War stories: Army airman flew 25 missions in WWII

By Jay Shenai

These days, John Ritchie lives by himself at Mount Angel Towers, a senior independent living community, in a single-bedroom unit with a tiny kitchen and a grandfather clock in the living room next to his recliner, which chimes every quarter hour. There he reminisces on his life, and World War II, and the fortune that kept him alive while so many others perished.

“I thought sure as hell our plane would get shot down,” he said. “I can’t figure out yet…”

He laughs slightly, and then stops.

According to the Oregon Department of Veterans’ Affairs, 152,000 Oregonians served in the war, in both the European and Pacific theaters of combat. Today, there are only about 37,000 still living in Oregon. They are increasingly rare testaments to the time when the state was pulled into global war. What they experienced and sacrificed remains difficult for others to comprehend fully.

“The new generations don’t really have an appreciation,” said Tom Mann, Public Information manager for the ODVA, “for what the ‘Greatest Generation’ really did in saving the world from fascism, totalitarianism and tyranny.”

At 91 years of age, Ritchie, a former pilot in the U.S. Army Air Corps, relies on documents and keepsakes to remember details. Among the papers, patches, memoirs and photos spread on his kitchen table is a 1943 typewritten shipping ticket from the then-United States War Department, lining out supplies he was assigned to take along on his deployment to England: canteen, canned meat, fork, knife and spoon; first-aid field pouch, blanket, tent; M1911A pistol, .45 cal., and holster.

The bureaucratic lingo at the effort of a nation to organize and mobilize into a world power, only two years removed from the provincial, agrarian place that was America before the war.

It also masks the terror of the flight that Ritchie was destined for as a pilot with the 436th Troop Carrier Group, 80th Squadron, on a night whose moonlit landscape will not fade from his mind even as other details of his life and service gradually leave him.

Ritchie remembers flying in formation the night of June 5, 1944, his C-47 twin-engine transport plane headed east toward the Cherbourg Peninsula, in France, to drop paratroopers deep into occupied Normandy. He remembers the sight of the Nazi anti-aircraft guns as their planes approached land.

“[The Germans] were throwing so goddamn much stuff up, flak, you know, I figured that was the end of me,” Ritchie said. “They were throwing it above us, we were so low.”

He states with pride that his was one of the few planes in that chaos to deploy troops into the right drop zone.

“We didn’t lose one damn man in our outfit,” he said.

And as he veered left in formation, he saw masses of U.S. Navy ships on the water below. It’s when he knew the moment most of the world had been desperately waiting for was imminent: the Allied advance on the Third Reich.

D-Day.

His discharge papers list the full exploits of Capt. John Ritchie: 1,536 flying hours, in 25 combat missions over France, Italy, Holland and Germany, running supplies to the front and wounded troops to the rear. What they don’t describe is how life was turned upside down for people like Ritchie, then a student at Willamette University who joined the National Guard to get some money to continue classes but who suddenly found himself deployed to fight across the world – not just for a tour or two – but for the duration of a world war.

“Everything changed so much,” Ritchie said.

“Things happened so goddamn fast.”

Ritchie recalls the days after the attacks on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941, when his Oregon National Guard unit, like so many across the country, was called into federal service. An unassuming man, he didn’t recall feeling particularly worried at the time.

“I just took it as it came along, you know,” he said, with a chuckle. “What the hell, you’re in the service, you do what you’re told.”

Among his papers is also a printed memoir from his wife, Hilda, who passed away in 2002. As so many did in those days, they married only months before his deployment. Her words testify to the loneliness they both felt as his deployment ripped them apart. She wrote of the pain of saying goodbye in the freezing cold of Ft. Wayne, Ind., around Christmas 1943, as she was left behind to drive home to Oregon, with nothing but the companionship of other military wives to console her over the course of several days.

“It was so very hard we couldn’t cry,” she wrote, “we had to be brave.”

“No one could talk, so it was very quiet for a good long time.”

World War II veterans are now well into their 80s. These days they face the chronic health issues of later years, especially hearing loss. They receive assistance from the ODVA with their federal veterans’ benefits, disability compensation claims, low-income pension claims and health care. The ODVA also operates the Oregon Veterans’ Home, a 151-bed skilled nursing facility located in The Dalles. There are plans in the near future to build a second facility in Linn County.

Ultimately, someday the last World War II veteran will pass away. And a war that changed the world will retreat further into the ether of distant history, where dates and treaties, strategies and speeches overshadow the personal experiences of those who served.

“It will be sad for people my age, whose fathers fought in the War,” Mann said. “Unfortunately, time marches on.”

For John Ritchie, though, it is still quite the opposite: Experiences define the war.

The experience of racing another plane in his squadron home across the Atlantic, giddy after the war was won, and nose-diving toward the runway as he reached Florida.

The experience of returning home in uniform, July 1945, to meet his daughter, Constance Mae, born while he was away, and to be the best first birthday present a girl could ever get.

In the apartment, on the kitchen wall hangs a framed photo of a young John Ritchie in Army uniform, a proud, confident but uneven smile across his face.

In the living room, Ritchie sits in his chair as the grandfather clock chimes again, marking the connection of the present to the past.