Because the regularly scheduled Lowell City Council meeting this week fell on St. Patrick’s Day, the council canceled its meeting, so instead of writing about local politics, today I’ll share an essay I wrote as part of Lowell’s bicentennial observance. However, instead of the founding of the mills and the digging of the canals, I jump forward to the 1940s and write about Lowell in World War II. I’ll have more comments at the end of the piece.

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Lowell in World War II

On Sunday, December 7, 1941, several thousand Lowell residents filed into the Lowell Memorial Auditorium for that afternoon’s Moses Greeley Parker Lecture, featuring a performance by the Trapp Family Singers. The Sound of Music would not exist for another 17 years; on this day, the group performed Austrian folk songs, classical pieces, and traditional Christmas carols. While they sang, the Japanese Navy commenced its devastating attack on the United States 4,000 miles away in Hawaii. In total, 2,403 Americans died in the assault, including Lowell residents Clifton Edwards of the U.S. Navy and Arthur Boyle of the U.S. Army.

If the Lowell Memorial Auditorium was central to the city’s experience at the start of World War II, it also served as the site of its closing chapter. On Sunday, May 18, 1947, hundreds gathered there to dedicate four bronze tablets bearing the names of 436 Lowell residents who lost their lives in military service during the war.

The names on these tablets are organized alphabetically by branch of service. The first of the 320 names from the U.S. Army is George E. Ahearn, the son of Canadian immigrants who grew up in a large family at 121 Crosby Street in Back Central. At age 22, he died in the Vosges Mountains of France on November 13, 1944, while serving with the 68th Antiaircraft Artillery Battalion. The final Army name is George Zouvelos, the son of Greek immigrants who lived at 94 Lilley Avenue in Centralville. He was killed in heavy fighting in Germany during the closing days of the war at age 18 while serving with the 97th Infantry Division.

The first of 84 names on the U.S. Navy tablet is Donald M. Adie, a graduate of Keith Academy and Lowell Textile Institute who lived at 26 Otis Street in Sacred Heart. He died on November 12, 1942, when his ship, the USS Barton, was sunk by the Japanese during the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal. The final name is Peter P. Yianopoulos, the son of Greek immigrants from 161 Mt. Pleasant Street in Centralville. He died on April 2, 1945, when two Japanese kamikaze planes struck his ship, the USS Dickerson, killing 54 aboard during the invasion of Okinawa.

The first of the 25 names on the U.S. Marine Corps tablet is Joseph E. Albert, the son of Canadian immigrants from the Acre. He died on March 1, 1945, at age 33 during the invasion of Iwo Jima, leaving behind a wife and young son. The final Marine is Julian J. Wojas, the son of Polish immigrants from 24 Ray Court in Centralville. After enlisting in 1940, Wojas was taken prisoner in the Philippines in May 1942. He died of disease in a Japanese POW camp on June 21, 1945, at age 28.

Throughout the war, Lowell’s residents fought and died on every continent and ocean. On June 5, 1943, 17-year-old Robert Beek was lost at sea while serving as a Navy gunner on a merchant ship sunk by a U-boat. On July 20, 1943, Frederick Webster died in a midair collision over Corpus Christi, Texas, while training as a Navy pilot. On March 4, 1944, 19-year-old Chester Colbath was killed during the Anzio invasion, and on March 22, Antonio Rapone died at age 26 when his bomber was shot down over Indochina. The casualties continued through the war’s end: John Shaughnessy on Omaha Beach on D-Day; Leo Cote in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge; Stanley Kijanka, one of the first in Lowell to enlist in the army, during the final push through Germany, Costas Ivos, whose B-17 was shot down over Germany in March 1945, and his two cousins, David Scondras who was mortally wounded in Lorraine, France, and his brother, USMC Lieutenant James Scondras, who perished on Iwo Jima. Most tragically, on August 6, 1945, 19-year-old Normand Brissette died while a POW in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb exploded.

Service was not limited to men. Lowell Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers was instrumental in creating the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), allowing women to serve in the military. Mary Hallaren, a graduate of the Lowell Normal School, became one of the first to enlist, eventually commanding the first WAC unit deployed to Europe. Helen Brooks (then Helen Mangan) also graduated from WAC Officer Candidate School and served as an aide to Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall.

For those who remained in Lowell, life was defined by a steady stream of casualty notices in the Lowell Sun, the rationing of food and gasoline, and the nightly patrols of air raid wardens. However, war contracts also brought full employment, briefly reviving the city’s fading mills.

That economic boom ended with the war as military contracts were abruptly canceled. Yet, thanks to another federal initiative guided by Edith Nourse Rogers, thousands of returning service members gained access to affordable home loans and college tuition through the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944—the GI Bill.

Though World War II ended with the surrender of Japan on August 15, 1945, its legacy endured. Survivors returned to Lowell to raise families, achieve homeownership, and make the city a better place for all who live here. Those who did not return are honored throughout the city by the dozens of street intersections dedicated as memorial squares and by the bronze tablets within the Lowell Memorial Auditorium. These names serve not only as a record of the past but as an inspiration for future residents to meet their own generation’s challenges with the same selfless resolve and dedication to the common good that defined those who gave their lives during World War II.

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I’ve long been interested in the many monuments and memorial street signs (“squares”) located throughout Lowell. An ongoing project has been to identify, locate and contextualize each of them. In the process of doing that, I focused on approximately three dozen memorial squares that were dedicated to the memory of Lowell residents who died while serving in the military during World War II.

I found those individual World War II stories to be fascinating. But I also found them perplexing. Nearly 440 service members from Lowell died in World War II. Why was this small cohort chosen to be publicly remembered? Perhaps more importantly, what of the other 90 percent who have largely been erased from public history except for the appearance of their names on four memorial tablets at the Lowell Memorial Auditorium? Who were they and what are their stories?

To help fill this gap in Lowell’s historical record, I am now researching all 440 and hope to have a book with their stories completed by this Memorial Day. I’ll share more information in the coming weeks.

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A reminder that my newest book, Lowell: A Concise History, is available as a free PDF download here and that a paper copy may be ordered from the print-in-demand publisher Lulu Press at this link. Finally, our own independent bookstore, lala books at 189 Market Street, is carrying physical copies of the book for sale.