Occam said:
Thanks, Navy_Pete - I assume you mean asking DHR how many Somalia medals were awarded to crew/airdet? That would probably work as 90 cumulative days service in theatre would've been required to be awarded the medal, and would eliminate any transient pers.
Or did you mean DHH from simply a historical records search perspective?
The only ones I saw were verbatim requests from a couple of historians, but they were along the lines of 'I'm so and so, and I'm looking for some information on (insert topic) for some research/stories/blogs/book etc'.
You could try asking just generally what you are looking for (How many people were part of the crew on Op Deliverance during xxx timeframe) and explain a bit of background why. I don't think there is any particular format but don't really know anything about the front end part of it.
In the current post deployment reports, part of it includes a crew roster and crew movements (including the backfills for the people on the deployment leave). Those are confidential (and really long), but if you really just want the number of crew, then someone with access to the records could go and do a count for you and give you that info. Also, if you don't know specifically what document it might be in, they may be able to find it. If you have an idea of some places to look, that would help; it'll probably get routed to a bureaucrat that has never seen a ship and they pass it on to various departments/directorates to see if they can find something. The medal count might do it, but it could also be a matter of someone at the Library and Archives doing a search, pulling the right record and finding something in a document.
ATIs can be tricky, and if you ask for a specific document that no one can find, you won't get anything back. For something like this, where it's a relatively long time ago, the remaining documents on file would be limited but some stuff like that they archive for historical interest instead of shredding it once it's not required to be held by the office that keeps the current records.
Worse case DHH can't help and you go back to the ATI route, but worth a try.
To give you an idea though, there was some parts removed from the HURON and some other ships that went to a number of different museums after the disposal. We had a few requests to provide some additional info for use on the info boards that went along with the display, and provided some suggested edits to their draft wording to make it accurate. Also, we were able to provide some extra info (like scans of old drawings) that went to the museums. That was just what came to the tech side, and I believe that someone else pulled info from the archives for some of the ships logs and whatnot as well. Had some other requests from an author but it was for items that we had no info left for, but I did spend a day poking through some drawers with old files seeing if we could help.
