The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page A06

A6 THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER MONDAY, MAY 50, 2016 PHILLY.COM MEMORIAL DAY Race against time to give back medals A veterans' group is seeking to return WW I Purple Hearts to descendants before April. In Verdun, French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel talk with a reenactor dressed as a French soldier during ceremonies to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the World War I battle. Getty images French and German leaders recall Verdun They marked the epic WW I battle's centenary. Km nephew. After the war, Zartman became a barber in York County.

He died in 1948. Zartman's descendant Wayne Bowers, 64, of Tho-masville, said before the ceremony that he was unaware of the details of his uncle's World War I service until he heard from Fike's organization at the beginning of May. "He died before I was born, and I never knew anything more about it," Bowers said. "My whole family is in shock, really. It's a fantastic thing to find out." Fike's efforts began in 2009, after his mother gave him a Purple Heart and dog tags she had bought in an antique shop.

He realized he should return the medal to its owner, Pvt. Corrado A.G. Picco-li, an Italian immigrant from the Watertown, N.Y, area who Fike had learned was killed in France in 1944. Fike found Piccoli's sister and returned the medal. Since Fike started Purple Hearts Reunited in 2012, the organization has presented hundreds of medals and lesser memorabilia received by his organization, including dog tags, from conflicts ranging from World War I to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So far, the most articles Fike's organization has returned in one year is 60. It plans to return the World War I medals by early April 6, 2017. And it will continue to return medals won in other conflicts. Fike is working with the Village Frame Shoppe and Gallery in St. Albans, to mount the certificates and the medals in frames that include biographies of the men who won them and, in some cases, photographs.

He is also raising money to help pay the $1,500 cost of each presentation, which includes buying the certificates and the medals, frequently online; framing them; and the presentations themselves, usually done with military honors in the hometown of the descendants. When he can't find a descendant, the commemora-tives are donated to museums or historical societies near the service members' hometowns what Fike calls "homes of honor." By Wilson Ring ASSOCIATED PRESS ST. ALBANS, Vt. A group that seeks to reunite lost Purple Hearts with service members or their descendants is embarking on an ambitious project: to return 100 such medals or certificates earned in World War I before the 100th anniversary next April of the United States' entry into the conflict. Zachariah Fike, of the Vermont-based Purple Hearts Reunited, began the project after noticing he had in his collection of memorabilia a total of exactly 100 Purple Hearts or equivalent lithographs awarded for injuries or deaths from what was known as the Great War.

"You're honoring fallen heroes," said Fike, a Vermont National Guard captain wounded in Afghanistan in 2010. "These are our forefathers; these are the guys that have shed their blood or sacrificed their lives for us. Any opportunity to bring light to that is always a good thing." The lithographs, known as a Lady Columbia Wound Certificate and showing a woman in a toga knighting an infantry soldier on bended knee, were what World War I military members wounded or killed while serving were awarded before the Purple Heart came into being in 1932. World War I service members who already had a lithograph became eligible for a Purple Heart at that time. The Purple Hearts and the certificates include the name of the service member to whom they were awarded.

Fike is working with researchers to try to find the descendants of the service members. So far, he has found about two dozen, including a handful of soldier's children, most now in their 90s, so they can be presented with commemorations that somehow were lost. The first return that's part of the World War I project was over Memorial Day weekend, on Saturday in Hanover, where the medal awarded to Cpl. William Frederick Zart-man, who was severely wounded while fighting in France on July 22, 1918, was returned to his grand- By Sylvie Corbet ASSOCIATED PRESS VERDUN, France In solemn ceremonies Sunday in the forests of eastern France, French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel marked 100 years since the Battle of Verdun, determined to show that, despite the bloodbath of World War their countries' improbable friendship is now a source of hope for today's fractured Europe. The 10-month battle at Verdun the longest in World War I killed 163,000 French and 143,000 German soldiers and wounded hundreds of thousands of others.

Between February and December 1916, an estimated 60 million shells were fired in the battle. One out of four didn't explode. The front-line villages destroyed in the fighting were never rebuilt. The battlefield zone still holds millions of unexplod-ed shells, making the area so dangerous that housing and farming are still forbidden. With no survivors left, Sunday's commemorations were focused on educating youth about the horrors and consequences of the war.

The main ceremony took place at a mass grave where, in 1984, then-French President Francois Mitterrand took then-German Chancellor Helmut Kohl's hand in a breakthrough moment of friendship and trust by longtime enemy nations. "This gesture said more than any words," Merkel stressed in her speech at the Douaumont Ossuary, a memorial to 130,000 unidentified French and German soldiers. She said the dead of Verdun were "victims of bigotry and nationalism, of blindness and political failure" and the best way to commemorate them is to bear in mind "the lessons that Europe drew from the catastrophes of the 20th century the ability and willingness to recognize how necessary it is not to seal ourselves off but to be open to each other." Merkel and Hollande light an eternal flame in memory of the 130,000 soldiers whose remains are buried at the World War I site. Getty images in a ceremony conceived by German filmmaker Volker Schlondorff. Hollande and Merkel rekindled the flame of remembrance and gave each other a hug inside the Douaumont Ossuary.

In the morning, Hollande welcomed his German counterpart under heavy rain at the German cemetery of Consenvoye, near Verdun, where 11,148 German soldiers are buried. They laid a wreath, accompanied by four German and French children, and walked side by side for few minutes in the cemetery, sharing an umbrella. After lunch, they visited the newly renovated Verdun Memorial. The museum, which reopened in February, immerses visitors in the "hell of Verdun" through soldiers' belongings, documents, and photos, and from its new rooftop, the battlefield can be observed. Merkel added that "the common challenges of the 21st century can only be dealt with together." Hollande has called for the "protection of our common house, Europe." He warned that the "time needed to destroy it would be much shorter than the long time it took to build it." Amid rising support for far right parties and divisions among European countries over how to handle refugees, he said Europe's role is "to fight against terrorism, fanaticism, radicalization" and at the same time to "welcome populations who are fleeing massacres." About 4,000 French and German children re-enacted battlefield scenes to the sound of drums amid thousands of white crosses marking the graves falling on the ground in a moving evocation of death, and getting back up as a symbol of hope, Honoring sacrifice of WWI veterans wearing his Civil Air Patrol uniform Sunday, recalled reenact-ing the role of a World War I infantryman in the cabin on weekends during the '90s, interpreting the history of the 314th for Valley Forge visitors, keeping the memory alive.

His two sons, Matthew, 24, and R.J. 23, who now serve in the military, would help him clean the cabin's artifacts. Both sons, Paski said proudly, carried rifles and marched in the Color Guard at 314th memorial services for several years. The Descendants and Friends of the 314th had the cabin deconstructed again in 2012 in hopes of bringing it home to Fort Meade and opening it as a public memorial by April 6, 2017, the 100th anniversary of the United States entering World War I. "To get that cabin reopened in Fort Meade," Rentz said, "and to get that plaque back in the cabin where people can visit it and remember what these guys did and what a whole lot of other guys like these guys did, that's our goal here.

That's our dream." MEMORIAL from Al from the 314th who died on the battlefield," said Nancy Schaff, the group's president. "This will be our 98th year of holding this annual service." All of the chapel's pews were filled for the memorial program, which included a Color Guard presented by the veterans of American Legion Post No. 901 in Jeffersonville. The day included a display of 79th Division artifacts from World War and a talk by historian William T. Walker, whose new book, Betrayal at Little Gibraltar, focuses on the Meuse-Argonne Offensive.

The Color Guard included Joe Patti, 78, whose father, Antonio Patti, a 314th infantryman, lost his left arm in combat. Joe Patti was momentarily overcome with emotion as he remembered the many childhood years his father took him to 314th memorial services at Valley Forge. He said he marches in the Color Guard to honor his father and all the men who fought with him. Outside the chapel, Marc Hermann, 34, was decked out as a World War I infantryman, complete with a rifle, a gas mask, and rations of corned beef, hard crackers, and coffee sealed in tin containers to protect them from poison gas attacks. "We no longer have any living veterans from World War I in the United States," said Schaff, who traveled to the memorial from her home in Rising Sun, Md.

"And we don't want memories of World War I veterans to be diminished because the veterans are no longer alive. "My husband was in the Army for 30 years," she said, "and when you're in the military, there is a great sense of tradition and respect for those who have come before you. Many members of our organization are direct descendants of the 314th." Schaff 's grandfather, John Bla-zosky, was a corporal in the 314th. He was wounded twice during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, where there were 117,000 American casualties in what Schaff called "the bloodiest battle of the war." She said her grandfather, who was from Port Matilda near State College, was "a coal miner during the week, and a farmer on weekends. He was maybe 5-foot-2, but he had that strong Pennsylvania grit." Schaff said all the men of the 314th had the indomitable spirit to strike an Imperial German Army stronghold that was considered impregnable.

"Against all odds, they held themselves together in the war," she said. Joel Rentz, who grew up in Reading and came to the memorial from his home in Florida, said his grandfather Irwin Rentz also served with the 314th. "My grandfather used to bring me to these things when I was a little kid," Rentz said. "There used to be a couple of World War I artillery pieces here, and I remember sitting in the artillery seat, watching my grandfather and all of his buddies talking. My father was also a veteran and very involved in this organization.

So this service is kind of in my DNA." Rentz's grandfather was a scout for the 314th in France. "The scouts would go on the other side of no-man's land," Rentz said, "roving the enemy trenches at night, cutting the barbed wire, capturing German soldiers, and bringing them back to get intelligence information. It was very high-risk. "I understand why my grandfather never talked about his days in World War Rentz said. "We'd go to Valley Forge together, but as far as discussing specifically what he did in the war, he didn't talk about that." One thing both Rentz's and Schaff's grandfathers did talk about was the log cabin that the men of the 314th built in 1917 as an assembly room and officers' club when they trained at Camp Meade in Maryland before going off to fight in World War I.

After the war, the 314th veterans chipped in to buy the cabin from the U.S. government, deconstruct it, ship it to Valley Forge, and reconstruct it in 1922 on hallowed ground near the Washington Memorial Chapel, where it housed a large collection of World War I memorabilia and was dedicated to the 362 soldiers of the 314th who died in France. "They put all of their personal mementos into it," Schaff said. A bronze plaque listed all the members of the 314th. A star marked the name of each soldier who had died.

Ray-Jude Paski, who comes from a military family and was E3 geringerdphillynews.com 610-313-8109.