Michael Tozeski (Pardee’25), an administrative coordinator in the BU Dean of Students office, has spent many lunch breaks in the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, combing through yearbooks and old issues of Bostonia.

WWII History

Finding the Names of BU’s World War II Casualties Lost to Time

BU staffer Michael Tozeski (Pardee’25) has searched archival materials with the hope of ultimately creating a memorial on campus

In his Thanksgiving address to the Boston University community in 1945, President Daniel L. Marsh honored the 223 BU students and alumni who died fighting in World War II. “Let it be kept in mind that very few of these men wanted to go; [the country] required them to yield up their lives,” said Marsh (STH’08, Hon.’53). “I now declare by all that is solemn and sacred that if we do not preserve the things for which our soldiers and sailors were told they were fighting”—including democracy, religious freedom, and the freedom of speech—“then our beloved dead have died in vain.” 

Marsh vowed to create a memorial to honor the fallen, but his vision never materialized. And while Bostonia, the University’s flagship alumni magazine, published their names during and after the war, a comprehensive list was never compiled. Nearly 80 years after Marsh’s speech, these 223 individuals—222 men and one woman—had been lost to history.

Until now. 

Michael Tozeski, an administrative coordinator in the BU Dean of Students office, has spent the last four months painstakingly hunting down each of the 223 names. During lunch breaks at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Tozeski pores over old BU yearbooks and Bostonia issues. After work, sometimes until midnight, he methodically enters the names, branches of service, ranks, hometowns, and graduation years into his spreadsheet. 

Tozeski (Pardee’25) often takes time to read the obituaries of these soldiers and the details of their deaths. The earliest casualty he’s found is a School of Law alum who graduated in 1906. The youngest were freshmen and sophomores who had just begun their studies before being called to serve—“children,” Tozeski says. 

“The phrase ‘the greatest generation’ doesn’t do it justice,” he says. “These young men gave up their lives, their careers, their families—their everything—to fight in a war with people they didn’t know for a cause that they may not have been completely informed on. It’s incredible and very humbling.” 

Digging Deep into the Archives

Tozeski came to BU in January 2022 to pursue graduate studies in international affairs and security studies at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. He graduated from the University of Connecticut in 2017 and had worked in intellectual property law as a policy research analyst at Northeastern, and for US Representative Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), whom he credits with sparking his interest in political science.

During his studies at BU, Tozeski met John Woodward, a Pardee professor of the practice of international relations and a former CIA officer. Woodward, a US Army veteran and director of BU’s Division of Military Education, which oversees BU’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) activities, had long been intrigued and bothered by the lack of a World War II memorial on campus. Other universities had prominent memorials, including Boston College. Harvard has a building honoring students who died fighting for the Union in the Civil War. 

Woodward had heard estimates of around 220 BU students and alumni who died during World War II. But he’d been unable to find a list of the names, despite reaching out to other departments. He asked Tozeski if he wanted to help with the search. 

Armed with only the rough number of casualties, Tozeski started his hunt in August, first visiting the Massachusetts state archives to search Military Personnel Records and then the Gotlieb Center. He has found the most information by scouring the pages of Bostonia magazines from 1941 to 1946, which frequently listed the names of those killed in war. Marsh’s 1945 Thanksgiving address, published in full in the magazine, quoted an exact number of casualties—223—so Tozeski knew he was on the right track. 

Along with each fallen soldier’s name, Bostonia also printed their school and year of graduation, branch of service, and rank. All of it went into Tozeski’s spreadsheet—but then he dug deeper. He paged through yearbooks to see if the individuals were listed—which wasn’t always the case. He relied on military service websites like HonorStates.org to corroborate his findings. He scanned all of the yearbook or Bostonia photos of the students or alumni he could find. 

Complicating his task was the occasional misspelled name or incorrect military title. The staff at BU Alumni Relations is helping him with the last few names in their records, along with other tidbits. 

All told, Tozeski has been able to find 221 of the 223 names through his research. He’s not done yet. 

Heroic Stories Unearthed

Daryl Healea (STH’01, Wheelock’11), College of Arts & Sciences assistant dean for curriculum and enrollment services and a BU historian, says that after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt instituted a draft, in 1940, BU enrollment dropped by 14 percent, between 1941 and 1943. Even BU’s head football coach, Pat Hanley, who was a member of the Reserve Officer Corps, departed the University to serve in the Solomon Islands.

Tozeski is moved by the stories of sacrifice and courage he’s uncovered, and about life as a student. Ultimately, more than 8,000 BU alumni and students fought in the war. 

They were shot down in bombers and other planes, he says, and were involved in dogfighting, an aerial battle in close range. “It’s stories of heroism and heroic actions,” he says, “individuals who knowingly dove down into a sinking ship to pull up their friends. The stories really are sticking with me.”

Take Robert Landess. After graduating from BU with a degree in journalism and working as a publicity assistant, Landess (COM’37, Questrom’37) joined the army as a first lieutenant in July of 1941 and would go on to achieve the rank of captain. He died on November 9, 1942, during Operation Torch, the Allies’ invasion of North Africa. Landess was posthumously awarded the Silver Star Medal and a Purple Heart. 

The occasion was featured in a 1943 issue of Life magazine: “For the heroism that marked his death at Djebel Murdjadjo [in Algeria], the US Army placed his medal into the hands of little Ann Hamilton Landess, his six-week-old daughter that he never had the occasion to meet.” 

One of the hardest people for Tozeski to confirm was Margaret (East) Gillum (CAS’29), the sole woman on the list. He found Gillum’s name among the war dead—and the fact that she was a Red Cross worker—in Bostonia. From newspaper archival searches, Bostonia learned she worked as secretary for Harvard, where her father was a prominent professor in the field of eugenics. She was married but lived with her sister in Dracut, Mass., before the war. She and seven Red Cross colleagues died in a plane crash while traveling from mainland Italy to a dance on the island of Sardinia. The plane was never found.

A Lasting Memorial

On the sidewalk next to ROTC offices on Bay State Road, a simple granite memorial honors BU’s veterans. It includes a quote from General Douglas MacArthur: “The soldier, above all other men, is required to practice the greatest art of religious training—sacrifice.” At Marsh Chapel, a small stained glass window depicts four chaplains who traveled aboard a ship that was torpedoed during World War II. They were said to comfort the soldiers once they knew they were fatally hit; one of the four was George L. Fox (STH’34), a Methodist preacher. The window is dedicated to all alumni (“both living and dead”) who have served in uniform.

Tozeski and Woodward hope to see a more prominent memorial for BU’s World War II dead somewhere on campus (maybe even a digital signage board), and eventually, memorials for other wars. They’ll figure out next steps in the next few weeks, once Tozeski’s research is complete (he’s looking for a few more ranks and hometowns). For now, he has paused looking for the two people he was unable to find.

In the meantime, Woodward plans to list the names on the ROTC website in the near future. He will encourage families of the fallen to visit and share additional information and will urge people to send the names of those not listed to the ROTC offices.

Woodward, who comes from a family of World War II veterans, says the project is important to the BU community. “You have to remember those people,” he says. “It borders on negligence if we don’t. I’m 65 and I remember every holiday we’d gather as a family. My dad and my uncles were all combat veterans of World War II. I saw how important the wars and their time serving were to them. They were young men when they served, and it had a huge impact on them. They always honored the comrades they lost in the war.”