U.S. Army Dog Tags (a magazine article)

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Forum members and any other interested parties.  A week or so ago I shared an article I wrote about Airborne Chaplains.  I am well please with the hundreds of people who read it.

So, I thought I'd share an article l wrote about Dog Tags back in 1989.  This article was published in Soldier magazine in April, 1990.  I was told that it would be read by about one million people. Maybe since then more people interested in military history will find a bit of information new to them.

Simple Little Things

by

Gerard C. Wilson

© 1989

 

 

     I don’t suppose a lot of time is spent thinking about dog tags.  You fill the information sheet and in practically no time you are the proud owner of a matched set of ne I.D. tags.  For what they actually are, two small pieces of stainless steel with a collection of letters and numbers pressed into them, they are gotten used to rather quickly and often forgotten; the information they hold though is not simple at all.

 

      The official U.S. Army nomenclature of the tags is: Tag, I.D., and Personnel.  We may never know exactly who coined the term “dog tag” but it seems plausible that the draftee’s of WW2 may have felt like they were being treated like dogs.   It’s one of those things like the initials U.S. being believed to stand for Uncle Sam, I suppose.  Someone says it and the next thing you know the term is so widely used that it’s almost official.

 

     We may never know who actually thought of wearing an identification tag into combat either, exactly when, or under what circumstances.  After the Civil War, brass or lead discs bearing a man’s name and a likeness of General McClellen with the legend “War of 1861” were found in an individual’s personal effects.  This is believed to be the earliest I.D. tag for our country’s armed forces.  These tags were privately purchased from merchants or jewelers with no regulations governing their size, design, or what information they contained.

 

     The I.D. tag idea must have been appealing, because the tags became more uniform by the Spanish-American War of 1898.  Still about the size of an American half-dollar coin, they were made of a metal called “monel.” It wasn’t until 1906 that the U.S. War Department made identification tags official with General Order number 204, which identified the tag as part of the uniform and prescribed the wear as what information it would contain.  This General Order was amended in 1917 to direct that a second identical tag be suspended from the first by a short piece of cord.  During World War I the aluminum tags were stamped on one side with “U.S.A.”, and the soldiers name and serial number on the other side.

 

     The tags apparently proved their worth and as Americans prepared for WW II they were redesigned and adapted for mass production.  The 1940 model was made of two thin layers of stain less steel, one of which was larger and crimped one edge over the other.  This model had a curious notch at one end.  It was used to properly position the tag in the embossing machine, and as a first nail position when nailing the tag to the shipping crate transporting the remains of deceased soldiers. The advent of the plastic body bag and better means of record keeping made the notch obsolete, and Military Specification 842 eliminated it from the tags in 1960.  The tag’s shape has not changed since that time, although the previous stock of the 1940 version was used until the late 1960s.

 

     The information carried on the dog tags has also changed over the years.  Beginning in 1906 with the soldier’s name and year of service, the information was steadily expanded to include rank, company, unit or corps.  The serial number was adopted at the beginning of the First World War, replacing most of earlier dog tag information.  From a practical view, the serial number saved a lot of time and energy since each dog tag was hand stamped with individual letters and number dies.

 

     During the early years of WW II the tag contained the soldier’s name serial number, blood type, religion, and date of his last tetanus shot and the name and address of the next of kin.  At some point during the war the next of kin information was eliminated.   The tetanus shot date was also eliminated sometime between The Korean and Vietnam conflicts.

 

     On July 1, 1969, the soldier’s social security number replaced the serial number.

 

     Dog tag embossing machines can still be found in some Army Reserve training centers and National Guard headquarters.  At major induction centers like Ft. Knox, Ky., and Fort Dix, N.J., computer assisted machines are now used to emboss the dog tags.  The computer program automatically arranges the correct line spacing, and holds the authorized religious preference abbreviations.  This new machine allows greater speed and efficiency in producing tags.  A skilled operator can produce up to 400 sets of identification tags in an average workday, while 150 sets a day was considered the maximum on the old stamping machine.

 

     General Order 204 ordered that the tags be “suspended from the neck by a cord or thong… when field kit is worn.”  The second tag, on the short cord or chain, was to be taken from a soldier killed in combat as a method of confirmation of death.  The tag on the longer cord was left with the body for on-site identification.  Vietnam photographs sometimes showed a dog tag worn on a bootlace.  This practice was adopted because some types of booby traps could sometimes destroy a man from the knees up. 

 

     Though they have evolved somewhat in the more than 125 years since their appearance in U.S. military service the dog tags’ purpose has not changed.  And though further evolution is likely in the next 125 years, dog tags will likely remain the “simple little things” they have been since about 1861.

 

   

 

 

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