In December 1941, the United States entered World War II after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In Pullman, at Washington State College, Ernest O. Holland was the school’s president and would be through 1945.
It was during those years Holland started gathering names and information about many of the college’s war dead, with plans to compile the information in a book.
With the end of the war, and Holland’s presidency, plans for the book were set aside and largely forgotten.
Raymond Sun, a WSU history professor, began a project to commemorate the school’s war dead from the 1940s. The project has taken the next five years and counting.
“I think it (Holland’s book) got lost in the shuffle and so I decided for a research project that I would create a digital archive or a digital memorial to honor the fallen servicemen,” Sun said.
The project got off the ground with about a dozen volunteers from Sun’s class on World War II, who combed through records to build a biography of each veteran.