Local 34 World War II Memorial

Boston, MA

During the Second World War, Boston's shipyards became a busy haven for the Royal Navy, as British warships crossed the Atlantic to be built, repaired, and refitted in American yards. Thousands of British sailors passed through the city, where local families and institutions offered them hospitality far from home. This plaque was the Royal Navy's thank-you to Bostonians for that wartime friendship.

Boston, MA

This memorial honors the Bostonians who died in World War II, the global conflict that drew the United States fully into war after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. From a city with deep maritime and industrial roots, thousands of young men and women shipped out to fight across Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific, and many never returned. Their names and sacrifice are gathered here so that a neighborhood's loss becomes a permanent part of the civic landscape.

Boston, MA

A modest plaque in the Jeffries Point section of East Boston keeps the name of Ralph Correale, a neighborhood son born in 1924 whose life ended in 1943. Those dates place his death at the height of the Second World War, when Eastie — a dense, largely immigrant waterfront district — sent a remarkable share of its young men into uniform and set aside squares and corners for those who did not come home.

Boston, MA

Jamaica Plain, a leafy streetcar-suburb neighborhood of Boston, sent hundreds of its sons into the two great conflicts of the twentieth century, and this memorial gathers their sacrifice into a single act of civic remembrance. In World War I, American doughboys shipped overseas to the trenches of France in 1917–18; a generation later, World War II drew the neighborhood's young men to battlefields across Europe and the Pacific. Communities like this one across America raised such monuments so that the names and losses of ordinary local families would not be forgotten. It stands as the neighborhood's collective thank-you to those who did not come home.