This is the American cemetery on the outskirts of Luxembourg City, not far from where Adolf Hitler’s Nazi forces staged the Third Reich’s last great offensive of the war during the Battle of the Bulge. (Courtesy of Marc Johnson)
Private First Class Clarke E. Krivanec went missing in action on Dec. 20, 1944, four days into the bloodbath that became the Battle of the Bulge.
Krivanec was 21 years old, an infantryman in 112 th Regiment of the 28 th Division, part of Gen. George Patton’s Third American Army. Private Krivanec was from Rupert, Idaho, a graduate of Rupert High School.
Clarke Krivanec never came home from Europe. Never married. Never had a chance for a career or a family. He almost certainly never again saw his mother and father after shipping out for the European Front in September 1943.
Private Krivanec is a name lost to time, a statistic, one of the 400,000 American dead in the greatest war the world has known, a war against fascism.
When nine Nazi divisions launched their surprise offensive in the early hours of Dec. 16, 1944, Krivenac’s 28 th Division was spread along a 25-mile front in the Ardennes Forest, a dense wood that had four years earlier provided the Nazi invasion route into western Europe.