Assignments TableA while back, I transcribed a World War II veteran's memoir. Upon finishing the text, it was evident that a table of his assignments would be a useful reference, so one was created:
Attachment:
File comment: 81 All dates taken from date of first and last flight in that stage in the author’s log book, except for end date of advanced training, which comes from invitation to graduation.
82 The first set of numbers in this column are total flight hours in stage – including solo/dual and day/night. The second set, in parentheses, are total to date.
83 Includes 10 hours in Link Trainer.
84 No flights appear in the author’s log book at this location.
85 Despite the author stating in his narrative that he was a P-47 instructor, there is only a single entry in his log book for this period – it appears he combined all of his flying into one entry – and it states he was flying BT-13s.
86 No flights appear in the author’s log book at this location. Given that the flights at the former location were combined into a single entry, it seems likely that the author was becoming much laxer about recording his flights by this point.
Keep Up Your Humor and Airspeed Assignment Table.png [ 66.37 KiB | Viewed 2835 times ]
(Source:
Keep Up Your Humor and Airspeed by Norman A. Olson.)
However, it was while working on transcribing a second, shorter biography that I realized that: 1) creating a standardized table would be useful and 2) it would be relevant to this thread. Partially due to the increased complexity and also in an attempt to better represent the information, a somewhat different style was tried for the second instance:
Attachment:
Military Biography Assignments Table (Reduced).png [ 219.89 KiB | Viewed 2835 times ]
(Source:
Military Biography by Russell B. Witte, Jr.)
Here is higher a resolution copy of the above:
(Source:
Imgur)
The table is ordered chronologically, with the older entries at the top and more recent ones at the bottom. (This format is indirectly inspired by the line-by-line interpretations of aircraft record cards provided by the
Air Force Historical Research Agency.) It is divided by subheadings based on each major period of the veteran's service history. With the first example, the situation was relatively simple, with only two different periods: training and operational.
A decision was made to only include assignments and not movements. (e.g. individual missions or stops on the journey to an assignment) This approach was selected for a number of reasons:
- It mirrors the way that it is often summarized or recorded in military records.
- For the above reason, significantly more effort is necessary to locate more detailed information.
- The table is intended as a summary and increased granularity would undermine that purpose.
- Doing so would increase the chances of breaking the format of the table due to a higher likelihood of the data not fitting into the parameters of the established columns.
The first column features two or three different types of information based on the period. Furthermore, note the importance of including the specifics of the location to disambiguate betweent two locations with similar names.
Glossary TableThe glossary table was originally developed as a second sheet for the Excel workbooks in which I was
recreating aircraft record cards. (I later found a table in an official government report, possibly from
DTIC, that used the same format.) The first instance of this table was for a transcribed version of the logbook for FG-1D, BuNo 92132:
Attachment:
(Source: FG-1 Aircraft Log Book)
From there, it was then utilized on transcribed aircraft record cards, where station codes were included. However, it was only while working on the biography above it was realized that such a table could also be implemented in such a document as well:
Attachment:
(Source:
Military Biography by Russell B. Witte, Jr.)
Decorations TableI have not come up with a good way of representing decorations, but it may be to mirror the awards and decorations section seen in Wikipedia articles. The only change being replacing the visual representations of ribbons with text. The following is for Hap Arnold:
Attachment:
(Source:
Wikipedia)
EDIT (24-12-11): Add higher resolution version of Military Biography Assignments Table.
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