So, this image caught my eyes a few months ago.

We can see two soldiers crouching and taking cover on the Ryan River Bridge in Worms, Germany.

In front of them, you can see a that American soldier with his dog tag out.

Worms was taken by American troops on the 20th of March, 1945, but they did not cross the Ryan River until 6 days later.

The exact date of this photograph is still unattested.

So I had seen this photograph before, a couple of years before actually.

Uh but now I started to ask myself, has the soldier ever been identified? Has someone tried to identify him at all? And that’s where the story began.

The photograph was published in American newspapers by April 1945.

It was taken by Associated Press photographer James Pringle.

Almost every article mentions the name of the two privates in the background.

The guy on the left was Billy Zimmerman and on the right Norman Booher.

Some of the captions indicate that the men were seeking to avenge their fallen comrade.

A group of researchers, Carlo Reva from Germany, and Karen Lrange Cox and William Bourneman, both from the United States, had managed to locate the living family of the crouching soldier on the left, Billy Zimmerman.

She said, “This poor guy, my dad told me always that he was uh in a trouble because he was before at the Air Force.

” The men seem to belong to battery B of the A38 anti-aircraft artillery battalion.

However, they had not been able to identify the dead soldier.

So, if you know me, you probably know that I work for a company called Footsteps Researchers.

And basically what I do and what we do is we establish timelines for individual servicemen that fought during World War II to see from what moment to what moment someone served in a particular unit at a particular time.

And this will help us to understand what that soldier has been going through or what he experienced and which battles he saw.

So there’s one type of report that really helps us in establishing such a timeline for an individual soldier and those are the army morning reports that are usually maintained on a company-sized uh levels companyized unit.

So for example for a companyized unit it will keep track of all personnel within that unit on a daily basis.

For example, when someone was promoted, when someone was on a furlow, when someone was sick, when someone was transferred to another unit or transferred to the unit, when someone was wounded, and of course when someone was missing or killed, this would all be reported in that morning report.

So, when I found out that Norman Booher and Billy Zimmerman served in the 838 anti-aircraft artillery battalion, I thought it was going to be an easy job.

I could just get the morning reports and find who the dead soldier was who was killed around those dates.

But there were two problems.

No one in battery B seemed to have been killed between March 20th and March 31st.

There was one guy killed on the 19th, but according to morning reports and after action reports, the unit was 75 mi away at the French border.

In addition, the unit did not arrive in worms until the 26th of March, 1945.

And that brings us to problem number two.

I dug into the US Signal Corps photographic and motion picture archives, which is the main archive for World War II Army photographs and film.

And these photographs were taken by Lieutenant Adrien J.

Salvas and motion picture cameraman Marvin W.

Kong.

All were dated March 21, 1945.

So the big question, of course, how can Billy Zimmerman and Norman Booher avenge their dead comrade if they were not in worms when the dead soldier was already dead on March 21, 1945.

In short, they did not try to avenge their dead comrade because it was not their dead comrade.

which means that the photograph with Booher and Zimmerman is most likely a staged photograph and definitely taken later than the photographs of March 21.

We can see several differences on the photographs.

Actually, the bridge tower shows significant damage that the blood has been dried up and it seems like it has rained to a certain degree.

So, we can definitely conclude there is some sort of a time difference between the two photographs.

So this meant that we had to dig deeper than before and start all the way at the beginning to when worms was first taken by the American troops.

The first bridge over the Ryan River was taken by the 9inth Armored Division at Remagan on March 7, 1945.

And the US Army used that momentum to stay on the heels of the German troops.

It was the US fourth armored division that was given the task to take the German city of Warms.

On March 19th, they caught a retreating German column at Altac, which was only less than 50 mi from Warms.

And finally, on the evening of the 20th, a company of tanks and a company of armored infantry took up positions in the town and at the bridge.

The tanks belongs to company C of the 37th tank battalion and the infantry to company A of the 10th Armored Infantry Battalion.

On the morning of the 21st, these men were replaced by a new unit from the fifth infantry division.

And that’s also when the photographer Lieutenant Adrien Salvas and motion picture man Marvin W.

Connell photographed and filmed the dead American soldier.

So basically all we had to do is go through the morning reports of all these units and see who was killed on either March 20 or 21st, 1945.

I couldn’t believe it.

We have Martin R.

Malin and Charles T.

Plug both listed as missing in action on March 21, 1945.

They are the only ones to be listed in any of the units to be either missing or killed.

Well, in this case, missing an action.

Martin Min’s MIA status was revoked a couple of days later.

He was back in the unit.

But for Charles T.

PL.

He remained MIA until at the end of April 1945 when his MIA status was changed to killed in action.

Charles Plugg was born on May 21, 1919 in Pokeypsy, New York.

He graduated from Pokeypsy Trade School in 1938.

Clark registered for the military on October 16, 1940.

According to his military registration card, the card shows that he was white, 5’10, had blue eyes, brown hair with a light complexion.

Prior to his drafting on June 28th, 1944, he worked for Wright Aeronautics in Patterson, New Jersey.

In December 1944, he was a replacement in the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium before advancing to worms in March 1945.

He was a member of company A of the 10th Armored Infantry Battalion, Fourth Armored Division under General George S.

Patton’s third army.

So, thanks to Footsteps researchers, I was able to get the individual deceased personnel file for Charles PL.

And within that file is a document that is called a burial report.

We see that for example he was uh buried on March 30th 1945 at the St.

Devolt Cemetery.

Uh his cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head and the date of death of course March 21, 1945.

But the place of death as well is in the vicinity of Warms.

Now, this is still very vague, but one thing I noticed and that not many of these reports have is that next to the place of death is a coordinate, a grid reference on a US military map.

So, what would happen if we plot that on a map? So World War I was the first war that required a mass production of maps for all nations involved, especially large scale maps of the front lines.

Those maps were made with the help of existing maps and aerial photography.

Remember this all predates the use of satellites.

And another system that they invented back then were grid squares.

And basically these are the forerunners of coordinates.

We call them grit references.

So by the end of world war I most of northwestern Europe was divided into squares to which people could reference to.

This whole system continued to develop and prior to World War II we had something called the British modified system in which most of Europe was mapped and divided into squares and grids.

And that is basically the coordinate system that the allies used during World War II.

And so how this worked is that if you look at each of those systems, you see that the map is divided into squares with two prefixes.

Now each one of those squares is 100x 100 km.

And we can see on the map here that worms is in the M grid and this also matches with the coordinate at the uh burial report of Charles Blog.

So basically what we see we have these numbers on the top.

We also have the same numbers on the bottom and they all indicate a line.

And we have also here numbers on our left.

And so a coordinate would be a grid reference would be whenever two lines intersect each other.

And so in this case 46 intersects with 22.

And so the coordinate would be m 46 22.

And that would cover this whole grid square.

In the case of Charles plugg, we have the sixdigit coordinate.

And all we have to do basically is just add a comma.

We have 46.

2 which would be approximately here.

And we have 14.

8 be here’s 14.

So 14.

8 would be somewhere over here.

And so if we intersect those, not only is Charles the only documented soldier killed in worms, he is also the only documented soldier to be killed in action between March 20 and 21.

Combined with the facial resemblance, this leads us to believe that he is the soldier on the photograph.

Well, if we found out, you know, his name, it means that we could tell the city who the who the soldier is that was killed during a battle.

I’m so sad that he had to die for that.

The freedom that we have right now is based also on him.

The second thing is to get in contact with the family and and tell them, hey, we we regret what happened, but we thank you so much that this brave soldier was here and liberated us.

For those that lived in 1945 here, not everyone took that as a liberation and they discussed it for years, especially older people that saw as more as occupation, not as liberation.

Me as an Italian being here in Germany coming from the Italian Doommites having partisans in their family that has been killed.

I saw it as a liberation for the people here and for me that that I can live in a free town in a free world in a free land within Europe.

For years, he was just a figure in a photograph, a soldier on a bridge without a name.

But from the records, a different story emerges.

All available evidence indicates that the man who died here on March 21, 1945 was Charles T.

Plugg from Pipsy, New York.

We are in contact with his family who have chosen to remember him privately.

For 80 years, his story ended here on the bridge.

Now, at least the photo has a name.

May we never forget.