Hopefully,
the serious family WWII researcher will have his father’s Honorable Discharge
or what it is commonly called today, the DD214.
It is a rich source of facts which will help in putting the pieces of
his military experience from basic training to his last duty station. In my case I didn’t take those facts
seriously enough and the pieces never fit his real story from Ft. Riley,
Kansas to Oran, Algeria in North Africa and, finally, to the bombed out Port of
Leghorn, Italy in 1944. “TC HQ 3rd
P of E”: but what did that mean? It
could have been hundreds of units by my hasty determination.
On
the other hand, I had other supporting evidence.
I remember some of Dad’s stories which placed him in Leghorn and I had a
limited number of pictures he took. They
were just enough to identify his parent unit and shed light on what he was
doing in Italy from October, 1944 to September, 1945. The first photo looks like the one you see
from Art Appreciation 101 of Hadrian’s Tomb on the Tiber River in
Rome. Dad is on its roof in a typical
GI-on-leave shot. It took me several
years to be curious enough to get a magnifying glass to identify what the patch
on his shoulder was, but it paid off. The
half image looked something like an onion dome you see on Russian Orthodox
churches. The photo of him in the chair was the clincher. It was taken in his tent compound somewhere
in Leghorn during the winter months (uniform sweater). It was an onion dome with a red star in the
center.
The
Internet has lots of sources identifying WWII shoulder patches: groups, clubs,
government entities, and companies specializing in military memorabilia. I bought my PBS patch at a gun show and
that’s what it turned out to be – the patch of the Peninsula Base Section
responsible for all the Services of Supply (SOS) in Italy. With few exceptions, the war in North
Africa and Italy is overlooked by historians with few exceptions like Rick
Atkinson. Combat units were just the tip
of the iceberg. There were truck parks,
medical facilities, salvage yards, horse and mule units, endless convoys of Liberty and Victory ships, major ports like Oran and Naples, and stockpiles of
spare parts, gasoline, and food. The
scope of the combat supporting elements is unimaginable and hidden from the public. I know I’m not the only
one who’s curious about it. 
In
the months ahead I'll tell how I found answers to questions many of us have
on this largely unknown front of World War II.
Oddly, the process involved the recent declassification of routine and benign
Army documents. The Internet has travel
companies that specialize in WWII sites and battlefields, so I know I’m not the
only Baby Boomer or elderly veteran interested in this. I’ve said it before: Do as much research as
possible before going to the National Archives.
I’ll analyze a few documents, the Tools
of War (book), photos, and a 1945 map of Leghorn I found online. It shows the probable location of PBS’s
headquarters in Leghorn that housed the TC’s (Transportation Corps)
headquarters – the same as indicated on my father’s discharge.