It’s Veterans Day, saluting all those who are serving or have served in our military. The following significant sources documenting those who have served, will serve you well.

First, of note regarding the American Civil War and primarily photographic portraits, is a new online resource created by Ron Coddington, editor and publisher of one of my favorite reads, Military Images (MI) magazine, announced in the Autumn 2023 issue. It is a list entitled “Identified Civil War Soldiers, Sailors and Civilian Portraits in Military Images Magazine,” which is an inventory of identified persons appearing in the publication since it began in 1979. Listed are 8,383 portraits (6,094 Union; 1,770 Confederate; 519 non-military individuals). Among the Confederate images by state used in MI are 167 Georgia, 230 Virginia, 280 North Carolina, and a lower number of images from the other Southern states. Known only as belonging to a unit in the CSA are 322 images.

Kurt Luther is a senior editor at MI, for whom he also writes a column, and he is a professor of computer science and the creator of Civil War Photo Sleuth. This site, which started in 2018, combines facial recognition technology and crowdsourcing, as well as information from military and other repositories, to put names to faces. It is free to sign up and search the database as well as identify and/or add other images. Users can upload a photo to the site, then tick off various tags that further identify an image. If you find a named image of someone you know something about, you can add that information.

The “Hello Girls” are considered America’s First Women Soldiers, and these women are the focus of this year’s Bells of Peace ceremony held Veterans Day. It took 60 years after of the end of World War I before Veteran Status/Honorable discharges for the remaining “Hello Girls” passed Congress, and by then there were only eighteen original Hello Girls, who left for France in 1918, living. A large number of women telephone operators were sent to France who spoke French and English equally well. As one of the operators stated “Every order for an infantry advance, a barrage preparatory to the taking of a new objective, and, in fact, for every troop movement, came over the ‘fighting lines’, as we called them.” (Hello Girls article on Wikipedia)

Their legacy of military service deserves to be honored a century later by the award of a  Congressional Gold Medal. Read on this site about how you can help them receive that medal, and see below it all the names of the women in the Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit.

Continuing the subject of women and war, the National WWII Museum, located in New Orleans, Louisiana, has opened a special exhibit called Our War Too, Women in Service “honoring the nearly 350,000 American women who answered the call to serve their country during World War II.”  In addition to their oral histories, the exhibit includes an interactive scrapbook that allows visitors to see within some of the wartime albums and memory books created by women to remember their time in service.

What about all the women on the home front during WWII? The Women’s Vintage Society of Dallas has created a film called Women on the Home Front, produced by the Commemorative Air Force (CAF), that takes a look at the life of those women. The lifestyle, music, activities, and even the food were impacted when America went to War. The women in the film are Kaila Brock, Allyson Blackney, April Trotta, Erin Patterson, and Jamie Seibert.

To continue the subject of WWII, materials documenting the Georgia-based Eighth Air Force are now available online as Mighty Eighth Air Force Collection , a co-project of the National Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force and the Digital Library of Georgia. The Eighth Air Force was activated in 1942, in Savannah, Georgia, and moved to England (redesignated VIII Air Force Service Command) to support the Allied air war against Nazi Germany. It became the largest air armada in the world, giving the allies air supremacy, paving the way for the D-Day invasion and the liberation of occupied Europe. The cost of the contribution of these young men was that of the 350,000 members of the Eighth, 26,000 were killed in action, and another 28,000 became prisoners of war.

I hope you find these sources as interesting and useful as I do. Think of those who served and are serving, as you observe this Veterans Day of 2023.

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© E. Lee Eltzroth and Hunting & Gathering, 2023. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material, or photographs, without written permission from this blog’s author is prohibited. The piece can be re-blogged, and excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to E. Lee Eltzroth and Hunting & Gathering, with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.