Krasny, John Friedrich (34170536): Difference between revisions

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'''[[Krasny, John Friedrich (34170536)|John Friedrich Krasny]]''' (1914–2005) was a Ritchie Boy (from Austria; Catholic) who trained at Camp Ritchie in class 10.

Krasny was a Ritchie Boy. John was a native of Vienna, Austria, and worked in his mother’s textile factory in Czechoslovakia until he immigrated to the United States in 1938. He was a laborer in textile factories in North Carolina. He entered the U.S. Army in September 1941 and trained in intelligence at Camp Ritchie, MD. He was attached to the 5th Armored Division from D-Day through the end of the war and used his language skills as an interrogator of German prisoners and civilians. He told his family that he and other “Ritchie boys” used creative methods to gather intelligence — for instance, they would telephone an Axis armaments factory, impersonate a German officer and attempt to order certain weapons to ascertain whether production was underway. In his unpublished memoir, Mr. Krasny said that interrogators discovered in advance the German troop buildup for the Battle of the Bulge. The information, gleaned from prisoner interviews, was passed to Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, but he and his colleagues felt that their warnings were ignored. “For me, knowing that SHAEF had strong warnings but did not act upon them remains the most frustrating event in my life,” Mr. He was awarded a Bronze Star by the Army. After the war, Mr. Krasny returned to the United States and received a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1948 from the University of Denver. While in Colorado, he indulged his love of skiing long before ski lifts were common in the mountainous West. He settled in the Washington area, working for what was then known as the National Bureau of Standards and later for the Gillette Research Institute on textile research-and-development projects. He received a master’s degree in statistics from American University in 1958. In 1972, he returned to the Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology), where he worked on garment and furniture flammability. He was the author of more than 80 technical papers and received a Bronze Medal from the Department of Commerce. John passed away April 8, 2005 at the age of 90.

* Camp Ritchie class roster (classes 1–31), merged research file