BANGOR — The lettering on the newspaper advertisement from 1942 was large and to the point: “Young Men Wanted To Join the Bangor Platoon U.S. Navy.”

Fifty-seven young men from throughout eastern and northern Maine responded, most of them age 17, but at least one as young as 15 years old. On Aug. 22, 1943, they gathered at Davenport Park, joined up and went off to boot camp in Providence, R.I., to prepare for service in World War II.

On Tuesday afternoon, a couple of those men attended the meeting of the city’s municipal operations committee and got a thumbs up on giving the city a bronze plaque to commemorate the swearing-in of the Bangor Victory Platoon — one of the largest groups of volunteers from Maine to join the Navy in World War II.

Acceptance of the gift will be on the agenda of a City Council meeting.

Jim Adams of Otis and Jim Savoy of Brewer came to the committee meeting and displayed newspaper articles and other mementos from the era of their naval service.

After boot camp, Adams said, the group was dispersed somewhat, because the various military branches thought it better not to have too many from one area serve together in case there were casualties.

“A lot of the boys went on the carrier Wasp,” Adams said, among them Savoy. “I ended up on an LST [landing ship tank],” he said, and both of them served in battles in the Pacific.

Only one of the 57 was killed in the war, a man named Gilbert Soucy from Portage. Seventeen others have died in the years since.

The group has held annual reunions in Bangor recently, Adams said, and now the members want to put up a small monument, a bronze plaque on a granite base, in Davenport Park. The group has started receiving pledges toward the project, which would be done at no cost to the city.

He visited the park recently, where remnants of the USS Maine serve as a memorial to Mainers who fought in the Spanish-American War.

“That is very well done,” Adams said of the park and the memorial.

City Manager Edward Barrett said that a council order could be written up for official action on agreeing to receive the Bangor Victory Platoon monument, and the group could contact Parks and Recreation Director Dale Theriault to work out the details of placing the marker.

After the meeting, Adams and Savoy paused in the lobby of City Hall, studying a wide picture of the youths as they graduated basic training all those years ago.

The pair said they hoped to have the monument in place by next Aug. 22, the 55th anniversary of the swearing-in of Adams and Savoy and their fellow sailors.