{"id":107353,"date":"2020-11-19T08:00:46","date_gmt":"2020-11-19T13:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=107353"},"modified":"2020-11-18T22:21:55","modified_gmt":"2020-11-19T03:21:55","slug":"wwii-soldier-returns-war-trophy-to-france-75-years-later","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=107353","title":{"rendered":"WWII soldier returns war trophy to France 75 years later"},"content":{"rendered":"
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John Waller – Photo Credit Virginian-Pilot<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Here’s a cool story I happened across. The Virginian-Pilot tells the story of John Waller. He was a US Army soldier during World War II. During the winter of 1944 he was in England and then ordered to Continental Europe to reinforce the beleaguered troops fighting the Battle of the Bulge.<\/p>\n

On the way he was one of 1,200 survivors out of 2,000 aboard a transport craft that got torpedoed by a U-boat as they transited the Channel. A few months later, he and his comrades were fighting through France and happened upon an abandoned chateau. Already ransacked by the Nazis, there was one locked safe left untouched. The GIs used some expedient combat engineering and blasted the safe open with grenades. He took home a photo the chateau, a pair of dueling pistols (long since sold for an engagement ring), and a small painted portrait (later dated to 1813).<\/p>\n

The portrait sat hidden in a drawer for decades until his daughter happened upon it as they were moving Waller out of the family home. He’d never shown anyone nor talked about it. He always wanted to return it to its rightful owner. His daughter, a filmmaker and retired professor, arranged for that to happen.<\/p>\n

Read the rest at the source; Viginian-Pilot<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s a cool story I happened across. The Virginian-Pilot tells the story of John Waller. He … WWII soldier returns war trophy to France 75 years later<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":664,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[359,218],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-107353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-army","category-feel-good-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/664"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=107353"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107353\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":107355,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107353\/revisions\/107355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=107353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=107353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=107353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}