First-hand officer memoirs become much easier to find for more recent conflicts. Senior naval officers before the First World War did not routinely publish retrospective accounts in the way later readers came to expect. The wider habit developed partly through the influence of American Civil War memoirists such as Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. Historians therefore have very different bodies of personal evidence for different periods.
Notable Point · 35:11-36:00
Why later wars leave more officer memoirs
The modern expectation that senior officers publish memoirs developed unevenly, leaving later conflicts with a denser personal record than much earlier naval history.