Peggy Linrud is trying to find photos of 17 Minnesota World War II soldiers buried at Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial in the village of Margraten. Having all of these nice, helpful persons in North Dakota as ‘pieds a terre,’ I took the intention to go after the photos of servicemen from North Dakota - a small number, but in a vast and not densely populated state,” Slangen says. “My first email to all of my B-17 connections brought several photos from other states.
The die had been cast, and Slangen felt called to the Peace Garden State. 14, 1943, B-17 crash in Eygelshoven was from Velva, N.D. He also found out that one of the crew members who survived an Oct. Slangen learned David Hedland, a soldier from Ransom County, was killed in Germany after after liberating Slangen’s hometown of Eygelshoven in September 1944. Slangen got interested in the project because of his love of history and became intrigued about specifically finding North Dakota soldiers after a couple of unusual coincidences. But with a photo of a person, it gets more vivid, more real and more profound.” “If you come closer you can read the words on the cross, but it is all still abstract - their name, the outfit they belonged to and their date of death. “For me at the cemetery in Margraten, all of the graves look the same from a distance,” said Wim Slangen, a Dutch historian working with the project.