The Paper Trail

GEORGE OERTEL AND ROUGHLY 15,000 OF HIS COMRADES in the 88th Infantry Division set sail in a convoy of hastily constructed Liberty ships from Newport News in November and December 1943. Under the threat of German U-boats, it took the convoys about a month to reach North Africa, and the voyage was not pleasant. Stacked in swaying bunks five-high in the fetid holds of the lumbering ships, the men got seasick by the thousands. Locked below decks for virtually the entire trip, many arrived weak and depleted when their regiments landed near Casablanca, Morocco.

From North Africa, they sailed to German-occupied southern Italy. Their immediate objective would be to drive north against the German army to break the Gustav Line, a formidable Nazi formation south of Rome, defended by 15 enemy divisions fortified by gun pits, concrete bunkers, turreted machine-gun emplacements, barbed wire and minefields. After nearly a year of brutal conflict against divisions of Panzer tanks and squadrons of Luftwaffe bombers, the Allies would ultimately liberate Rome and drive north into the European heartland.

That much I knew from reading various military histories. But to try to find out what actually happened to Lt. Oertel, my last possible source was the National Archives in College Park, where most of the written reports of World War II are stored. Thousands of typewritten papers, stamped "SECRET" but subsequently declassified, told the story of extremely difficult conditions as the 350th Regiment slogged its way through the hot, malarial plains of southern Italy into the Apennine Mountains, where they were subjected to heavy bombing from German planes and artillery. The terrain was so difficult that jeeps and trucks couldn't make it, so mule teams, aided by Italian civilians, were used to carry food, weapons and ammunition for much of the way.

As the 88th Infantry prepared to move north in March 1944, it began taking enemy artillery fire and suffered light casualties in its first skirmishes with the Germans. The detailed reports that month note additional problems from malaria, body lice and fungus infections because of the hot, wet conditions of southern Italy. Enemy shelling, land mines and booby traps continued to cause casualties as the infantry pressed north. The report also noted that "propaganda shells" were being dropped on frontline troops.

At 11 o'clock on the night of May 11, 1944, George Oertel and his comrades faced their first heavy combat as the Allied troops launched the broadest offensive yet in the Italian campaign, called Operation Diadem. The regiment suffered heavy casualties but inflicted worse on the Germans as it drove north for the next several weeks, according to the operations report. By the end of May, the regiment of 3,300 men reported a monthly loss of 106 killed and 623 wounded.

This offensive by the 88th Infantry became big news back home, because the 88th was the first all-draftee division to see combat in the war, and its performance was a test of the Army's entire training regimen. A headline in The Washington Post exulted: "All-Draft Divisions Chase Nazis 30 Miles." The 88th Division wore blue shoulder patches, and German POWs told them they had been dubbed "blue devils," a nickname that the division adopted.

As I combed through page after page in the Archives, I found myself hoping I would find something extraordinary or heroic to mark the role of George Oertel. Perhaps he had won a Silver Star or Bronze Star or some great honor. I couldn't find him, and instead, over countless pages, I was struck by the day-to-day misery of the conditions that were described as his 88th Infantry made its way from the stifling heat of the coastal plains into the cold, rugged mountains, where rain, snow and enemy artillery took their toll.

The 88th moved through the mountains under dark of night because otherwise German mortar and machine-gun emplacements would blow them away. The Americans crossed mountain after cold mountain, many of them getting sick, many coming down with painful trench-foot infections that occasionally required amputation. Sometimes they ran out of C-rations and had to wait a day or even two for the mules to arrive.

Later, I would find a book about the 88th, called Blue Devils in Italy, written by one of Lt. Oertel's fellow soldiers, John P. Delaney. He summed up the Italian campaign this way: "War is never glamorous. War is a dirty, filthy business. It is life lived under the most miserable conditions. It is death suffered under the most horrible circumstances. It is fought on lonely hillsides, in rubbled towns, in ditches and sewers and cellars, in rain and snow and mud, in pain and fear . . . War is dead men in the hot sun, dying men screaming in pain, wrecked men in hospitals with plates in their skulls, sightless eyes, stumps of legs and arms, men fed through tubes or with their insides held together by wire . . . War is something that should never happen, but does."

At the Archives, after thousands of pages of records, I finally came upon the name of 2nd Lt. George C. Oertel Jr. It was in July 1944, and the 350th Regiment records for that month, unlike others, were contained in a gray metal field folder that is dented and scratched, as if it had seen combat. Oertel was listed among 50 officers who were awarded the Combat Infantryman Badge for "exemplary conduct in action against the enemy" for the battle on May 11. The newly created honor went to those who had performed admirably under hostile fire, and carried with it a $10 monthly pay stipend. "On Saturday, 1 July 44, at 1000, an impressive ceremony and parade was held to present medals and awards, and honor those Officers and men who received them. The afternoon was devoted to recreational activities, to include swimming in the Tyrrhenian Sea," the record said.

Ten days later, Oertel would be dead. With the Nazis in retreat, Rome had fallen in June, and Oertel was among the thousands who joyously entered the liberated Eternal City. Huge throngs of Italians turned out to welcome the Americans, but the 88th Infantry could not stay for long. The assault continued north, driving toward the Arno River and the hills of Tuscany.

The last day of Oertel's life, July 11, 1944, appears unremarkable in the records. The 350th Regiment was moving near a village called Villamagna. The 10 a.m. log entry for that day said: "Our regiment is still fighting hard just S of 38th grid line." A later summary of the day's action noted, "During the afternoon of 11 July, our troops on the left flank encountered strong enemy resistance in the form of heavy artillery."

The regimental records continue on through the rest of the war, as the 88th drove north all the way through Italy in a victorious but costly campaign. In 344 days of fighting, the division, whose authorized strength was 15,000 men, had lost 2,298 killed in action, 258 who died of wounds, and 9,225 wounded. In all, 312,000 Allied troops were killed, were wounded or went missing in Italy alone. When the 350th Regiment finally came home in the summer of 1945, George C. Oertel Jr. was left behind, buried in a military cemetery near where he had fallen, in a seaside town called Follonica on the shore of the Tyrrhenian.

The man who performed Oertel's burial service was Maj. Wallace Hale, the 88th Division chaplain, who now lives in Texas and is about to turn 90. He doesn't remember Oertel specifically, he said, because some days he buried more than 100 men. Hale was only 29 then but said he will never forget the spirit of the soldiers, who called him "Chappie." "Even in the worst days, they could find things to laugh about, smile about, even when they lost their best buddies," he said. "Young men have exhilarance and staying power. If war was fought by old men, it would never be fought."

IT WAS OBVIOUSLY FOOLISH, in retrospect, for me to think that Sandy Lang would even remotely resemble the dark, handsome soldier who had been the object of my quest. Nonetheless, it was jarring to finally meet the infant son of 2nd Lt. George Oertel Jr., who was now a 60-year-old, white-haired grandfather with a thick white mustache and a substantial belly that he said he'd acquired only in recent years.

Lang and his wife of 39 years, Linda, warmly welcomed me into the living room of their spacious ranch house in Altamonte Springs. He was a soft-spoken and quiet fellow, and, after we visited for a while and I began to spread out my materials on the coffee table in the living room, Lang shook his head back and forth wordlessly. He was examining his father's Purple Heart certificate, along with photographs of his parents' wedding, which he had never seen before.

"Well . . . isn't that something?" he finally said. "It's a little overwhelming to have this all dumped in my lap."

Lang, who was still named George Oertel III until his formal adoption around age 10, said he was puzzled as a kid that his name was different from that of his parents. He started asking questions then and learned that his birth father had died in the war, but his mother never gave many details. Once, after visiting his Oertel grandparents, he remembers peppering his mother with questions and her telling him that "it's really too painful for me to go back and revisit those times."