When the late U.S. Army veteran Linzie Albert Holmes departed from his station in Italy eight decades ago, he left something behind.
A small piece of himself, one might say.
Like many soldiers who fought during World War II, he did his best to bury the worst of the memories and to go on with his life.
“Daddy didn’t talk about his service much,” said Linzie Holmes’ son, Dennis Holmes. “He was in Italy and Sicily back during the war, but he never did talk about it.”
At some point during his time in the village of San Miniato, Pisa, Linzie Holmes was issued a new set of dog tags by the Army, and as was common practice during wartime, he buried the old ones.
Not long ago, an archeology student at the University of Pisa named Davide Fezzuoglio was metal detecting in a field -- where the 8th Replacement Depot had been set up by the Army from September of 1944 until July 1945 to support the 5th Army battalion and other combat units in Europe –- when he got a hit.
Fezzuoglio, one of the founders of the WW2 Tuscany Hunters research group, dug a couple of inches beneath the surface, and he uncovered one half of a dog tag, which read “Linzie Holmes,” with a serial number below the name.
“Finding a dog tag is a dream come true if you are a hobbyist who searches for (World War II) relics, as they are not so easy to find, and there are not so many places where soldiers stayed enough time to lose or get rid of them,” Fezzuoglio told The Enterprise-Tocsin in an email.
Soon after the first find, Fezzuoglio was able to locate another part of the dog tag.
“The other half was inside a dump pit a few meters away,” Fezzuoglio said. "’Dump pits’ were deep holes made by soldiers during (World War II) where they trashed bits and scraps.”
Fezzuoglio said there are a lot of World War II artifact hunters in Italy, but not all of them seek to return the items they find to the soldiers or their families.
“I saw the collections of a few greedy researchers that have hundreds (of dog tags) and never returned any,” he said. “I think it is a shame and not a good way of practicing this hobby.”
Fezzuoglio said that when he finds something that identifies a solider, he goes to work trying to find that person or a relative.
Above is the dog tag unearthed by artifact hunter Davide Fezzuoglio during a recent dig in a field in Pisa in Italy. It belongs to the late Linzie Albert Holmes, a longtime Indianola resident. Photo provided to The E-T
He starts with the National Archives, and he uses sites like Find a Grave to try and track down at least a relative of the soldier.
“It's tough work, but after we are able to talk to relatives and listen to their stories, it's the best feeling, a great satisfaction,” he said.
That’s where Indianola’s Rivers Phillips enters the story.
When Fezzuoglio tracked Linzie Holmes to Indianola, he left a short note on the Find a Grave website, a message Phillips might have missed on most days.
Phillips has been documenting the veterans buried in the Indianola Cemetery through the Daughters of the American Revolution for nearly twenty years, she said, and she frequently uses Find a Grave to help genealogists across the country build family trees.
Phillips has grown accustomed to using the Find a Grave app while working in the cemetery, but on the day before Fezzuoglio left his note, she had decided to go to the website to print off her list of veterans.
The next day, she wanted to go back to a grave and spray some ant killer before she took a photo of another headstone.
“I decided to reprint my list, and that’s something that I never do,” she said. “Linzie Holmes comes up, and I went, ‘That’s one of my veterans. He wasn’t on there yesterday.’”
She opened the note, and it simply read, “I have the dog tag.”
“I couldn’t believe it,” Phillips said. “I sent an email to this guy, and he responded immediately.”
She not only knew Linzie Holmes’ family, but she knew exactly where he was buried.
Within a week, she had connected Fezzuoglio with Dennis Holmes.
“I thought that it was fascinating that this guy is digging in the ground in Italy and finds these dog tags and that he actually made the effort to find the family,” Philips said. “They look really good to be buried that long, You can still read them.”
Linzie Holmes was a native of Duck Hill. His family moved to Indianola when he was a child.
He married his wife Beatrice, and they had four children, Faye Vance, Kaye Chambers (deceased), David and Dennis.
Linzie Holmes returned from the war and lived a life not too different from other veterans of the time.
He was a member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and he was a Mason.
He passed away in 1997 at the age of 73.
Dennis Holmes said he knew very little about his dad’s service, other than a photo of his father on what appears to be an Italian motorcycle while stationed in Italy.
“I remember when I was a kid growing up, we never did eat rice at home,” Dennis Holmes said. “Daddy wouldn’t let momma cook rice, because he said that over there, for a couple of weeks, all they had to eat was rice. He said that if he ever made it back home, he didn’t want rice.”
Linzie Holmes had his dog tags with him when he came home from the war, his son said, which is why Fezzuoglio believes he likely buried a prior Army issue.
“I was tickled to death to hear from Rivers,” Dennis Holmes said. “I told my brother and sister about it, and they just couldn’t believe it either.”
There is a wrinkle in the story.
Because of a twenty-year-old Italian law, which states that artifacts older than 70 years belong to the Italian government, many of Fezzuoglio’s relics had to be turned over. That includes Linzie Holmes’ dog tag.
Fezzuoglio said that his team is working on a book about their digs and finds, and they have located around 40 dog tags.
“We managed to return a dozen,” he said. “I'm not able to return the dog tag to the (Holmes) family, which was enthusiastic to receive it.”
Fezzuoglio said that he is hopeful that since he has positively located Linzie Holmes’ family, the Italian government will release the dog tag and allow it to be shipped to Mississippi.
“For me it's beginning to become a life mission,” Fezzuoglio said about returning the war relics. “It’s a project, it's a purpose. I mean those men and women are the 'greatest generation,' and they deserve all the strain I put to discover and safeguard their traces left for us 80 years ago…Returning the dog tags to relatives is a way to say thank you for those (war) efforts.”
Fezzuoglio said it's a way to honor the soldiers’ memories and to demonstrate the peaceful ties between the United States and Italy in 2024.
The Holmes family would like to be reunited with the dog tag, but that will have to wait.
The dog tag sits just as Linzie Holmes left his memories of war so many decades ago, locked away somewhere in Pisa.
