The Second World War: the county's 430, and the town roll the records do not itemize

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, joined where possible with the newspapers' obituary record.

The sweep, with its limit printed: the index's letter pages H, L, M, R, S and W were read whole. Their Walkerton-attributed rows of the Second World War are veterans, every one: George L. Matz, Navy, buried at Teegarden; Walter J. Hiler, Army, buried at Woodlawn in Walkerton; Henry R. Snyder, Army; Clyde L. Stickley, Navy, a Seabee and military policeman, buried at Woodlawn; William D. Ward, Army, of Walkerton, whose service ran through the Second World War and Korea both. The Army Air Corps Museum's enlistment extracts add three more Walkerton names of the war — Pehrson, William; Smith, Robert; Swihart, Thomas — enlistees, not casualties, printed as such. No row in the letters read marks a Walkerton-attributed man killed in the Second World War. That finding stands at the sweep's actual strength, which is partial, and the partiality is structural, not a shrug: the C page refused the fetch and was not retried; the remaining letters were not read; and the index itself undercounts the dead who never came home to a county burial — the very class a death roll is made of, as Roderick's absence from it in the First World War already showed. A town of Walkerton's size, which raised a Mothers of World War II unit strong enough to build the memorial in the next article, is not asserted here to have lost no one. The item closes as a named gap: the town's Second World War death roll, if the record holds one, will be settled by the full index sweep, by the Saint Joseph County Public Library's Military Service Notes Column Index (1941–1979), which covers the war years from the county newspapers and is the standing settler of this whole class, and by the Walkerton Independent's and the Tribune's obituary files for 1941–46.

One more burial lead, at lead strength: the Veterans Affairs record places in Woodlawn Cemetery at Walkerton a row of the war's veterans who did come home — among them Merrill H. Smith, Army corporal (1922–2007); Linder W. Schmeltz, Army staff sergeant (1917–2008); Delbert G. Krick, Navy (1925–2021); Leigh Roy Hahn, Army corporal (1923–2018) — printed as burials, which are evidence of service and of homecoming, and are used as attribution for nothing else in this section.

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. St. Joseph County veterans index — letters H, L, M, R, S, W read whole; the Walkerton rows as quoted; C page refused (HTTP 403), not retried.
3. Army Air Corps Museum, "Servicemen — St Joseph County — Indiana — World War II" extracts — the three Walkerton enlistment lines.
4. Veterans Affairs burial records as transcribed (Interment.net) — the Woodlawn lines, printed as leads.