The papers are comprised of military documents, correspondence/telegrams, 82nd Airborne Division war-time publications, ration books, and newspaper clippings relating to Harry Lee Reisenleiter’s World War II military service. The collection is arranged alphabetically by type of document and dates from 1942 to 1986. The bulk of the papers date from 1944 to 1945. Date gaps exist from 1946 to 1958 and from 1960 to 1985.

Military documents regarding Reisenleiter’s service include his discharge/separation papers, pay record book and war bond records, and August 12, 1945, orders for point of debarkation in Great Britain. There is also a signed letter of permission to carry captured enemy equipment (i.e. souvenirs) dated June 21, 1945. Reisenleiter’s membership card for “The Red Devil Sergeants Club” is also filed with military documents (ca. 1943). In 1986, he requested copies of his 1944 hospitalization records from the National Personnel Records Center of the National Archives which provided copies of Company B’s morning reports.

One personal piece of correspondence in the collection is a note that Reisenleiter wrote his mother on the VE Day (May 8, 1945) issue of The "All American" Paraglide, which was published in newspaper form by the 82nd Airborne Division. He also annotated several articles and photographs in the issue. There is one other issue of The “All American” Paraglide dated October 17, 1944, and published in Nijmegen, Netherlands, as the souvenir edition celebrating the 82nd Airborne’s participation in Operation Market Garden. The third publication in the collection is the April 9, 1945, edition of the Devils’ Digest, published by the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, which highlights the companies' victories and contains news from its veterans who returned home.

Other personal correspondence includes only two items: a telegram that Reisenleiter sent to his mother about moving to a new address and one greeting card specific to the WWII era, “Our Parting Gift to a Brand-New Soldier,” that he received before leaving for basic training. The remainder of the correspondence is mostly official correspondence including the July 20, 1944, telegram sent to Albert Reisenleiter alerting him that his son was slightly wounded in France. There is a subsequent letter dated July 24, 1944, informing Mr. Reisenleiter that Lee returned to duty on June 27, 1944. In 1959, the Army informed Lee that he mistakenly was not awarded the Bronze Star Medal when he received the Combat Infantryman Badge in August 1944.

In addition to the entire military newspaper issues that Reisenleiter sent home, there are also a few clippings from St. Louis papers during 1944. One contains a photo of the 508th baseball team, on which Lee played, that participated in an exhibition game in England not long before the D-Day invasion. Most interesting is an undated brief article entitled D-Day Remembered by Sergeant Lee Reisenleiter in which he shared, “With a lot of fear and uncertainty, I stepped out into the dark amid the tracers, and took my chances. The jump went well, but it seemed like a lifetime before I hit the ground.”