Information on Black GIs during WW 2

This question may also be of interest to the African American Records group.

Dear Mr. Langer,

Thank you for posting your question to the History Hub.

There is no database or comprehensive list of individual African-American soldiers who served during World War II.

The kind of personal information about individual soldiers that you seem to be looking for would most likely be part of a soldier’s Official Military Personnel File (OMPF). The OMPFs of veterans with a service completion date of 62 years ago or more (based on a rolling date; currently those who separated from service prior to 1955) are considered archival and are held at the National Archives at St. Louis. If you know the name of an individual soldier, you might be able to request his OMPF. Unfortunately, many of the Army personnel records from the period you’re interested in were destroyed in a fire in 1973, but if a record still exists, it would give medical information about the soldier, information on training that the soldier completed, and would probably have information about his unit, which could be helpful for further research. To find out more, please visit Official Military Personnel Files (OMPF), Archival Records Requests; you can also email the National Archives at St. Louis for more information: stl.archives@nara.gov.

If there is a particular unit (or units) that you are interested in, there may be unit records in the custody of the Textual Reference Branch at the National Archives at College Park, MD. However, they typically do not include rosters or personnel information such as you seek, and there is not a name index to the records. For more information regarding unit records, you may email archives2reference@nara.gov. Please include the specific unit(s) information as well as dates of interest.

Additionally, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library has compiled this list of their Resources Related to African-Americans' Experiences in World War II. You can contact them directly (eisenhower.library@nara.gov) if you have questions about these materials.

Finally, there are many additional resources at the National Archives website that you might find useful, including a Guide to African American Research and several posts like these-- "Teamwork": African-American Soldiers during World War II and USS Mason, USS PC-1264, and the African-American Crews during World War II--on the National Archives’ Rediscovering Black History blog. You can also search the National Archives' Catalog for relevant records.

Thank you, again, for sharing your question, and best of luck with your continued research.

This post was written by Rachael Salyer with contributions from Michael Chornesky and Megan Dwyre.