Type catalog.archives.gov into your friendly neighborhood search bar. (Avoid archives.gov, which will give you fifty-odd links, none of which will take you to the catalog.)
The search bar at the end of catalog.archives.gov gives you two options - Search and Advanced Search. Let’s start with Search. (I will explore Advanced Search in a subsequent article.)
Type a suitably martial expression in the search bar. I chose ‘French trench mortars’.
This phrase turned up close to seven thousand hits, each one of which relates to a document, photo, or film.
As I am looking for films, I clicked the familiar engine oil funnel (can you tell I drive a KIA Soul) marked Filters. Then, under Type of Materials, I selected (the delightfully old-timey category of) ‘Moving Images’
Now, you may wonder why Moving Images outnumber Photographs and other Graphic Materials. (I certainly did.) The reason, alas, is the irritating practice of placing paper documents that describe films in the same category as actual movies.
What is worse, you won’t be able to distinguish items that contain both films and documents from those that hold nothing but documents until you explore the item in question.
The first item on the list that I examined contained two films and ten pieces of paper. Moreover, to get to the films, I had to scroll past nine of the aforementioned documents. (US National Archives)
At this point, you will have figured out that the need to dig through so much paper in order to find films brings out (Merle Haggard, please call your answering service) the fighting side of me. Nonetheless, they often contain descriptions of the people, places, and units being filmed. Thus, while I enjoy the option of downloading each of the films by its lonesome, I decide to hit the button that says Download Complete Production File.
Alas (and, indeed, alack) this yielded a PDF that contained the paper elements of the file, but no video recordings. Thus, I downloaded the two films the old-fashioned way, that is, as individual MP4 files.
None of the footage, by the way, showed French trench mortars. The first film, however did show Doughboys of II Corps of the American Expeditionary Forces, which served until British command in France and Flanders in 1918, training with 3-inch Stokes mortars and French 37mm guns.