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Ritchie Boys Wiki is an open roster of soldiers linked to Camp Ritchie military intelligence training in World War II. Start with a name or Army serial number (ASN), then add biography, photographs, and sourced corrections. Anyone can edit text without an account.

Secret Heroes: Camp Ritchie and the Making of The Ritchie Boys — their unique history and demographics.

What was a Ritchie Boy?

At Camp Ritchie, the Army trained soldiers — many of them immigrants and refugees fluent in the enemy’s languages — for military intelligence in World War II. This wiki is their open roster and memorial: biographies, photographs, and sourced corrections anyone can help improve.

Start here · Introduction · By The Numbers · Find a soldier

Find a soldier

Open search and type a surname or ASN (for example Guy Stern or 37413105). Article titles look like Surname, First (ASN).

Browse by class or letter on Contents. For camp background, see Camp Ritchie.

Start here for families · Contribute · Contact Us · Introduction · Directory · Notables · About the data

How to help

Families: start with Find name → roster fields → add a photo or obituary.

1. Search for a soldier, or open one from Contents
2. Use Edit soldier facts for roster fields, or Edit for biography and sources
3. Log in only if you need to upload a photograph
4. Watch Special:RecentChanges if you help patrol edits

Featured Ritchie Boys

Soldier profiles with fuller biographies — portraits rotate each week from a curated pool (more in Notables and The Stories):

Robert F. Goheen

George Jellinek

Philip Johnson

Author J. B. Cartwright compiled The Quiet Contingent: An Addendum on WWII: The Boys of Camp Ritchie, with more than 400 biographies drawn from first-hand sources, interviews, and obituaries (paperback and Kindle). It includes well-known Ritchie Boys such as Guy Stern, Paul Fairbrook, Hans Tuch, and Werner Angress, as well as many less-known men whose postwar lives ranged across law, politics, the arts, and intelligence work.

Reading

Start here (more topic pages on Contents and under Site pages in the sidebar):

• Start here
• Introduction
• Camp Ritchie
• The Stories
• FAQ
• About

Related links

• Ritchie Boys of WWII (Facebook)
• Ritchie History Museum
• Camp Ritchie Museum (Facebook)
• Historic Fort Ritchie (Instagram)
• Ritchie Museum (YouTube)

Disclaimer

Class roster data (Classes 1–31 only). The class, section, and related roster fields for Classes 1–31 come from U.S. government training-roster records held by the National Archives. Camp Ritchie Museum, Inc. (also known as The Ritchie History Museum) digitized that material and made it available for this project. The underlying records are public-domain government information; the museum does not own the data. Please credit the museum as the digitization source when citing this roster. That dataset is separate from Dan Gross's research files and from material created by this wiki's maintainers. We have tried to catch errors, but mistakes and omissions remain possible; not every person who trained at Camp Ritchie appears in this data. On the original theritchieboys.com site, this material was a separate searchable class roster database. On this wiki it is integrated into soldier profiles, class pages, and related navigation. Attribution to the museum applies to that Classes 1–31 roster data (class/section assignments and related roster fields), not to biographies, photographs, research notes, timelines, or other content on the site. Broader limits on biographies, photographs, and other site content are explained on About the data.

Soldier biographies, photographs, and captions may come from Facebook posts, family submissions, and automated or AI-assisted editing; anyone can change wiki text. Nothing here should be treated as verified fact without checking primary sources. See About the data for how material is compiled and where errors can appear.