In April 1999, two Navy Reserve officers landed aboard the USS Enterprise (CVN-65), then patrolling the Persian Gulf, and proceeded to spend the next two weeks collecting documentation and conducting interviews with dozens of members of the crew and embarked air wing about the events that transpired between 16 and 19 December 1998, in what was called Operation Desert Fox.
In documenting that aircraft carrier’s lead role in conducting punitive strikes in response to Iraq’s refusal to cooperate with U.N. inspectors, the two reservists were performing duties that harkened back to World War II, when historians, led by Samuel Eliot Morison, were commissioned as naval officers of ranks commensurate with their academic experience and sent out to capture the momentous history that was the Battle of the Atlantic and the War in the Pacific. Of course, the result of that effort was Morison’s 15-volume History of United States Naval Operations in World War II series, which has served as a key secondary source for follow-on authors such as John Prados, Richard Frank, James Hornfischer, Ian Toll, and Trent Hone.
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1. David F. Winkler, “Documenting Desert Fox,” Naval Aviation News, July-August 1999, 25–26.
2. Department of the Navy Records Management Manual (November 2007 revision), V-I.
3. David Alan Rosenberg, email to author, 15 November 2021.
4. See David Sears, “Sam Morison’s War,” Naval History 34, no. 1 (February 2020): 20–25, and “Sam Morison’s Long Campaign,” Naval History 34, no. 2 (April 2020): 28–34.
