Heres a followup to my post about NPRC's letter stating: "The record needed to answer your inquiry was in the area that suffered the most damage in the July 1973 fire ... We have located a few documents that were successfully recovered after the fire."
Yesterday my Dad's records from NPRC arrived. That is, what's left of them. Nearly all the photocopies show badly charred originals with ragged edges and big chunks missing or faded away. They sent copies of various documents including pages from his Service Record AGO Form No. 24, but some of the most important things I wanted to know are missing, possibly never recorded, or unreadable. At least I was able to see (with a magnifying glass) that on the date of 8-1-41 he was a Corporal in the 36th Engineers, and on 10-12-42 he was at 1st Battalion Headquarters Camp Pickett, VA. Overseas campaigns page was easily readable but service dates & locations page is either faded-out or NPRC copies were not dark enough for them to show. I sent another letter asking them to try again copying them darker because they had sent 2 or 3 versions of light/dark on several other docs improving readability. Its worth a shot. I don't give up easily.
Peanuts