the events of the last year (the second and third imposed wars) and should be addressed more consciously.

References

Azizi, Gholamreza, Shivehnameh-ye bazkhaniT Baznevisi va Enteshar-e Asnad-e defa-e Moghaddas (Manual for Reading, Rewriting, and Publishing Holy Defense Documents), Tehran, Foundation for the Preservation of Works and Publication of Holy Defense Values, 2008.

Coffman, E. M. (1998). The War to End All Wars: The American Military Experience in World War I. University Press of Kentucky.

Terkel, Studs (2004) The Good War: An Oral History of World War II, The New Press.

Raynor, Sharon (2022) Practicing Oral History with Military and War Veterans, Taylor & Francis Group.

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