Fortitude Investigative War Research
Erin Faith Allen
Selected work in reconstructed and first-person war reportage, drawn from archival rigor and on-the-ground fieldwork at the sites of consequence from all aspects of war.
Private, unindexed writing portfolio, shared directly for editorial consideration. Please do not circulate. Publication status is noted where applicable.
Scheduled for publication in WWII History, Winter 2026.
On April 29, 1945, twenty-four-year-old war correspondent Marguerite Higgins pulls an enemy coat over her frame, hides her hair beneath a Russian helmet, and talks her way through the last German lines to Dachau. She reaches the prisoner enclosure ahead of the infantry divisions sent to liberate it, then orders the armed SS down from their towers in their own language.
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In March 1945, a soldier who has never seen combat enters two houses in a German village occupied by the U.S. Army. The court-martial file calls what happens looting. The testimony inside it preserves something more intimate and more terrible: one night of theft and violation, recorded in the language the Army used to contain it.
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On January 6, 1945, Second Lieutenant Dallas B. Hartwell stands exposed in a frozen field outside Gambsheim, France, directing his platoon toward cover. He is badly wounded and left behind when Company E withdraws. At Box 65 in Wendell, Idaho, his mother waits for the Army to tell her where her son is. Eighty years later, his dog tags, his commander’s casualty tally, and the file of an unknown American bring his case back into motion.
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Long before Camp Gruber becomes Rainbow land, it is Raincrow land. Rachel Raincrow survives the Trail of Tears and makes a home on the acreage the Army later condemns for its training camp, disinterring its graves and scattering its families on forty-five days’ notice. Her mark survives in a pension file, an X beside the words her mark, while other women arrive to hold the wartime camp together.
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Lieutenant Colonel Edwin Rusteberg takes seven hundred eighty-one men into the frozen villages of Hatten and Rittershoffen in January 1945. Fewer than half walk out. Against flame-throwing tanks and troops fresh from the Soviet front, the 1st Battalion of the 242nd Infantry Regiment holds the line. Six men step forward here from the casualty count, carrying their names, their faces, and what waited for them at home.
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Inside an abandoned firing range at Camp Gruber, a paper silhouette riddled with approximately 126 bullet holes rises against my body. Seven of the holes have been joined by pencil into a constellation. Across the road, German prisoners worked inside the camp while Americans trained to fight them, each group moving beneath the same indifferent stars.
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In the frozen fields of Latvia, the volunteers of Legenda dig for soldiers missing since 1944. Neighbors fought beneath opposing uniforms in a country trapped between two armies, and no path through the war was clean. Bone by bone, the searchers lift the dead from the earth and begin the long work of returning them home.
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Jara and Mila survive the massacre that wipes Lidice from the map, then survive Ravensbrück, where the guards keep attack dogs instead of guns. Decades later, photographs of their burned village lie between us as they speak of their father, shot into a mass grave, and of the past that has never remained safely in the past.
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Beneath a field at Ďáblice outside Prague, the parachutists who killed Reinhard Heydrich lie in a mass grave with hundreds of others. The man who betrayed them is buried there too, alongside the men who ordered their deaths. Rain falls over all of them without distinction.
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As a child imprisoned at Terezín, Helga Weissová smuggles a drawing across the ghetto to her father. His answer comes back: Draw what you see. She obeys him for the rest of her life. Decades later, I sit with Helga in her Prague studio, surrounded by the work that survived the ghetto and the father who did not.
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