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Queens College Students Come Across WWII Vets During World War II, 60 percent of Queens College students enlisted or were called to duty (942 out of a class of 1,600). Founded in 1937, the college graduated its first class the same year that the nation was drawn into the conflict. One student, Arnold Franco (Class of '43) now age 83, served with an elite group of code breakers. Last year, he was honored with the French government's highest award, the Legion of Honor. Early this year, a core group of six students began researching the fate of the Queens College men and women who served their nation. The intergenerational WWII research project was supported by Franco, himself a former history major, as a way to educate and link today's students with those who preceded them. The students, recruited mainly from history clubs on campus, pored over student newspapers and college yearbooks, community newspapers, and national Archives (National Personnel Records Center) documents. They discovered that 59 Queens College students-most in their early 20s or younger-perished: For some of the deceased veterans, the information is sketchy, but for others, the students found photos and detailed biographical information and reminiscences by mourning classmates such as "For Private John Morrell, 219th Field Artillery Battalion, killed July 28, 1944 in France: He was part and parcel of Operettas and the early seasonal Variety Shows. He sang in all the choirs. Indeed a song has been lost to the world." They learned about young men from Flushing, Corona, and other city neighborhoods, some foreign-born, like Sergeant Meyer Gelman, a native of Russia, who died April 18, 1944 in action over Germany. And John Charles Burt, who served in four different units at Guadalcanal in the Army Air Corps who is buried at the Tablets of the Missing at Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines.
The many threads of this story will come together at 2 p.m. on Friday, November 10, the eve of Veterans Day, 2006 as the college dedicates its new World War II Memorial Plaza, which Franco has funded. During the ceremony, which will take place on the Quad by the flagpole, the six students who provided the research will read the names of the 59 deceased veterans. The French consul, Franco, college and elected officials and QC grad and poet Samuel Menashe, a Battle of the Bulge survivor, will also participate. |
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