Arlington National Cemetery has given us a list of 13,100 individuals who died from 1941 through January 1946.
We need help to narrow down this list to only those who died while in military service during World War II - it should be around 7,700.
Once we have identified the WWII fallen buried at Arlington, we have volunteers ready to write those stories.
But we need to build a complete list of these WWII fallen first.
It would probably take one person many months to go through 13,100 names. But many hands make light work.
Dozens of volunteers helped to build out the D-Day project that had 2,502 names and the Pearl Harbor project that had 2,335 names.
We are breaking up the Arlington National Cemetery into 17 groups to make the project more manageable. (The image below show how they are being divided by section.)
Right now we need help to build out the list for our first 4 groups (named using operational code names from WWII):
Group Name # of Names Arlington Location
Operation Watchtower 107 East portion of cemetery
Operation Landcrab 295 North portion of cemetery
Operation Torch 339 Section 25
Operation Galvanic 344 Section 10
It generally takes no more than 2 to 5 minutes to review one of these names and add missing information. People can help with as few or as many names as they wish and start and stop at any time.
I created a training video to show people what is involved. The first 5 minutes cover the basics. If it looks like something you would like to help with, you can watch the rest. The last 5 minutes has details about becoming involved in directing the operations for one of these sections. Attached is the PowerPoint slides and spreadsheet referred to in the video.
What can you expect?
In a previous post about Arlington, I shared the type of interesting content you may find while helping with this phase of the project - including the story of an American general who went missing and may have disappeared into the Russian gulags.
Thanks for your interest. Email me at don@storiesbehindthestars.org to help create what will be the most complete and accurate database of WWII fallen buried in Arlington.
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