Class of 1945

Rae DeMatteis was born and raised in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where he and his older brother, Michael DeMatteis, Class of 1942, attended Altoona High School. He spent a year and a half at Dickinson College, participating with his brother in varsity soccer before leaving in December, 1942 to train as an aviator.

DeMatteis was assigned to the 15th Air Force in Italy. On March 22, 1945, he was participating in one of the epic 1500 mile round trip flights from Foggia to Berlin when his aircraft was hit by anti-aircraft fire over Ruhland. With a damaged plane, the crew intended to attempt a crash landing behind advancing Russian lines but they were hit by further fighter attack, forcing them to bail out. Some members of the crew survived but DeMatteis was not found among them. He was reported missing in action as of March 22, 1945, four months before his twentieth birthday, and is presumed to have perished in the crash. Despite the best efforts of his family, to this day the full circumstances of Lt. DeMatteis' disappearance have not been ascertained.

Richard Galt was born in February 1924 in Egypt, where his father was dean of the American University in Cairo. His father later moved on to Susquehanna College and it was from Selinsgrove that Galt entered Dickinson with the class of 1945. After two years and with the Second World War well under way, he became one of three members of the campus chapter of Phi Delta Theta to transfer to the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York.

Galt graduated in 1946 and immediately volunteered for military aviation. He trained as a specialist in jets and served in Japan and Korea. He advanced to become a military test pilot and was killed at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida on October 13, 1953 during the secret testing of the latest version of the F84F jet fighter/bomber. He is buried at West Point.

James Loenshal was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania on August 17, 1923 and graduated from Hollidaysburg High School in 1941. He entered the College in the autumn with the class of 1945. He played on the basketball team and was a member of Phi Delta Theta fraternity. He was slated to join Skull and Key at the end of his sophomore year but by then he had already withdrawn to enlist in the Army Air Force, in February 1943.

Training as a pilot, Loenshal received his commission in Oklahoma in June 1944 and was posted to Italy and a B-24 squadron soon after. On a mission to bomb the Korneuburg oil refinery near Vienna, on February 7, 1945, the Liberator that Loenshal was co-piloting received a direct hit from enemy anti-aircraft artillery over Austria. Though initial reports from the squadron suggested that parachutes had been seen, official communications later confirmed that the aircraft had been seen to disintegrate in mid-air, changing his status from "missing in action" to "presumed dead." He was twenty-one years old.

Thomas Rockwell was born in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania in May 1923 and attended the Carson Long Military Institute. He entered Colgate University and transferred to Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania after a year, but withdrew before the end of his first term in the fall of 1941.

He enlisted in the Army Air Corps in December 1941 but ultimately trained as an infantry officer at Fort Benning, Georgia, earning his commission in November 1943. Rockwell later trained as a paratrooper and toured the country with a group of parachute infantry jumpers promoting war loans. He was assigned to Europe in August 1944. Rockwell was reported as missing in action on December 24, 1944 and confirmed as killed in action on January 12, 1945.