Fold3 - Military Records at Your Fingertips

Not so long ago military history researchers seeking documents relevant to their needs had to go in-person to National Archives II in College Park, Maryland. Searching for just the right docs was time consuming, involving poring through often disorganized finding aids. Having found what you hope is the right stuff, you order your boxes and wait. If you're lucky you might get them in an hour. If you miss the time slot, it could be a lot longer. And if you're really unlucky, someone else has the boxes you need and your visit is for naught.

Thankfully, times change. I was doing some research for an article about Admiral William F. "Bull" Halsey's encounter in the Western Pacific with Typhoon Cobra in December 1944. I did have one book about the  battle between Bull and Cobra, but relying on a single source has always unsettled me. This piece deserved to be well and broadly researched. But living in Northwest Montana makes it difficult to pop into the Archives. In fact, in the "old" days I doubt I would have even proposed the piece to my editor, because I knew access to Naval unit histories and war dairies would be essential to telling the full story.

Guess what? Great advances have been made in recent years in digitizing and posting to the internet an amazing variety of documentation on myriad subjects. So I found everything I needed on my "go-to" site for military matters: Fold3.com, part of the expansive Ancestry.com offerings.

Two of the ship captains involved in the typhoon's aftermath were the focus of my article. Using Fold3 I was able to locate the war diaries of both ships for December 1944. These are detailed day-to-day reports of activities on the vessels. I was also able to download a lengthy Navy report about how Halsey's Third Fleet came to clash with Cobra. It contained quotes from various other officers about how they coped with thirty-foot waves and 130 mile-per-hour winds. In all, there were easily five or six dozen war dairies available on the site covering the storm.

This is a screen grab of a Fold3 page. Navigation: World War II>WWII War Diaries>C>Com 3rd Fleet>War Dairy, 12/1-31/44. The thumbnails on the right constitute the complete diary.

Here is page one, December 1, 1944, of the Com 3rd Fleet report:

These digital war diaries are available for thousands of ships over many time periods. 

Shifting gears a bit, to find more out about the two skippers I used Ancestry.com to pull-up high school and college yearbooks, which had interesting contemporary comments about the pair. And for more information about the typhoon, I went to Newspapers.com. If the paper you're interested was published in 1923 or earlier, you can access it through the site. However . . . anything after that date you may not have access to without paying an additional fee of $60 per year. If you do that, you can see papers right up through just a couple of weeks ago.

Some smaller newspapers available on the site remain free.

Here is part of a free 1945 article I found through Newspapers.com about USS Hull, which sank during the storm:

This photo of Jim Marks (far left) leading the Naval Academy jazz band in 1938 came from the Annapolis yearbook, found on Ancestry.com.

So, I can sit around in my jammies and favorite chair trolling through this vast archive of military matter. No dressing up, no drive to College Park, no waiting for carts to come out, no copying fees. S'wonderful. And it's only going to get better as more and more stuff gets scanned and uploaded.

If this post was helpful or interesting to you, please let me know. I’m always looking for ways to improve the blog.

Disclaimer: The descriptions of web pages are accurate as of the date of the post. Like everything else in this digital world of ours, they can change in the blink of an eye.