Transcription of the dog tags:

James B. Barnes (Legal Name)
32557038 (Serial Number*) T41 42 (Tetanus Immunization) O (Blood Type)
R. Barnes (Next of Kin)
3092 Stockton RD (Address)
Shelbyville IN (Location) P (Religion Marker)

*A serial number starting with a 3 indicated that the servicemember was drafted into the Army, it's important that we do not forget that Bucky didn't chose to fight.

During World War II the dog tags of American service members would have had one of the following regulation religion markers:

  • P for Protestant (the marker we see on Bucky's dog tags)
  • C for Catholic
  • H for Hebrew, this being the marker for 'Jewish'
  • NO (or left blank) for No Religion

For Jewish servicemembers fighting in Europe, being discovered to be a Jew by your captors–especially if you were captured by the Nazis–carried considerable risk and could mean the difference between life or horrific torture, experimentation and possibly even death.

Some Jewish service members, justifiably incredibly fearful of what could happen if they were found out, would either omit a religion marker altogether or, after getting their tags, would attempt to obscure the 'H' marker in some way so it could not be read by their captors.

While this saved some lives, it was not a perfect and fool-proof system, and we have no way of knowing how many times it failed.

In 1943, the year Bucky was drafted, the Army introduced a more official (and more widely adoptable, and thus widely adopted) option to protect Jews in its ranks:

Through the European Theatre of Operations United States Army, Jewish servicemembers could elect to have the 'H' marker for Hebrew on their dog tags replaced with a 'P' for Protestant.

This would offer Jewish servicemembers a more convincing layer of protection if they were ever captured by the enemy, because, unlike an obscured religion marker (or that lack of one) which could itself draw suspicion, a set of dog tags printed with a 'P' would be entirely indistinguishable from the dog tags worn by a gentile and would be less likely to draw suspicion.

Due to this option being made available to Jewish people serving in the United States Armed Forces, the 'P' marker on Bucky's dog tags not only does not definitively prove that he's really a gentile, in actuality its presence provides even further historical support in favour of him being a Jewish man.

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Sources and Additional Reading: