World War II

Ennis, TX

Jack Lummus grew up on an Ellis County farm, starred as an athlete at Baylor, and played professional baseball and football before joining the Marines in World War II. On Iwo Jima in early 1945, he led his rifle platoon against a network of fortified enemy positions, pressing the attack even after being wounded, before a land mine cost him his life. For his extraordinary courage that day he was awarded the Medal of Honor.

York, PA · est. 1999

Jacob L. Devers grew up in York and rose to become one of the most consequential American commanders of World War II. Made the Army's youngest brigadier general in 1940 and a four-star general by 1945, he led Allied forces in Europe and played a central role in the 1944 liberation of France. His career carried him from a Pennsylvania boyhood to the highest ranks of a global war and, finally, to burial at Arlington National Cemetery.

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.

Millard County, UT

This spot lies within the Topaz War Relocation Center, one of ten camps where the United States confined Japanese Americans after Executive Order 9066. On April 11, 1943, James Hatsuki Wakasa, an elderly resident of the camp, was shot and killed by a sentry near the perimeter fence. His death became a rallying point for the incarcerated community and a lasting symbol of the injustice they endured.

Hillsboro, TX

James Lindell Harris was born on a farm near Hillsboro in 1916 and entered the Army in 1941, training at Fort Sam Houston before joining the 756th Tank Battalion. He led his men through North Africa and Europe, and at Vagney, France, though mortally wounded, kept directing his unit and refused aid until a wounded crewman was carried to safety. For that courage he received the Medal of Honor posthumously.

Indiana, PA · est. 1998

The small college town of Indiana, Pennsylvania, raised one of Hollywood's most beloved leading men. Jimmy Stewart carried an everyman decency into classics of the 1930s and 1940s, from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to It's a Wonderful Life. His fame was matched by real service: he flew 20 combat missions over Europe in World War II and remained in the Air Force Reserve, retiring as a brigadier general.

Parker, AZ

This surviving building stood within the Poston site near Parker, one of the War Relocation Authority camps where the United States confined Japanese Americans during World War II. Beginning in 1942, tens of thousands of men, women, and children—most of them U.S. citizens—were removed from the West Coast and held behind barbed wire in remote desert camps solely because of their ancestry. Ordinary houses and barracks like this one were home to families who lost their freedom without charge or trial.

Washington, DC · est. 1997

Jean Monnet (1888–1979), the French economist remembered as a founding architect of a united Europe, spent part of World War II in Washington working from an office in the historic Willard Hotel. As a member of the British Mission, he threw his talent for large-scale coordination into America's "Victory Program," helping marshal the astonishing surge of industrial output that armed the Allies. Only after the war did he turn that same genius for cooperation toward binding former enemies into a peaceful European community.

Medina, TX

Joe H. Newcomer built a long career in Texas law enforcement, serving as a Special Texas Ranger, deputy sheriff, justice of the peace, and chief of police. During World War II he worked as a shipboard security officer for a chemical company, and he later helped found and lead regional peace-officer associations. His marker, recorded in 1968, honors a life spent in public safety and civic service.

Dallas, TX

The son of a Methodist minister and a World War II veteran, John Goodwin Tower left a political-science classroom for the national stage in 1961, winning the special election for Lyndon Johnson's vacated Senate seat and becoming the first Republican senator from Texas since Reconstruction. Over 24 years he built influence through key committee chairmanships, later serving as chief U.S. negotiator at the Geneva arms-reduction talks and chairing the commission that investigated the Iran-Contra affair. He died in a 1991 plane crash while advising President George Bush.

Monroe, NC

John J. Parker (1885–1958) was a distinguished jurist who served as chief judge of the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals from 1931 until his death. In 1945–46 he served as an alternate American member of the Nuremberg tribunal, which brought Nazi leaders to justice after World War II. Born in Monroe, he was once nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Lincoln, CA

This park honors Charles Joiner, born in Monroe, Louisiana, in 1923, who enlisted in the U.S. Navy when the Second World War broke out and served in the North African theater. His dedication plaque ties a local Lincoln, California, park to the life of a sailor who answered the call in one of the war's early campaigns.

Cleburne, TX

John B. Joiner built a one-story farmhouse on this Cleburne land in 1895 and sold it in 1912 to the Long family. Banker Joseph Benjamin Long and his wife Lorena added the second story, and the couple raised their family here amid civic and church life. During World War II, with her two sons serving overseas, Lorena worked as a librarian with the Women's Army Corps — a chapter reflected in the home, which the family kept until 1997 and which blends Classical columns with Queen Anne details beneath a pronounced belvedere.

Columbus, TX

Joseph V. Frnka, born in the Czech-Texan community of Industry, built this Columbus home in 1906 and taught himself law well enough to join the Texas Bar in 1915. He served in the Texas House in the 1920s, rose to assistant state attorney general, and after World War II sat as a prosecutor and judge with the U.S. military government in occupied Germany.

New Orleans, LA

Fred J. Cassibry (1918–1996) served in the U.S. Navy in World War II, then gave four decades to public life in New Orleans — on the City Council, the Orleans Civil District Court, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, and a state economic development body. The marker remembers him as a dedicated official who never forgot he served the people. The square was dedicated by 1999 under Louisiana Acts 708.

Wichita Falls, TX

Nicknamed "Little Adobe," this pueblo-revival terminal was built in 1928 for Kell Field, Wichita Falls' first municipal airport, in the heady early years of American commercial aviation. Pioneering aviators including Charles Lindbergh, Wiley Post, and Amelia Earhart passed through its doors. In 1941 the airfield was folded into Sheppard Field, a World War II Army Air Corps training center, and it endures today as part of Sheppard Air Force Base.

Kenedy, TX

Rising on land once part of a royal Spanish grant, Kenedy took shape after railroad promoter Mifflin Kenedy bought a townsite in 1886 along the San Antonio and Aransas Pass line. Booming into a cotton and business hub, the incorporated town earned the rough nickname "Six Shooter Junction," and a 1915 hot-mineral-water strike spawned a popular bath house and hotel. During World War II an alien detention camp operated on its outskirts, one chapter in a long agricultural history that still sustains the town.

Kenedy, TX

During World War II the United States interned not only its own residents of German, Japanese, and Italian ancestry but also civilians seized from Latin American nations, holding many as bargaining chips to exchange for Americans trapped overseas. The camp at Kenedy opened in April 1942 and passed more than 3,500 internees through its fences over thirty months before becoming a branch prisoner-of-war camp for Fort Sam Houston. Five people who died in confinement lie buried here, their graves marked by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1976 and the ground designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2005.

Kenedy, TX

After the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor drew the United States into World War II, the government detained tens of thousands of people it classified as 'enemy aliens' — Japanese, German, and Italian nationals, many seized in Latin America, along with U.S.-citizen relatives. Texas hosted several confinement sites, and Camp Kenedy, a former WWI training camp and Civilian Conservation Corps site, was converted by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in 1942. Its first detainees, largely men from Latin American republics, arrived that April; the camp held internees until 1944, when it became a prisoner-of-war camp.

Runaway Bay (Bridgeport), TX

After the United States entered World War II in 1941, Lake Bridgeport became an ideal, sparsely populated site for military training, serving as a bombing target range and auxiliary seaplane base for Eagle Mountain Lake Marine Corps Air Station. Beginning in 1942, crews built an administration building, seaplane ramp, and stone and floating targets, and hundreds of Navy and Marine aviators trained here in strafing, dive-bombing, glider work, and tests of the early TDR radio-controlled assault drone. Training took lives, too — two Marine aviators and a local guard died in accidents in 1944.

Vernon Hills, IL

During World War II, the U.S. Navy did something almost unimaginable: it turned the freshwater expanse of Lake Michigan into a carrier-flight-training ground, safely inland and beyond the reach of enemy submarines. Two former Great Lakes excursion steamers were rebuilt with flat wooden flight decks as the training carriers USS Wolverine and USS Sabre, operating out of the Chicago area. Thousands of naval aviators made their first carrier takeoffs and landings on these paddle-wheel carriers before shipping out to the Pacific—among them a young pilot named George H.W. Bush.

Laredo, TX

Military aviation came to Laredo during World War I, when the Army carved auxiliary landing fields across South Texas to relieve an overtaxed Kelly Field in San Antonio, including one north of old Fort McIntosh. As the country geared up for another world war around 1940, that foothold grew into a full training installation, eventually known as Laredo Air Force Base. Thousands of airmen and gunners trained beneath the wide border sky.

Miami-Dade County, FL

During World War II the U.S. Navy blanketed South Florida with air stations to train pilots for the war in the Atlantic and Pacific, and this parkland began life as part of one of them in 1942. A 1945 hurricane wrecked the base, but a huge concrete directional arrow — pointing north to guide aircraft — still survives on the ground. Such arrows were part of early aviation's navigation network, later repurposed and remembered as relics of the flying age.

Del Rio, TX

In 1942, with the nation racing to train pilots for World War II, the U.S. Army built an airfield east of Del Rio, where year-round clear skies and open ground offered near-ideal flying conditions. It was named for Lt. Jack Thomas Laughlin, a Del Rio native shot down over the Java Sea and the first local pilot killed in the war; his widow and infant daughter attended the 1943 dedication. Instructors trained crews on the B-26 Marauder before the base closed at war's end and reopened as an Air Force base in 1952.

Maxton, NC

From 1942 to 1945, the Laurinburg-Maxton Army Air Base served as a major U.S. Army Air Forces glider training center. Engine-less gliders, towed aloft and released to land troops and equipment behind enemy lines, were trained here for airborne operations — including units that took part in the D-Day assault on June 6, 1944.

Cuero, TX

Born in Cuero, Leonard Roy Harmon joined the Navy in 1939 and served as a mess attendant aboard the cruiser U.S.S. San Francisco. During the Battle of Guadalcanal in November 1942, as enemy fire raked the ship, Harmon helped evacuate the wounded and was killed shielding an injured shipmate with his own body, earning the Navy Cross. In 1943 the destroyer escort U.S.S. Harmon—the first U.S. warship named for a Black man—was christened by his mother.

Orange, TX

Irish immigrant brothers bought an existing Orange shipyard in 1859 and built wooden ships for decades, a trade their descendants carried into the steel age. Under Edward T. Malloy, who joined in 1939 and later bought control, Levingston Shipbuilding boomed during World War II, delivering 160 tugs, tankers, and rescue vessels to the Army and Navy between 1941 and 1945. After the war it reinvented itself as a world leader in offshore drilling rigs before closing in 1985.

Boston, MA

This plaque honors members of Local 34—a labor union chapter—who left their jobs to serve in the armed forces during World War II. Across the country, unions, workplaces, and neighborhoods raised such memorials to their own who answered the call. It stands as a small, local tribute within the vast American mobilization of the 1940s.

Wichita Falls, TX

The men of the 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery—many of them Texans from the Wichita Falls area—were captured by Japanese forces on Java in March 1942, in the opening months of America's Pacific war. Held prisoner for three and a half brutal years, the survivors were not freed until Japan's surrender in September 1945. Their fate was so obscured during the war that they became known as the 'Lost Battalion.'

Livingston, TX

Raised in Livingston, James M. Parker Jr. joined the Army Air Corps and, as the United States entered World War II, volunteered for the Doolittle Raid—the daring first American strike on the Japanese mainland. In April 1942 he flew as co-pilot aboard the B-25 "Whirling Dervish" with Crew #9, completing the bombing run before the low-on-fuel crew bailed out over China. He returned home, recovered from malaria, and served on through the war before retiring in 1947 with numerous decorations.

Albany, TX

Albany High School graduate William Edwin Dyess became one of the Pacific war's most consequential survivors. Captured when Bataan fell in 1942, he endured the Death March, escaped his captors a year later, and then did something rarer still — his firsthand published accounts of prisoner abuse reached the American public and shaped how the world understood the war in the Pacific. He died in a stateside P-38 crash weeks after a hero's visit to his hometown football field in 1943.

Albany, TX

Albany-born and Tarleton-educated, William Edwin Dyess trained as a pilot at Randolph Field and was leading the 21st Pursuit Squadron of P-40s in the Philippines when Japan struck in December 1941. His stubborn attacks at Subic Bay with almost no aircraft, his ordeal on the Bataan Death March, and his daring escape a year later made him a symbol of resistance. His Chicago Tribune accounts of Japanese atrocities altered world opinion, and his story inspired a book and an acclaimed play before his death in a 1943 crash.

Abilene, TX

This Abilene marker traces the arc of Albany native William Edwin Dyess from aviation cadet at Randolph Field to squadron commander in the Philippines, where he fought on despite crippling losses of aircraft. Taken prisoner at the fall of Bataan in 1942, he survived the Death March and prison camps, then escaped with eleven others in 1943 — reaching Australia by guerrilla contact and submarine. His accounts in the Chicago Tribune exposed conditions in Japanese camps before he died flying a new P-38 over Burbank late that year.

Killeen, TX

Born in St. Louis in 1894 and a 1916 graduate of Texas A&M, Andrew Davis Bruce began 37 years of military service in 1917, rising to lieutenant colonel at age 24 in France during World War I. Asked to create the Army's tank destroyer center, he chose Killeen in 1942 for its terrain and climate and named the camp for Confederate general John Bell Hood, giving rise to Fort Hood. In World War II he led the 77th Infantry Division through Guam, Leyte, Ie Shima, and Okinawa, earning two Distinguished Service Crosses, before a later career as president and chancellor of the University of Houston.

Williamstown, MA

This playground was given in 1952 by Mr. and Mrs. Harold E. Field in memory of their son, Lieutenant Herbert Allan Field, who died in the service of his country in the summer of 1945 as the Second World War drew to a close. Across the country, grieving families turned their loss into gifts for the living — parks, playgrounds, and fields where the next generation could grow up in the peace their sons had died to secure. In Williamstown, that memory took the shape of a place to play.

Del Rio, TX

Born in Del Rio in 1914, Jack Thomas Laughlin graduated from the local high school and the University of Texas before joining the Army Air Corps in 1940 and earning his wings in California. On January 29, 1942, his B-17 Flying Fortress was shot down over the Java Sea, making him the first Del Rio-born pilot killed in World War II. When the Army built an airfield in town that year, citizens successfully petitioned to name it in his honor.

Whitfield County, GA

This roadside memorial marks the death of Lieutenant Theodore Marxon of the Army Air Forces, who was killed in the line of duty on February 5, 1943 — the same winter the United States was racing to build the largest air force in the world. During World War II the A.A.F. expanded from a few thousand aircraft into millions of personnel, training pilots and crews at airfields spread across the South, Georgia among them. Line-of-duty deaths like Marxon's were a grim, constant feature of that buildup, as young aviators flew unforgiving aircraft in the rush to prepare for combat overseas.

Little Falls, NJ

This M5 light tank stands as a war memorial, its pedestal bearing the reminder that 'Freedom Is Not Free.' The M5 Stuart was a fast, lightly armored American tank used for reconnaissance and infantry support in World War II, crewed by four and mass-produced for U.S. and Allied forces. Displayed in the community, the vehicle honors the local men and women who served in the nation's wars.

Rosenberg, TX

Born in Mexico in 1920 and brought to Fort Bend County as a child farmworker, Macario García was drafted in 1942 and single-handedly destroyed two German machine-gun nests near Grosshau in November 1944, though wounded. President Truman presented him the Medal of Honor in 1945 — yet weeks later he was refused service and arrested at a Texas restaurant for being Hispanic. His case, taken up by LULAC and others, became an early rallying point in the postwar Mexican-American civil rights struggle.

Terrell, TX

William Francis "Bill" Long came to Texas as a teenager and found his life's work in the air, flying as an observer with an aero squadron in World War I before building a chain of flight schools across the state. Known as "Mr. Love Field," he trained pilots and mechanics through the 1920s and 30s, then answered the nation's call as war loomed again. During World War II his four schools trained roughly a tenth of U.S. Army aviators and a third of Britain's RAF cadets who came to America, including the No. 1 British Flying Training School at Terrell.

Greenville, TX

What began in 1941 as a federally aided civilian airport for Greenville quickly grew, with Congressman Sam Rayburn's help, into a $5 million Army Air Forces training base. Named for Lt. Truett Majors, the first Hunt County pilot killed in World War II, the field opened fully in January 1943 and trained cadets in BT-13s and P-47s. Alongside American airmen, it trained Women's Army Corps members and Royal Air Force and Mexican Air Force pilots before deactivating in July 1945.

Benton County, WA

Built in a matter of months during World War II, Hanford's B Reactor was the world's first full-scale reactor designed to produce plutonium. The plutonium made here fueled the Trinity test and the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, part of the secret, sprawling Manhattan Project. Today it is preserved as a National Historic Landmark within the Manhattan Project National Historical Park.

McAdoo, TX

Raised in the tiny community of McAdoo, Marshall Clinton Formby, Jr. devoted his life to the betterment of West Texas. He served as Dickens County judge, won a Texas Senate seat interrupted by his service as an Army captain in the European theater of World War II, and built businesses in farming, oil, radio, newspapers, and cable television. As a member and chair of the Texas Highway Commission in the 1950s, he championed farm-to-market roads and the state's interstate highway system, and he served for years on the boards guiding Texas Tech and higher education.

Martinez, CA

This marks the site of the Martinez Troops-in-Transit Canteen, which operated from October 1943 to February 1946. Staffed by 1,348 volunteer hostesses, it offered rest and refreshment to more than 401,000 servicemen and women, escorts, and children passing through by rail during World War II. Such canteens were a nationwide grassroots effort to comfort the millions in uniform on the move.

Ennis, TX

Pearl C. Matthews bought this Ennis property in 1900 when he and his brother Will, owners of a McKinney department store, opened a second store in town, and he built the present house in 1908 after years in a cottage on the site. Arkansas native Harry Atwood purchased the home in 1917, and it stayed in the Atwood family for decades. His grandson Felix Atwood, a lieutenant colonel in World War II, later lived here while practicing law in Dallas.

Sacramento County, CA

As tensions rose across the Pacific in 1936, Congress authorized the Sacramento Air Depot, the installation that would become McClellan Air Force Base. Built to supply and stage air operations on the West Coast, it grew into a major logistics hub during the wartime years that soon followed.

Red Willow County, NE

On the high plains of southwestern Nebraska, McCook Army Airfield trained bomber crews during World War II, one of hundreds of hastily built airbases that turned the rural interior into a vast flight-training ground. Crews learned to fly heavy bombers here before shipping overseas. Today the abandoned runways and scattered structures mark where the war effort reached deep into the American heartland.

Lewistown, PA · est. 1967

This Lewistown home was the birthplace of Frank R. McCoy, a West Point graduate whose long career carried him from the Spanish-American War through both World Wars. A soldier-diplomat as much as a general, he served on international commissions and led the Foreign Policy Association, helping shape how Americans understood their growing role in the world. His life spanned the era in which the United States rose to global power.

Fort Worth, TX

Fort Worth leased 100 acres on Decatur Road in 1925 for a new municipal airport, timed to the Air Mail Act that year, and by May 1926 National Air Transport — a forerunner of United Airlines — flew the field's first mail run to Chicago. Renamed Meacham Field in 1927 for a former mayor, it gained the nation's first air-conditioned passenger terminal in 1937 and, during World War II, trained U.S. Navy pilots and ferried fighters and torpedo bombers toward the Pacific. After commercial flights moved on in 1953, it became one of the world's leading centers for corporate and general aviation.

Mecca Township, OH

This memorial honors two young men of Mecca, Ohio, who were killed in action during World War II: First Lieutenant Lawrence D. Jacoby, who died in 1943, and Private First Class Neal M. Overmier, who died in 1944, one day shy of his twenty-first birthday. Their names stand for a small rural township's share of the sacrifice demanded by the global war.

Charlotte, NC

This memorial honors the residents of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, who died in World War II—the deadliest conflict in human history, which drew millions of Americans overseas between 1941 and 1945. Charlotte and its surrounding county sent thousands of sons and daughters into the fight, and like communities across the nation, it counted its losses when the war ended. Monuments like this one rose in county seats and town squares in the postwar years, giving grieving families and neighbors a shared place to remember those who never came home.

Riverside, CA

This memorial honors five Mexican-American soldiers from the Riverside area who gave their lives in World War II. Placed by the Mia La Raza Coalition, it insists that their sacrifice—long underrecognized—be remembered. Hundreds of thousands of Mexican Americans served in the war, earning a proud combat record even as their communities faced discrimination at home.

Stowe Township, PA

This plaque marks the home of Michael A. Musmanno, a Pittsburgh-area jurist whose career stretched from the coal-country courtrooms of the 1920s to the world stage. He served in both World Wars, sat in the state legislature, and in 1947–48 presided over one of the Nuremberg trials that held Nazi leaders to account for their crimes. He capped his life with sixteen years on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and authorship of sixteen books, and was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery.

Mobile, AL

This site holds much of Alabama's early aviation history, from John Fowler's flying-machine experiments and Mobile's first flying field to Bates Field, dedicated in 1929. In 1939 the War Department built a great military aviation depot here, named for aviator Wendell Brookley, that employed more than 16,000 people during World War II. After the war Brookley's giant Globemaster cargo planes flew in the Berlin Airlift, and in 2012 Airbus opened its first American aircraft plant on the site.

Jacksboro, TX

In November 1940, Battery F of the 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery — a Texas National Guard unit — mobilized here for active duty. Shipped out from San Francisco in late 1941, the men were still at sea when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and they were sent to defend Java, where the unit was captured in March 1942. For three and a half years they endured captivity across Asia, forced into brutal labor, much of it on the Burma–Siam Railway, where most of the deaths occurred; the survivors came home only after Japan's surrender.

New Orleans, LA

Molly Marine was dedicated on November 10, 1943 — the Marine Corps birthday — in the heart of New Orleans, honoring the women who joined the Marine Corps Women's Reserve during World War II under the recruiting call "Free a Marine to Fight." Believed to be among the first monuments to a woman in U.S. military uniform, she stands trim in her service dress as thousands of women stepped into stateside duties so male Marines could deploy.

Philadelphia, PA

This monument enshrines the memory of the six million Jewish men, women, and children murdered in the Holocaust — in the ghettos, concentration camps, and gas chambers of Nazi-occupied Europe during the Second World War. Dedicated in Philadelphia, it was among the earliest public memorials in North America to the victims of the Holocaust. It stands as a permanent act of collective remembrance.

Carnegie, PA · est. 2004

In 1943, with the nation's factories running full-tilt for the war, the federal government threw up planned housing like Mooncrest to shelter the workers who kept the arsenal fed. Its residents crossed the river to the Dravo Corporation, turning out armor plate, munitions, and ships for the fight overseas. After the war the Air Force ran the community briefly before the little homes passed into private hands in the 1950s.

Alton, TX

Financed by the neighboring cities of Edinburg, McAllen, and Mission, Moore Field opened in 1941 as a U.S. aviation training base, named for Lt. Frank M. Moore, a pilot killed in World War I. It trained airmen throughout World War II before closing in 1945, was reactivated during the Korean War, and since 1960 has housed research offices of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Its runways trace the long shadow of three American conflicts across a single Rio Grande Valley site.

Moulton, TX

Before radar was widespread, the United States guarded its skies with a network of watchtowers manned by civilian volunteers of the Ground Observer Corps. Sponsored by the Moulton Lions Club and built in 1942 from surplus lumber, the town's 20-foot tower — Military I.D. "King 136" — was the only one this far inland, roughly a hundred miles from the coast. Volunteers trained in aircraft identification at Randolph Field stood daylight watch with binoculars and a telephone line, scanning the sky until the invasion threat faded and the tower was dismantled for scrap in 1944.