Without memory there can be no community.   And for more than two hundred years, Dickinson College has been a community bound together by such memory.  Especially worthy of our remembrance are those among us who have been over the decades dispatched to defend the ideals upon which the community and the nation it serves are based.  These pages seek to remember those young men and women who took on this duty at the cost of their lives.  Further, it seeks to remember them not as names from long ago but as Dickinsonians who walked the halls of Old West, sat in the classrooms of Denny and Tome, and played in red on a Saturday afternoon at Biddle Field.

Dickinson College holds today and has always held as an institution the conviction that war is abhorent to the human condition.  On the occasion in 1949 of the commemoration of the service of Dickinsionians in World World Two, for instance, President William Edel hoped that the College never again find it necessary to place another war memorial in Old West. Sadly, these hopes have not been realised.  But still at the heart of Dickinson's commitment is the guiding idea that the cause of peace and civilized discourse among nations is indeed a higher education.

Men and women of Dickinson have served in each of the nation's wars since its charter as an undergraduate institution in 1783.  Much of the senior class in 1814 was absent from the College serving the Philadelphia militia in defense of that city and received their degrees in abstentia. Andrew Steele of the class of 1792 was a surgeon of the Louisiana militia under Jackson defending New Orleans in 1814.  John Summerfield Battee, an 1842 graduate, served the Army in Mexico before re-enlisting, in the Union Navy, during the Civil War.  Enthusiastic students signed up for the Spanish-American War, though only one reached the front lines before fighting was halted.  Other conflicts did see Dickinsonians fall and the pages below do their very best to commemorate their sacrifice.

The genesis of this effort concerned the long overdue recognition of those who had died in the service of the United States since 1946, in wars which, like the Korean Conflict, did not absorb the full engagement of the nation, or, like Vietnam, ended in discord and defeat.  With an important impetus from a recent ROTC graduate of the College, Ryan James (class of 1999) as a history major in his senior seminar, an exhaustive search produced the lists of those fallen in Korea, Vietnam, and in the Gulf.  The delay ended when an official plaque of remembrance was dedicated to these men and women in Memorial Hall in the fall of 2000.  This web-site is intended to supplement all the references to sacrifice in Memorial Hall and has been expanded to include the American Civil War and both the World Wars.

The names of these Dickinsonians have been arranged by the date of their sacrifice, a device which the compiler feels tells some of  the story of the wars in which they fought, and chronicles their contribution to a nation's struggle.  In the few instances where dates of death are not know, those entries are made at the end of the section.  Photographs, wherever possible, have been used which emphasize the subject in student days.  For this task, especially, the project owes a great debt to the staff of the Dickinson College Archives and Special Collections, especially Michele Tourney.

An exhaustive search of alumni records and publications, yearbooks, and college records has gone into these pages.  Still, one cannot have the full confidence that all information is exact, nor that some names have been omitted.  For any assistance from readers of these pages concerning omissions, errors, or further information, the author will be most grateful.  Please contact him at osborne@dickinson.edu.