Last of two parts
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.
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.”
(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.
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 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 10th 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.”
(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 213th Regiment Museum at Allentown’s Charles C. Curtis Armory. The museum supports the 213th Regional Support Group, a National Guard unit, by maintaining a gallery of artifacts dating to the Civil War. The 213th 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 213th Regiment Museum.
“I’m very, very happy to have gotten them down there,” Bruce said. “They’re back home where they really, truly belong.”
David Venditta 