Raymond Wilson Fritzinger
Sgt 33481601 614th
Pennsylvania
1917 - 1944
Left Waist Gunner aboard 42-31036 (Nobody's Baby)
Margraten cemetery, Netherlands.
Wall of Missing
Raymond was born Dec 22, 1917, in Walnutport, Northampton, Pennsylvania.
In Nov 10, 1942 he enlisted to the air corps.
In 1944 he arrived in England to join the 401st BG
His last mission, Feb 4, 1944, Target: Frankfurt, after dropping bombs the plane was hit by flak.
They believed to have crashed in the North Sea as no evidence of their crash or bodies were ever found.
He was awarded with an Air Medal and a Purple Heart Medal
In 1944, when Raymond died on the age of 26 he left behind his family :
His father, Wilson A Fritzinger, age 79
His mother, Anna M Fritzinger, age 67
His brother, Paul W Fritzinger, age 28
He was married to Ethel L. Wright and they had a baby boy who was 2 years old at the time
his father's disappearance.
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Mission to Frankfurt, germany, At 12:25 the ship was seen to lose altitude and gradually fell back from the formation.
No one knows what happened but the ship did not return to base.
Raymond W. Fritzinger was aware of his fate.
Before he went off to war in November, 1942, the Walnutport auto mechanic told relatives privately
that he didn't think he would be back.
Less than 1 1/2 years later, Sergeant Fritzinger was missing in action.
A tailgunner on a B-17 Flying Fortress, his plane was shot down over the North Sea on Feb. 4, 1944,
as it was returning to England from a bombing mission to Frankfurt, Germany.
Just 26 years old, Fritzinger was declared dead on Sept. 18, 1945, the first man from the borough of
Walnutport killed in World War II.
He left behind a wife, Ethel (Wright) Fritzinger, and a 2-year-old son, Darrel.
Darrel, now a New Tripoli resident, followed in his father's footsteps.
A former jet mechanic in the U.S. Air Force and a member of the Pennsylvania Air National Guard,
Darrel now works for the U.S. Department of Labor's Veterans' Employment Service.
Darrel remembered nothing about his father and said his late mother never talked much about him.
But recent years have brought insight into his father's life.
In 1986, when the 42-year-old Raymond W. Fritzinger Post 7215, Veterans of Foreign Wars,
Walnutport, rededicated its war memorial, Darrel chatted for the first time with borough
residents who knew his father.
He also obtained some of his father's military records, learning for the first time exactly how he died.
 
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