The World War I Diary of Col. Frank P. Lahm, Air Service, A.E.F.

About a year before General Frank P. Lahm died in 1963 he gave his World War I diary to the editor saying simply I want you to have this. You may use it in any way you wish. It was evident that although the diary was not the sort that would force historians to rewrite the story of World War I, it was, nevertheless. an interesting and useful addition to the limited literature of the conflict and should be edited and published. A careful reading of the diary revealed, however, that it contained the names of around 1,000 persons--men and women, military and civilian, American and foreign. well known and obscure, important and unimportant--and that for it to be of maximum use as a historical document, it was essential to identify as many of these persons as possible. The decision to undertake this task led to two other decisions first, not to clutter the narrative with a vast amount of biographical data but, instead, to arrange all persons alphabetically and put them, together with a sketch of each one who could be identified, in a Personnel Section in the Index second, to keep all sketches brief, no matter how important the person may have been. The editor has identified most of the persons mentioned in the diary. The few who remain unidentified are those whose names are not sufficiently distinctive or whose assignments were not sufficiently clear to distinguish them from other persons with the same family name, or whose names evidently were misspelled by General Lahm, or who were citizens of nations whose records for the period of World War I are incomplete or non-existent, or who, for some unknown reason, have simply refused to come to the surface in spite of a substantial effort by the editor. Fortunately, those who remain unidentified were not important to the story.