World War II dog tag, lost in France, makes its way to GI's widow decades later

James W. Wallace joined the U.S. Army in 1943 and served in the European theater during World War II. He battled the Nazis. He helped liberate France.

At some point he lost his dog tag.

Francois Blaizot was walking near a beach in France last summer. He had a metal detector. He found a dog tag.

Thursday, nearly 71 years after the allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, the tag was delivered to Wallace's widow at an Indianapolis retirement home.

Catherine S. Wallace, 90, had been prepared for the handoff. The event, held where she lives at the American Village retirement home, was choreographed. But even so she seemed genuinely overwhelmed.

"Oh dear, Oh. Oh, dear," she stammered through tears into a phalanx of television cameras. "I don't believe it."

Her husband, who died in 1997, didn't talk about the war much, she said. She never met any of his war buddies. She has not one photograph of him in his uniform.

He did make sure his family watched war movies, including "The Longest Day," about the June 6, 1944, D-Day invasion. They would pile into the car and go to a drive-in.

A dog tag is a soldier's ID. American soldiers were first issued dog tags in the early 20th century, in time for World War I, for the grim purpose of identifying their remains. Wallace's was typical, made of aluminum and about half the size of a business card.

American soldiers' dog tags are found with some frequency along France's Normandy coast. They are relics of the huge American army that came through as it drove the Germans from France.

The French hunt them with metal detectors and sometimes keep them as mementos . But in recent years, as the Internet has made it possible to search widely for people with just a few keystrokes, some finders have been giving them back to the GI's or their survivors.

In 2012 the family of a soldier from New Orleans got his tag back. In 2013, a vet from Rochester, N.Y., was reunited with his tag. (On that occasion, the French newspaper LeMonde waxed poetic: "The sand on a beach is sometimes like a memory — one day, things that you thought were buried forever surface again, and you don't know why.")

Dog tags from other wars, including Vietnam and World War I, are sometimes found and returned, as well.

"I can't tell you how often it happens, but I'd call it frequently," said Lorine McGinnis Schulze, who runs a website that facilitates dog tag returns. "My little blog has had 24 cases in the past couple of years, so imagine how many more are found where the folks don't contact me!" she said in an email.

Wallace's dog tag, on which was imprinted "2823 Caroline St., Indpls, Ind.," was unearthed by Blaizot after he was tipped that there had been an encampment of American soldiers on some land just inland from Utah Beach, one of the D-Day landing zones.

Wallace arrived in Normandy after the fighting, military records show. He helped manage the supply chain that fueled and fed the advancing army. He started the war as a private and in two years was a staff sergeant. He received two bronze stars, though neither military records nor his family know why.

He was discharged in 1945, and he returned home to Indianapolis. In 1949 he joined the Indianapolis Fire Department, according to IFD records. He worked at Station 1, on West Michigan Street, which at the time was the only fire station in the city that had black firefighters. He retired as a lieutenant in 1970.

His dog tag listed his wife as "Thelma Wallace." James and Thelma Wallace divorced shortly after the war, and in 1951 he married Catherine. She taught first and second grade for Indianapolis Public Schools for 30 years.

The couple had three children, two of them adopted from Korea in the early 1960s. The family lived in Butler-Tarkington. The marriage lasted until his death, 46 years.

Despite the ease of Internet searches, Wallace's dog tag made its way home the circuitous, old-fashioned way, its journey a testament to the high-esteem war veterans are held in, here and abroad. The Frenchman who found the tag tried and failed to find Wallace and so turned the tag over to an acquaintance, Roger Delarocque, who runs a bed-and-breakfast on the French coast. Delarocque each year during the D-Day commemoration ceremonies invites American veterans to stay free.

Delarocque contacted Chuck Hodge, a 63-year old commercial real estate broker from Dallas. They knew each other from the dozen-some commemoration ceremonies each has attended. Hodge in his spare time has recorded about 750 oral histories of World War II vets.

Hodge, seeing the dog tag's Indianapolis address, contacted a veterans group in Marion, Indiana, thinking he was contacting one in Marion County. There, a volunteer named Cory Goodwin, a 42-year-old former marine, realized there had been a mistake — Marion is in Grant County — but he took on the task anyway. He took possession of the dog tag, and he tracked down Wallace's widow to the American Village retirement home on East 54th Street.

On Thursday he gave her the tag, along with a small packet of French soil, a gift from Blaizot, and a note from him:

Dear Madame Wallace,

It is a real pleasure to give you back the dog tag of your husband. It is a way for me to pay tribute to the men like your husband who came in our country to restore liberty.

You're sincerely,

Francois Blaizot

Call Star reporter Will Higgins at (317) 444-6043. Follow him on Twitter @WillRHiggins.