The idea for this project came to me from a posting that we received on our Troop 9 web site several months ago. It was a request from a Weymouth resident, Mr. Robert Thomas, for help in registering the over 3500 Weymouth World War II veterans in the newly dedicated National World War II in Washington D.C. Late last year, Bob found out that the new WW II Memorial in Washington, DC was going to have a lasting electronic database to honor all the participants of WW II, soldiers and home front civilian workers alike.

What started out simply as registering his own father, a Philadelphia Marine sergeant killed in action on Okinawa in the waning days of the war, grew exponentially when he found that Weymouth’s two WW II Medal of Honor (MOH) recipients were not in the National Registry’s database. He enrolled those men and a few US Marine MOH recipients from around the country who for some reason had been missed as well.

Just before Memorial Day in 2004, Bob decided to go to Washington to visit the new about-to-be-dedicated memorial. His return trip included a stop at the birth town of one of the two Weymouth MOH recipients Elden H. Johnson in Bivalve, NJ. His parents had moved there from Weymouth for work just before he was born.

There he visited the Town Clerk’s office and came away with more information about not only Johnson, but the almost 3600 other Weymouth men and women who went into combat or support positions from a copy of an old Boston Globe article he got from the clerk. That’s when he got the idea to enroll all of Weymouth’s WW II heroes as a tribute to their service and sacrifice and to be the first town in America to enroll all of its military participants and integrated support personnel into the National WW II Memorial Registry.

Following that initial email posting and after several emails, phone conversations and meetings with Bob about how Troop 9 could help with his initiative, the Eagle project that I had been struggling so hard to find, found me.

The project has three distinct phases:
Phase I – To build a local Memorial Web site, similar to the one in Washington D.C., where friends and families of Weymouth veterans could visit and learn about Weymouth’s Greatest Generation person by person.

Phase II – To complete the database of the over 3500 names by organizing and leading a group of volunteers who will canvas the VFW Posts, American Legion Halls, Libraries, Shopping Malls and elderly homes to gather the untold stories and veteran details to help fill in the many voids.