Raff, Edson Duncan, born 15-11-1907 in New York City, 
to Mary Edna Abell Raff (1884-973) and he had one brother and one sister, Margaret Virginia Abel Raff (1905-1999) and Herbert Kingman Raff (1911-2004).Edson had one son, Thomas Duncan Raff (1938-1990).
Edson had served as First Captain of Cadets at a small prep school in Winchester, Virginia, called the Shenandoah Valley Academy, before serving in the army. Edson graduated from West Point 
in 1933 with a concentration in mathematics. Raff led the first combat jump by American paratroopers in World War II and served a decade later as an early commander of the Army’s Special Forces. 
The American paratroopers of World War II were an elite bunch. Colonel Raff, a graduate of West Point, was one of their first commanders, having trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1941, when the Army was inaugurating its jump school under 2* Airborne Major General, Lee, William Carey “Bill”,
The father of the Airborne’s, 82nd and 101st AB..
On the evening of 07-11-1942, the 556 paratroopers of Colonel Raff’s Second Battalion, 509th Parachute Infantry Regiment 
, took off from Cornwall in western England for the American Airborne’s first mission. 
Flying aboard 39 C-47 transports, the troops were in the vanguard of Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of French North Africa.
German paratroopers had succeeded in the 1940 invasion of the Low Countries, but Colonel Raff’s men were undertaking the longest journey for an airborne invasion that had ever been tried. They were flying 1.600 miles toward two airstrips near Oran, Algeria, that they had been ordered to seize.
Many of the planes became lost and missed their objectives, and when Colonel Raff bailed out, he smashed into a large rock, breaking two ribs, and found himself 35 miles from his destination, the Tafaraoui airstrip. By time he arrived there by jeep, it had been taken by troops landed from the sea.
Soon Colonel Raff’s paratroopers teamed up with British engineers, a small American anti-tank unit and lightly armed French troops to harass German forces in Tunisia, although greatly outnumbered. 
General Dwight Delano Eisenhower, 
who had been the Allied commander for the North African invasion, called Colonel Raff’s exploits in Tunisia ”a minor epic.” ”The deceptions he practiced, the speed with which he struck, his boldness and his aggressiveness, kept the enemy completely confused during a period of weeks,” the General wrote in ”Crusade in Europe” Colonel Raff told of his early airborne experiences in ”We Jumped to Fight”. He trained paratroopers for the invasion of Normandy, then commanded an armoured task force that landed at Utah Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944. The next winter, Colonel Raff commanded the 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment 
in the Battle of the Bulge.
He was honored as a member of the French Legion \
On 24-03-1945, Colonel Raff became the first American paratrooper to jump into Germany east of the Rhine, leading his regiment in Operation Varsity, the last large-scale American airborne drop of the war in Europe. His paratroopers nicknamed “Raff’s Ruffians” landed near Wesel, then took part in the capture of Essen and Duisburg.
After World War II, Colonel Raff turned to another aspect of unconventional warfare. In the 1950’s, he commanded the 77thj Special Forces Group, Airborne, and the Psychological Warfare Centre, both at Fort Bragg, N.C. He was credited by Lieutenant General William Yarborough 
as the “father” of the then-controversial green beret now routinely worn by US Army Special Forces. He was an early proponent of having Special Forces troops wear green berets, despite the Army’s opposition on the ground that the berets carried a foreign flavor and seemed elitist. In 1961 the Special Forces obtained formal Army approval for their green berets, thereby gaining their informal name. It was President John F Kennedy
who encouraged the wearing of the Green Beret by the Special Forces. Raff was married with, Alomah Make of Bora-Bora and had one son, James, and a daughter, Leila Boyer. His first marriage, to Virginia Chaney, ended in divorce.
Death and burial ground of Raff, Edson Duncan.
Colonel Edson Raff retired from the military in 1958 and died very old age 95 on 11-03-2003 in Garnet Kansas. Raff is buried on Arlington National Cemetery, Section MF. Close by a gravestone of Brigade General Kenneth Newton Walker 
On 05-01-1943, Walker was shot down and killed leading a daylight bombing raid over Rabaul, for which he was awarded the Medal of Honor. Neither Walker’s body nor the wreck of his aircraft was found. Walker was therefore listed on the Tablets of the Missing at Manila American Cemetery and Memorial, Philippines, where servicemen missing in action or buried at sea in the Southwest Pacific are commemorated. On 07-12-2001, a headstone marker was erected in Section MC-36M of Arlington National Cemetery to give family members a place to gather in the United States.
Message(s), tips or interesting graves for the webmaster: robhopmans@outlook.com
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