WWII Orders of Battle
Since my father’s personnel file burned at the NPRC leaving nothing behind, learning about a military organizations is important so that I can reconstruct his service using organizational records.
The Ike Skelton Combined Arms Research Library (CARL) digital library is home to an important collection for beginning research into military organizations. This massive collection was donated by George Nafziger to the Library. The Nafziger Collection of Orders of Battle contains detailed information about military organizations spanning from 1600 to 1945¸all of which can be downloaded from the website.
The Nafziger Collection of Orders of Battle is available at: https://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15040coll6
The finding aid can be downloaded from by clicking on the link to its page, or from: https://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p4013coll11/id/1277/rec/1
To locate information about WWII, I clicked on the button
This brought me to a search page for the collection that already had the “World War II” filter selected.
There were many results to browse, so in the search bar, I entered the terms: 500th AAA
The results narrowed down to a small number of relevant documents. The first result was the one I wanted, “American antiaircraft artillery, barrage balloon and coast artillery battalions, 1941-1945.”
I clicked on the result and was brought to a page where I could view, download and print the document.
I downloaded this PDF file, and copied the source information into a document where I keep links and annotations about what I locate.
The document is a long table, listing information about all these WWII Battalions.
The first page contains the column headers (slightly misaligned):
Page 5 is the Battalion I am interested in:
What does this mean:
The 500th AAA Gun Battalion (Semimobile) was raised (began on) 20 January 1943. It was disbanded on 20 September 1944.
What to do with this information:
This information about this organization becomes part of the timeline of my father’s service. It will also be combined with information gathered from other sources.
When reconstructing records of my father’s service, this is key information for looking for military organizational records. This will help to unlock the data found in the Morning Reports. Since the Battalion was disbanded in September 1944, I will have to look to those Morning Reports for that month to find out what happened to the men of the organization after that. My father was still in Greenland until November 1944.
Combining this date information with my other reading, it may be that my father was in this Gun Battalion at Camp Davis, NC.
An interesting point is that the 500th AAA Gun Bn was redesignated (renamed) from the 500th CA Bn in June 1944. The redesignation was noted in the Morning Reports. This previous name was not reflected in the list, but combining the date with the older designation will help me locate the appropriate Morning Reports.
