Okay, this is a doozy.
Is there any way to get a list of Americans who died in World War 2? That is, not merely the number of people who died, but a list of their actual names? Hopefully, combined with a note as to when and where they died?
Perhaps a check with the Veterans Administration of the nation in question?
Yes. Several, in fact.
I have, in my dorm room, a CD with many, many names of people who died in WW2 and where they died and such, I think. I know I have one for the Civil War, and I’m almost positive there’s one for WWI, so there should be one for WWII.
If you have a name and a rough idea of where the person might have died, try searching by city names or area names near that place.
A third option: http://ww2.vet.org/rollsrch.html and the parent site http://ww2.vet.org
I did a search for your last name, John, and found nothing, which means either they don’t have anything or there’s nothing to have.
Just as an aside: any of y’all dopers who read this thread and have people you’d like me to look for on these CDs, lemme know by email, IM, whatever. Happy to oblige.
Casualty lists for Korea and Vietnam (sorted by home state) are available online from the National Archives and Records Administraiton. They apparently don’t have the WWII casualty list online, but, but I expect you can see it by visiting the National Archive in College Park.
The Center for Electronic Records
The National Archives at College Park
8601 Adelphi Road
College Park, MD 20740-6001
(301) 713-6645
cer@nara.gov
The documents are on the NARA website after all (organized by home state and then home county), but they make it extremely hard to find them. The documents you want are called “World War II Honor List of Dead and Missing Army and Army Air Forces Personnel from [name of state or territory]” and “State Summary of War Casualties from World War II for Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard Personnel from [name of state or territory].” The documents were published by the War Deparment and Navy Department, respectively, in 1946. Each files on the NARA website is a GIF images of about 400 kilobytes with about 250 names. To download all the files would be on the order of one gigabye. You can search for these files from NAIL search form Convenient search terms are WWIICASARMY or WWIICASNAVY with the two-letter postal abbreviation of the state. Searching for “WWIICASARMY-ME” will lead you (eventually) to the files for Maine Army casualties. Visting the National Archive in person will almost certainly be more convenient unless there’s just one name you want to check (and that only if you know the home state and home county).
A more convenient source may be available online. You can do a Google search for “world war ii” “honor list of dead and missing” and come up with a lot of genealogy sites, some of which list the names of the dead and missing. You can narrow it down for the state you’re interested in. For example, all the dead and missing from Kansas who were in the Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard in WW II can be found here. I could not find such a list for Maine, though, so it appears to be a hit-or-miss proposition.