Nearly 80 years and 8,000 miles later, an invaluable piece of family history has made its way back to the Mueller home in Marietta.
Under the most improbable circumstances, the dog tag of World War II veteran Col. Ferdinand P. Mueller was returned this year to his son, Kurt Mueller, himself a Vietnam veteran.
“It is phenomenal,” Kurt Mueller told the MDJ. “Who would’ve ever thought?”
The heirloom made its way home by way of a long road, beginning in August when Mueller received a LinkedIn message from Peter Auckram of New Zealand. Auckram, a World War II and Vietnam War memorabilia collector, said he was researching a serviceman named Ferdinand P. Mueller — would Kurt Mueller, he asked, be of any relation?
Mueller replied he was, in fact, the son of “F.P.” or “Dude” Mueller, as he was known to his friends.
Auckram wrote to Mueller, “You aren’t going to believe this, but what must have been his lost dog tag was dug up in Auckland and is on sale on a local auction site … It took 20 plus hours of research to find his full name, service number, birth/death details etc. and the breakthrough was an article (F. P. Mueller’s obituary) that mentioned you and your brother’s name.”
Astonished, Mueller offered to put up the money to bid on the tag, but Auckram insisted on paying for it himself. He wanted to repay Mueller, he said, for his father’s service protecting New Zealand from the Japanese military.
Tracking down the seller after winning the auction, Auckram learned a member of a local metal detecting society had turned up the tag some 20 years prior. The man who originally found it later died, passing it on to the seller, Philip Salmon. The tag arrived in Marietta in mid-September, and Kurt Mueller has since had it framed.
F.P. Mueller died in 2003 at 89, so how the dog tag was lost will remain a mystery.
But Kurt Mueller pieced the timeline together from stories his father told him, along with various military records, learning his father was stationed in New Zealand in 1943 as a member of the 25th Infantry Division. The unit was assigned there after seeing action at Guadalcanal and Vella Lavella in the Solomon Islands.
F.P. Mueller wrote of his time there, “New Zealand, what a wonderful experience. Milk, ice cream and food that gave me back the pounds I lost. We were sent there to be trained for the next operation, but no training areas could be found. So, after a couple months, on to New Caledonia.”
The R&R was much needed, Kurt Mueller said. His father was shot in the helmet and knocked unconscious at Guadalcanal, though he quickly returned to service. And the war kicked off for him at Pearl Harbor, where F.P. Mueller was awakened in his barracks on Dec. 7, 1941 to the sound of Japanese fighters descending on the base.
With the return of the dog tag, Kurt Mueller said, “it forced particularly myself to go back in and do all this research on my dad, and realize what a war hero he was.”
Just as much as receiving the tag itself, Kurt Mueller said it’s been a joy to reconnect with his father’s story.
“The camaraderie between my dad and I, particularly both of us serving in combat, was pretty tight. We talked a lot of stuff,” he said. “…It’s really interesting for me to kind of go back and really read about a lot of the stuff that he went through and what he did. I never knew he was in New Zealand. That never was a thing that we ever talked about.”
Kurt Mueller remains active in veterans’ groups in Atlanta, where he said the story has made waves.
“It has generated a lot of interest,” he said. “People just can’t believe the story.”
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