The Second World War: the county's 430, and the search for a second Osceola name

1941 – 1945

The frame: the War Department's Honor List of Dead and Missing, State of Indiana (1946) counts the county's Army dead at 430 — the figure the Mishawaka pass read whole and tallied exactly, carried here from the banking. The Honor List itself states no residence (the National Archives' own note for the volume: "The birthplace or residence of the deceased is not indicated"), so a town's share of the 430 can only be recovered from the county veterans index's township attributions — the instrument built from the county's burials and obituaries. The next article claims the one man that instrument gives to Penn–Osceola.

Beyond him — the sweep, with its limit printed: the Army Air Corps Museum's extracts of St. Joseph County enlistments (234 servicemen grouped by city) attribute exactly one enlistee to Osceola: "Cook, Jack (Osceola)" — the whole of the extracts' Osceola share, a survivor's record so far as any source read shows. The county veterans index pages add two Osceola-attributed men of the war as veterans, not dead: "Morman, Robert James | WWII | Army | | Chapel Hill | Osceola" and "Moser, Russell H. | WWII | Army | | Fairview | Penn — Osceola" — burials at Chapel Hill and Fairview, printed as veterans; the index does not mark them as war dead and neither does this section. The A page of the index (read whole) also carries two Osceola-attributed Navy men without service dates, Marshall Wayne Adkins and Tommy W. Arnett, both buried at Chapel Hill — veterans of their era, unattributed to a war by the index rows as read. One more Osceola serviceman stands in the town's own observance record: Edward Aldrich, who "served in a medical corps hospital in Hawaii from June 1942 throughout World War II" (the Tribune, in its 2006 Memorial Day parade account) and marched as the parade's grand marshal sixty years later — he stands in the posts article below. Finding: in every source reached, no second Penn–Osceola-attributed Second World War death was found — stated at the sweep's actual strength, which is partial: the index's B and C pages returned a server refusal and were not retried, and the remaining letters were covered by domain search rather than a whole read. The full index sweep stands named in the closing register as the settler that would raise this negative to whole-index strength.

Sources:

1. War Department, Honor List of Dead and Missing, State of Indiana (1946) — the county 430, read whole and tallied in the Mishawaka pass, carried from the banking; National Archives note on the volume's limits.
2. Army Air Corps Museum, "Servicemen — St Joseph County — Indiana — World War II" extracts — read whole.
3. St. Joseph County veterans index (RootsWeb) — A page read whole; D page text-searched, no Osceola match; M page reached through search cache; B and C pages refused (HTTP 403), not retried.