A records search, a doughboy’s journey home

Howard Lee Strohl was killed August 9, 1918, during the Battle of Fismes and Fismette in the Marne department of northeastern France.

You might remember my blogs last year about an Army officer from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, who was killed in the First World War.

There’s more to tell about 2^nd Lieutenant Howard Lee Strohl.

I had pieced together his story with the help of his great-niece, a unit history, the National Guard armory in Allentown, Ancestry.com, and contemporary accounts on Newspapers.com, one of which had the text of a letter he wrote home from France.

What I didn’t have was Strohl’s official military personnel file. It wasn’t at the National Archives’ National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. “If the record were here on July 12, 1973,” said the message from an archives technician, “it would have been in the area that suffered the most damage in the fire on that date and may have been destroyed.”

A card from Lieutenant Strohl’s burial case file
(National Archives at St. Louis)

But she opened another door, saying a casualty file held by the Army might have information I wanted. She suggested I write to the Army Human Resources Command’s Casualty & Memorial Affairs Operations Division at Fort Knox, Kentucky.

So in May 2023, I mailed my request with as much detail on Strohl as I could muster. Four months later, an email arrived from a tech at the National Archives at St. Louis: “We have located Howard L. Strohl’s burial case file as requested.” It turned out Human Resources Command doesn’t have World War I-era burial case files, so Fort Knox forwarded my inquiry to St. Louis.

I got directions on how to pay electronically using the U.S. Treasury’s Pay.gov service and did it right away. The cost was $28.80. “Please allow time for the scanning and uploading process to be completed,” the archives tech said. “Our staff is minimal and all requested records need to be digitized and redacted prior to delivery, so we are looking at a much longer turnaround than is typical.”

Six months passed. I gave the tech a nudge in an email. She wrote back promptly that I’d be getting the record in the next several days. Sure enough, an email arrived with a link to a PDF scan of the file.

Of its thirty-eight pages on the disposition of Strohl’s remains, the last one interested me the most. It’s an account of his final moments, given after the war by a sergeant who had been with him.

Strohl’s dog tag from his grave in the American cemetery at Fismes, France
(National Archives at St. Louis)

Strohl and Sergeant Claflin L. Bowman were in Company D, 109^th Machine Gun Battalion, part of the 28^th Infantry Division. In early August 1918, they were among the doughboys battling German troops along the Vesle River at Fismes, a village in the Champagne-Ardenne region of northeastern France.

“The carnage was awful,” a unit historian would write, “and it was our 28^th Division which successfully withstood the attack, at a fearful loss.”

Bowman said Strohl fell about 2:30 p.m. August 9 – a day after the 109^th got into the fight. He told an officer asking about the circumstances of Strohl’s death:

Just before the Lieut. was hit I was with him in the cellar of a house which was on the street leading from the city hall to the Vesle River. Lieut. Strohl left the building for the purpose of securing information but was hit by the fragments of a shell just as he reached the street. He was wounded in the chest and in the thigh. Lieut. Strohl[’s] wounds were dressed at once but he died without regaining consciousness. He is buried in the yard at the hospital at Fismes.

Howard and Ada after their October 31, 1917, wedding

Six days earlier, Strohl had written to an aunt and uncle in Allentown about seeing “all the grim horrors of warfare.” If he hadn’t been killed, he would have received an order the next day to return to the States for further training.

He was twenty-three. Back home in the Lehigh Valley, he left a wife, who had given birth to their son after he departed for France.

His remains were removed from the hospital yard and reburied two weeks before the Armistice in American Battle Area Cemetery 617 at Fismes. It was Grave 67, Row C, marked with a cross.

Sergeant Bowman, of Myerstown, Pennsylvania, was interviewed in February 1919. The officer who took his statement, 2^nd Lieutenant Charles C. Curtis, went on to become a major general in the National Guard and command its 28^th Infantry Division. Allentown’s National Guard armory, home of the 213th Regional Support Group, bears his name.

—

A January 1919 letter from Ada Strohl asking the American Expeditionary Forces about her husband’s grave
(National Archives at St. Louis)

Strohl’s burial case file shows the military’s care in dealing with his family and bringing his remains home. It’s clear the war dead of more than a hundred years ago were honored and their kin treated with respect just as they are today.

Both Strohl’s widow, Ada, and father, William, asked the Army for information about his remains. William Strohl wrote to the Adjutant General’s Office in Washington in April 1919:

Howard’s father, William Levinus Strohl

Having been informed that the Government intends to remove and send home the bodies of the American soldiers, and being deeply interested in this move on account of having lost my son, Lieut. Howard L. Strohl, 109^th Machine Gun Bat. on last Aug. 9^th, I will kindly ask you to forward me any information you may have concerning such action.

The office responded with the War Department’s policy and said, “In due time, you will be asked for information relative to your wishes in the matter of the disposition of the remains of your son.”

William Strohl’s letter to the Adjutant General’s Office
(National Archives at St. Louis)

According to the policy, the nearest next of kin – in this case, Ada – could choose to have the body returned to any address in the United States, interred in the National Cemetery at Arlington, Virginia, or any other national cemetery, or left in Europe. The government would pay the full cost for the transfer of bodies.

Ada asked that her husband’s remains be brought to her in Hellertown. But she remarried in 1920 before that could happen, and as a result no longer qualified as his nearest next of kin. That was now her toddler son, Howard R., with Bethlehem National Bank as his guardian. The bank wanted Strohl’s body delivered to his father in Bethlehem.

In April 1921, the Graves Registration Service of the American Expeditionary Forces removed Lieutenant Strohl’s remains from the American cemetery at Fismes. They were placed in a casket and delivered by rail to the port at Antwerp, Belgium.

Bethlehem National Bank telegram to Hoboken, New Jersey, correcting the Bethlehem street number for the shipping of Strohl’s remains
(National Archives at St. Louis)

The Army ship Wheaton, built by Bethlehem Steel, carried Strohl across the Atlantic. On June 11, the transport docked at Pier 42 in Hoboken, New Jersey. From there, the Lehigh Valley Railroad took him home to Bethlehem. He was laid to rest, finally, in Towamensing Cemetery.

Remembering a lost defender of Bataan

Private Earl Seibert of Headquarters Company, 803rd Engineer Battalion
(Newspapers.com)

Private Earl Seibert died eighty-two years ago at a prison camp in the Philippines and was buried there. When the Defense Department announced last month that his remains have been identified, I reached for my filing cabinet.

In 2002, I interviewed a veteran who had much in common with Seibert– eastern Pennsylvania hometowns, service in the same Army unit, the Bataan Death March and a camp where more than 2,500 POWs died. The difference was that Joe Poster was spared.

—

Seibert was among seven men from Allentown who shipped out to the Philippines in the fall of 1941. Along with thousands of other U.S. and Filipino troops, they were taken prisoner the following spring, several months after Japanese forces invaded the islands. Ahead of them was the Death March and horrific captivity. Only three would survive.

Soldiers from Allentown (crouching, from left) John Sokalsky, Raymond George and Eugene McNamara; (standing, from left) William Johnson, Walter Lamm, Earl Seibert and Edwin Warfield. All belonged to the 803rd Engineer Battalion. The photo ran December 29, 1941, in their hometown paper, The Morning Call.
(Newspapers.com)

In December 1941, just days after the Japanese landed, The Morning Call of Allentown ran a photo of the seven men – Seibert, Eugene McNamara, Edwin Warfield, John Sokalsky, Raymond George, William Johnson and Walter Lamm. Citing a letter from McNamara dated November 29, the paper said they were together at Fort Stotsenburg/Clark Field, about fifty miles from Manila.

Before his Army service, Seibert was a mechanic at Hoffman Bros. auto salvage. He and the six others were inducted in June 1941 and got basic military engineer training at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Assigned to the 803^rd Engineer Battalion, they arrived on Luzon in October and were attached to the Far East Air Force. Their job was building airfields.

An update in The Morning Call of May 30, 1942
(Newspapers.com)

Seibert, of Headquarters Company, was badly wounded January 16, 1942, as the Americans and Filipinos fought to defend the Bataan peninsula. There were no details on his injuries.

After the Allies surrendered April 9, most of the men in the 803^rd’s three companies on Bataan – a fourth company was on Corregidor — walked from Mariveles to San Fernando on the Death March, according to Good Outfit: The 803^rd Engineer Battalion and the Defense of the Philippines, 1941-1942, by Paul W. Ropp.  They were taken by train to Capas for internment at nearby Camp O’Donnell. Many of the engineers left the camp to toil for their captors in the mountains of northern Luzon. After a few months, they were marched to Cabanatuan Camp 1 , where disease, malnutrition and maltreatment took a dreadful toll.

Seibert, age twenty-three, died of diphtheria at Cabanatuan on July 27, 1942. He was buried in a common grave at the camp cemetery. His parents didn’t learn of his death until three years later, after Japan’s surrender.

Ropp’s 559-page history of the battalion lists what happened to its members. Here’s what the book says about the six other soldiers from Allentown, all of them members of Company B:

Lamm

— Private Walter Lamm survived the war. He left Cabanatuan in September 1942, was transported on the hell ship Tottori Maru to Korea and then to a POW camp in Mukden, Manchuria. (He died in 2008 at age eighty-nine.)

Warfield

— Private First Class Edwin Warfield survived the war. He was taken from Cabanatuan in July 1944, transported on the hell ship Sehiiko Maru and held captive near Osaka, Japan. (He was eighty-six when he died in 2000.)

Sokalsky

— Private First Class John Sokalsky survived the war. He was taken from Cabanatuan, transported on the Tottori Maru and taken to Mukden in October 1944. (He died in 1984 at age sixty-eight.)

— Private Eugene McNamara died May 1, 1942, at Camp O’Donnell of cerebral malaria and dysentery.

George

— Private Raymond George, twenty-four, died in the Cabanatuan hospital August 27, 1942, of dysentery. He had been wounded in action April 8. (Warfield helped bury him.)

Johnson

— Private William Johnson, twenty-eight, died April 15, 1942, of a fractured skull during the Death March. He might have been murdered near Balanga. According to a November 1945 story in The Morning Call, Warfield told Johnson’s parents their son collapsed during the march and was carried away, never to be seen again.

—

Poster in photo taken September 8, 1945, after he was liberated from Mukden camp

Word that Seibert died at Cabanatuan and his remains have been identified took me back to an interview I did for The Morning Call twenty-two years ago. Joe Poster grew up in Pottstown and served in Company B of the 803^rd. He went on the Death March and the work detail in the mountains. At Cabanatuan, he once helped bury the dead. Sent to Manchuria, he almost died of nephritis at the Mukden camp.

“I can’t say how I made it,” Poster told me. “I lived day to day. I was scared all the time. I thought maybe tomorrow those Japanese will kill me. I never knew whether they were going to murder us or not. That’s the way it was for three-and-a-half years, even till the last day.”

Poster came home late in 1945. He got married, worked for Mack Trucks in Allentown and was a national commander of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor.

When I arrived at his home for one of our interview sessions, he yelled that I was making him remember “all this stuff.” He was still haunted and couldn’t sleep.

He died in 2003, a year after my story ran. He was eighty-three.

A proper home for a fallen airman’s medals

Last of two parts

John Yanno of the 213th Regiment Museum in Allentown, Pennsylvania, shows newly arrived medals honoring Bob Riedy for his service with the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War II.

Robert Harvey Riedy, an American in the Royal Canadian Air Force, was killed March 18, 1942, on a training flight in England. The accident happened at Mount Farm in Oxfordshire, a Royal Air Force satellite base for No. 15 Operational Training Unit, which trained night bomber crews on the twin-engine Vickers Wellington.

Bob was in the cockpit of a Wellington Mk.1. If the records are accurate, he was in the right-hand seat for second pilots. Another RCAF sergeant was the captain in charge of the aircraft and sat in the pilot’s seat on the left. A gunner was aboard and would have been seated near the wing root.  

Wellington Mk.1 bombers

During takeoff at 1:25 p.m., the Wellington swung off the runway and clipped a twin-engine Lockheed Hudson bomber parked on the edge of the fire track, according to the RAF accident report. The Wellington rose vertically to 200 feet, stalled and plummeted to the ground. Riedy, who was twenty, and the captain/pilot died on impact. The gunner was seriously injured.

Captain/pilot Charles G. Wiley, age twenty-three and from Galt, Ontario, was blamed for the crash. The station commander noted the accident was due to “pilot inexperience and error of judgement.” The report explains: “Pilot contrary to training instructions failed to stop aircraft and line up runway prior to takeoff.”

Riedy’s burial card, part of his service record in Ottawa, Canada, shows he was interred March 21, 1942, at the Canadian Military Extension of England’s Brookwood Cemetery.
(National Archives of Canada)

Two days later, Bob’s parents in Allentown, Pennsylvania, received a telegram from Ottawa, Canada. According to The Morning Call, it said he was “killed in action.” They were expected to learn the details later from his commander. Bob was buried in England’s Brookwood Military Cemetery. The Allentown church he attended, St. Paul’s Lutheran, was filled to capacity for a memorial service.

A letter from Bob – the fourth his parents received from him after his death – arrived in mid-April and included a clipping from The Times of London. A photo showed him and five other grinning fliers with the headline, “They swept into battle against the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau.” The caption said they were among the airmen who, in February 1942, tried to stop the two German battleships from steaming home from the French coast.

Photo from The Times of London shows Riedy (arrow) with fellow fliers. They reportedly joined in trying to keep two Scharnhorst-class battleships from reaching German ports in the Channel Dash of February 11-13, 1942. Riedy sent the clip to his parents. It ran in The Morning Call of Allentown on April 16, 1942.

No. 15 OTU was one of the units that provided Wellingtons for the so-called Channel Dash. But the records of crews and aircraft are sketchy, so I couldn’t confirm that Bob participated.

In 1992, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Bob’s death, The Morning Call ran a story about him based on letters, interviews and contemporary newspaper coverage. If Bob’s parents knew how he was killed, they apparently didn’t tell the newspapers. One of his Allentown pals said he remembered hearing that Bob’s Hawker Hurricane fighter was shot down over the English Channel.

Intrigued, I wrote to Ottawa for Bob’s service record and to London for RAF records. Months later, the reporter who did the original story wrote a column on my findings – that Bob’s life ended in a training accident.  I went on to write blogs about Bob and even tried to find out what became of the gunner who survived the crash, Sergeant W.J.D. Carter of the RAF Volunteer Reserve. There was nothing more to say, or so I thought.

Last November, The Morning Call emailed that a caller named Bruce Hoch wanted to speak with me about Bob. When I phoned Bruce at his home in Seekonk, Massachusetts, I was amazed to learn he had two medals posthumously awarded to Bob and one given to his parents.

Bruce Hoch of Seekonk, Massachusetts, returned Riedy’s medals to Allentown.

Bruce wanted to find a suitable home for the medals in Bob’s hometown. But how did he come to have them?

In the early 1940s, Bruce’s parents lived next door to Bob’s on Jackson Street in Allentown, and the couples were friends. Bruce’s father was just a few years older than Bob and didn’t know him. After Bob was killed, Russell and Mildred Hoch moved elsewhere in the city, with Bruce a toddler at the time. The Hochs remained friends with Harvey and Eda Riedy.

“My father used to go fishing with Harvey all the time,” Bruce said. “I think the friendship between them was somewhat due to [my father’s] being close to Robert’s age. … As I got older, I used to go with my father and Harvey fishing.”

Bruce’s parents ended up buying a home on South 10^th Street in Allentown. When Eva died in 1968, Harvey came to live with the Hochs. He died the next year.

“When Harvey passed, what possessions he had at our house were left with my parents,” Bruce said. “My father gave Robert’s medals to me at the time. I was probably in my twenties. That’s how I came into possession of them, and they’ve been with me probably close to 50 years.”

Yanno mounted Riedy’s medals in this shadow box and set it atop the 213th Regiment Museum’s World War II display case. They are (from left) the War Medal 1939-1945; the Memorial Cross, given to Bob’s parents; and the Canadian Volunteer Service Medal.
(Photo courtesy of John Yanno)

Bruce’s job in a company of inventory specialists took him from Allentown to Hazleton and Lancaster, and then to Nashua, New Hampshire. He moved on, starting a small business in Seekonk.

“The medals stayed with me,” he said. “Every now and then, when Memorial Day would come around, it would work on my mind a little bit, because I’m seventy-two now, and if something happens to me, I don’t know what would happen with these medals.

“I didn’t want them to just fall into someone’s hands that are going to turn around and sell them or whatever. I wanted them to be somewhere where they would mean something to somebody, where people would be able to see them and read about them.”

Bruce saw a story I’d written about Bob online and called The Morning Call to reach me. I put him in touch with John Yanno of the 213^th Regiment Museum at Allentown’s Charles C. Curtis Armory. The museum supports the 213^th Regional Support Group, a National Guard unit, by maintaining a gallery of artifacts dating to the Civil War. The 213^th Regiment is known as the “First Defenders,” so named by President Abraham Lincoln when he asked for soldiers to help defend the capital.

“We have displays from many of the wars that the United States was involved in and would be honored to add Bob’s medals to our collection,” John emailed Bruce.

When the three medals arrived, John found them in “great condition.” Two had been awarded posthumously to Bob — the War Medal 1939-1945, awarded by the United Kingdom to all full-time personnel of the Armed Forces and Merchant Marines, and the Canadian Volunteer Service Medal. The other is the Memorial Cross, given to his parents because their son died on active duty in the Canadian Forces.

The medals are now on display in the 213^th Regiment Museum.

“I’m very, very happy to have gotten them down there,” Bruce said. “They’re back home where they really, truly belong.”

RCAF pilot’s medals come home to Pennsylvania

First of two parts

Sergeant-pilot Robert H. Riedy of Allentown, Pennsylvania, with the Royal Canadian Air Force in England, 1942

The last time I wrote about World War II flier Robert Harvey Riedy was seven years ago. Now someone wanted to talk to me about him. An editor at my former employer, The Morning Call of Allentown, Pennsylvania, emailed a transcription of a voicemail message. I didn’t recognize the man’s name. He left his phone number but didn’t say where he was calling from.

Riedy was a 1938 Allentown High School grad memorialized as the first serviceman from the city to die in Europe during the war. My file on him was more than 2 inches thick. What more was there to learn about him?

—

Bob Riedy was a YMCA summer camp leader and a swimmer, the only child of Harvey and Eva Riedy of Jackson Street near the Little Lehigh Creek. His dad was a cashier and freight agent for the Jersey Central and Reading railroads and a leader in the local Democratic Party.

Bob’s teachers and pals at Allentown High described him as brilliant. The yearbook says he “has good common sense and good judgment. … Because his mind is usually wandering around in the air, he is planning for a career in aviation.”

He graduated with honors at sixteen and followed through on his plan, studying aircraft maintenance at the Curtiss-Wright Technical Institute in Glendale, California. In April 1939, he made headlines across the country when he caught a ride home with a noted transport pilot, Frank Cordova, on a twin-engine Barkley Grow. Bob’s hometown newspaper crowed that he “contributed to the log of American aviation by being recorded as the first trans-continental hitchhiker through the clouds.”

Riedy in the 1938 Allentown High School yearbook, the Comus

After 14 months at Glendale, he found work at the Consolidated Aircraft Corp. in San Diego. Then in April 1940, he was hired as an aeronautical engineer at the Curtiss-Wright plant in Buffalo, New York, one of the largest airplane factories in the world, where he worked alongside college graduates.

Bob wrote to his parents from Toronto seven months later. He had quit his job and flouted U.S. neutrality by crossing the border to join the Dominion of Canada in the fight against the Nazis.

“I am in training with the Royal Canadian Air Force under the British Commonwealth Training Plan as a ‘special reserve,’ ” he wrote on December 13 from No. 1 Manning Depot. “After the completion of about eight to nine months’ training, I expect a commission as pilot-officer. … If they don’t give me a commission, I shall at least become a sergeant-pilot.”

His joining the RCAF hadn’t been “as sudden and impetuous as you may think,” he wrote to his buddy Charles Fegely in Allentown. “I had been contemplating it for some time. … For years I had cherished hopes of getting into the Royal Air Force. … This may sound a bit unpatriotic to you as it does to all my other friends, but … the RAF with its squadrons all over the world from Cairo to Singapore spells just a little more romance than ‘U.S. Army Air Corps.’ “

Riedy’s RCAF service record
(National Archives of Canada)

On December 17, 1940, he wired his parents that he was being transferred to Coastal Command and would be leaving the next day for RCAF Station Debert, Nova Scotia, a training site for pilots and aircrew from British Commonwealth nations.

 “I hope to become a writer someday,” Bob told The Morning Call when he was home for Christmas. “My experiences now should help me considerably.”

Returning to Canada, he took air navigation courses at No. 3 Initial Training School in Victoriaville, Quebec. After that, he was off to No. 2 Elementary Flying Training School at Fort William, Ontario, and then to No. 6 Service Flying Training School at Dunnville, Ontario.

Vickers Wellington Mk.1 bombers

In October 1941, Sergeant-Pilot Riedy ferried a bomber to England. “Arrived safe – having swell time,” he said in a cablegram to his parents. But in a letter to Charles Fegely, he made clear his disappointment: “In spite of the fact that I expected to fly fighters, they’ve stuck me on bombers.”

According to his RCAF service record, he was assigned to No. 20 Operational Training Unit at Lossiemouth, Scotland, which trained night bomber crews using the twin-engine Vickers Wellington. An OTU was the crews’ final training stage and included operational sorties.

On December 7, 1941, the day of the Pearl Harbor attack, Bob wrote to his YMCA friends at home that he had gotten out of flying bombers. “It was just like driving a truck, so I raised a stink – told them that my dad was a good friend of FDR and all that. It worked, and I’m being put back on fighters, which are a heck of a lot more fun.”

The Morning Call of March 21, 1942: Despite the headline, it’s unclear whether Riedy intended to seek a transfer to a U.S. unit. The story says “it is believed” that’s what he wanted, because he had asked his parents to send a copy of his birth certificate to the American authorities in London.

Bob’s service record doesn’t show him with a fighter unit. It has him remaining with No. 20 OTU until February 1942, when he was transferred to No. 15 OTU at RAF Harwell, which provided the same bomber training.

In his letter to his YMCA pals, Bob wrote about how grateful he was to the British servicewomen who kept him safe in the skies.

“Whenever the weather sets in and you get yourself lost (which is practically always with me) it’s invariably a woman control officer who gets you down in one piece and on the right side of the [English] channel. …

“Perhaps you think I’m eulogizing them too much, but when your life depends on them every time you take off, and when some 18-year-old girl, who is much more homesick than you are, fixes a jam in your guns in a hurried refuel – well, you want to let somebody hear about it.”

No British servicewoman or anyone else would be able to save him one day at an airfield near Oxford. He wouldn’t live to become a writer, but he wasn’t forgotten. Eighty-one years after Bob’s death, medals he earned were returned to his hometown for display in a place of honor. It happened after I called the man who wanted to talk to me about him.

COMING NEXT: A proper home for Riedy’s medals

A Christmas poem from a WWII merchant mariner

Cadet-Midshipman Frank Tone
(Courtesy of the Tone family)

Eighty years ago, a cadet from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy named Frank Tone sent a Christmas poem from the Mediterranean to his parents in Easton, Pennsylvania. Eleven days later, he was killed aboard his Liberty ship during “little Pearl Harbor,” a Luftwaffe attack on the port of Bari, Italy.

Frank, a twenty-year-old engine cadet, was on the SS Samuel J. Tilden the night of December 2, 1943, when a bomb destroyed the engine room, where he was on watch. There was no body to recover.

Elsewhere in the harbor, Ju-88 bombers sank 17 Allied ships and killed more than 1,000 British and American servicemen and hundreds of civilians. The Liberty ship SS John Harvey exploded, killing all aboard and spreading deadly mustard gas in the air and water. No one was supposed to know about the chemical weapons cargo.

I wrote a two-part story about Frank that ran over the weekend in The Morning Call of Allentown, my old employer. His family provided a trove of material: old photos and original documents, including the Western Union telegram informing his parents he was missing in action, a “certificate of presumptive death” and several Victory Mail letters he wrote from the Mediterranean.

One of those letters to his family is intriguing. It was dated November 21, 1943, and included a two-stanza typewritten Christmas poem. Here it is:

Polish the star on the Christmas tree
And give it an extra sparkle for me
Then give it my share of your Christmas cheer
So we won’t feel so far apart this year.

Yes, I’m in the old world and you’re in the new
But “merry Christmas” can still ring true
For we’re winning the right to say again
“Peace on Earth, goodwill to men.”

Beneath it, Frank signed it in longhand, “Love to all.”

So, did Frank write the poem? If he didn’t, who did?

I turned to my friend Kenneth Woolley III at the Allentown Public Library, a tenacious researcher who helped me debunk the myth that Bethlehem Steel made the steel for New York City’s iconic Chrysler Building. “I like this mystery,” Kenny said. “I’ll see what I can turn up.”

The V-mail Frank Tone sent from his Liberty ship on November 21, 1943
(Courtesy of the Tone family)

Here’s what Kenny said after several weeks on the case:

“I had a few other librarians on the trail of this poem also. We could not find any mention or lines from the poem in any resource we tried. I checked first with all the U.S. newspapers and even U.K. newspapers. I also tried some poetry encyclopedias that let you search by keywords and text. Internet searching also turns up nothing with that text. Nothing shows up. This leads me to believe that
a) Frank wrote the poem himself.
b) Frank borrowed the poem from a friend or acquaintance who wrote it.
c) It was a generic poem being used by many in the military, but if this was the case, surely other examples in letters or postcards would have survived.

“I did try to find other examples of poetry on GI postcards and looked at many letters from GI’s to home and I did not find the poem. … 

“Also, the V-mail telegrams that I found online for Christmas tended to have pre-filled illustrations and cartoons. Sometimes they were little Christmas jingles and verse, but they were very illustrated text and fonts. My question would be: Did the GI’s fill these out themselves or was a telegraph operator on hand helping them fill them out? They might have had a bunch of ‘ideas’ and templates to give GI’s sending the telegram.

“Frank’s V-mail seems to be hand-typed, although the added Bible verse and poem seem to indicate a generic nature to it. So it really is difficult to say if he wrote it or not. I’d love to see all the V-mail held in collections in museums and libraries across the country that I found in my research to see if any follow Frank’s format. So far, his is fairly unique.”

What do you think of this mystery poem? Where did it come from?

A final salute to a Devil’s Brigade commando

Bert Winzer of the 1st Special Service Force in World War II

I met Bert Winzer in March 2012 at the annual banquet of Lehigh Valley Chapter 190, Military Order of the Purple Heart.

I’d go to those events at the Fullerton American Legion post in search of veterans’ stories for my employer, The Morning Call of Allentown.

Bert and I talked. He wowed me. During World War II, he fought in the 1^st Special Service Force, better known as the Devil’s Brigade, an elite unit of Canadians and Americans made famous in the 1968 movie of the same name.

Winzer with shrapnel that was removed from his left shoulder in 1944

He agreed to be interviewed and told me his story over many hours at his home in Lower Macungie Township. The piece ran on Memorial Day 2012 as part of my “in their own words” series. I brought him a stack of copies.

After that, I saw him from time to time at veterans’ events like the Purple Heart banquets. He was also speaking at schools and in front of community groups.

When I visited him this summer at the skilled nursing facility where he was living, he pointed at the wall in front of him. “There, there!” he said. My story was taped on it. It was gratifying to know I had done something to make him proud. He deserved it.

Last month, I was among dozens of friends and family members who attended Bert’s 101^st birthday party. Among the guests were two other 101-year-old World War II vets, Pearl Harbor survivor Dick Schimmel and Angelo Bokeko of the 13^th Armored Division. Both were Bert’s pals.

Bert died in his sleep last Tuesday, October 24. I wrote about him again for the newspaper, this time with tears in my eyes.

War memories from idyllic Prince Edward Island

On the north shore of Canada’s Prince Edward Island is one of the most eloquent tributes to war dead I’ve ever seen.

Memorial to Canada’s war dead along a dunes trail in Prince Edward Island National Park, Cavendish. The toll was more than 66,000 lives lost in the First World War, more than 45,000 in the Second, 516 in Korea and 158 in Afghanistan.
(Source: Veterans Affairs Canada)

The stone monument, just a few feet high, stands along a dunes trail near the main beach at Cavendish, a locality well known as the site of the Anne of Green Gables house and a popular tourist attraction. Beyond the dunes lies the placid Gulf of St. Lawrence. Both land and sea are wondrous to the eye.

My wife and I came across the simple, dignified stone while walking the trail this month during our vacation on the island. Under an outline of a maple leaf, the words are etched in both English and French for tourists from all over the world to see:

“They will never know the beauty of this place, see the seasons change, enjoy nature’s chorus. All we enjoy we owe to them, men and women who lie buried in the earth of foreign lands and in the seven seas. Dedicated to the memory of Canadians who died overseas in the service of their country and so preserved our heritage.”

Prince Edward Island War Memorial in Charlottetown pays tribute to the islanders who “gloriously laid down their lives” in World Wars I and II, the Korean War and the Afghanistan War.

Days later, we met a Canadian with a deeply personal connection to wartime sacrifice and courage.

We were walking along the harbor of Charlottetown, the maritime province’s capital, when we saw an elderly woman sitting alone on a boardwalk bench. She stood up when we spoke with her.

I pointed to a fiercely dark cloud directly overhead, and wondered aloud why all of the other clouds around it were the brightest white. She said it seemed that a hand was going to reach down from the angry cloud and grab us.

The woman was Imelda Trainor, a native of New Brunswick soon to be ninety-nine years old. She lives in a condo just yards away and had stepped out for some air. Almost immediately, she was proudly telling us about her late husband.

Charlie, she said, was a Spitfire ace in World War II.

Flight Lieutenant Hugh Charles Trainor, a squadron leader in the Royal Canadian Air Force, racked up 8.5 kills. (You were an ace if you had five or more.)

Trainor, of 411 Squadron, was flying a Spitfire Mk IX-T when he shot down two Messerschmitt Bf 109s in Normandy over two days in June 1944, after D-Day. They were his third and fourth victories, according to Richard Bryant on Flickr.

Trainor became an ace the next month at the controls of a different Spitfire when he destroyed two more Me-109s on a single flight, Bryant says.

On September 19, 1944, while flying with 401 Squadron, Trainor took off from Belgium in a Spitfire LF Mk IX. The plane’s engine stopped because of problems with the fuel feed, according to the Aviation Safety Network. He bailed out over the Netherlands and was captured by the Germans.

The Canadian Army Reserve’s 36 Signal Regiment in the Gold Cup Parade on August 18, part of the island’s Old Home Week celebration in Charlottetown. The unit consists of communication squadrons from Glace Bay and Halifax in Nova Scotia and PEI’s Charlottetown.

Trainor was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Distinguished Service Order.

Back home in Atlantic Canada, he and Imelda were married in 1951. She was a nurse and flight attendant, and her husband a commercial pilot. They lived in Charlottetown and raised a family. Imelda said their son, forty years old, was struck by lightning while leading fellow construction workers off a Florida field. It grieved her to talk about it.

There was another World War II combat flier in Imelda’s family, her brother Gerald Vautour of the RCAF. He flew Mosquito fighter-bombers, she said, and was killed in 1944.

We walked with Imelda for a while, hugged her goodbye and watched as she turned on unsteady legs and made her way home.

A fallen doughboy’s well-traveled footlocker

Howard Lee Strohl’s World War I footlocker. His great-niece keeps it in the study of her home and uses it to store stationery supplies.

Last spring, I posted a two-part blog about Howard Lee Strohl, an Army officer who was killed in France in the First World War. A nice surprise followed. I heard from his great-niece, a researcher of her family’s history. She had never seen the photo that prompted me to write about him – the last picture taken of him before German artillery felled him in August 1918. Nor had she seen the letter he penned to his aunt and uncle in Allentown just days before his death.

Strohl with Ada Ruch of Hellertown, Pennsylvania, after their October 31, 1917, wedding in Augusta, Georgia, where he was training at Camp Hancock. He was twenty-two; Ada was eighteen. The image is a scan of a scan. “I don’t know what ever became of the original,” his great-niece said, “but we never had it.”

But she has something of Strohl’s that has survived the last 105 years – a terrific heirloom, his footlocker – and photos of him that I’m posting here.

The great-niece, whose name I’m withholding at her request, is an Army veteran of the Persian Gulf and Iraq wars who grew up and lives in the Washington, D.C., area. Her parents were from the Lehigh Valley, Strohl’s home turf. Her grandfather, Mitchell, was Strohl’s younger brother.

She said her father, Mitchell Jr., took the footlocker with him when he went to the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, in 1938. He was there for a year before entering the Naval Academy.

In Naval Academy tradition, everything is issued to midshipmen, down to their skivvies. So, the footlocker stayed home in Pennsylvania for the next four years and throughout his World War II service in the Pacific. It joined the naval officer again as he moved from post to post with his family every few years.

In the 1950s, he took the footlocker to Italy when he was ordered to Naples, and he had it in Paris for two years in the early Sixties. When his daughter was an Army officer, it went with her to Germany.

“The footlocker still has one of its original handles; the other is long gone,” she wrote. “The front, you can’t close and has been broken as long as I can remember. The footlocker still has a couple of the post-World War II shipping labels from my parents’ moves. The red one on the left from 1961 would have been from when the family went to Paris for my father’s retirement tour in the Navy, on the SS United States.

Howard (left) and his brother Morgan, circa 1897. “Unfortunately for Howard,” his great-niece said, “it was the fashion at the time, into the early twentieth century, to dress little boys up like little girls.”

“On the top of the footlocker, the Army Transport Service had painted a swath of tan paint with my father’s name, rank, serial number, and my grandparents’ address in Pennsylvania. I removed that with paint remover about 35 years ago. … If you look at old Sears, Roebuck catalogs of the 1900-18 period, or in specialty catalogs for military uniforms and equipment, you will see footlockers like these for general sale.”

—

I had no luck getting Lieutenant Howard Strohl’s personnel file from the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. It’s not there.

“If the record were here on July 12, 1973, it would have been in the area that suffered the most damage in the fire on that date and may have been destroyed,” an archives technician wrote. “The fire destroyed the major portion of records of Army military personnel for the period 1912 through 1959.”

Strohl’s great-niece said her late brother Randy, who got her started in genealogy research, hit the same roadblock years ago. But she shared two primary sources I hadn’t seen. One is an Army Transport Service manifest. It shows 2nd Lieutenant Strohl of the 109th Machine Gun Battalion shipped out to France from Hoboken, New Jersey, on April 30, 1918, aboard the troop transport Finland. Hoboken was the U.S. military’s main port of embarkation. The Finland, built in Philadelphia, had been an ocean liner.

The Strohls of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in April 1918: William and Abbie with sons (from left) Mitchell, Howard and Morgan. The couple had eight children, but only three lived to adulthood.

The other item is a burial card. Strohl was initially buried on the battlefield at Fismes, France, where he was killed in action. A diary kept by a Private John W. Feather has this August 9 entry: “Lieut. Strohl killed by a shell.” And this one for August 12: “George McKinney, Sam Curley and I recovered Sergeant Bechtel’s body from the bridge and buried it aside Lieut. Strohl and Wolfe.”

On October 26, Strohl was reburied in American Expeditionary Forces Cemetery 617 at Fismes. He didn’t come home for a year-and-a-half.

Strohl as a Pennsylvania National Guardsman. In 1916, he went to El Paso, Texas, after Mexican rebels attacked U.S. border towns. He was a private in Company M, 4th Infantry Regiment.

“It was not safe, nor could resources be devoted to returning human remains while the war was going on,” his great-niece said.

On April 9, 1921, his remains were disinterred. They were shipped from Antwerp, Belgium, to Hoboken, arriving on May 18. From there, they were sent to his father, William, in Bethlehem.

—

For months, I’ve puzzled over discrepancies in Howard Strohl’s story. Some references list him as dying August 8, not August 9, and put his rank as first lieutenant, not second lieutenant. While the National Personnel Records Center was a dead-end for Strohl’s official paperwork, I’m hoping the Army Human Resources Command at Fort Knox, Kentucky, has his casualty file. I wrote for it in early May but haven’t heard back.

His great-niece said I shouldn’t get too wrapped up in those particulars.

“In the end, a young man of twenty-three gave his life for his country, and his family mourned his passage from their presence, particularly his mother.  And that’s what we need to remember.”

Troubling WWII tales from a graveyard in France

There’s a new book, The Plot of Shame, about American soldiers who were executed for crimes committed in Europe during World War II.

I’m in it.

No, so far as I know, I didn’t have a previous life as a violent criminal. It’s just that British military historian Paul Johnson used some info and photos from one of my blogs and credited me in the text.

Johnson’s book is about a semi-secret tract at the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery in northern France. Called Plot E, it holds the remains of ninety-four Americans put to death by the U.S. military for wartime crimes of rape and murder. (In all, ninety-six Americans were hanged or shot, but the remains of two lie elsewhere.) The stories from Plot E are chilling. Johnson tells them in detail, with background on the criminals, narratives of their vile deeds, and an emphasis on the victims, who were both soldiers and civilians.

A contemptible soldier I’ve written about is buried in Plot E. He was Werner E. Schmiedel, alias Robert Lane, a German-born resident of Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, and rogue Army private who led a notorious gang of deserters called the Lane Gang. He was hanged by the military in 1945 for gunning down an Italian man in a Rome wine shop.

Werner E. Schmiedel of Breinigsville, Pennsylvania, is buried in Plot E at the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery in France. On June 11, 1945, he was hanged by the U.S. Army at Aversa, Italy, for murdering a civilian. The mug shot was Prosecution Exhibit 3 at Schmiedel’s court-martial.
(National Personnel Records Center)

I told Schmiedel’s story in a 2015 piece for The Morning Call of Allentown, where I worked. Much of what I wrote was based on court-martial records from the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis.

After I retired, I heard from a Joe LoPinto in upstate New York who wondered why his late father wasn’t in my story, which Joe’s son had seen online. The name John LoPinto didn’t ring a bell, but in fact he was a lead Army agent in the hunt for Schmiedel. What’s more, he had kept the complete report of the investigation, a document I didn’t have. Joe LoPinto shared it with me, along with stories his dad had told him about the case. With this new material, I wrote a blog in 2017 titled “Busting the Lane Gang: The John LoPinto Story.”

Johnson read my blog and emailed me in April 2022. His latest book, The Brookwood Killers, had just been published. It’s about twenty British soldiers who were executed for civil crimes and whose names are on a national memorial in Brookwood, Surrey. Now he was working on a book about Americans who’d been executed. The topic had been dealt with before, in an encyclopedic 2013 book by retired U.S. Army Colonel French L. MacLean called The Fifth Field, another name for Plot E. (I had interviewed MacLean for my newspaper story on Schmiedel.) Johnson knew of MacLean’s “excellent book” but wanted to look at the stories more from the victims’ perspective.  He hoped to use some of my blog’s info concerning John LoPinto’s report. After checking with Joe LoPinto, I gave the OK.

Technical Sergeant John LoPinto of Ithaca, New York, was an agent in the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division who played a key role in Schmiedel’s capture. In The Plot of Shame, Paul Johnson credits LoPinto’s son Joe and me for our help.
(Courtesy of Joe LoPinto)

I’ve just finished reading The Plot of Shame. Johnson is up front about its disturbing material. If we don’t have the stomach for it, he says in his intro, we should “close the cover” right then and there. But that didn’t stop me from reading every entry on every sordid case. I have to say, though, it was so disturbing that I kept laying it aside to pick up the cheery book I was reading, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. (I can explain. My wife and I will be taking a road trip to Prince Edward Island, so I had to get familiar with Anne’s story.)

It was wrenching to read about John “The Clumsy Hangman” Woods and botched executions, about soldiers convicted and sentenced to death on evidence that seemed less than damning, about the disproportionate number of Blacks among the doomed men. You learn about horrifying crimes, how they played out and to whom they happened. Johnson calls special attention to the victims, at the end of each account asking us to remember them. One more thing: I’m glad he included the desertion case of Private Eddie Slovik, a guy with a bad record who clearly didn’t belong in combat and who, it seems, was unjustly singled out for the firing squad. Slovik was buried in Plot E, but in 1987 his remains were returned to his hometown of Detroit.

We honor those Americans who served in World War II for their sacrifice and courage, but a few disgraced the flag instead of upholding it. They committed terrible acts against fellow soldiers and innocent men, women and children overseas. They should have been liberators, not rapists and murderers. We don’t like hearing about them, but it’s important that we have a record of who they were and the evil they did. The Plot of Shame helps fill that role.

A cousin, an uncle who died too young

They were soldiers. One was in Vietnam, the other in the Pacific during World War II. Here’s my tribute to them on this Memorial Day:

My cousin Nicky, an Army helicopter pilot, home on leave in June 1969 before going to Vietnam. (The spelling of his surname is different from mine.)

NICHOLAS LOUIS VENDITTI

Hometown: Malvern, Pennsylvania
Branch of service: Army
Rank: Warrant Officer 1
Unit: Americal Division Support Command
Date of death: July 15, 1969
Place: 312th Evacuation Hospital, Chu Lai, South Vietnam
Cause: Wounds suffered July 10, his sixth day in Vietnam, during a training accident involving a grenade
Age: 20
Burial: Philadelphia Memorial Park, Frazer

My Uncle Sam in the Army, 1941. After a year on a remote Pacific island, he would get a disability discharge.

SAMUEL VENDITTA

Hometown: Malvern, Pennsylvania
Branch of service: Army
Rank: Technician Fifth Grade
Unit: Battery F, 198th Coast Artillery
Date of death: May 10, 1950
Place: At home
Cause: Non-combat brain injury suffered in 1942 on Bora Bora in the Pacific
Age: 33
Burial: East Brandywine Baptist Church Cemetery, Guthriesville, Pennsylvania