thedrifter
04-25-08, 07:44 AM
Missing but not forgotten
BY HOWARD WILKINSON | HWILKINSON@ENQUIRER.COM
UNION TOWNSHIP – Sometimes, when Regina Herbolt was a child, she would walk into the family living room and see her mother, Juanita, clutching a framed photograph that sat on a cupboard, staring at the face beneath the glass and crying softly.
The little girl was never sure why.
Decades later, after Herbolt had become a friend to the family of Staff Sgt. Matt Maupin, the Union Township soldier whose family had waited for four years to learn that their son had died, she came to learn about the face in that picture and why it so touched the heart of her mother, who died nine years ago.
It was her mother’s brother, Joseph Rease Errgang, who was a 28-year-old gunnery sergeant 55 years ago near the 38th parallel in Korea, a battle-hardened Marine who led other Marines into combat on a frigid, barren patch of land called Grey Rock Ridge and who was never heard from again.
He was presumed to be killed in a firefight with Chinese communists. But, unlike his fellow Clermont County serviceman Matt Maupin, his body was never found.
“I made up my mind then that I would find out what happened to an uncle I never knew,’’ said Herbolt, sitting in the living room of her Union Township home with her 14-year-old son Robby at her side.
“My mother went to her grave not knowing what had happened to her brother. But her daughter will know. Her grandson will know.”
TALLY OF THE MISSING: 84,500
As the Maupin family prepares to bury their son this weekend, thousands of other families around the country have endured decades without knowing what happened to their young men in uniform who remain listed as “missing in action” from wars dating to World War II.
The Department of Defense’s Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office still lists nearly 84,500 American servicemen as unaccounted for – the vast majority, 74,384, from World War II.
Many of them were sailors lost at sea or airmen whose planes were shot down over remote areas. Others were foot soldiers engaged in land battles where casualties were high and their remains were never identified.
There is little hope of finding the remains of many of them, but the Defense Department – working with other military agencies and foreign governments – often finds and identifies soldiers, marines, airmen and sailors who have been lost for decades.
The remains of nine veterans of World War II and Korea have been identified this year, the most recent being a Columbus, Ind., soldier, Sgt. Virgil Phillips, who had been missing since 1950 and whose remains were found five years ago but not positively identified until early in April. Phillips was buried in Loogootee, Ind., last week.
From time to time, one will see a sign of one of the missing – the road at Banklick Woods Park in northern Kentucky that was named after PFC Gary Lee Hall of Covington, a Marine missing in southeast Asia since 1975; the Vietnam Veterans of America chapter in Reading, named after Staff Sgt. Eddie Uhlmansiek, a Northside soldier missing in Vietnam for 41 years.
Many of those still listed as missing are presumed to have been killed in action, even though their remains were not recovered. Gunnery Sgt. Errgang was among those.
‘A MARINE’S MARINE’
Joe Erggang was a tall, strong kid – 6 foot, 3 inches, with blond, wavy hair. A small town boy from Batavia who dropped out of Anderson High School during World War II to join the Marine Corps. He was soon to find himself fighting his way across beaches and through jungles throughout the South Pacific.
After the war, he married and settled down in Milwaukee, the hometown of his bride, but he re-entered the Marines when the Korean War broke out.
At dusk on Feb. 27, 1953, he found himself on the verge of yet another battle, this time as platoon sergeant for 1st Reconnaissance Platoon, Recon Co., Headquarters Battalion, 1st Marine Division.
With a first lieutenant in command, Errgang and 20 other Marines ventured into the dark of Grey Rock Ridge, looking to take out a Chinese machine gun nest. They ran headlong into a blaze of machine gun fire that decimated the platoon.
Once it was over and the platoon was back at its base, it was obvious that three men were missing, including Errgang.
Dick Oxnam, ready to retire as a city employee in Tucson, Ariz., was a young Marine lieutenant at the time. His 2nd Platoon went to look for Errgang and his fellow Marines. They searched until mid-afternoon the next day, finding two of the fallen Marines, but not Errgang.
“How he got separated from the main platoon is a mystery,’’ Oxnam said. “He wasn’t the sort to wander off. This was a Marine’s Marine. He was experienced. If he was captured, I can guarantee you he put up a fight.”
Marines, Oxnam said, live by the warrior’s ethos that no man is left behind.
“It bothers me to this day,’’ Oxnam said. “It shocked me then and it shocks me now. How could such an experienced Marine be out of contact with his platoon?”
Lee Ballenger, now a retired police officer in southern California, was one of the young Marines who went to battle that night at Grey Rock Ridge. He wrote about the experience vividly in “The Final Crucible,” the second volume of his history of the Marine Corps in Korea.
In his book, he speculates that Errgang might have been captured by the Chinese, although he said it is unlikely they would bother to carry off a severely wounded marine.
“It would be logical to assume that Errgang was ambulatory,” Ballenger wrote. “He might have died in captivity, of wounds or mistreatment, or conceivably been taken to the Soviet Union, the fate of an unknown number of prisoners of war.”
In an interview with the Enquirer, Ballenger said that what he wrote about Errgang’s possible fate “is just speculation. Nobody really knows. Nobody may ever know.”
Finding the remains of missing airmen is generally easier for the military, Ballenger said, than for infantry soldiers “who march into a meat grinder.”
“They are killed in hostile environments and may be there for decades,” Ballenger said. “There is generally not much left of them, even if they can be found.”
When Regina Herbolt began her quest to learn what happened to her uncle a few years ago, she began exchanging e-mails with both Oxnam and Ballenger, along with other members of Recon Co. who remember her uncle.
She and her son Robby have traveled to reunions of the Korean War Marines in Florida and Seattle, where they were warmly received by her uncle’s brothers-in-arms.
“I really feel a bond with these men,’’ Herbolt said. “They knew my uncle. And I know it still bothers many of them that he was never found.”
Two years ago, the marines of Recon Co. presented her and Robby with a shadow box containing all of Errgang’s medals, including the three Purple Hearts he earned in World War II and Korea.
Herbolt and her son have shared all they have learned with their large family – especially her 94-year-old father, Ross Herbolt, a retired farmer from Bethel who had heard his late wife talk often of her brother.
But the one person she would like to share the story with is no longer here – her mother.
“In her later years, she would talk about Joe more and wonder what had happened to him,’’ Herbolt said. “She wondered if he was alive. She missed him so.”
From time to time, Herbolt said, her mother would cry when she would hear a song from the early ‘50s, “You Belong to Me,’’ sung by Jo Stafford. It was her song, a song that brought back memories of her brother.
Fly the ocean in a silver plane, see the jungle when it’s wet with rain.
Just remember ‘til you’re home again
You belong to me.
• DataCenter: Find names of the missing.
http://dunes.cincinnati.com/data/
Matt Maupin special section.
http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=maupin
Ellie
BY HOWARD WILKINSON | HWILKINSON@ENQUIRER.COM
UNION TOWNSHIP – Sometimes, when Regina Herbolt was a child, she would walk into the family living room and see her mother, Juanita, clutching a framed photograph that sat on a cupboard, staring at the face beneath the glass and crying softly.
The little girl was never sure why.
Decades later, after Herbolt had become a friend to the family of Staff Sgt. Matt Maupin, the Union Township soldier whose family had waited for four years to learn that their son had died, she came to learn about the face in that picture and why it so touched the heart of her mother, who died nine years ago.
It was her mother’s brother, Joseph Rease Errgang, who was a 28-year-old gunnery sergeant 55 years ago near the 38th parallel in Korea, a battle-hardened Marine who led other Marines into combat on a frigid, barren patch of land called Grey Rock Ridge and who was never heard from again.
He was presumed to be killed in a firefight with Chinese communists. But, unlike his fellow Clermont County serviceman Matt Maupin, his body was never found.
“I made up my mind then that I would find out what happened to an uncle I never knew,’’ said Herbolt, sitting in the living room of her Union Township home with her 14-year-old son Robby at her side.
“My mother went to her grave not knowing what had happened to her brother. But her daughter will know. Her grandson will know.”
TALLY OF THE MISSING: 84,500
As the Maupin family prepares to bury their son this weekend, thousands of other families around the country have endured decades without knowing what happened to their young men in uniform who remain listed as “missing in action” from wars dating to World War II.
The Department of Defense’s Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office still lists nearly 84,500 American servicemen as unaccounted for – the vast majority, 74,384, from World War II.
Many of them were sailors lost at sea or airmen whose planes were shot down over remote areas. Others were foot soldiers engaged in land battles where casualties were high and their remains were never identified.
There is little hope of finding the remains of many of them, but the Defense Department – working with other military agencies and foreign governments – often finds and identifies soldiers, marines, airmen and sailors who have been lost for decades.
The remains of nine veterans of World War II and Korea have been identified this year, the most recent being a Columbus, Ind., soldier, Sgt. Virgil Phillips, who had been missing since 1950 and whose remains were found five years ago but not positively identified until early in April. Phillips was buried in Loogootee, Ind., last week.
From time to time, one will see a sign of one of the missing – the road at Banklick Woods Park in northern Kentucky that was named after PFC Gary Lee Hall of Covington, a Marine missing in southeast Asia since 1975; the Vietnam Veterans of America chapter in Reading, named after Staff Sgt. Eddie Uhlmansiek, a Northside soldier missing in Vietnam for 41 years.
Many of those still listed as missing are presumed to have been killed in action, even though their remains were not recovered. Gunnery Sgt. Errgang was among those.
‘A MARINE’S MARINE’
Joe Erggang was a tall, strong kid – 6 foot, 3 inches, with blond, wavy hair. A small town boy from Batavia who dropped out of Anderson High School during World War II to join the Marine Corps. He was soon to find himself fighting his way across beaches and through jungles throughout the South Pacific.
After the war, he married and settled down in Milwaukee, the hometown of his bride, but he re-entered the Marines when the Korean War broke out.
At dusk on Feb. 27, 1953, he found himself on the verge of yet another battle, this time as platoon sergeant for 1st Reconnaissance Platoon, Recon Co., Headquarters Battalion, 1st Marine Division.
With a first lieutenant in command, Errgang and 20 other Marines ventured into the dark of Grey Rock Ridge, looking to take out a Chinese machine gun nest. They ran headlong into a blaze of machine gun fire that decimated the platoon.
Once it was over and the platoon was back at its base, it was obvious that three men were missing, including Errgang.
Dick Oxnam, ready to retire as a city employee in Tucson, Ariz., was a young Marine lieutenant at the time. His 2nd Platoon went to look for Errgang and his fellow Marines. They searched until mid-afternoon the next day, finding two of the fallen Marines, but not Errgang.
“How he got separated from the main platoon is a mystery,’’ Oxnam said. “He wasn’t the sort to wander off. This was a Marine’s Marine. He was experienced. If he was captured, I can guarantee you he put up a fight.”
Marines, Oxnam said, live by the warrior’s ethos that no man is left behind.
“It bothers me to this day,’’ Oxnam said. “It shocked me then and it shocks me now. How could such an experienced Marine be out of contact with his platoon?”
Lee Ballenger, now a retired police officer in southern California, was one of the young Marines who went to battle that night at Grey Rock Ridge. He wrote about the experience vividly in “The Final Crucible,” the second volume of his history of the Marine Corps in Korea.
In his book, he speculates that Errgang might have been captured by the Chinese, although he said it is unlikely they would bother to carry off a severely wounded marine.
“It would be logical to assume that Errgang was ambulatory,” Ballenger wrote. “He might have died in captivity, of wounds or mistreatment, or conceivably been taken to the Soviet Union, the fate of an unknown number of prisoners of war.”
In an interview with the Enquirer, Ballenger said that what he wrote about Errgang’s possible fate “is just speculation. Nobody really knows. Nobody may ever know.”
Finding the remains of missing airmen is generally easier for the military, Ballenger said, than for infantry soldiers “who march into a meat grinder.”
“They are killed in hostile environments and may be there for decades,” Ballenger said. “There is generally not much left of them, even if they can be found.”
When Regina Herbolt began her quest to learn what happened to her uncle a few years ago, she began exchanging e-mails with both Oxnam and Ballenger, along with other members of Recon Co. who remember her uncle.
She and her son Robby have traveled to reunions of the Korean War Marines in Florida and Seattle, where they were warmly received by her uncle’s brothers-in-arms.
“I really feel a bond with these men,’’ Herbolt said. “They knew my uncle. And I know it still bothers many of them that he was never found.”
Two years ago, the marines of Recon Co. presented her and Robby with a shadow box containing all of Errgang’s medals, including the three Purple Hearts he earned in World War II and Korea.
Herbolt and her son have shared all they have learned with their large family – especially her 94-year-old father, Ross Herbolt, a retired farmer from Bethel who had heard his late wife talk often of her brother.
But the one person she would like to share the story with is no longer here – her mother.
“In her later years, she would talk about Joe more and wonder what had happened to him,’’ Herbolt said. “She wondered if he was alive. She missed him so.”
From time to time, Herbolt said, her mother would cry when she would hear a song from the early ‘50s, “You Belong to Me,’’ sung by Jo Stafford. It was her song, a song that brought back memories of her brother.
Fly the ocean in a silver plane, see the jungle when it’s wet with rain.
Just remember ‘til you’re home again
You belong to me.
• DataCenter: Find names of the missing.
http://dunes.cincinnati.com/data/
Matt Maupin special section.
http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=maupin
Ellie