Nov. 17 Panel Highlights Fallen Cougars during World War II

A panel highlighting the lives of Washington State College students who died during World War II is planned for 2 p.m. Monday, Nov. 17, in the Terrell Library Atrium. In all, 250 WSC students are commemorated in the Fallen Cougars Project, directed by Raymond Sun, associate professor in the WSU Department of History.

The panel, titled “The Fallen Cougars: Washington State College During World War II,” will cover the leadership of WSC President Ernest O. Holland during World War II and his vision of honoring WSC’s war dead; the origins and goals of the Fallen Cougars Project; the stories of Fallen Cougars Toll Seike and Stephen Daniels; and WSC’s military training programs during the war.

Penny Martinez, manager and school-certifying official of WSU’s Veterans and Military Affiliated Student Services, will offer brief remarks about the WSU Veterans Center and introduce panelists Sun, WSU Libraries Dean Trevor Bond, and WSU history doctoral candidate Kyley Canion Brewer.

Washington State College student Toll Seike is among the Fallen Cougars that Raymond Sun’s students have researched to honor their memories. Seike was killed in combat on Oct. 29, 1944.

The Fallen Cougars Project grew out of a service assignment to participants of a national conference of World War II educators, which Sun attended in 2017. With previous knowledge of archival war records in WSU’s Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC), he began the task of documenting in a digital space the WSC servicemen who died during the war.

Integral to that work was introducing his WSU students to primary sources in an academic library archives. Since the Fallen Cougars Project’s beginning, Sun’s undergraduate and graduate students have researched MASC’s war records and other sources to compile essays, photographs, and other documentation online of WSC’s World War II dead.

“Dr. Sun is an excellent teacher who believes that students should engage with primary sources,” Bond said in 2023 when Sun was named that year’s recipient of the WSU Libraries’ Excellence Award. “Along the way, they have uncovered the stories of individual students whose actions may have been otherwise lost to history.”

Sun said he thinks that working on the Fallen Cougars Project has had a major impact on most of his students. In learning about the WSC servicemen’s family history, what they did and accomplished at college, and the circumstances of their military service, deaths, and legacies, the students knew “their” Fallen Cougars on a personal level.

“In many cases, they come to care deeply about the servicemen they’re researching and develop a personal stake in reconstructing their lives and reinfusing their humanity into the bare names on the WSU Veterans Memorial or in the index of the war records,” Sun said in 2023. “The project helps reintegrate the Fallen Cougars into living memory and into the current WSU community, and the student researchers take great pride in that—as do I.”

With support from university administration, the WSU Veterans Memorial was updated this year with newly cast bronze plaques reflecting the project’s research. WSU will also send families of the Fallen Cougars a certificate of academic achievement, signed by President Elizabeth Cantwell and Provost Chris Riley-Tillman, recognizing the students’ academic accomplishments.