Whenever I need statistics about the Ritchie Boys, I contact Dan Gross. I have come to call him “The Archivist.” I don’t know if this title is original to me, or if I heard it somewhere, but it is well-deserved.
For the last decade, Dan has spent countless hours researching the Ritchie Boys at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and the research specialists there know him on a first-name basis. If they are contacted by anyone with questions about the Ritchie Boys, they always mention Dan Gross as the man who knows the most on this subject.
Dan Gross was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1928. Shortly before his seventh birthday, he was hospitalized with a light case of polio, the disease that crippled so many before the development of the Salk vaccine. Luckier than most, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt who had recently become the US president, Dan was able to enjoy a fairly normal life with little handicap.
Fifteen years old at the time of Pearl Harbor, he followed with fascination the news of escalating war in Europe and the tales told by arriving Jewish refugees. He had grown up with the stories of his mother’s emigration from Poland in 1917. She had come to America as a teenager, accompanied by one sister while two older sisters remained behind with their families. Just over a decade later, his two aunts and their families were caught under the Third Reich and disappeared in the maelstrom of the Holocaust. Needless to say, any news of what was happening in Poland was of special interest to the Gross family.
After the end of World War II, with a degree in Mechanical Engineering, Dan enjoyed a career as a research engineer with the National Bureau of Standards. In the late 1980s, like many recent retirees, he became a volunteer. Around 2005, he began doing volunteer research about the interrogation of German prisoners of war at Fort Hunt for the National Park Service. (More on Fort Hunt in a future blog.)
At about the same time, Gross read an article in the Washington Post about the showing of the documentary film, “The Ritchie Boys.” Though he had a colleague who he knew had served during WWII in an intelligence unit, he had never previously heard of Camp Ritchie. His friend confirmed he had indeed been trained there. Intrigued by the coming together of so much information, Gross purchased the video of the documentary and watched it.
Like me, Dan then went on the Ritchie Boy film documentary web site and found the forum/chat room. Struck by the dearth of good answers to questions posed on the forum, he researched Camp Ritchie at the National Archives, which was near his home in Silver Springs. I can’t help but wonder – when I dug into boxes of primary documents at the National Archives for two enthralling days in September of 2005, did we only narrowly miss meeting?
Luckily, I did meet Dan at the Washington DC Ritchie Boy Symposium in 2012 and we have stayed in touch since then. Since he discovered the film documentary, research into the Ritchie Boys has become Gross’s passion. Most of his work is done at the National Archives, but he also makes use of other sources, including military records, memoirs, and email and personal contacts with Ritchie Boys. He has read and transcribed thousands of small cards that contain Camp Ritchie records of student grades, class standing, and military assignments. All of this continues as he still goes to the Archives almost every week.
He has transferred information from more than 20,000 personnel record cards, as well as from operations reports, special orders, reports on interrogations, and any other record with information related to the Ritchie Boys. Aided by his son who is a software manager, Dan stores all collected data in Excel and Word files on his computer. In a recent telephone conversation, Gross shared his desire to see his work collected, reviewed, and stored safely by a military museum or library. I certainly hope this happens as his collected data is an invaluable treasure trove.
Dan Gross is currently helping the nonfiction author, Bruce Henderson, (www.brucehendersonbooks.com) conduct research for a book on The Ritchie Boys that is expected to be complete within a year or two. He told me, “I can’t wait to see this book finished. It really excites me.”
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