Ottie Owen Oldham Jr.

A word on the cards with a hollow marker, like this one. They describe the units and places around Oldham, drawn from the U.S. Army’s published campaign histories. Those volumes record regiments and battalions rather than individual men: they name the 16th Infantry, and they never name Company H or the men in it. So these cards say ‘the company’ or ‘the battalion’. The cards with a solid marker are the documents that name Oldham by service number.

Company H was the heavy weapons company of the 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry: the company that carried the battalion’s 81mm mortars and heavy machine guns rather than rifles. The War Department published the manual for this kind of company, Heavy Weapons Company, Rifle Regiment, on 19 May 1942, the same week the company took Oldham on at Camp Blanding. A rifle regiment kept one such company in each battalion to give the riflemen fire they could not carry themselves.

The 1st Infantry Division sailed for England in the summer of 1942 and trained there through the autumn. It had spent 1941 on the Atlantic coast learning to land on a defended shore, working alongside the 1st Marine Division; the 9th Infantry Division took over that role when the division left for the United Kingdom. The landing rehearsals were the point. In England the division was preparing for a major amphibious landing, though the men rehearsing it were not told where it would fall.

The 81mm mortar was the heaviest thing a foot soldier could carry into the line. Its manual called it the weapon that ‘combines mobility and power in greater degree than any other supporting weapon’, with an explosive shell comparable to a 75mm gun’s and a useful range of about 2,000 yards. Broken into loads, the weapon and its ammunition were carried forward by the squad on foot. A mortar squad’s ammunition bearers hauled the rounds forward and fed them to the crew, and when the crew took losses the bearers stepped up to serve the weapon themselves. It was heavy work close to the front, feeding the gun the whole company was built around.

Operation TORCH put the 1st Infantry Division ashore around Oran on 8 November 1942, its first day of the war, against Vichy French resistance. The 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry came ashore that morning, was released from reserve, and was sent inland toward Fleurus on the division’s southern flank. Over the next two days the battalion relieved another at Fleurus and pushed up the Fleurus–Oran road, running into a sharp fire fight near St. Eugène before the Oran garrison gave up on the 10th.

Through the winter the 1st Division fought east across Tunisia, and in February 1943 it met Rommel’s counteroffensive at Kasserine. On 20 February the 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry moved to the northern edge of the Bou Chebka plateau; its companies, attached to Combat Command B, held ground near Bou Chebka pass among Senegalese troops while the German armour drove for the Kasserine gap. The battalion waited at the crossroads east of Djebel el Hamra for the order to counterattack, in the U.S. Army’s first hard fight against the Germans.
Where Oldham was in these weeks rests on Company H’s pay rolls, which carry the service number 33146214 in November 1942 and again in June 1943, with no surviving document in between. The battalion’s movements are its own; they are not a record of Oldham’s.

In the spring the 1st Division went over to the attack in southern Tunisia. The 16th Infantry helped take Gafsa on 17 March, then fought at El Guettar at the end of the month, where the regiment’s advance on Hill 482 had to cross four miles of open ground in full view of the enemy. The official history called it ‘slow and costly’. The regiment took Hill 469 in late April. When the Axis armies in Africa surrendered in May, the campaign the division had opened at Oran was finished.
The famous fight for Hill 609 in these same days belonged to the 34th Division, not the 16th Infantry; the regiment held the neighbouring high ground at Hill 531. And as with the winter, the pay rolls are what place Oldham in the company, not the regiment’s battle map.

After Tunisia the company pulled back to the Algerian coast to refit and rehearse the next landing. Company H’s own morning reports place it at Saint Leu and then Staoueli, near Algiers, through the early summer. The 2 June report at Saint Leu shows the company being rebuilt: twelve enlisted men attached from the 1st Replacement Depot for rations, quarters and administration, filling the gaps Tunisia had left. These weeks were the pause between the desert and Sicily.

In the first week of July the 1st Division loaded onto its invasion transports off Algeria and sailed for the south coast of Sicily. The 16th Regimental Combat Team would land on the beaches in front of Gela, in the centre of the U.S. Seventh Army’s assault, with orders to push inland and seize the Gela–Farello landing ground and the town of Niscemi. The landing was set for the dark early hours of 10 July.

The 16th Infantry came ashore at Gela before dawn on 10 July and pushed for the high ground toward Piano Lupo, linking up with paratroopers dropped inland. The next day General Conrath sent the Hermann Göring Division’s tanks at the beachhead in two columns. The 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry stood in the path of one of them. On 11 July, the official history records, it was ‘first to feel the weight of the German attack’ at Abbio Priolo, where its companies and the paratroopers had ‘little time to complete more than hasty foxholes and weapons emplacements’ before the Mark III and IV tanks came on. Company H was the battalion’s heavy weapons company, so its mortars and machine guns were part of that thin line. The battalion held, and by mid-afternoon, with tanks destroyed and disabled, Conrath called the attack off.

After Gela the 1st Division drove into the mountainous centre of the island, and Company H’s morning reports trace the route town by town: Niscemi, Mazzarino, Pietraperzia, Enna, Villapriolo, Gangi, Nicosia. By the end of July the division was pursuing the retreating 15th Panzer Grenadier Division east from Nicosia; on 29 July heavy rain and rear-guard resistance stopped the 16th Infantry short of Cerami, with the stronghold of Troina still eight miles beyond.
These are the company’s stations, and for one stretch they are explicitly not Oldham’s. From 21 to 25 July 1943 Oldham was off the company’s rolls at the 1st Medical Battalion clearing station, wounded at Gela and not yet returned. The towns the company passed through in those four days are its route, and not a record of one wounded man’s whereabouts.

His parents learned he had been hurt six weeks after it happened, and only because the War Department wired them. The hometown paper reported it that Friday:

“Ottie O. Oldham Jr., a son of Mr. and Mrs. O. O. Oldham, of Evans, was slightly wounded in action in the North African area on July 12, according to a telegram received by the young man's parents on Monday morning of this week. … The young man's mother had received two letters from him since the date of his being wounded. One of the letters was under date of July 20 and the other July 27. In neither of the letters did he mention about being wounded.”

A second War Department notice told his parents he had left an army hospital in North Africa. Three days later he was in another, and he never went back to a rifle company.

The Jackson County paper carried the news home:

“Mrs. O. O. Oldham, of Evans, has been notified that her son, Ottie Oldham … has been awarded the Purple Heart … He has now been discharged from the hospital but his wounds were such that he will not see active front line service again but has been given an assignment of limited duty.”

His discharge names the medal and its number but gives no date. This item supplies one: the award reached him in North Africa by late November 1943. The paper calls the wound severe. In August the same paper called it slight, and the Army's medical record describes a bullet wound of the forearm, returned to duty. Take the date from this item, not the description.

A sweep of the unit's own morning reports puts the 80th Station Hospital at APO 763 every month from September 1943 to February 1944, a 500-bed fixed hospital taking casualties out of the Sicily campaign. He joined it in October and is named again in March. The monthly pages in between do not name him, so his winter here is an inference from two fixed points rather than a documented fact.

A station hospital was a fixed rear-area hospital that held the sick and the recovering, well behind the fighting. The 80th Station Hospital at Bizerte, on the Tunisian coast, was one of dozens strung across the Mediterranean rear. Men passed through them from the front and, if they could not go back to a rifle company, were put to work in the roles the rear still needed filled: clerks, orderlies and supply hands. It was the kind of place a wounded infantryman reclassified for limited service ended up, and supply-clerk work was the kind of duty such a man was given.
At the 80th, Oldham was a patient first and staff second: sent there on limited-service duty, then kept on as a supply clerk. That turn is documented on the solid-marker cards around this one.

By 1944 the Army was rotating men out of the theatre who could no longer serve at the front: the wounded, the sick, the reclassified. It sent them home under a rotation policy rather than holding them in rear jobs overseas forever. A man tagged for rotation was gathered with others into a numbered group, moved to a port, and shipped back to a reception station in the United States. That is the machinery that carried Oldham from Bizerte to Virginia in April 1944, and the solid-marker cards that follow trace that route by name and number.

Three weeks after stepping off the boat he was at his parents' house in Evans. The Jackson County paper:

“Pfc. Ottie Oldham, son of Mr. and Mrs. O. O. Oldham, of Evans, is spending a furlough with the family, having arrived back in this country only a short time ago from the European theatre of the war. He was wounded in Africa and was awarded the Purple Heart but has now recovered from his wounds received.”

This is the only record of the five weeks between his return on April 17 and his appearance at Camp Reynolds on May 22. His family had not seen him in nearly two years.

Five years after coming home he applied for Pennsylvania's veterans' bonus. The Beaver County record keeps details no other surviving document carries: his organization written as ‘16th Inf 1st Div.’, the Wounded box marked, and a note that his discharge certificate was recorded at the courthouse in Ripley, West Virginia. He named his mother Lillie of Evans as beneficiary. The state paid him $140 for domestic service and $330 for foreign. For a long time this form was the only place his regiment was named, and he had named it himself to claim a bonus. The 16th Infantry’s own award order, found in 2026, says he had it right.