Hello all. I would assume that the US Army when soliders were issued a weapon kept track of who got what. Would there be any way of tracking down, by serial number, the individual who was issued a specific sidearm? Any help or suggestions would be appreceated. Thanks in advance. Tom
I'm sure any such paperwork was way down at the company level and not something you could find today.
I did some searching and found this. I think Keith is correct. There is very little chance of discovering any provenance. Some have wondered why records regarding a particular weapon’s subsequent disposition after it left the factory weren’t maintained and available today. They point out, correctly, that there was strict accountability for the weapons issued to a particular unit, thus those records should still be around. The primary reason why this is not the case is because such accountability only existed while the weapons were in the possession of the unit to which they were issued. During peacetime, such records were maintained until the weapons were transferred to another entity or turned in for some other reason. After the guns were “off the books” of the unit, the records were destroyed as there would have been no reason to keep them. Pity they weren’t thinking of us collectors today! When a unit deployed overseas, all bets were off regarding accountability of weapons as it would have been impossible to account for guns lost, destroyed, abandoned (yes, it happened), “carried home” (yes, that also happened on some occasions), captured, traded for another weapon, etc. Theoretically, the weapons were all supposed to have been accounted for when a unit was withdrawn from a theater of operations but the realities of the situation usually meant that any gun that was missing was simply shown as “lost in action.” Even these incomplete records were destroyed when the weapons were turned in upon the unit’s return stateside. To the average supply clerk or weapon’s room sergeant, a rifle was simply something else to account for along with blankets, overcoats and socks and not the treasured and valuable collectible as we view it today. http://forums.thecmp.org/archive/index.php/t-52938.html
There was a service for M1 Garand owners that would (allegedly) find the provenance of that particular rifle. I forget the name and most of the details. They've been out of business for years. Regardless the chance of finding out who was issued a particular gun in your collection is next to none.
In the army, the CO of a unit was required to maintain a roster of the personnel assigned to the unit, and also had to maintain inventories of the unit's equipment and weapons. A new CO was required to sign for the equipment. So, yes, documents were routinely produced listing soldiers and their weapons including the serial numbers. But no, the army did not have a system for tracking the "chain of custody" for individual small arms. Trying to use the unit rosters to locate the names of soldiers who were issued a given weapon would be like finding a very small needle in a very large hay field. The attached image is an example of an infantry platoon roster (Item 2, 313th Inf.) from approximately V-E Day (my father was the PL). Note that it does not include any side arms. View attachment 21961
It was in my Dad's scrapbook along with photos and other mementos. That was his platoon from 9/44 through the end of the war in Europe. For you music fans, the 1st squad BAR man, Johnnie Whisnant, was a professional banjo player and was well known in Bluegrass circles... http://www.allmusic.com/artist/johnnie-whisnant-mn0001405597/biography
Ah. I was just wondering if you found that online somewhere. Fold3 has OCR'ed (ie: converted the text to digital format) of a lot of the documents they have in their collection. If there was a source for large amounts of records, they could perhaps do the same. That would make searching for serial numbers easy.
