SEQUIM — He was an American ground crewman, green as the Texas cotton. She was a jaded, faded German moll who’d been stranded in Tunis.
Miram Ritchie lost his heart to her the instant he sat in her lap, flipped her switches and spun her prop.
Ritchie always had loved airplanes, but he hadn’t gotten his hands onto one until he joined the Army Air Corps the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed.
After training, he was shipped to Tunisia, where the Allies had driven out the Germans.
There he found the abandoned Focke-Wulf 190 single-seat fighter where the retreating Nazis had left her.
A senior ground crew chief let him climb into the cockpit and turn over her 1,500-horsepower engine.
He’d later curse the man for addicting him to aircraft.
“After that, I was captured for sure,” Ritchie recalled in an interview Friday in The Fifth Avenue retirement living center in Sequim where he lives
“I had to work on airplanes.”
Ritchie will become reacquainted this week with the warbirds he serviced in North Africa, Sicily and Italy: a B-17 Flying Fortress and a B-24 Liberator, both heavy bombers, and a trainer version of the P-51 Mustang fighter escort that was Ritchie’s specialty.
Ritchie will fly with his daughter, Ginny Rheinheimer, on a 30-minute trip Wednesday aboard the B-17 Nine-O-Nine as part of the Wings of Freedom Tour at William R. Fairchild International Airport in Port Angeles running Wednesday through Friday.
Ritchie lied about his age to join the Air Corps on Dec. 8, 1941, trained in various places around the United States, then shipped out for the British Isles aboard a troop ship that sailed through a three-day-long storm in the North Atlantic.
“I never got seasick,” he said, but most all of his shipmates fell ill.
“The only thing that bothered me was all the stuff they threw up,” he said “There’s no way to clean it up, frankly.”
A radio repairman, Ritchie worked on Spitfire fighters in Scotland, Ireland and England before he shipped out again on the Empress of Canada without an inkling of his destination.
For 25 days on the Atlantic and through the Straits of Gibraltar, “we ate stewed tomatoes and boiled potatoes for breakfast,” he said.
“For dinner, we got boiled potatoes and stewed tomatoes.”
The men landed in Algiers, marched 25 miles overland and occupied a bombed-out airfield that had been abandoned by Vichy French forces he said had “traitored” to the Nazis.
It was there that the Focke-Wulf’s spell fell on him.
Later, Ritchie was sent to Sicily, where he worked on the American-flown but British-made Spitfires.
They were fighter aircraft that the Americans tried to turn into dive bombers, with ill luck.
“We lost pilots out the kazoo,” he said. “We got down to eight pilots out of a normal complement of 30.”
The Spitfires returned to fighter duty.
Ritchie said he was supposed to repair radios, “which I hated.
“If they wanted me to do any radio work, they had to get me away from helping a mechanic somewhere.”
Eventually, his unit ran short of mechanics.
“I’d been working around the airplanes so much that they finally gave me a P-51 to be the crew chief of.”
The airplane, though, was no prize.
“It had a leak between the head and the block, so every time it went out on a mission and got back, I had to change spark plugs,” Ritchie recalled.
“The powers-that-be finally agreed to put a new engine in it.”
The P-51s Ritchie serviced eventually flew a “shuttle,” escorting bombers over southeastern Europe — including the massive raids on Ploiesti, Romania — then into Russia to land.
From there, they accompanied Soviet airstrikes against Germany. They landed in Allied territory and escorted bombers back across Germany, landing in Italy to restart the circuit.
As the war wound down, Ritchie was rotated back to the States.
Returning to America, Ritchie’s troopship “met this convoy of Liberty [naval cargo] ships that were spaced about 5 miles apart out on the open ocean.
“The following day we still were meeting those Liberty ships. That just made us aware of the tremendous production the U.S. had during the war.”
For Ritchie, though, the war was over. He was discharged in July 1945.
After a period of “just floating around,” he re-enlisted, working again on P-51s and later on C-47s and B-29s, which he serviced in Okinawa.
He also was stationed in Alaska, California, Illinois and Nevada.
He retired from the Air Force with the rank of master sergeant in 1963.
“When I got out of the military, if I walked under the wing of an airplane, I wished it would just fall on me,” Ritchie recalled. “I was tired of them.”
He couldn’t bear to leave aviation, however, instructing mechanics and pilots first for Boeing in Seattle, later for Braniff Airlines in Texas on Lockheed L-188 Electras, then in Dallas for American Airlines on Boeing 727s and 747s — including the jumbo jets that ferried NASA space shuttles atop them.
He’d married in 1949 and had a daughter, Jennifer, in 1955 and a son, Michael, in 1958.
Eventually he got his pilot’s license and bought his own small airplanes. He sold his last aircraft in 2006.
On Friday, Ritchie sifted through photos of aircraft, ground crews and airfields he knew during the war.
He acknowledged that the conflict was his ticket into the sky — but he regretted the cost that others paid.
Thanked for his service, he brushed gratitude aside, saying, “I had a lot of help, and for the little that I did, you’re more than welcome.
“There were about 12 million other people involved, plus a whole nation.”
He didn’t dwell on the crash landings he witnessed, the shot-up aircraft, or the men who sometimes died inside them — if they made it back to their home airfields at all.
“I wouldn’t like to go through it again,” he said.
“A lot of people paid a lot.”
At 91, Ritchie recalled dates, places and the names of men without hesitation — plus every kind of aircraft he ever flew or knew.
And whatever tricks his memory someday may play on him, he’ll never forget that lass with the Iron Cross.
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Reporter James Casey can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or at jcasey@peninsuladailynews.com.
