"Alumni, of course, were in the military from the very earliest stages of the war, some even before Pearl Harbor. By early 1943 over two hundred alumni were on active duty and a year later this figure had climbed to four hundred. Occasionally an alumnus would return to the School and invariably end up by speaking to the assembled student body and providing a firsthand account of action in the theater from which he had come. Notices of service awards to alumni were read. (The Prep could boast of a Medal of Honor awardee in Michael Daly '41.) And sadly, word would inevitably arrive, from time to time, of a death in action. (More than a dozen alumni were to give their lives before VJ Day)."