United States. War Department. General Staff

United States. War Department. General Staff is a corporate author used for works issued by the U.S. War Department’s General Staff, especially in the 1910s and 1920s. Library records connect the name to handbooks, regulations, intelligence summaries, and studies of military organization, showing that these books were created as official government publications rather than as the work of one individual.

The General Staff appears on a wide range of titles, including A handbook for the War Department general staff (published in 1924), wartime studies of the American Expeditionary Forces, and reports on topics such as mobilization, training, and overseas graves registration. Many of these works were prepared under the direction of the Chief of Staff or within branches such as the War Plans Division, which gives them a clear documentary and administrative character.

For readers today, this author credit usually signals a primary historical source: concise, formal, and closely tied to how the U.S. Army studied war, organized itself, and recorded major events in the years around World War I. These books are often valuable less for personal voice than for the window they offer into official military thinking of their time.