HIS LAST PASTROL. Researching and reconstructing the battlefields has always been a passion of mine. Working closely with my friend Myra Miller has allowed me to request many service records of WWII veterans. Two years ago I requested my very first Individual Deceased Personnel File (IDPF). An IDPF contains information regarding an individual soldier’s death. […]
Edgar Valderrama – 5th Infantry Division, 11th Infantry Regiment, Company C Entering the City We were a scraggly, dusty, sorry looking line of Dogfaces dragging ourselves single file into the first German city I had seen since ‘joining’ the Fifth Infantry Division as a replacement. The city had been rendered an impressive pile of ruins […]
Guestblog by Edgar Valderrama – 5th Infantry Division, 11th Infantry Regiment, Company C. We reached the Danube after the war had ended. They say the Danube appears blue to those in love. I was in love, yet the Danube sure looked like any big muddy river to me. The end of the war had caught […]
Earlier this year D-Day Overlord published an article on how George G Klein did not land in Pointe du Hoc on D-Day. Instead at the time he was in Northern Ireland with B Battery of the 46th Field Artillery Battalion, attached to the 5th Infantry Division. Instead of judging Klein for covering up his real history […]
Christmas 1944. A day that I believe every veteran of World War 2 remembers. May it be the people he was with, may it be the house stayed at, may it be the foxhole he shared or may it be the meal he at that day. Christmas is a day you simply can’t forget, especially […]
Edgar Valderrama was a replacement in C. Company, 11th Infantry Regiment, 5th Division, after the Battle of the Bulge. He joined the division in Luxembourg and crossed the Sauer River with them in February ’45. Ed still has quite some stories to tell us. To keep his memory and all the others of the 5th division […]
Edgar Valderrama was a replacement in C. Company, 11th Infantry Regiment, 5th Division, after the Battle of the Bulge. He joined the division in Luxembourg and crossed the Sauer River with them in February ’45. Ed still has quite some stories to tell us. To keep his memory and all the others of the 5th […]
The Siegfried Line near Wallendorf is probably the best spot to dive into the Battle of the Bulge in Luxembourg. The defensive structures around the village are part of a 630km defensive line full of pillboxes, tank traps and other stuff. I travelled to Wallendorf to see some of these defenses. Around the village you […]
The 5th Infantry Division was the first division to cross the Rhine River. On the night of March 22nd 1945, they crossed the river and within 24 hours the whole division was across. They managed to establish a six-mile deep bridgehead and capture 19.000 demoralized German troops. Their crossing was also the first crossing ever […]
By Edgar Valderrama from C Company, 11th Infantry Regiment The following story was passed on to me by Edgar Valderrama, a veteran of the 11th Infantry Regiment of the 5th Infantry Division. Valderrama was in C company and probably joined the division before the division’s battle at Metz. His name is in the official 11th regimental roster, […]
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