Cambridge-Isanti High School social studies teacher Jeremy Miller is paying tribute to a pilot who disappeared over the Pacific during World War II.
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Miller is one of 18 teachers who participated in the Understanding Sacrifice program, which seeks to reinvigorate teaching about World War II by having educators conduct research on an American service member who was lost or died during the war. The program is a project of National History Day, the American Battle Monuments Commission and the National Cemetery Administration.
The subject of Miller’s research was Cpl. Warren Bolin, who was a pilot in a marine bomber unit in the Pacific. Bolin was from St. James, Minnesota. His aircraft disappeared over the Pacific Ocean after leaving Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands, on a mission to the Bonin Islands south of Tokyo.
In July, Miller will deliver a eulogy for Bolin at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii, where soldiers lost or missing in action are memorialized.
Miller applied for the program after his former college adviser emailed him about the opportunity, suggesting he thought
Miller had a fair chance of being selected to participate. This year the program had its participants study soldiers who were stationed in the Pacific during the war, which held particular interest for Miller, who was a Marine himself. Marines did almost all of their fighting during World War II on the Pacific front.
“Those are the stories I know,” Miller said. “That’s the history I learned when I was in the Marine Corps.”
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There are two main products of Miller’s research about Bolin: He wrote Bolin’s story for the American Battle Monuments Commission, and he developed a lesson for use in the classroom.
“Those are the two main goals: to bring the story back and tell that, and then create a lesson that can be shared with other teachers,” Miller said.
Bolin and the crew he served with used rockets to engage Japanese ships in combat. Their tactics and equipment were experimental at the time. The bombers would adjust flight variables like altitude and speed, using radar and autopilot to determine what settings were best.
“They basically had to experiment to figure out what’s the best way to use these rockets and fire them accurately,” Miller said.
To conduct his research, Miller used Bolin’s military records, ancestry.com, books about his squadron and other military documentation. Miller met Bolin’s brother and looked through items he has kept related to his brother. Miller was able to look through Bolin’s personal logbook, including a final entry dated the day Bolin was lost.
“The logbook was unbelievable to look through,” Miller said. “You know that was it … (Bolin) was a real person with real brothers and real sisters.”
Miller’s primary teaching interest is economics, but working on his Understanding Sacrifice project has inspired him for the history courses he teaches, too. He is having students in his section of U.S. History complete a research project of their own using veterans buried at Fort Snelling. He would like to take a field trip to the fort, if possible.
“Part of this is making it personal,” Miller said. “This project has certainly changed how I teach history.”
While in Hawaii, Miller plans to visit Pearl Harbor and the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, which works to track down information on missing soldiers.
“It’s always humbling to see what people have done, what people have sacrificed,” he said.