The Fire and What Survived

A document with burn marks from a file in the 1973 fire in the St Louis National Personnel Records Center © Erin Faith Allen

On July 12, 1973, a fire broke out in the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. It burned for two days. When it was over, an estimated sixteen to eighteen million military personnel files were gone. Army records from 1912 to 1960 were the most devastated. Roughly eighty percent of Army personnel files from World War II did not survive.

I have delivered this news to more families than I can count. I'm sorry. Your father's file burned. Your grandfather's file burned. There is nothing there.

It is one of the hardest things about this work. I have held three, even five, inch thick unburned files in my hands, dense with documents and orders and medical records and letters and photographs, everything a family could want to know about who their person was and what he did. To know that the equivalent of that, for millions of men, simply does not exist anymore. I will never fully make peace with it.

But here is what I want families to know: a burned file is not the end of the road. It is a detour. There are other repositories, other record sets, other ways to reconstruct a life from the archive. Morning reports. Unit diaries. Muster rolls. Enlistment records. Hospital records. The Veterans Administration. State archives. Newspapers. The work is slower and more lateral, but it can be done. I have done it many times.

The photograph above is a page from a file that survived. It belongs to my own family. Recently, while at the archives pulling records for ongoing research, I was able to hold it in my hands: singed around the edges, fire-damaged but intact, the fingerprints still clear after more than eighty years.

January 30, 1941. Inducted and sent to Fort MacArthur, California.

He made it through the fire. Some of them do.