Although there may be yearbooks and crew photos intermingled with textual records of the units, ships or crews, they are not considered permanent records unless the photographs were taken by the Army Signal Corps or other official military photographers usually for publicity. These photographs were considered permanent records are part of the photograph collections listed in the blog postings highlighted below.
Sometimes, the officers of a unit or crew will pay for a photographer to come to their base to take pictures, These photographs sometimes are filed in the records of the unit or crew but oftentimes they are just distributed to the individual members with no permanent copy kept.
NARA's Special Media Branch blog, "The Unwritten Record," posted a 4-Part series that explains about researching for military unit or crew photographs during WWII using records at the National Archives in College Park - Still Pictures (RDSP). Please contact RDSP via email at stillpix@nara.gov if you have any questions about these records:
