Today is Veterans Day, and Loomis Chaffee salutes all who have served and all who have died in service to our country. 

A newspaper clipping from April 19, 1942, invoked the reality of World War II. Seventy-four people at Loomis — 35 faculty and 39 students — were in the civil defense program in Windsor. The faculty was involved in various areas — from auxiliary police to air-raid wardens — and the students each were “engaged with the airplane spotting program.”  

Loomis and Chaffee students also picked potatoes at area farms to help out with the labor shortage while many workers were serving in the military during the war. 

Head of School Nathaniel Horton Batchelder was in the auxiliary police, as was faculty member Lloyd W. Fowles. One of the air-raid wardens was Sara Blair Huntington Johnson, wife of Martin Harold Johnson, a Loomis teacher serving in World War II. 

Years later, in 1964, Lloyd, head of the history department, wrote the book The Harvest of Our Lives on the 50th anniversary of the school’s opening.   

Wrote Lloyd: “No one could know or predict what would happen after the fateful day in December 1941, that war began [for the United States]. However, a school filled with young men just below the military age, who were taught by many men eligible for service in the armed forces, was inevitably doomed to hard blows.” 

Many graduates would not return from the war. Neither would Martin Harold Johnson. 

“War leaves more than change in its wake,” Lloyd wrote, “and above everything else at Loomis it meant the loss to the world of those young graduates who had prepared so well for a future that had ceased to exist. Tragedy has no deeper claim on a school than the death of its young alumni.”  

Latin teacher Knower Mills wrote a poem reflecting the pervading feeling at the school. The first verse read:  

Killed in action. That was the word that came.  

The school was the same. The sky and river the same, 

But here to this quiet place the war came again, 

Bludgeoning into our hearts with savage pain. 

Today, near the chapel doors in Founders Hall, is a plaque in tribute to the fallen men of World War II — 44 alumni and one teacher — with a poem written by Ralph Shulansky ’45, “MEMORIES. Of Old Loomis Boys Killed in World War II,” which begins: 

Yours were the feet 

Which trod these very paths 

Furtive feet, running from your latest schoolboy prank 

Listless feet, lolling on a carved and ancient desk-top 

Active feet, hurrying to class or to cross that last white line. 

Opposite the chapel a memorial plaque recognizes alumni who have died in other wars: three in Korea, five in Vietnam, one in Iraq. The names on the two plaques in Founders span from Volckert Petrus Doew, Class of 1925, who died in World War II, to Pierre E. Piche ’92, who died in Iraq.