A Plea for Aid
Summer 2014, Vol. 46, No. 2 | Pieces of History
Silk "blood chit" found in the Official Military Personnel File of James Vurgaropulos. (Records of the Army Staff, National Archives at St. Louis)
Every day, staff in the preservation laboratory at the National Archives at St. Louis work on damaged military personnel files that survived the 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center. One day the folder of 1st Lt. James Vurgaropulos, a World War II pilot, came to the work bench.
Inside that folder was a special sort of record—a piece of silk backed by linen, bearing the image of the Chinese Nationalist flag and columns of Chinese characters. The cloth measures 8 inches wide and 9½ inches tall and shows water damage from the aftermath of the fire.
Vurgaropulos’s unit, the 75th Fighter Squadron of the 23rd Fighter Group of the U.S. Army Air Force, was fighting the Japanese in China. He and other soldiers operating in foreign lands carried such “blood chits” to help them in case they were stranded in a place where they did not know the language and needed help.
The message written on the cloth announces that the bearer has come to China to help the war effort and asks for assistance and medical care. Vurgaropulos, however, was killed when his plane crashed in Hunan Province on June 29, 1944. Villagers found his body and buried him. After the war, they showed an Army search team the burial site, and the pilot’s blood chit became one piece of evidence in the quest to identify him.