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But not forgotten

CAPTAIN LAWRENCE RITTER

PHOTO PROVIDED
Capt. Lawrence Ritter stands with his WWII Army Air Corps squadron.

Editor’s Note: Matt Connor, a former columnist for the Lock Haven Express, was a contributing writer and managing editor of Mountain Home magazine, the regional magazine of the Twin Tiers, based in Wellsboro. Matt won a 2010 Keystone Press Award from the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association for this story, originally published as the May 2009 Mountain Home cover story. It is republished here with permission under the Mountain Home copyright. You can read it in its original format at www.issuu.com/mountainhome/docs/may–2009.

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On Friday, April 26, 1946, Captain Lawrence Ritter of the U.S. Army Air Corps, slipped the surly bonds of earth for the last time as he was flying over central Pennsylvania’s Black Forest near Slate Run. A twenty-six-year-old decorated World War II pilot, Ritter was ferrying a P-47N Thunderbolt fighter plane from Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Michigan to LaGuardia Airport in New York when he hit a catastrophic surprise April snowstorm. His plane went down in one of the most remote regions of the Keystone State. It would be months before his plane was recovered.

The story of the eventual discovery of the Ritter plane, and its re-discovery over a half-century later, is one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of Pennsylvania military aviation, and one that still resonates with history lovers, tourists, and outdoor enthusiasts who continue to make the pilgrimage to the crash site today.

That site, on Pennsylvania State forest land, is accessible during the spring and summer months via deeply rutted gravel roads leading through thick forests and winding streams, with an occasional hunting cabin to break up the primeval atmosphere that permeates these woods. A twenty-five mile drive from the village of Slate Run ends at a gated footpath, where a hike of a mile or two farther will lead one to a circular clearing in the forest and, just beyond that, the pile of twisted metal, wiring, and rusted gears–all that remains of the once-majestic P-47 aircraft that came to its end here.

It’s not an easy spot to find, but as the story of the Ritter plane crash continues to seep into the wider culture, hikers and other outdoors enthusiasts increasingly are making it a destination of choice.

“The first time I came here I was with a friend, who is a pilot, and my daughter,” said Roger Tracey, who acted as Mountain Home’s tour guide on a visit to the site in late March. “She was walking way ahead of us, and I had told her some things to look for. She came running back and said, ‘There’s a big turnaround, and it comes to a dead end.’ I asked her if there was a huge mound of dirt and some hemlocks. She said ‘yes,’ and I said, ‘Good, I think we’re there.'”

In addition to the few pieces of P-47 wreckage that remain there, a memorial stone dedicated to Ritter now also graces the spot, placed there by two Boy Scout troops who re-discovered the Ritter site fifty-five years after the plane went down.

“The forest ranger who originally talked to us about it told us that Captain Ritter’s father had wanted to place some kind of headstone at the crash site. However, he was denied access because he was from New York and the crash occurred on Pennsylvania State game land.

That was part of the lore of the crash story,” said Bryan Makos, the former Boy Scout who was instrumental in creating the memorial to the fallen flyer. “My goal was to fulfill a father’s wish fifty-some years later.”

ROUTINE MISSION, TRAGIC END

The flight from Selfridge Field to La Guardia was supposed to have been strictly routine. Ritter, a Yonkers, New York, native who had 1,500 flight hours under his belt (more than half of those with P-47s) was more than capable of handling his mission, having shot down two Nazi fighter planes and helping to sink a German U-Boat while a member of the 319th Squadron of the 325th Fighter Group–the famous “Checkertail”–during World War II.

Broad-shouldered and dark-haired with a high, intelligent forehead, Ritter was a married man with at least one child, and was no doubt looking forward to returning home to his family at the close of his military career.

At about 3:40 p.m. on Friday, April 26, 1946, Ritter’s plane left Selfridge Field. An hour and twenty minutes later he hit a snowstorm over the mountains of northcentral Pennsylvania. The roar of an enormous explosion ripped through the region about 5 p.m. that evening. That explosion marked the last moments in the life of Captain Lawrence Ritter, whose plane went down violently in that thick forest just months after the close of World War II.

“He had survived the war,” Makos said. “Now the war is over and he’s looking forward to the best years of his life, and instead he tragically dies in a freak April snowstorm.”

In the ensuing days, the Army Air Corps, the Civil Air Patrol, and state police combed the area searching for the missing plane without luck. Frustrated at their inability to find a trace of the plane, the search was abandoned and Ritter was declared “missing” on May 2.

It would be seven long months before the family of Captain Ritter finally learned of his fate, when the crash site, and some human remains, were finally discovered by local bear hunters.

“I was living around Nauvoo, Pennsylvania, and bear hunting was not the best around that area,” begins Paul Seaman, a Williamsport resident and former post office employee, who may be the last surviving member of the hunting party that discovered the Ritter crash site.

“I had a chance to go with a friends of mine, Bobby Hiler and Claire Gardner and the fish warden from Tioga County.

We were around Leetonia, and there were several other fellas the fish warden brought in. I don’t recall their names anymore.”

Seaman, 86, has an active mind and a sharp memory, despite some recent health challenges. He is also a former Army Air Corps flight photographer, giving his observations of the site a decided credibility.

“I was a staff sergeant, an aerial photographer in the Fifth Air Force,” he said. “I flew in all the aircraft. If it had room for me, I flew in it.”

Seaman and his hunting companions had just finished their lunch, around noontime, he says, “when somebody over on my left said, ‘Hey, there’s a big piece of metal laying over here.’ I went over and looked at it, and I thought right away that that could be the plane that crashed in April 1946.

“I got to looking at it a little closer and a little closer, and I recognized that it was a P-47. Since I had been in the Air Force I recognized different parts of aircraft and could identify them. I recognized the engine, which was humungous, and buried at least four feet in the ground. It was an eighteen cylinder radial engine embedded in the ground. As I stood on it, in the crater caused by the crash, my shoulders were just about level with the ground around it.”

Almost incredibly, in an era long before the development of the cell phone camera or even the pocket-sized instamatic cameras of the 1970s, Seaman actually was able to take some photos of the wreckage at the moment they were discovered, the first ever taken at the site.

“It wasn’t my aerial camera, that’s for sure,” Seaman says of the old folding camera he used that day. “It was a cheap camera.” From his observations of the scene, Seaman said he thinks the sudden winter tempest disoriented Ritter and caused him to crash straight down into the mountain.

“From what I remember, there was a blinding snowstorm that came up quick, and I imagine he was 7,000 or 8,000 feet above the mountain there and became disoriented,” Seaman said. “He lost his sense of direction and didn’t know if his upside was down or his downside was up. It’s one of those things that happens when you’re flying, at times.”

The trajectory of Ritter’s plane as it went down disturbed far less of the surrounding forest than if it had come in horizontally across the mountain, crashing into trees and other obstacles as it went.

“You’ve gotta remember, this aircraft is on top of the mountain, and after it crashed in April and was missing, the army came in with search parties,” Seaman said. “They also had aircraft flying overhead. What the aircraft overhead was looking for was a swath cut through the trees. That didn’t happen. This airplane came straight down. When it did, it hit into the mountain; there was no swath.

There was nothing visible from the air that you could see, unless you were really very good at aerial observation. You would have never recognized it as a crash site.

“There wasn’t any piece of the aircraft that was larger than … well, there may have been one piece that was about ten feet long. There was probably one piece of that wing that was probably eight to ten feet long, but as the P-47 came straight down, you’ve gotta remember, the leading edge of the aircraft compressed that wing, and I would say it was compressed from seven or eight feet down to about fourteen, fifteen inches. But that portion of the wing stayed together.”

Seaman and the rest of the hunting party went down into the (now nonexistent) village of Leetonia to notify the authorities, then accompanied them back up the mountain to the crash site.

“I said, ‘I think we ought to notify them as soon as possible.’ We got word down to Leetonia and they got the state police down there, and they questioned us. We went back up on the mountain where the crash was, and they took over the investigation from that time on.”

Seaman said there was indication of fire at the location, and of human remains. In both cases, however, the signs were minimal.

“Remember there was a snowstorm going on when it happened,” he says. “The fire was from the fuel on the aircraft. That’s all that was really burned in the area there. I would say there was maybe a fire in an area of maybe fifty, sixty feet… The only other thing I ever found was vertebrae, small bones. I did find his little shaving kit. That’s how I found out who it was. His name was in there. He was a captain. He was flying from Michigan to New York. You’ve gotta remember it lay there from April all through the summer into November of 1946. If there was any part of that body left there, the animals would have carried it away.”

After arriving on the scene, state police informed the military, and soon dozens of army personnel and vehicles were converging on this tiny, isolated speck of Pennsylvania mountains. The Slate Run Tackle Shop, containing the only delicatessen in the area, found itself taking orders for fifty sandwiches at a time to feed the officers and enlisted men combing the Black Forest.

A new road was carved into the forest to access the wreckage, which remains today as a footpath to the site.

Most of the material from the crash site was retrieved, with some of the pieces of the plane allegedly going to a local scrap metal dealer. Ritter’s remains–some small bone fragments and his dog tags–were returned to his family, who reportedly had them cremated and spread at the crash site.

And that’s where the story would have ended, had it not been for an ambitious young man with a yen for military history and a drive to earn his Eagle Scout badge.

THE

REDISCOVERY

Bryan Makos is the publisher of a bi-annual military history magazine called Valor, based in Montoursville.

He is also a former Boy Scout who was instrumental in the rediscovery of the Ritter plane wreckage over fifty years after Seaman and his hunting buddies first stumbled on the site.

“There’s a local gentleman here who helps out with veterans’ affairs and has a huge military collection.

His name is Jess Hackenburg. He’s pretty plugged in on anything to do with World War II and veterans in the whole Lycoming County area. He had told us about this crash site, about a P-47 Thunderbolt that had crashed up on the mountain near Slate Run,” says Makos, 25. “We thought, ‘Hey, this might be a neat Scouting project, to get the Scouts together to try to locate this crash site.’ So that’s where the spark came from.”

After searching newspaper archives for information on the crash, Makos and members of Boy Scout Troops 172 and 93 planned their journey into the Black Forest in the late spring of 2000, armed with GPS coordinates of the crash provided by the Bureau of Forestry.

“We didn’t know what we’d find, but we knew it wouldn’t be like some crash sites in the South Pacific, where you can actually stumble upon an intact airplane,” Makos says. “We were expecting to find very little, and that’s essentially what we did find. There are just little bits and pieces left now.”

But it wasn’t easy. Turns out the GPS coordinates were far from accurate, and after hours of searching the young men still had not found a trace of the crash site.

“It was in May or June, so there were gnats everywhere,” Makos said. “You had the summer heat that was starting up, and you had bugs in your eyes and mouth. At first it was like Indiana Jones. We were very excited about what we were going to see. Would there still be oil in the actual crater, as we were told?

How much of the plane would still be there? Are there still human remains somewhere? Will there be machine gun shells?

“So you have these wild images running through your mind, but then it starts to take longer.

We started to get frustrated. It’s hot and sweaty and you have the gnats. We still had the uniforms on, and it was getting frustrating marching through the woods, with the trees all looking the same. Everything looked the same. During the initial search it became very clear to all of us involved as to why it took them so long to find the crash site back in 1946. That area is remote wilderness, really. So we were a little down. At the same time, we had a feeling for the way the people who were searching for the wreck back in 1946 felt.”

Finally, a break. One of the boys stumbled across a cylinder from a P-47 radial engine.

“It was just sitting out there in the woods. I think it attests to the violence of the crash because it must have been a good 200 yards away from the actual crash site. So it really threw it for a loop.”

Finding the cylinder made Makos feel “like Indiana Jones finding a piece of gold treasure,” he says. “It was enough for us to say, ‘Okay, we’ve gotta be close.’ That cylinder head is heavy, it’s huge. It’s the size of a small boulder. So we knew it had to have crashed nearby in order to fling that thing where it was. That was like a shot of adrenaline to the whole search effort. After a bit more searching we came upon the actual crash site.”

The mood among the Boy Scouts was euphoria mixed with reverence, Makos said.

“It was a surreal experience, because while it wasn’t what you might picture when you think of a wrecked airplane–this is sixty years later, after all–we were still extremely excited to see it and accomplish what we set out to do. At the same time, I think there was a certain reverence that was felt upon being there because we knew a man had died there, that blood was spilled there.”

The spot was marked with a post and a piece of plastic, and the boys returned to their homes to begin planning a memorial. The Scouts, joined by veterans’ groups and members of the general public, raised several hundred dollars for a memorial stone, and contacted various interested parties about the possibility of holding a service of remembrance at the site, which took place in June 2001.

“The most disappointing part of the whole experience was that we were unable to track down any relatives and have them come here,” Makos says. “We wanted to have someone from the family there when we dedicated the memorial stone. I sent out hundreds of letters to Ritters. I knew Captain Ritter was from Yonkers, so that was the starting point. So any Ritters in the Yonkers area, I sent letters to. Then I expanded that and sent letters to any Ritters throughout the New York area and then into Pennsylvania. I didn’t find any relatives.

“Then I enlisted the help of the Veterans’ Administration,” Makos continues. “They put in a search for next-of-kin and were unable to turn up anything. So between the two of us, we came up with nothing. Despite everything, we weren’t able to turn up any relatives. That’s the only bittersweet part of the whole thing.”

But Seaman was there, along with a veteran P-47 pilot who spoke briefly about the aircraft Ritter was flying at the time of his crash, as well as about 100 members of the general public who trekked to that isolated mountain to pay their respects to the fallen pilot.

There was a twenty-one gun salute, a moment of silence.

“We found out that what little remains were recovered were cremated, and Captain Ritter’s wife had them scattered over the crash site. So he really was there,” Makos says.

“There’s some gratification, if you believe in the afterlife, that perhaps Captain Ritter was looking down at us and smiling the day of the memorial.”

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