Imagine what would happen if all of our veterans photographs, film footage and written documents were digitized and shared online with education and veterans groups at no cost. That’s the ambitious goal of the Veterans Legacy Preservation Project, a program founded by the National Combat History Archive.

“Each day we lose over 1,600 hundred WWII veterans and with them typically goes their photographs, film and written memoirs” said Gary Mortensen, President of the National Combat History archive. “It’s hard to imagine, but these precious documents are typically sold at estate sales or on eBay or even worse simply thrown away".

The Veterans Legacy Preservation Project was launched not only to remedy the loss of this incredible history, but also to restore, aggregate, index and digitize the images with the purpose of sharing it online with veterans and educators at no cost. “It is important that future generations have access to these documents so that the deeds of our great veterans are never forgotten or misinterpreted” said Scot Laney, founder of the National Combat History Archive.

Since its inception in 2005, the Veterans Legacy Preservation Project has been able to collect over 1 million photographs and over 12,000 hours of combat and military-related footage. Currently an online interface is under construction with active feedback from education and veteran organizations.

Each day new film and footage comes into the Veterans Legacy Preservation Project and the staff goes to work. “What’s great about the digital age is that we are not required to keep the original documents’ Said Mortensen. “In fact, we encourage families to keep them. All we need to do is make a high resolution copy and we can give back the original as well as a copy on disk to the family. We do this service at no-cost to the family because typically they don’t have the resources such as a good scanner or the preservation knowledge to do things such as color correct, or remove defects from the documents”.

The vision of the Veterans Legacy Preservation Project is to enable a veteran, student or educator to put inkey  search words such as “Sherman tank”, “Tarawa” or “Khe Sanh” and have unprecedented access to a vast online resource of digital photographs and documents and streaming video. “Imagine putting in the key word B-24 and getting back information from the people who helped to design and build it to the ground crew who maintained it to the men who flew in it. Film, photographs, letters and even the manuals on how to fly it would be online, that’s the vision” said Mortensen.

While a small part of the Veterans Legacy Preservation Project content will be available to the public, it will be available as a water-marked medium resolution images to prevent piracy. Students, educators and veterans will have access through online access via school and specific veteran-related websites.

"We all need to work together to make this happen" said Laney. "Sadly we don'd have another five years to deliberate, the time is now". 

For more information, call 503-597-7030 or email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it