Lost Medals, Part II: Mystery Partially Solved
POLAND, Ohio -- Part of the mystery has been solved of how Army Air Force Capt. Anthony Baird Mitchell’s medals ended up for sale on the website of a dealer of military memorabilia in Toronto, Canada.
In the MidSeptember edition of The Business Journal was the account of how Michael Leone, a dentist in Boardman and amateur historian, acquired Mitchell’s medals for bravery during World War II and other personal effects (CLICK HERE to read story).
The article struck a chord with some longtime residents of Poland who follow and research its history, one of them being David R. Smith who lives in the historic Logan House on North Main Street. He and Ted Heineman, a close friend of Mitchell’s brother, the late attorney James Mitchell, had been trying to obtain Baird Mitchell’s medals.
Smith, who called The Business Journal to offer more information and set the record straight, was aware Leone had acquired them but didn’t know how they came into the possession of Emedals.com in Toronto, which sold them to Leone.
Leone, a dentist who ran anchor on the 1975 Poland High School mile relay team, acquired the medals last year.
Mitchell, the younger son of the then mayor of Poland, Osborne Mitchell, grew up in the Kirtland house, 118 North Lima Road, in that village and dropped out of Cornell University in his senior year to enlist in the Army Air Corps Sept. 27, 1941.
He was a captain and would have been promoted to major Sept. 20, 1944, but was killed two days before it took effect while a co-pilot flying a B-24 over German-occupied Holland. His plane had just dropped supplies to U.S. troops during Operation Market Garden not far from the bridge at Arnheim, “A Bridge Too Far.”
Unknown to Leone were efforts by Heineman and Smith, who presented their findings Sept. 21 during a lecture between services at Poland Presbyterian Church. Leone lent the medals for the audience to view,.
In his home on North Main Street, Smith, a retired history teacher and guidance counselor, filled in some of the missing pieces of Mitchell’s life and last flight and how his medals ended up in Canada.
As reported, Mitchell ran anchor on the 1937 Poland track team that won the state championship. The team set a record of 4:34 at Poland Athletic Field – rededicated as Baird Mitchell Field Sept. 16, 1946 – that stood many years. Indeed, in 1936, Baird Mitchell helped to survey and lay out the cinder track where Poland thinclads practiced and competed, Smith says.
After graduating from Poland Seminary High School, Mitchell entered Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, Pa., where he met the woman he would marry, Sara Jane Aiken, Sept. 27, 1942, a year to the day after he enlisted. Aiken was the daughter of Brig. Gen. John Aiken.
Mitchell’s father, Osborne, was born in Washington, Pa., in 1886 and practiced law there before coming to Youngstown in 1916, says attorney Paul Dutton, a partner in Harrington, Hoppe & Mitchell.
Osborne was joined by his son James and Mitchell’s successor as mayor of Poland, Brooks Reed, in what became Mitchell, Mitchell & Reed. That firm merged with a Warren firm 17 years ago to become Harrington, Hoppe & Mitchell. Mitchell served as mayor from 1934 to 1944.
James Mitchell, the oldest of five children -- Baird Mitchell was the youngest -- served in the South Pacific during World War II where he transported U.S. troops from island to island including Okinawa.
Baird Mitchell’s wife, whom everyone called Sally, bore him a son, Anthony Baird Mitchell II, July 10, 1943.
After enlisting in the Air Corps, Baird Mitchell took his basic training at Randolph Field, Texas, where he was graduated as a bomber pilot. Before being sent overseas, he served on anti-submarine patrols over the Gulf of Mexico. On two of those missions, his plane suffered engine failure and he had to bail out. Both times the Coast Guard rescued him.
For those efforts the Army awarded him the Air Medal and promoted him to captain in March 1943.
From the Gulf of Mexico, his older brother recalled to Heineman, Mitchell was sent to North Africa to fly B-24s. When that campaign wound down, he “was assigned a desk job at some airfield in England,” he said in an oral history. Baird Mitchell arrived at the airbase near North Pinkenham, England, in April 1944. The airbase was 200 miles west of The Netherlands.
Baird Mitchell did see his wife and infant son, who later became known as Mitch, during Christmas leave in December 1943.
As the Garden Market campaign struggled, Allied troops ran low on supplies and B-24s were used for the first time to transport and drop fuel, food, communications equipment and medical supplies.
To elude German radar, the B-24s in the 854th Bomb Squadron flew in at 150 feet and climbed to 400 feet so the parachutes used to supply the paratroopers would open.
German anti-aircraft fire hit the lead plane in which Mitchell was co-pilot shortly after it turned around to head back. It was flying too low for the crew of 10 to bail out. Nine died as the pilot, Capt. James K. Hunter, tried to land the B-24 on its belly in an open spot. Instead it crashed into trees and farm buildings.
The Army notified Sally Mitchell that her husband was missing in action. Mrs. Mitchell, who kept a “Baby Firsts” for her son, wrote, “Oct. 4th, 1944 -- This day, my son, we received the news that your daddy has been missing since the eighteenth of September over Holland. He was on an expedition to rescue some eight thousand paratroopers who were trapped. However, I know in my heart that he will return to us. God has brought him through so many narrow escapes and I know he will not fail him how.”
That was her last entry.
Mitch grew up in Washington, Pa., and his mother remarried Sept. 24, 1947. Her husband, Robert Coyle Woodward, sought to adopt her son and give him his name but Osborne Mitchell was strongly opposed, Smith says.
The son, Mitch, apparently took and kept possession of his father’s medals and letters of citation. He grew up and became a painter/decorator and owner of his own company in Florida.
He married three times and had a daughter by each of his first two wives.
James Mitchell (1912-2003) kept in touch with his nephew. When his son was assigned to serve in Vietnam in the 1960s, the lawyer kept a map of Southeast Asia in his office, following the progress of the war and where his son was stationed, Dutton says. When Mitchell learned his son had been killed, he took down the map and never again spoke of the war.
Losing a brother and son as casualties of war overwhelmed him.
Sally and Coyle Woodward moved to Maitland, Fla., where they had a daughter, also named Sara, who grew up to marry Alan Norvell. Late one Saturday night in mid-July 1978, the Coyles and Norvells were in a twin-engine Cessna – Alan Woodward was the pilot – en route to Herndon Airport near Orlando when their flight ended in a fiery crash, killing all. The fuel tanks in the plane burst into flame upon colliding with the trees and it broke into several pieces, the Lakeland (Fla.) Ledger reported.
And so, Smith notes, Mitch Mitchell lost both parents to air crashes.
After Mitch died of cancer at age 58 in 2001, his widow, Gioia, told Smith she gave the medals her father-in-law had been awarded to the National Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force in Pooler, Ga., just west of Savannah. Smith described her as friendly, open and helpful in his efforts to learn what became of her husband and his father’s medals.
Smith and Heineman called the museum only to learn it had no record of the medals or their donation. A call from The Business Journal to Vivian Rogers, museum curator, resulted in another search for the medals and the same result.
So how Baird Mitchell’s medals ended up at emedals.com can only be speculated. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal, Purple Heart, Army Good Conduct Medal, European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal, World War II Victory Medal, and American Defense Service Medal and American Campaign Medal.
Emedals listed the collection “for USD $1,300.00” and added “SOLD” with a horizontal line through the asking price when Smith visited the website.
The owner of Emedals, Barry Turk, tells The Business Journal he bought them at “Show of Shows in Kentucky,” a market he visits in February of each year. He would have acquired them in February 2013.
Upon confirming that “The Awards of Captain Mitchell – KIA” were Baird Mitchell’s, Leone says he gave the dealer his credit card number and three days later the medals arrived in the mail.
MORE:
Lost Medals: Part I
Copyright 2014 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
CLICK HERE to subscribe to our free daily email headlines and to our twice-monthly print edition.