George Marzicola
Age: 86
Born: June 14, 1924
Hometown: Los Angeles
Residence: Rancho Mirage
Military branch: U.S. Army; 5th Army: North African Campaign: 601st Military Police Battalion; 1st Armored Division
Years served: January 1943 - November 1952
Rank: World War II — sergeant; held the rank of first lieutenant when he resigned his commission in the U.S. Army Reserve in 1952.
Family: Eve Richards Marzicola (deceased); one child, Nancy Harper of Palm Desert.
About this series
Staff writer Denise Goolsby will profile desert veterans from World War II through the end of 2010 — the 65th anniversary of the end of the war. Contact her at (760) 778-4587 or via e-mail at denise.goolsby@thedesertsun.com
Coming tomorrow
U.S. Army veteran Josef Citron of Palm Desert.
More
The day after George Marzicola was sworn in as a private in the U.S. Army infantry, the 18-year-old was ordered to report to an Army intelligence officer for questioning.
The higher-ups at the military base in Arlington — a suburb in Riverside County — saw something on the recruit's personal history documents that was troubling.
Marzicola recounted the conversation between himself and the Army major.
Major: “You stated that you have an uncle, a colonel in the Royal Italian Cavalry.”
Marzicola: “Yes, that's Uncle ‘Nini' — a wonderful man.”
Major: “What would you do if you met your Uncle Nini in combat? Would you kill him?”
Marzicola: “Kill my Uncle Nini? No way!”
Major: “Then what would you do?”
Marzicola: “I would take him prisoner or he would take me prisoner.”
After this brief exchange, Marzicola was transferred out of the infantry and into the Military Police corps.
Marzicola was on duty at company headquarters when he heard that volunteers were needed to serve under Gen. George Patton in Africa.
“As an 18-year-old patriot, raised by Italian immigrants who loved America for the incredible opportunities to improve one's life I signed up as a volunteer for combat duty in the North African campaign,” Marzicola said.
In April, Marzicola was in Newport News, Va., where he joined a huge convoy of Liberty ships, cruisers and battleships “as far as the eye could see,” he said of the transatlantic crossing to Africa.
“It was my first experience with warfare bombardment,” he said. “Our company was ordered to pull ‘naval watch' duty. My buddy and I were on deck one day, when suddenly, out of the depths of the ocean, we were surrounded with German submarines, blasting and sinking some of our ships. One bomb hit the side of our ship, knocking my buddy against the bulkhead and breaking his arms and legs.”
After nearly a month, the convoy finally arrived in port in French Morocco.
“The Germans had bombed a French aircraft carrier — the deck of the ship was at water level,” Marzicola said. “Dead, wounded and mutilated GIs were carried or walked aboard our ship.”
“This impacted my illusion about the glory of warfare.”
His company was eventually shipped to Oran, Algeria in North Africa.
“One day, our CO (commanding officer) called the company out and asked, ‘Who speaks French?'” Marzicola said. “As one quickly learns in the Army — don't volunteer too quickly, because it may be a trick.”
The volunteer might be assigned a job totally different than what he thought he was volunteering for.
The second time the officer asked, Marzicola considered his current situation.
“I'm sleeping on the ground in an Army pup tent and when the wind blows across the Mediterranean, it cuts you right in half. It's freezing.”
Marzicola had taken three years of high school French, so he thought to himself, “How much worse can it get?”
“So I raised my hand and volunteered,” he said.
The division general needed an interpreter. In Algeria, which at the time was a French colony, the official language was French.
Oran was the source of water and power for the U.S. troops, the Army hospital and 1,000 Italian prisoners living in a barbed-wire encampment.
Marzicola had to persuade the mayor of Oran to provide a steady supply of these vital resources to the U.S. military.
Marzicola, who learned Italian when he was 7, was assigned to Army intelligence, translating French to English and Italian to English.
One day, a U.S. colonel told Marzicola he should sign up for a “retinue” of Italian prisoners.
“When I understood what “retinue” was (a group of attendants), I signed up for 10 Italian prisoners to serve me,” he said.
Marzicola now lived in a big hospital tent, complete with a bunk and dining room tables and chairs. The prisoners, whose living conditions just got a whole lot better, bunked in a tent next to Marzicola.
When he woke up in the morning, a Venetian barber came by to “Clip, clip, clip and shave me,” he said. A Toscano chef stopped in to ask him what he'd like for breakfast and dinner that day.
“A Venetian tailor made me look like a West Point cadet. A Venetian contractor built wooden floors with short walls in the tents of my company buddies,” he said.
In January 1944, he joined the 5th Army, fighting in the Italian campaign, on a special intelligence assignment surveying air raid shelters — collecting maps and locations from different sections of Naples, Italy.
“Short-term duty on the road to the major battle to Monte Casino,” Marzicola said.
Marzicola, a graduate of Los Angeles High School and the University of Southern California, moved to the desert in 1963. He served as president of the Palm Desert Board of Realtors in 1974.
Marzicola bought and sold parcels of land where desert landmarks have since been built, including Las Palmas Country Club in Rancho Mirage and JW Marriott Desert Springs Resort & Spa in Palm Desert.
In 1986, he donated the acreage to the city of Palm Desert for the construction of The Fountains at The Carlotta senior living facility, which opened in 1999. The center was named in honor of his mother, Carlotta Marzicola, who died in 2005 at age 107.
