Emil Francesco Ragucci

Emil was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on 17 January 1924. He spent his childhood in the Germantown neighborhood surrounded – quite literally – by brothers and sisters. Nicola and Carmela Ragucci raised eleven children in their row house on Lena Street. Life could be chaotic at times, but the Raguccis were a tight-knit bunch. “We had good parents, a family that stuck together,” recalled Emil’s younger brother Dominick.

Emil was a well-liked boy in the neighborhood, known for an obsession with baseball statistics – he could rattle off the records of all the top players of the 1930s. But baseball wasn’t his only interest: he also wanted to become a Marine.

Emil was seventeen when Pearl Harbor was attacked; when his birthday rolled around in January 1942, he launched a campaign for parental permission to join the service. One after another, his older brothers enlisted and set off for Army basic training or the Merchant Marine. With every departure, Emil’s pleas grew louder and Carmela’s refusals grew stronger. Finally, he petitioned his brothers for help. Under this combined assault, Carmela finally relented, and Emil enlisted in the Marine Corps on 5 November 1942.

Boot camp passed rapidly, and by January 1943 Private Ragucci was on the rolls of the Fifth Replacement Battalion awaiting orders for overseas duty. He crossed the country to California, sailed from San Diego, and arrived in New Zealand that spring. On 5 April 1943, he was assigned to Easy Company, Second Battalion, 2nd Marines.

Ragucci learned that he was taking the place of a veteran – a Marine killed, wounded, or struck by disease in the Guadalcanal campaign. An aggressive training schedule afforded very little slack for the new men, and Ragucci was soon hiking dozens of miles through the boondocks, practicing fieldcraft, and scrambling down nets into landing craft. This was hard work for a “feather merchant” like Ragucci – only 5’5″ and 140 pounds – but he managed to keep up in his training and on occasional liberties in Wellington.

In October, Ragucci and his company boarded the USS Zeilin and departed New Zealand for their next operation – the invasion of Tarawa.

On 20 November 1943, Easy Company was tasked with landing on Beach Red 2 – a heavily defended stretch of sand on Betio’s northern shore. The company came under intense fire as they approached the beach, and their rightmost vehicles – including those carrying  2Lt. Donald R. Dahlgren’s Second Platoon – were driven to the west, into the killing zone of Beach Red 1.

“We were the only [LVT] to get over the sea wall,” recalled PFC Lonnie Yancey. “Can’t tell you how, but we did. A Jap threw a grenade in with us, and it went in the engine room and knocked the motor out.” Dahlgren, Yancey, and a handful of Marines – including Private Ragucci – tumbled out of the vehicle and into a massive shell hole. The crater offered some protection, but no guarantee of safety. “There was a pillbox just above the hole with a back entrance to it just above the amtrac and the shell hole,” continued Yancey. “Japs were between us and the beach, and also all around us. They didn’t know we were in the shell hole and it was a turkey shoot.” Soon, several Marines lay wounded or dead – including Dahlgren, mortally wounded by grenade fragments.

In Yancey’s recollection, Emil Ragucci was still alive when Sergeant Edward Godwin, the acting platoon leader, ordered the men to shelter by the LVT for the night. Early in the morning, Godwin decided to pull the survivors back to the beach to consolidate with friendly forces.

“Ragucci got out the morning of the second day but came back to get me,” said Yancey. “As we started up the side of the hole on the beach side, he was shot and fell back in my arms. All I could do was lay him down where he was.”

Officially, Emil Ragucci was reported dead as of 20 November 1943. After the battle, his remains were buried in the East Division Cemetery, Row B, Grave 19.

The Raguccis received the dreaded telegram two days before Christmas. “My sister read the telegram and was horrified and screamed,” recalled Dominic Ragucci, who was ten years old at the time. “And my mother just broke down.” The family’s sorrow did not end there: in January 1944, PFC Nicholas Ragucci Junior died at Monte Cassino while serving with the 141st Infantry.

(Despite their terrible loss, the family continued to serve. All eight of the Ragucci brothers were in the armed forces at some point in their lives.)

When Private Ragucci’s burial ground (re-designated as Cemetery 33) was exhumed by Graves Registration personnel in 1947, his remains were not among those identified. Nor could the technicians at the Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii provide any further clues. He was declared non-recoverable in 1949.

In 2013, non-profit organization History Flight conducted an archaeological dig on the site of Cemetery 33. They recovered numerous personal effects and human remains left behind by the 604th, and turned their finds over to the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC).

Using modern anthropological analysis and a DNA comparison from a living relative, one set of remains was positively identified as Emil Ragucci. He was officially accounted for on 30 November 2017.

The following year, Emil’s body returned to his native Pennsylvania for burial in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery. Two of his brothers – Victor and Dominick – were present to welcome him home.

Watch Emil’s dignified transfer, memorial service, and funeral.

CENOTAPHS
Honolulu Memorial, Tablets of the Missing

FINAL BURIAL
Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, Cheltenham Township, Pennsylvania