Eddie Ryan’s Story Returns to Minnesota
A piece of One Day Over the Rhine found its way home to northern Minnesota this week.
WDIO in Duluth featured the story of Corporal Edward “Eddie” Ryan, the young tanker from Makinen, Minnesota, whose life sits at the heart of my book.
In March 1945, Eddie was mortally wounded when his Sherman tank was hit during the fighting in Dinslaken, Germany. Lieutenant Tom Carr and PFC Billy Kane went into the burning tank to pull him out, suffering terrible wounds themselves in the attempt to save him.
For me, Eddie has never been simply a casualty on a page. I have followed him through his letters, his family, the places he lived, and the ground where his war ended.
Seeing a television station near his hometown tell people his name and what happened to him eighty-one years later meant more to me than I expected.
He made it home in another way.
Erin Faith Allen is an investigative war historian and the founder of Fortitude Research, specializing in WWII archival research, wartime reconstruction, Holocaust documentation, and the recovery of women's wartime histories. She is a leading authority on the 42nd "Rainbow" Infantry Division, inluding their liberation of Dachau concentration camp. Her family-commissioned book, One Day Over the Rhine, was published in 2026.
All original photographs and written work published on this site are copyright Erin Faith Allen. Historical and archival images are used where they exist in the public domain.
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