I’m excited to announce that my thematic research collection, entitled “Service and Sacrifice: Clemson Men in World War II”, is finally online! As you know, this has been a semester-long project based on items in Clemson University’s Special Collections and Archives. It’s so fulfilling to see my hard work finally pay off. For the last few couple of weeks, I’ve been working to bring my project online using the Omeka S platform. Adding 60 digitized archival items and their metadata was definitely tedious, but their images and information are central to the project. My thematic research collection (TRC) will help future researchers who want to understand how World War II impacted the Clemson cadets, alumni, and their families. Of course my inventory of items is not exhaustive. The point of a TRC is to carefully select, or curate, the items. One of the hardest parts of the project was deciding which items to include out of a number of interesting finds. As the project creator, I had to make decisions not only about which items to include, but also about how to arrange those items thematically. At first I was looking too broadly at the topic of Clemson men in WWII; I was going to provide information about cadet life at Clemson College and the backgrounds of the cadets. While that is important, it was necessary to narrow down my focus to the war itself. Therefore, I divided my project into the following sections:
- Overview
- War Clouds Coming: how Clemson students (and American students in general) viewed the war before the U.S. entered it
- Turning Point: how the sentiments of the Clemson students (and Americans in general) changed due to Pearl Harbor
- Fighting Tigers: the experiences of Clemson servicemen during the war
- In Memoriam: how the Clemson community memorialized those who were killed
- Sources
For the “War Clouds Coming” section, I provided some historical context about the war in Europe and the Pacific and included newspaper clippings from The Tiger, which generally expressed the isolationist sentiments of the rest of the country. The German bombing of Britain changed the cadets’ view somewhat, and they supported aid to Britain, also participating in relief drives for British civilians. A number of Clemson cadets signed up for the draft, but most American students at the time expected to return to school in Fall 1941.
The “Turning Point” section chronicles the Clemson community’s (and America’s) reaction to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. In addition to newspaper articles from The Tiger, I included an audio recording of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “day of infamy” speech, which the Clemson community would have heard over the radio on December 8. While the college leadership urged calm, the faculty and the students expressed their outrage over the attack and were ready to join the fight. In this turnaround they were not alone: the attack galvanized popular support for American military involvement.
“Fighting Tigers” is the largest section, as I included a selection of articles from The Tiger with stories of Clemson men who had distinguished themselves in battle, sometimes at the cost of their own lives, as well as those who were wounded, missing, or prisoners of war (POWs). The highlight of the section is the two featured Clemson servicemen, Capt. William E. Cline, Class of 1941, and Capt. Manny Lawton, Class of 1940. As I mentioned in another post, Cline was a white officer who commanded a segregated tank platoon in Italy. From his archival collection, I selected some photographs and letters to his parents. Lawton served as an advisor with the Philippine Army. He survived the Bataan Death March and spent 3.5 years in Japanese prison camps. From his papers, I chose some annotated manuscripts of his memoir, Some Survived, as well as a couple of letters to his parents.
The final section, “In Memoriam,” shows how the Clemson community memorialized the fallen men. Every December 7, on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the College held a memorial service for those killed or missing in action. The program from 1944 has already been digitized on TigerPrints, but I found a 1945 program in the William Cline Collection, which was pretty cool. I included some articles from The Tiger about the services, but my favorite items are probably the photographs I took of two memorials on campus: the Scroll of Honor and the Mell Hall Memorial. Visiting the memorials was a very moving experience, and I’m planning to write about that in a future post. I’ll also share some special pictures that were not published with my project.
Looking back on this project, I can say that I’m very proud of being able to contribute to scholarship on the history of Clemson University. While the Clemson men who served in World War II have been and will continue to be memorialized, I feel that I’ve brought a lot of pieces of that history together in a unique way. It means a lot to me to be a part of both the research and commemoration of their experiences and sacrifices. As I mention in the “Overview,” I don’t want to portray the Clemson servicemen as larger-than-life heroes, although many of them received decorations for their bravery, but as ordinary young men who did their duty in spite of hating war or being afraid and homesick or suffering imprisonment. The Clemson men were part of that extraordinary generation who fought and won an incredibly costly, brutal war, then came home and got jobs, started families, and built homes and businesses. Not all of them made it. Some fell on the battlefield or perished in prison camps. Others came back but couldn’t really live again. Their families had to deal with the holes they left behind. I think my project helps to bring a lot of these men together again to that time and place where they were soldiers, so that scholars can study them as part of the Clemson community instead of scattered in separate collections. In a way, a project like this is more satisfying than writing an academic paper, which only a small group of “experts” will read. It’s a scholarly work, but also public-facing. And it drew on the skills I’ve acquired as a web designer and developer, which I could use to help my classmates. I’m not sure exactly what all this will mean for my career. I’ll have to ponder my experience creating this project. For now, though, I’m happy with what I’ve produced and I hope that this TRC will be a resource for future researchers.
Please check it out and let me know what you think! https://documentinghistory.clemson.edu/studentprojects/s/clemson-men-wwii/