Our collection has over 1 million records documenting the service of Australian men and women during World War II.
These include service records for the Army (series B883 and B884), the Royal Australian Air Force (series A9300 and A9301) and the Royal Australian Navy (series A6769 and A6770).
Over the past 15 years we’ve digitised more than 200,000 WWII records and made them available to view online through RecordSearch. This includes all Royal Australian Navy service cards (series A6769 and A6770).
In April 2019, the Australian Government announced funding of $10 million to help us digitise the remaining 850,000 records over 4 years.
What we’ve done so far
Work on the WWII Digitisation Project started in July 2019.
Since then, we’ve digitised tens of thousands of additional records and made them available online.
What we’re doing next
We’ve started large-scale digitisation of the remaining WWII service records.
The first series of records being digitised are the Army Citizen Military Forces personnel dossiers (series B884).
Records in this series will be temporarily unavailable to the public from November 2020 to December 2021 while they are being digitised. As records are digitised, the digital copies will be added to RecordSearch and made available free of charge.
The table below provides rough timeframes for when we expect to have digital copies of these records digitised and available online. We will update this table regularly.
|
Series |
Place of enlistment |
Digital records expected to be available online |
|
B884 |
Northern Territory |
December 2020 |
| B884 |
Tasmania |
March 2021 |
|
B884 |
Queensland Western Australia South Australia |
May 2021 |
|
B884 |
New South Wales |
August 2021 |
|
B884 |
Victoria |
November 2021 |
|
B884 |
Papua New Guinea |
December 2021 |
If you have a question about access to WWII service records, you can get in touch here.
