National Archives of Australia - WW2 service records

[dicole]

I don't know if this news has been posted before or elsewhere - I was just doing a search for a WW1 service record on the NAA database and noticed that some WW2 service records have also been digitised and are freely available.

Not all of them yet, but the first three I searched are up, but only about 50% of the Worner records.

This will be a great help to anyone researching recent past rellies who might have served in WW2. I can see I will be spending quite some time updating my database.


Di

[SueNSW]

I'm happy to be shot down in flames over this - but I think the ones that are available are those where individuals have already requested and paid for records to be be copied/digitised - which the NAA will do on demand.

50% is pretty good odds - I've got 3 brothers (cousins of my mother) - 2 army and 1 navy I'm interested in - only the navy one has been digitised. I know he was a survivor of the HMAS Perth sinking, then a POW and later was one of only 4 POW's to be rescued when a "hellship" he was being transported from Singapore to Japan on was torpedoed by a US submarine.

He has been mentioned by name in at least 1 book about HMAS Perth and the fate of her crew - so maybe his record was digitised as part of research for that

Cheers
Sue

[dicole]

Hmm, well, the ones I found were not ones I had requested - two of them I got before digitisation started. I was searching for Cleveland Page, I just wanted his service number without having to go and find my folder. I found in the results the WW2 records for his nephew Cleveland Page, so I started looking at the others.

The WW2 ones give date of birth rather than just age, and usually that appears in the search results as part of the heading, so I have a lot of them already, but I am sure I will find something interesting among them.
Di

[Mary from Italy]

They'll be files that somebody else has requested; they're automatically put online.

[dicole]

I wish I could know who they were, then, I did not think any of the Pages were doing family history (I have left enough footprints around the internet for the last 10 years, you think they would have found one by now). We could compare notes about other (interesting) things.