42nd Infantry Division insignia (portrait pending)

PFC

John T Ratchek

Aged 28, fallen January 6, 1945

Unit: Company E, 222nd Infantry Regiment
Serial number: 32824578
Hometown: New York, New York
Date of death: January 6, 1945
Classification: Killed in action
Burial: Saint John the Baptist Catholic Cemetery, Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania

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Your note goes directly to me, Erin Faith Allen. I am the historian who stewards this Wall of Honor, and I read and answer every email personally. Family stories, photographs, and corrections are all welcome and treated with care. Nothing you send is posted publicly.

About the 42nd "Rainbow" Infantry Division Wall of Honor

This wall of honor holds the names of the 687 men of the 42nd "Rainbow" Infantry Division who died in service to the nation during World War II. The Division was commanded throughout the war by Major General Harry J. Collins. It trained at Camp Gruber in Oklahoma, sent its advance element Task Force Linden ashore at Marseille in December 1944 under Brigadier General Henning Linden, fought through Operation Nordwind, Operation Undertone in the Hardt Mountains and across the Siegfried Line, took Wurzburg, Schweinfurt, Furth, and Nuremberg in house-to-house fighting, captured Munich, and liberated the Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945.

This wall of honor is part of the broader 42nd "Rainbow" Division reconstruction maintained by Erin Faith Allen, an investigative World War II historian and the founder of Fortitude Investigative War Research. Fortitude Investigative War Research specializes in archival reconstruction of WWII military and Holocaust records, the liberation of Dachau, the lived experience of soldiers and civilians in war, and the recovery of women's wartime histories that the official record left behind.