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Lost Medals of World War II Hero: Part I
POLAND, Ohio -- All four of the seniors who ran the mile relay on the 1937 state championship track team at Poland High School volunteered to serve in the Army Air Corps during World War II.
Frank Powers, the quick starter, Jack Johnson and Robert Barton, who ran the second and third legs, returned after the war. The anchorman, Anthony Baird Mitchell, did not. Mitchell lost his life Sept. 18, 1944, in a mission over Nazi-occupied Holland as he returned from a supply drop to the 101st Airborne Division not far from the bridge at Arnheim (the “Bridge Too Far”).
By coincidence, the man who ran anchor on Poland’s 1975 mile relay team, Mike Leone, has the dog tag sent Mitchell’s family and the medals the Army captain was awarded posthumously. How Leone came into possession of Mitchell’s medals – including the Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal with an oak leaf cluster and Purple Heart – is a remarkable story.
Leone, a dentist with a practice in Boardman, is an amateur historian with an interest in military history and a collector of war-related memorabilia.
He grew up in Poland and ran on the cinder track at Baird Mitchell Field, the venue where Poland High played its home football games until the new stadium was built. Leone played trumpet in the marching band his four years at Poland.
About 10 yards from the entrance to the athletics field is a rock with a bronze plaque that honors Mitchell. It was dedicated during solemn ceremonies Sept. 16, 1946, almost two years to the day Mitchell’s B-24 was shot down.
Johnson, Barton and Powers stood in their uniforms behind the rock and saluted as the plaque was unveiled.
Leone recalls the many times he passed the rock when he was a student and saw the bronze plaque. “I read it and wondered what [Mitchell] was like. How did he die?” the dentist says.
The house where Leone grew up “held a lot of history books,” he says, and had he not gone into dentistry he likely would have become a history teacher. At Youngstown State University, Leone “took enough hours to be a history major,” including Martin Berger’s course on World War II. He took it the first time the history department offered it.
As Leone researched Mitchell’s life, he found that he was the only son of a mayor of Poland, Osborne Mitchell, and of his track prowess. (The record time the mile relay team set stood many years.)
Mitchell went to Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, Pa., where he met his wife, the daughter of a brigadier general, and graduated in 1941.
The following September, well before Pearl Harbor, Mitchell volunteered for the Army Air Corps. He was sent to England in June 1944, assigned to the Eighth Air Force and flew on several raids over France, Belgium and The Netherlands.
On the day of his last mission, Mitchell was not scheduled to fly. Several officers wanted to be the co-pilot to replace Lt. Raymond Toll, who was ill, and Mitchell won the assignment on the flip of a coin.
It was the first time in the war that heavy bombers -- B-24s -- were used to drop supplies at a low level. Instead of bombs, the bays carried medicines, communications equipment, ammunition, food and fuel.
Mitchell’s B-24, the lead plane, left the English coast just before 3 p.m. for the 34-minute flight to Holland -- morning fog had delayed their takeoff -- where they were to drop their supplies.
When the crew reached the Dutch coast just before 4 p.m., the pilot, Capt. James K. Hunter took the plane to 300 feet where it immediately attracted small-arms fire. By 4:15 the plane was flying at treetop level, 150 feet above the ground and the crew could see Dutch citizens cheering and waving at them, the survivor, Frank DiPalma, remembered. The Dutch hid DiPalma from the Germans.
During the remainder of the run to Veghel, the B-24 attracted intense German anti-aircraft fire but made it to its target and dropped the supplies. Hunter had to pull up to 400 feet so the parachutes would work.
A few minutes into the return, flak from a German 20-mm gun hit the tip of the right wing of the B-24 and it caught fire. The Germans had mounted the anti-aircraft gun only the previous day.
A crewmember of a B-24 behind Mitchell’s plane photographed it crashing into a field, the outer half of the right wing aflame and trailing thick smoke. Because it was flying at such a low altitude, no one could bail out and only DiPalma, badly hurt, survived.
The Dutch found him wandering along a road and transported him to an institution for mentally disabled boys where local doctors tended him. The staff hid him in the basement and bluffed the Germans looking for possible survivors.
The Dutch recovered the bodies of the other nine and buried them in the cemetery near the village of Biezenmortel. Mitchell and five of his comrades were reburied at the American Cemetery at Margraten. Three were returned to the United States to be buried in New York, Alabama and North Carolina at the request of their families.
After the war the residents of Biezenmortel honored the crew by inscribing their names in a stone panel inside their church. Leone has visited the site of the crash and the church.
The Army Air Corps notified the families of the deaths, sending home one of the dog tags each wore along with a letter of condolence. Mitchell was due to be promoted to major Sept. 21, 1944, and he was awarded the Purple Heart, Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal with an oak leaf cluster, among others, such as a Good Conduct Medal.
Five hundred attended the ceremonies at the field where Mitchell won acclaim as a member of the Poland track team, filling the seats the Works Progress Administration had built during the Great Depression.
It’s not clear how Mitchell’s medals, letters of commendation and other effects, including his college yearbook, left the family. His only child, a son, died in 2001 at age 58 in Florida, Leone discovered, leaving no kin.
Leone, who collects military medals, visits websites that offer war relics and military memorabilia for sale. He has visited the sites where Civil War battles were fought and visited Europe, including Germany twice, to interview generals who led their armies against the Allies during World War II.
Early on a Monday night in 2013, Leone was visiting the website of a military antiques dealer in Toronto, Canada, when he saw medals awarded a “Capt. Mitchell KIA” offered for sale.
He looked closer and saw it was Anthony Baird Mitchell. “Omygod! I can’t believe it’s his stuff,” was his reaction.
He immediately emailed the dealer to say, “I’ll take it. I didn’t quibble about the price. I knew I had to have it,” the dentist says. (He declined to say how much he paid.)
He gave the dealer, whom he had purchased from before, his credit card number and three days later Mitchell’s medals arrived.
Sources: Mike Leone; Triumph and Tradition of the Poland Schools, by Robert L. Zorn. Intercollegiate Press, 1976; The Youngstown Daily Vindicator, Sept. 18, 1946; Kate Tame, researcher and specialist genealogist for Aircrew Remembered.
MORE:
Lost Medals, Part II: Mystery Partially Solved
WATCH Tuesday's Daily Buzz for a video report about the lost medals.
Copyright 2014 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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