An oval of monel metal, an inch and a half long, carried the most personal identifier a sailor had: the print of his right index finger. The Navy Department ordered the tags on May 12, 1917, and directed that one be made for every officer and enlisted man in the naval service. The other side carried his name, his dates of enlistment and birth, and the letters U.S.N.
The order put the work of identification in the hands of the Navy’s medical staff, and it spelled out the tag down to the wire it hung from.
The text survives as General Order No. 294, reproduced by the Naval History and Heritage Command, dated Washington, May 12, 1917, and signed by Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels. It opens with a direct instruction: “Upon the receipt of this order steps will immediately be taken to make identification tags for all officers and enlisted men of the United States naval service.”
What General Order No. 294 specified
The order describes the tag precisely. It “consists of an oval plate of monel metal, 1.25 by 1.50 inch, perforated at one end and suspended from the neck by a monel wire encased in a cotton sleeve.”
Each face had a job. “The tag has on one side the etched finger print of the right index finger,” the order reads. “On the other side are to be etched the individual’s initials and surname, the month, day, and year of enlistment (expressed in numerals, e.g., 1.5.1916) and the month, day, and year of birth (similarly expressed). This side will also bear the letters U.S.N.” Officers’ tags carried initials and surname, rank and date of appointment instead.
The work fell to the medical department. “The etching of the tag shall be done by such member or members of the Hospital Corps as the medical officer may designate,” the order says. It then walks the corpsmen through the process: a fingerprint and lettering laid down in printer’s ink, dusted with powdered asphaltum, heated until the two melted into glossy black lines, then left in a diluted nitric acid bath for one hour so the acid bit the design into the metal.
Why a fingerprint
The Navy was already using fingerprints when the order was written. The National Institute of Justice’s Fingerprint Sourcebook history chapter, by Jeffery G. Barnes, records that “in 1907, the Navy adopted the practice of fingerprinting of applicants,” citing a 1938 history. The same chapter notes that Mary Holland, a trainer of Navy personnel, was the first American woman to teach fingerprinting.
The order itself does not explain the choice. What it shows is a tag that carried a biometric mark alongside the written details, a feature that set the Navy’s design apart from the Army’s.
The Army’s disk came first
The 1917 Navy tag was not the first American military identification tag. The Army’s came more than a decade earlier. David O’Mara, writing for the Western Front Association’s study of 1914-1918 identification tags, dates the Army tag to War Department General Order 204 of Dec. 20, 1906: a small circular aluminum disk carrying the soldier’s name, rank, unit and “USA.” A second disk was added on July 6, 1916, and serial numbers were introduced on Feb. 12, 1918, according to that study.
O’Mara describes the Navy tag’s monel as “the same as ships propellers,” though his summary mentions a thumb print. The order’s own text, as reproduced by NHHC, specifies the right index finger.
The fingerprint outlasted the war
The design held for more than two decades. A Bureau of Navigation circular letter dated May 13, 1941, and signed by C.W. Nimitz, reproduced by NHHC as Circular Letter No. 57-41, describes the same 1.25-by-1.50-inch oval of monel metal, now “perforated at each end,” and keeps “the etched fingerprint of the right index finger” on one side.
The other side changed with the times. The 1941 letter calls for information “embossed by the graphotype machine”: name, officer’s rank or man’s service number, blood type, and a “T” with a date if the man had received tetanus toxoid.
The record shows a Navy tag that went into World War I with an etched fingerprint, and was still specified with one on May 13, 1941, by then joined on the reverse by the sailor’s service number and blood type.
Top image: Kenneth Sawyer Goodman’s identification tag, from the Newberry Library collection. It is not one of the 1917 Navy fingerprint tags described here. Image Credit: Newberry Library — Public domain / Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Combat Rated editors prior to publication.