No. 115 November, 2009
Harold Ratzburg was born at the start of the Great Depression and raised on a Dairy Farm in Wisconsin. He served four years in the US Air Force in the 50's and was stationed in Germany, where he met his wife Anneliese, who helped get him through College to become a Civil Engineer. After a time as a Highway Engineer and College Instructor, he wound up as a City Engineer of a small town in New Jersey. Twenty four years later he retired to become an old geezer telling old stories on his new fangled computer.
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Dog Tag Story---Follow up
By Harold Ratzburg
After reading my dog tag story in the September '09 issue of Motor Pool Messenger, another old Geezer, WW II Veteran Jack Bennett, (even older than I am) of the MTA brought his original issue dog tags to a MTA meeting for show and tell.
Jack was a 20 year old college kid in 1943 when the dreaded draft notice came that said----Uncle Sam needs you----and away he went.
What makes the tags interesting as a collectible is that Jack's dog tags are made of brass, not of a stainless steel alloy, and they show the complete name and address of his next of kin, his mother. Early in the war, all dog tags were made of brass and it is my understanding that they were made of brass until a new alloy, which also would not rust, was developed. I don't know just when that change of material came about, It is possible that different induction centers used the brass tags until the supplies ran out, so the changeover date differed from one region to another, depending on the supply at hand.
The only thing we know for sure here is that in January, 1943, more than a year after the war started, Jack's induction center made his tags of brass stock--and--that Jack got a tetnus shot in 1943 and 45, his newly assigned Army serial number was 32718127, he was Blood type "O", what his mothers name and home address was, and that he was a Prodestant.
I believe that sometime in 1943, the military stopped putting the next of kin"s name and address on individual dog tags. Maybe somebody out there knows the exact date of the order which must have gone out to make the change, but I haven't found it yet. This date is important you know, for the really picky collectors in the crowd.
During Jacks military career of three years and one month, he became a skilled truck driver and like most GI's he became a collector of WW II stuff on the spot, before it became "vintage" collectibles.
At the beginning, his career was like many GIs drafted in WW II. Jack was inducted at Camp Upton, Long Island, and the US Army, in it's infinite wisdom, sent him to Tacoma, Washington for an accelerated four weeks of basic training. He was then posted to various bases around the United States, serving in an Anti-Aircraft Battalion in Washington (the state), in Riverside California and the Mohave Desert. For a four month period in 1943 he was studying under the Army ASTP program (Army Specialialized Training Program) until the Army abandoned the ASTP program as no longer needed cause the USA was winning the war and the conflict would be shorter than expected.
In June, 1944, When the Army decided that the US had gained enough control of the sky with US Air Corps planes that Anti-Aircraft units were not needed so much, Jack was transferred to an Army Engineer Bridging Company in Paris, Texas, Where he was trained to drive the good old GMC Deuce and half truck to haul Infantry assault boats.
Then, in January 1945, it was off to Europe where Bridging and Assault Boat Companies were needed to support the assault troops as Patton chased the German Army back into the German heartland.
He landed in England and after three weeks of organizing and training, the outfit was shipped to France. Jack was assigned along with other men to pickup the unit's trucks in Paris, France. While there, he managed to get only one pass to go into town, and when I asked him what he did in the city, (that was wide open for US GIs), Jack sorta ignored the question. Paris, at the time, was a US soldiers dream city for a pass where Jack sold his cigarette ration, (which cost him five cents a pack,) for two dollars a pack. A nice profitable markup on the black market.
The duty of Jacks outfit was to keep moving the assault boats and bridging material forward, for use if needed, but staying behind the advancing Infantry troops. The front moved quickly forward and Jacks outfit was not ever needed to help make an assault crossing with their equipment. Consequently, Jack never did have a "Band of Brothers moment" and hear the crack of a bullet aimed at him, but he doesn't feel that he really missed it that much either. And so the shooting war for Jack ended, and he could think about other things to do, like collecting.
During their occupation duties, Jack and his Sergeant each "accumulated" a really nice K98 German Rifle from a warehouse of captured equipment. To get it back to the states was a problem, because in their outfit at the time, the GIs could not just box it up and send it home. Jack and his Sergeant solved that little problem by preserving their K98s with cosmoline and then packing them with other weapons that the outfit was sending back, so when they arrived back in the USA, their rifles were there waiting for them. He still has that rifle today and is looking for a cleaning rod to complete it as a collectible. Shipping a nice German helmet home was no problem at all, and he still has that WW II collectible.
Comments on the First Dog Tag Article
I heard from Norman Dauerer, a member of the MVPA in NY, as follows "The only thing different is that I understood that the purpose of the notch is that it served as an orientation mark for the addressograph machine used for generating lists of those killed in action".
Then, from a WW II Vet, Jim Cullen, who landed in Normandy, I got the following: "In Normandy, one of the first things we did was to get rid of our gas masks. Although many guys were panic stricken when a false gas attack happened. From the discarded masks, we cut two rings from the rubber gas mask hose. These fit perfectly around our dog tags and acted as silencers. Thinking back about this several years ago, I wondered why we did it. The tags were always inside our shirts and during the Bulge, under many layers of shirts and jackets. In any event they didn't make much noise to start with and if you let a Kraut get close enough to hear a slight tinkle, you were in deep trouble."
copyright 2009, Harold Ratzburg
By Harold Ratzburg
After reading my dog tag story in the September '09 issue of Motor Pool Messenger, another old Geezer, WW II Veteran Jack Bennett, (even older than I am) of the MTA brought his original issue dog tags to a MTA meeting for show and tell.
Jack was a 20 year old college kid in 1943 when the dreaded draft notice came that said----Uncle Sam needs you----and away he went.
What makes the tags interesting as a collectible is that Jack's dog tags are made of brass, not of a stainless steel alloy, and they show the complete name and address of his next of kin, his mother. Early in the war, all dog tags were made of brass and it is my understanding that they were made of brass until a new alloy, which also would not rust, was developed. I don't know just when that change of material came about, It is possible that different induction centers used the brass tags until the supplies ran out, so the changeover date differed from one region to another, depending on the supply at hand.
The only thing we know for sure here is that in January, 1943, more than a year after the war started, Jack's induction center made his tags of brass stock--and--that Jack got a tetnus shot in 1943 and 45, his newly assigned Army serial number was 32718127, he was Blood type "O", what his mothers name and home address was, and that he was a Prodestant.
I believe that sometime in 1943, the military stopped putting the next of kin"s name and address on individual dog tags. Maybe somebody out there knows the exact date of the order which must have gone out to make the change, but I haven't found it yet. This date is important you know, for the really picky collectors in the crowd.
During Jacks military career of three years and one month, he became a skilled truck driver and like most GI's he became a collector of WW II stuff on the spot, before it became "vintage" collectibles.
At the beginning, his career was like many GIs drafted in WW II. Jack was inducted at Camp Upton, Long Island, and the US Army, in it's infinite wisdom, sent him to Tacoma, Washington for an accelerated four weeks of basic training. He was then posted to various bases around the United States, serving in an Anti-Aircraft Battalion in Washington (the state), in Riverside California and the Mohave Desert. For a four month period in 1943 he was studying under the Army ASTP program (Army Specialialized Training Program) until the Army abandoned the ASTP program as no longer needed cause the USA was winning the war and the conflict would be shorter than expected.
In June, 1944, When the Army decided that the US had gained enough control of the sky with US Air Corps planes that Anti-Aircraft units were not needed so much, Jack was transferred to an Army Engineer Bridging Company in Paris, Texas, Where he was trained to drive the good old GMC Deuce and half truck to haul Infantry assault boats.
Then, in January 1945, it was off to Europe where Bridging and Assault Boat Companies were needed to support the assault troops as Patton chased the German Army back into the German heartland.
He landed in England and after three weeks of organizing and training, the outfit was shipped to France. Jack was assigned along with other men to pickup the unit's trucks in Paris, France. While there, he managed to get only one pass to go into town, and when I asked him what he did in the city, (that was wide open for US GIs), Jack sorta ignored the question. Paris, at the time, was a US soldiers dream city for a pass where Jack sold his cigarette ration, (which cost him five cents a pack,) for two dollars a pack. A nice profitable markup on the black market.
The duty of Jacks outfit was to keep moving the assault boats and bridging material forward, for use if needed, but staying behind the advancing Infantry troops. The front moved quickly forward and Jacks outfit was not ever needed to help make an assault crossing with their equipment. Consequently, Jack never did have a "Band of Brothers moment" and hear the crack of a bullet aimed at him, but he doesn't feel that he really missed it that much either. And so the shooting war for Jack ended, and he could think about other things to do, like collecting.
During their occupation duties, Jack and his Sergeant each "accumulated" a really nice K98 German Rifle from a warehouse of captured equipment. To get it back to the states was a problem, because in their outfit at the time, the GIs could not just box it up and send it home. Jack and his Sergeant solved that little problem by preserving their K98s with cosmoline and then packing them with other weapons that the outfit was sending back, so when they arrived back in the USA, their rifles were there waiting for them. He still has that rifle today and is looking for a cleaning rod to complete it as a collectible. Shipping a nice German helmet home was no problem at all, and he still has that WW II collectible.
Comments on the First Dog Tag Article
I heard from Norman Dauerer, a member of the MVPA in NY, as follows "The only thing different is that I understood that the purpose of the notch is that it served as an orientation mark for the addressograph machine used for generating lists of those killed in action".
Then, from a WW II Vet, Jim Cullen, who landed in Normandy, I got the following: "In Normandy, one of the first things we did was to get rid of our gas masks. Although many guys were panic stricken when a false gas attack happened. From the discarded masks, we cut two rings from the rubber gas mask hose. These fit perfectly around our dog tags and acted as silencers. Thinking back about this several years ago, I wondered why we did it. The tags were always inside our shirts and during the Bulge, under many layers of shirts and jackets. In any event they didn't make much noise to start with and if you let a Kraut get close enough to hear a slight tinkle, you were in deep trouble."
copyright 2009, Harold Ratzburg