1
Introduction
In 2016, the O’Callahan Society, in support of the Naval ROTC Unit at the College of the Holy
Cross, published a history of the Unit which included statistics on the Navy and Marine Corps
officers commissioned through the Unit since 1944. These statistics were largely based on a
2004 annual report submitted by the Unit (on file in the Navy Archives in Washington D. C.) and
that report, in turn, built on a previous report that was prepared in 1990. These reports were
combined with information from other Unit annual reports in the Navy Archives and from
binders prepared by Commander John Bishop, USN (Retired), the Unit’s Executive Officer,
Acting Commanding Officer, and civilian Administrative Officer from 2006 through 2017.
Although the 2004 and 1990 reports became the reference documents for the O’Callahan Society
statistics, some inaccuracies became evident, particularly with the mixing of NROTC Marine
Option students and Platoon Leaders Class (PLC) Marine students. In early 2017, it was learned
that the 2004 report had inadvertently left out the second Holy Cross NROTC class which was
commissioned in March, 1945. At that point, the O’Callahan Society determined to update the
2004 list and correct the discrepancies which had been identified.
In addition to re-examining the surviving Unit annual reports (1945-47, 1966-99, 2001-11, and
2014) and the Unit binders, the following resources were used:
- Holy Cross College Archives: commencement and commissioning programs, newspaper
articles, news releases, photos, and other papers pertaining to officer commissionings.
- CrossWorks: Holy Cross website with some college yearbooks, alumni magazines
(1998-2017), and college catalogs. From the 1940s through 1970, the catalogs included
the previous year’s graduates and commissioned officers. The catalog name lists usually
corresponded to the commencement programs but there were occasional differences.
- NROTC Unit Yearbooks (Knight Watch): some are available at the Unit.
- Ancestry.com: hosts Military Registers (1951-85 at 4-5-year intervals), Marine Corps
muster rolls through 1958, World War II Navy muster rolls, and many Holy Cross
yearbooks not available on CrossWorks.
- Phone conversations and e-mail exchanges with the individuals concerned.
More than 180 individual cases of conflicting or incomplete information, the military status of all
249 members of the Class of 1947, and the distinction between 298 NROTC and PLC Second
Lieutenants 1950-69 were resolved with these methods and these resolutions are detailed in
Appendix B. One byproduct of the 2017 research was a realization that the Unit recently
reached the milestone of 100 women commissioned through the Unit. The names of these
women have been extracted to a separate list contained in Appendix A.
Updating and correcting the list of commissioned officers from the Holy Cross NROTC Unit
also provided an opportunity to collect additional information on the graduates, although only the
alma mater category is complete. The additional information includes:
- Alma maters since the Unit was opened to other colleges and universities in the
Worcester area in the 1970s
- Type of commission (regular or reserve). From September 1996 through 2005, all
NROTC commissions were Reserve and since 2006, all commissions have been Regular