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A. L. Todd
Alden Todd (12 January 1918 - 8 March 2006) was an American writer and World War II parachute infantryman whose wartime exploits included a search of Nazi leader Hermann Göring’s private train.
Bo...view moreAlden Todd (12 January 1918 - 8 March 2006) was an American writer and World War II parachute infantryman whose wartime exploits included a search of Nazi leader Hermann Göring’s private train.
Born in Washington, D.C., he graduated from the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. He received his undergraduate degree from Swarthmore College in 1939.
He worked as an English teacher at a Quaker school in Wilmington, Delaware, and for a shipbuilder in Chester, Pennsylvania, before volunteering for the Army’s parachute infantry regiment at the outbreak of World War II.
Shortly after V-E Day, as he spoke fluent French and knew some German, he was assigned as a driver-interpreter in southern Germany, where Hitler and several high-ranking Nazis maintained vacation estates.
After the war, Todd returned to the District, where he worked for the Federated Press, a news service that specialized in labor news. In 1965, he moved to New York, where he worked as director of communications for the accounting firm Haskins and Sells. He moved to Anchorage in 1989, after the death of his wife Jane in 1988, to be near his sons.
As well as his account of the Arctic expedition led by Adolphus Washington Greely from 1881 to 1884, first published in 1963, Todd was the author of eight books, including a biography of the Revolutionary War hero Richard Montgomery, and the story of President Woodrow Wilson’s choice of Louis Brandeis as a U.S. Supreme Court justice. He also was the author of “Finding Facts Fast” (1972).
He died in Anchorage, Washington in 2006, aged 88.view less