Veteran’s dog tag returned to family 78 years later
GALLIPOLIS — Sitting on the couch inside the house where she grew up atop a hill in this Ohio River town, Jessica Varian’s eyes shine with unshed tears as she reads one more time the cursive words her grandfather scratched out on notebook paper.
The scene Howard Waugh describes takes place just days before the Allied troops liberated Rome during World War II, and the long and grueling Battle of Anzio along the Italian Coast was drawing to a close. The young Army soldier was marching down the critical Highway 7 when he turned his head to peer at the beachhead where so much blood had been shed over months.
“I take a last look back thinking how did I survive,” Waugh — Varian’s grandfather who was drafted in 1942 and served with the Army’s 39th Combat Engineer Battalion — recounted decades later when he journaled about his war memories after he was well into his 80s. “This place haunts me to this day.”
That last sentence — just seven words — underscores why it is so emotional, so meaningful, so profound for Varian to now clutch one of her grandpa’s dog tags in her hand after a history sleuth with a metal detector unearthed it in a wooded area near the Anzio/Nettuno Beachhead some 78 years after Waugh lost it in the war.
“My grandfather was so proud of being a U.S. Army veteran and of the work he and the soldiers did to liberate so many people. He lived his entire life honoring the military,” said Varian, a 34-year-old nurse from Gallia County — about 100 miles southeast of Columbus — who was incredibly close to her grandfather, who died in 2016 at the age of 94.
“He talked about his military service every day. But you never saw the darkness or heard about the bad things he saw and endured,” she said. “It’s good to know now that this piece of him that he carried with him is off that beach where terrible things happened and back home where it belongs.”
Battle of Anzio: New discoveries from World War II
Berta Alessandro remembers so clearly the stories his father told him of how the Germans occupied their country’s land in the war and how the soldiers from Allied countries came to help his people.
Those memories were front of mind when, about three years ago, the now 42-year-old invested in a metal detector and decided to devote as much time as he could to scouring ground near Anzio/Nettuno for World War II artifacts and get them back in the proper hands.
He regularly combed the area known as Foglino woods where Allied troops had camped, but the brambles and thorns and butcher’s broom had grown so thick that, aside from a few uniform buttons, Alessandro mostly found garbage.
Then in August, a devastating fire swept some of the acreage and cleared the undergrowth. He returned, and on Nov. 21 his metal detector got a hit.
“I gently … removed the earth slowly with the shovel and these plates came out,”
Alessandro said of the dog tags during an interview with The Dispatch over Facebook, using Google Translate. “When I saw I did not believe my eyes. My heart reached my throat.”
He snapped a photo of the dog tags — two of them, still connected to the chain that would have hung around Waugh’s neck — and ran home to clean them. Then he called Lorenzo Tarquini, a friend who runs the Nettunia Historical Research Group and a museum located in Forte Sangallo, a 16th-century fort in Nettuno.
Tarquini works hard to both preserve artifacts locally and get others back in the hands of loved ones.
“Our mission is to pass on the history of the Second World War in our territory to the new generations,” he wrote in a translated email to The Dispatch.
So he researched for descendants of Waugh, whose dog tags indicated he was from Rural Route 1 in a place called Bladen (that’s a crossroads in Ohio Township in Gallia County not far from Gallipolis) and that Homer Waugh (his father) was next of kin.
“For us,” Tarquini wrote, “it is a pleasure and an honor to find and return a personal object to a man, father, soldier, who fought hundreds of miles from home.”
Waugh: A familiar name in Gallia County
The Waughs can trace their roots back to the founding of Gallia County, and the family name is etched many times into the granite of the Doughboy Monument in Gallipolis City Park that honors all of the county’s war veterans.
Here, in the foothills of Appalachia where the winding and majestic Ohio River reflects the shadow of one of the nation’s largest coal-fired power plants, U.S. flags out front of properties are a staple and every event honoring veterans packs in nearly everyone from town. The love of God, family and country run as deep as the tree roots that snake through the ground.
Howard Waugh took his commitment to service and love of his country seriously, said Ellen Werry, the only child of Waugh and his late beloved wife, the former Jessie Mae Hill. After returning home from the service in 1945, Waugh spent his lifetime barbering by day — he eventually owned his own shop in downtown Gallipolis — and working the night shift as a psychiatric aid at the old Gallipolis State Institute.
“He never met a stranger,” said Werry, a 61-year-old retired nurse. “And he just never slowed down. He never missed a parade, and there was no stopping him from attending any military funeral as part of the color guard. He never would miss one.”
Finding the descendants
Tarquini was unsuccessful in his quest to reach Werry and Varian (Werry thinks she probably thought his message was spam and likely ignored it), so he reached out to another friend, Maurizio De Angelis, who lives in Rome and runs another association of historical researchers who scour for war artifacts. De Angelis then reached out to Sherry Hancock, a volunteer researcher with a U.S.based Facebook group called “Family Treasures Found.”
Using the research already provided by Tarquini, and doing some internet sleuthing of her own, Hancock sent a private message to Werry in early December.
“I thought it was a scam,” Werry recalled. She showed Varian, who was even more skeptical.
“I thought it wasn’t real and that they probably wanted my mom to send them money,” she said.
Then she saw the photo Alessandro had taken of the dog tags still lying among the tree roots and dirt.
“It was just unbelievable,” Varian said.
Just seeing the dog tags there on the ground was enough to send her mind back to her grandfather’s memories, and how he never got over the day that most of the men in his squad were lost in a single battle there at Anzio. His memoirs dated the entry as March 26, 1944.
“My sad day,” he wrote. “Early in the a.m., my squad was divided into two details. … Around 4 p.m. we got word that Sgt. (illegible) and his men were all killed.”
Her grandfather carried the weight of that day forever, Varian said.
Waugh returned to Italy in 1984 for the anniversary of the battle and went to the cemetery at Nettuno to honor all of the war’s fallen. He wrote, “…was very depressing, almost a guilty feeling, made you feel small and lonely. Tearful.”
So when Werry and Varian realized the message from Hancock and Family Treasures Found — which has more than 42,000 members and had successfully reunited family with tens of thousands of photos and heirlooms at no cost — was legitimate, they were overwhelmed.
Then, on Dec. 27, just a few days before what would have been Waugh’s 100th birthday, the package from Italy arrived. Inside was a dog tag encased in a clear frame with an American flag as its backdrop. (The other is on display at Tarquini’s museum.)
A couple of days passed before Werry finally slid the dog tag from inside the frame. She wanted to — needed to — hold it in her hand.
Varian eventually did the same.
“My grandpa was … the epitome of a gentleman, with allegiance, grit and valor who personified the Greatest Generation,” she said. “I feel like now things have come full circle. He would be so pleased.”