News-Info-Alerts

Re: Recovered Aircraft Brings Back Memories

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: July 14, 2002

"World War II memory surfaces, quite literally

By MIKE HARDEN

When Michael Mauritz went home to Pittsburgh in 1945, he left the story of his World War II heroism in 40 feet of water off the coast of southern Italy.

The fighter pilot might have taken the untold tale to his grave, if the nets of Italian fishermen had not snagged a rusting P-40 at the bottom of Anzio Bay.

"All I knew was that Daddy was in the war," said Mauritz' daughter, Donna Robare, of Canal Winchester, Ohio. "He was a pilot, and he had been a prisoner.

"We never much talked about it," she recalled of her baby-boomer upbringing in suburban Pittsburgh. "He never really told us any of the circumstances."

"You don't want to bore people," said Mauritz, now 81. "It was hard to imagine who would want to hear it."

To his way of thinking, he wasn't any different from the more than 16 million other Americans who served in World War II.

After the war, he put away his uniform and medals and hired on at a steel mill, where he worked for 37 years.

His Italian odyssey began to surface - literally - in 1998, when a letter arrived at the home where he and his wife, Louise, had reared their family.

"You'd better come look at this letter, Mickey," Louise called to her husband when he returned from running errands one January day.

Italian aviation historian Ferdinando d'Amico had written the note.

"What brought me to write this letter to you," d'Amico wrote, "was caused by an event that took place a few weeks ago and (in) which I was involved: the rescue of a Curtiss P-40 fighter from the sea near Anzio.

"I was contacted by a search-divers team to identify the submerged plane on the basis of data found on the fuselage."

The serial number, matched with mission records, indicated Michael Mauritz had been the pilot. A computer search revealed five men of that name living in the United States.

The P-40 in question, Mauritz knew, was the one he had been forced to ditch in the Mediterranean while flying a reconnaissance mission in 1944.

The letter noted that witnesses near the beach had remembered seeing the pilot escape and swim to shore.

"Last time he was seen," d'Amico continued, "he had reached the shore and was trying to hide in a bush with German troops heading toward him. He was listed as missing in action.

"I don't know if the real Michael Mauritz is still alive and if he survived the capture and imprisonment. What I do know, however, is that I had to try to locate him or some of his relatives in the U.S.

"I hope that you could help me to bring back together the man and the machine."

Mauritz soon learned that efforts to retrieve his old plane were financed by Mariano de Pasquale, a self-made multimillionaire who owns what is regarded as the world's largest private collection of World War II military artifacts.

Military vehicles from his vintage assortment have lent authenticity to films such as "The English Patient" and "Life is Beautiful." The collection is housed in a 16-building museum on the outskirts of Rome, where he hoped to display the Mauritz plane.

Yet the story of the pilot - after he ditched the plane - remained a mystery.

Mauritz was taken prisoner by German soldiers on the beach. He was sent by train to a prison camp in northern Italy, from which he escaped with Capt. Charles Schuster, an Army Ranger, five weeks later.

To have any hope of being rescued, the pair had to pass over the Apennines, the Italian Alps.

Mauritz and Schuster spent five months on foot and, because of their meandering route, covered something like 250 miles.

They braved winter storms; Mauritz survived a near-fatal bout with pneumonia. Ultimately, they reached friendly forces at the Adriatic Sea.

Along the way, they were fed and housed by Italian peasants who risked death if the Germans learned of their small kindnesses.

The mountain ordeal made the story even more compelling to de Pasquale, who offered to fly the veteran to Italy in September 1998 for the dedication.

Mauritz made the trip with daughter Donna, son Craig and daughter-in-law Peggy. (Poor health kept his wife from accompanying them.)

While there, Robare said, her father learned something he didn't know about the plane nicknamed "Skipper."

"It had been sabotaged," she said.

German sympathizers, somehow gaining access to the plane during the night before its final mission, had stuffed a parachute into an air intake, causing the engine to overheat and malfunction.

When the plane was hauled ashore, the parachute was found still inside the intake.

Mauritz and his family were saluted with toasts throughout their stay in Italy.

At one dinner, the former pilot and POW lifted his glass "to all the kind and generous Italian people who fed me, housed me, nursed me through illness and risked their lives for five months to help me return home."

In 1998, after returning from the trip, he was encouraged to write a book.

Collaborating with writer Francine Bartolacci Costello, Mauritz produced "The Secret of Anzio Bay" (Word Association, $14.95), published earlier this summer.

Robare had to compose herself over a request from her daughter-in-law that "Pap" sign a book for his great-granddaughter, Sydney.

"She's 15 months. My dad's 81."

There but for fortune and fouled fishnets, his story could have remained at the bottom of the sea.

"What a legacy for Sydney," Robare said, "to one day be able to read it.

(Mike Harden is a columnist at the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch. E-mail mharden(at)dispatch.com.

© 2002 Texas Scripps Newspapers"