Ferdinand Rosnovski 10-10-1944
Martin & Emma Rosnovski once lived at 424 Gilmore Ave, Trafford with their 4 boys William, Louis, Ferdinand, and Robert. The two middle boys, Louis and Ferdinand, were both graduates of the Trafford High Class of 1937, they both entered military service, and they both trained in the military with a parachute battalion. Louis trained with the Marine Corps 4th Parachute Battalion and Ferdinand with the Army’s 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment.
Ferdinand was part of the largest mass deployment of soldiers by parachute in history when his unit took part in Operation Market Garden during the Second World War. As a member of the 505th PIR, 82nd Airborne Division, his unit landed behind German lines on September 17, 1944, in Groesbeek, Holland.
Prior to the war, like so many other young men from Trafford, Ferdinand worked at Westinghouse for a short time. In 1940, he also worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps in Westmoreland County. The CCC came out of Roosevelt’s New Deal Program that helped improve America’s public lands, parks, and forests, but it primarily aimed at getting people back to work following the Great Depression.
His father Martin immigrated from Austria in 1910 and worked various jobs around the Trafford area, including the Westinghouse Tin Works and The Houston Brick Company. His mother, Emma Sieg Rosnovski, an immigrant from Lithuania, arrived in the United States in 1908. She began her efforts to become a US citizen in January 1939, and her petition to become an American citizen was finally granted when she signed her “Oath of Allegiance” to the United States on May 1, 1944. Just five months later, her son Ferdinand Rosnovski would die of his wounds on October 10, 1944, in Holland following the ground attacks of Operation Market Garden. Rosnovski’s remains were returned to the United States in 1949 and interred in Arlington National Cemetery.
