PFC Natale Cusinato’s Story in Fra Noi
Sometimes the research keeps traveling after I hand it back to the family.
I had the privilege of reconstructing the wartime service of PFC Natale Cusinato, who served with Company K, 132nd Infantry Regiment of the Americal Division in the Pacific.
His son Angelo grew up knowing pieces of his father’s war, but like so many children of World War II veterans, much of the story had never been spoken aloud. The archival documentation allowed us to begin putting those pieces back together.
Now Natale’s story has reached a much wider audience through Fra Noi, Chicago’s Italian-American magazine. Writer Samuel Tinaglia traces his extraordinary journey from Chicago and Italy to Guadalcanal and Cebu, and the life he carried home afterward.
I am especially happy to see this one published. Research begins in documents, but its real destination is always in the hearts of the people moved to tell their stories.
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.
```