NYT Umbrella Man Exposed

[Keith Millea]

10. The Warren Commission was never given access to the military service file of the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, who had previously served in the Marine Corps. In 1973 the Department of Defense "routinely" destroyed Lee Harvey Oswald's military service file, allegedly as part of a general program to eliminate its files pertaining to nonmilitary personnel.

1973 was a bad year for military records.Check out what the Army and Air Force lost.

On July 12, 1973, a disastrous fire at the National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) destroyed approximately 16-18 million Official Military Personnel Files (OMPF). The records affected:

[TABLE="class: striped"]
[TR]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Army
[/TD]
[TD]Personnel discharged November 1, 1912 to January 1, 1960
[/TD]
[TD]80%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="class: alt"]
[TD]Air Force
[/TD]
[TD]Personnel discharged September 25, 1947 to January 1, 1964
(with names alphabetically after Hubbard, James E.)
[/TD]
[TD]75%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]



No duplicate copies of these records were ever maintained, nor were microfilm copies produced. Neither were any indexes created prior to the fire. In addition, millions of documents had been lent to the Department of Veterans Affairs before the fire occurred. Therefore, a complete listing of the records that were lost is not available. However, in the years following the fire, the NPRC collected numerous series of records (referred to as Auxiliary Records) that are used to reconstruct basic service information.

http://www.archives.gov/st-louis/militar...-1973.html