On January 20, 1945, Ernie’s unit launched an early morning attack near Huppenbroich. A snowstorm was raging, and many soldiers quickly said a short prayer or kissed a photo of their loved ones before moving out. Later that day, when his platoon took cover in an abandoned mine shaft during heavy German shelling, the shelter was hit directly. Ernie and twenty-one other Americans were killed instantly.
The Margraten Boys is the story of ten thousand American boys who, together with Ernie Little, rest in a Dutch village not far from the Belgian border. These soldiers took part in some of the largest military operations of World War II: Operation Market Garden, the assault on the Siegfried Line, the Battle of the Bulge, the crossing of the Rhine and Roer rivers, and the air war against Germany.
The stories of The Margraten Boys would never have been preserved without the unique network of adopters established by the residents of Margraten in 1945. The network soon expanded across the Netherlands and into Flanders. Even today, adopters regularly visit the final resting places of these forever young soldiers and maintain close ties with their American relatives.
The Margraten Boys is based on more than a thousand testimonies from adopters and American families. It is the poignant history of a unique commemorative phenomenon centered around a place that continues to grow in significance as the last eyewitnesses of World War II inevitably fall silent.
