Scope and Content Note
The papers of Herbert Bain Knowles (1894-1976) cover the years 1941-1945 and describe Knowles’s service in the United States Navy’s amphibious forces in the Pacific during World War II. The collection traces the American advance across the Pacific Ocean to Japan via the Solomon Islands, Attu, Kiska, Tarawa, Kawajalein, Saipan, Guam, Leyte, Lingayen, and Nagasaki, Japan, during 1942-1945.
Included are mimeographs and carbon copies of after action reports of Knowles and others, conference notes, service communications, operation plans and orders for assault landings and training exercises, marine division field reports, Knowles’s unpublished “History of U.S.S. Heywood,” and his war diaries or monthly logs of Transport Division 18 and Transport Squadron 12. Also included are photographs of the Leyte beachhead and a military intelligence bulletin. Personal materials consist of a few items of correspondence, health reports, orders, response to orders, vouchers, and similar documents depicting Knowles’s naval life while not in combat or engaged in ship and troop deployment.
Knowles was a pioneer and innovator in the art of assault troop landings. His ideas and innovations, as found in his operational plans and orders and in his after action reports, were to become widely adopted for amphibious landings by United States forces.