Throughout the history of operations research (OR), the military context has proven crucial: in the founding of the field, both in Britain and in the United States; in giving employment for its practitioners; and in providing challenging problems for them to tackle (and sometimes solve). Among recent publications on the development of the field are several describing the work of particular operations research units in the American or British military services, some focused just on the formative years of World War II and some taking the story into the postwar era. One of the richest, in technical detail, anecdote, and analysis, is Charles W. McArthur's Operations Analysis in the U.S. Army Eighth Air Force in World War H, Volume 4 in the History of Mathematics series published by the American Mathematical Society.
McArthur traces the activities of the first operations analysis section in the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF) from its establishment in late 1942 through the end of the war. Following AAF practice, McArthur calls the subject operations analysis, though the administrative units he describes bore the name Operations Research Section. In describing the scope of their activities, he uses a fairly standard definition of OR, at least in its initial, wartime incarnation: "using groups of scientists and other skilled civilians in the application of scientific method to military operations"--one instance "of the greatest mobilization of science of war up to that time" (p. 1).
McArthur, a bombardier in the 493d Bomb Group, had a personal stake in the success of OR groups in the Eighth Air Force, though, as he notes, at the time he was "totally unaware of them" (p. xxi). His interest in their activities was piqued, much later, by his own work in mathematics, and by his growing awareness that some of his teachers and older colleagues had served as operations (or operational) analysts during the war. Not all wartime operations analysts were mathematicians, to be sure; indeed, one of the unusual characteristics of early OR teams was their interdisciplinary nature, with specialists drawn from a variety of scientific and nonscientific fields. (The Eighth Air Force OR team included, for example, John Marshall Harlan, later a Supreme Court justice.) And for some team members, as McArthur knew from personal experience, the links with the emerging field of operations research were quite short-lived--hence his efforts to document the role of the mathematicians who spent the war as civilian operational analysts, whatever their subsequent career paths.