great big wwii resource guide :)
when i first started looking into wwii records, my main thought was âdamn really feels like this should be easier??â i was thinking, given the booming books-about-tanks industry in america, that there would be some kind of massive GI database or a big book saying where every unit was when, etc etc. and there is super not. in my opinion this is the fault of the national archives and records administration, but we donât have to get into it.
here is a big list of the workarounds and resources i use to find existing primary and secondary source information about wwii, from the level of one individual GI up to units and divisions, as well as general context about the soldierâs experience.
SO YOU WANNA FINDâŚ
record access caveats under the cut, bc i canât help myself:
all of these resources deal primarily/exclusively with american records, specifically american army records, specifically in the european theater, bc thatâs my personal wheelhouse and also i had to cut myself off somewhere. as kate beaton said ugly people and other countries may have fought against the nazis but we may never know for sure. also i donât know shit about the navy etc and i refuse to find out as i am afraid of boats. onwards:
draft cards - there were six waves of registration that all use slightly different paperwork. later ones (for men who turned 21 after october 1940) are slightly more informative as they give the relationship with the next of kin in addition to just their name and addy, but itâs much the same. also, it is possible for some guys who enlisted in their teens to kind of wiggle through eligibility periods and never actually register for the draft. the link above also has a breakdown of who registered when and potentially relevant records at nara regarding the draft process broadly, though a lot of specific classification records were destroyed in the 70s.
[also destroyed in the 70s at nara - millions of individual personnel records, in a big yet-unexplained fire at their facility in st louis. something like 90% of individual army service records were destroyed without ever being duplicated or indexed, which has very little to do with the rest of this post as you can't really get your hands on personnel files anyway unless you're a relative, but i just like to bitch about this. goddamn nara.]
enlistment records - the originals are held by NARA which means theyâre a huge pain in the ass to get a hold of and i donât believe theyâve been digitized anywhere. the index linked has a lot of mistranscriptions and misspellings in the names, so you may need to get creative with your search terms if you donât find the guy youâre looking for.
hospital records - if possible search this collection by serial number. not every record has a name attached, and they were originally filed by serial number only. searching by name won't always get you complete results for a particular guy
newspapers - in a lot of cases neither the paywalled repositories nor the state collections will include the big papers of record for a particular city - ex, the boston globe, the nyt, the chicago tribune. if your guy of interest was a city dweller and doesnât show up in a search of statewide papers, city public libraries will often have archival access to their big papers (in addition to microfilm records of other small local papers that might not have been digitized yet, if youâre in really deep).Â
census - the census is available like 16 places online. the links above are free, but i find ancestryâs (paywalled) search the most usable. lots of public libraries have institutional access to paywalled sites like ancestry, newspapers, jstor, etc. literally always worth checking
unit histories - the skelton library is home to all kinds of weird and extremely specific declassified paperwork! the ike skelton library is my best friend! i recommend searching all levels of the org chart - unit, corps, and army. in lots of cases for famous units like the 101st ab, other people have already combed through and collated this kind of documentation, but i still think itâs helpful to look at the og if you can. itâs often very interesting to see what is included/elided in these reports and how things are phrased.
technical/field manuals - unforch as usual thereâs no central repository of tms and fms. once you have the tm or fm number of your manual of interest, you can look for a copy on hyperwar, hathitrust, or the internet archive. i havenât personally noticed patterns in which type of manual lives where.
the green books - worth looking at for this insane logo alone.
