Help needed on information regarding B Company of the 119th Infantry

About 80% of the service records burned up. Normally I'd advise sending a mail order request to NARA, but they are not processing non-emergency requests at the moment. When they get going again, that's the first step and, if his record survived the fire, this suspected earlier unit should be listed. If it got burned up, the morning reports are about your only chance. But having the discharge is a really big deal.

The morning reports are in St. Louis. You have to either go in person and look through them yourself or hire a private researcher. You can hunt around the internet for a good description of how morning reports look, but what you are trying to do is go from the date of the earliest event that you know with reasonable certainty and track back from there.

We know the date of his second wounding - and we strongly presume that he was serving in B119 at that time. Morning reports are organized by unit (and there's no name index) and were prepared daily to track changes to the status of unit personnel (usually company). Only changes are listed, so if nothing happened to a GI on that day, there's no mention. Transfers, promotions, wounds, new quals, etc. are the sort of things that get listed.

So, from 12 Oct 44's B119 MR, you go backwards in time looking at every daily card until you find a change for him - in this case, his transfer in date. By my theory, this transfer entry would say something like 'arrived for duty from Replacement Depot #17' (heavily abbreviated as the MR cards are small). Continuing my hypothetical: you would then go to the MRs of that replacement depot and search through every card from the one showing his departure for the 119th until you find the date of his arrival at the replacement depot. It will show what unit he arrived from. In my scenario, probably a hospital. Now go to the date of his first wounding and find the unit he was sent to the hospital from. Eventually you'll get to that earlier combat unit.

Hope that's not too muddled. The point is, every GI was assigned to a unit and that unit had to account for his presence - or explain his absence by describing who and why he was now somebody else's baby. Not to depersonalize it, but it's kinda like transferring title of a car. If it's been sold several times, tracing it back to the original owner requires some work, but you know every day is going to be accounted for in the record..

The good news is, there are very experienced private researchers that understand the process (much better than me) and can usually solve such puzzles. Again, assuming that NARA ever starts up again. In the meantime, you can search the 'net for info on the combat operations of the regiment and division around the time of his second wounding. Good luck.

Here's a link to an extensive but somewhat jumbled website on the 30th Infantry Division:

Reports

 

Thanks for your help. This helps alot.

 

Thanks Jeff. That's good information to have.

 

Yes, I was in college at the time of his death and came home to be a pallbearer at his funeral. His brother Roy, listed in the obituary, was my grandfather. Thanks!