The Daily Battle Communiqués issued by the Communiqué Section, Public Relations Division of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force Europe (SHAEF), relate the daily progress of the Allied campaign in Europe from D-Day on June 6, 1944 until the German surrender on May 7, 1945.

These communiqués were designed mainly as a guide to correspondents covering battlefront activities, though they also served to keep various branches of the Allied forces informed and coordinated. (They were not secret or confidential.) The reports do not describe the local horror and suffering from bombs and bullets but provide an overall, almost businesslike, account of the Allied advance across France, the Netherlands, and Germany.

The head of the Communiqué Section, Lt. Col. D. Reed Jordan, saved the individual reports, making possible their compilation into a complete collection. This is to great scholarly merit, since most copies of the day were immediately discarded. Mr. Jordan’s nephew, Keith S. Taylor, has donated one copy of them to the Harold B. Lee Library. Now the communiqués are available worldwide in digitized form. One of the many values to researchers of the Second World War is the full-text searchability — including searches by personal names and city names — data that can verify the existing historical records of military actions, individuals, and the geographic places that set the stage for one of the greatest military campaigns in history.