hard spring

barrett. 20s. what. what? what???

[wrishwrosh]

great big wwii resource guide :)

when i first started looking into wwii records, my main thought was ‘damn really feels like this should be easier??’ 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 don’t 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 soldier’s experience.

SO YOU WANNA FIND…

…one particular guy

draft cards - every man in the us born between 1877 and 1927 was required, at some point 1940-43, to register for the draft. the registration cards have all kinds of data, including a guy’s birthdate, address, full name, next of kin, employer, and physical description. you can also see their signatures which is nice. digitized by state on familysearch (accesssible w free account). also a collective database on ancestry (paywalled). 

enlistment records - these records have some overlap w draft cards, but they include the date and place of enlistment, initial serial number, amount of school completed, and job at the time of enlistment. index on familysearch (accessible w free account) 

hospital admission records - transcriptions of army surgeon general records on just about every injury or illness treated in army hospitals during the war, including what kind of injury, how and when it was acquired, and how it was treated. i hesitate to recommend something that's only accessible behind a paywall but these records are SO juicy. on ancestry.

newspapers - if your guy of interest was from a small town, there is a decent chance that some local paper was literally publishing his letters home to his mother throughout the war. newspapers are also a good way to keep track of things like promotions. newspapers.com and newspaperarchive.com are two good repositories, but they’re paywalled. lots of state libraries, historical societies, or university systems will have free historical newspaper databases (here’s california’s.)

census - if you want more info about a guy’s family or life in the states before or after the war, the us census is your go-to. taken every ten years, the latest year currently available to the public is 1950. the 1940 lives here. the 1930 is here. (accessible w free account)

…one particular unit

the org chart - aka the order of battle in the eto. what units were in charge of what other units, who was in command when, what campaigns was everybody part of, etc etc. not juicy, but useful. transcription at the center for military history.

unit histories - the real juicy stuff (where a unit was on each day of the war and what they did) is in the unit histories. the originals are held by nara and can be accessed by paying them for photocopies and waiting five months or by going to college park maryland which i do not recommend. fortunately, an enormous variety of unit histories, morning reports, and after-action reports, primarily for combat units, have been digitized and made full-text searchable on the ike skelton digital research library. 

unit yearbooks - lots of units also wrote their own unofficial histories or yearbooks. these can be a treasure trove of weird inside jokes, details about living conditions and day-to-day duties, and old photos. there’s a collection on fold3.org (paywalled) but it’s by no means complete, plenty are available on the internet archive as well.

oral histories - wwii oral histories are scattered wildly across the internet, but the closest thing i’ve found to a central repository is the veterans history project at the library of congress. they have a giant database of oral histories from veterans, which you can search by unit, branch of service, campaign, and geographic area. in a lot of cases you can also stream the original recording, which is great to get a sense of tone and speech patterns.

just plugging the name of the unit into archive.org or google or jstor and seeing what comes up - self explanatory. a good way to find weird little memoirs and dissertations and forums and war department publications.

…general info about the soldier’s experience 

technical/field manuals - handy dandy instruction booklets for the soldier, published in the bajillions by the war department. a helpful way to understand how things were supposed to operate during the war. the library of congress has research guides listing the titles of each tm and fm. 

the green books - enormous series of books written by the army postwar to analyze their own performance. helpful for understanding how macro-level decision making translated into unit level movements, and answers a lot of questions about logistics. if you are wondering things like ‘where were they getting the bullets from?’ or ‘how did a replacement depot work?’ the answers are probably in these books. index of titles is here, the books themselves are on the internet archive.

film shorts - a librarian on the internet archive has collected, among a ton of other super useful publications and ephemera, over 2,000 wwii era newsreels, cartoons, and training films. they're sick!

the american soldier in wwii project - a modern project out of virginia tech analyzing and transcribing the results of a corpus of surveys given to gis during the war. interesting commentary! just a neat project! also includes a helpful glossary of slang and abbreviations.

life magazine - a good look at how the war was marketed to the american public as it was happening. helpful for understanding pop culture as well. also the ads are often hilarious. full-text searchable on google books.

mizzou prices and wages through the decades libguide - closing on my best best best best best beloved. my legal wife the mizzou prices and wages through the decades libguide. designed to contextualize comparative historical values of money. i would recommend clicking around on it, losing 1-6 hours, and coming back to thank me.

[wrishwrosh]

record access caveats under the cut, bc i can’t help myself:

all of these resources deal primarily/exclusively with american records, specifically american army records, specifically in the european theater, bc that’s 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 don’t 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 it’s 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 they’re a huge pain in the ass to get a hold of and i don’t believe they’ve 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 don’t find the guy you’re 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 doesn’t 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 you’re in really deep). 

census - the census is available like 16 places online. the links above are free, but i find ancestry’s (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 it’s helpful to look at the og if you can. it’s often very interesting to see what is included/elided in these reports and how things are phrased.

technical/field manuals - unforch as usual there’s 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 haven’t personally noticed patterns in which type of manual lives where.

the green books - worth looking at for this insane logo alone.

[oonpy]

Keep in mind I do some blogging while walking at active crowded roads

[priorwalterxxxii]

fanfiction is lowkey cloth mother

[marisatomay]

“what’s the song of the summer” ?? it’s DANCING IN THE DARK by bruce springsteen for the 42nd year in a row

[wrishwrosh]

fifa get out of my house

[alittlekendoll]

arousal! repulsion! arousal! repulsion! arousal! repulsion! arousal! repulsion!

[thunderstruck9]

Ed Ruscha (American, b. 1937), Etc., 1990. Acrylic on museum board, 20 x 30 in.

[letterful]

?

[wrishwrosh]

also i want the hold fast finger tattoos from master and commander.

[wrishwrosh]

surely my sudden incontrovertible desire to tattoo my hands and travel solo to a remote island have NOTHING to do with the increasing number of stress dreams im having about work

[wrishwrosh]

also i want the hold fast finger tattoos from master and commander.

[wrishwrosh]

my greatest joy is planning needlessly logistically complicated travel. thinking abt a potential trip at the end of the summer and have set my heart on accommodation only accessible by car OR by 3 hour train to 2 hour bus to a van on the side of the remote rural road where you can maybe rent bikes and then you can bike 7 miles across a bog. with a suitcase

[hahshbsdisksnjsjsjebsdeactivated]

[agnes-nielsens]

they call me the information withholder for reasons i won't get into

[normal-horoscopes]

God I fucking love being a monk at the Monastery of Lindisfarne on this fine morning of June 8th, 793. I love looking at all the gold and silver objects and alive monks that live here.

[389]

by Bobby Beasley

[memories-of-ancients]

Copper crab, Moche culture, Peru, 6th-7th century

from The MET

[whiteshakira]

my unwritten novels were snubbed at the international booker prize once again