Alumni Bulletin - Winter 2008 - (Page 24)

Far right: Racing trophies cover a dresser in Fitch’s farmhouse. Bottom: A P-51 Mustang replica hovers above other war-craft replicas. Over the course of almost 60 years in motor sports, those skills have carried Fitch to victory many times. He raced throughout the Americas and Europe with the Briggs-Cunningham team and later with the renowned 1950s Mercedes-Benz factory team. As the Corvette team captain, Fitch helped the boulevard sports car evolve into a respectable racer for the 1956 and 1957 World Championship races in Sebring, Fla. A descendant of John Fitch—who invented a working steamboat years before Robert Fulton, the man most commonly credited as inventor of the steamboat—Fitch may have inherited his ancestor’s mechanical genius. He has built ﬁve sports cars and invented scores of safety devices that have saved countless lives. Fitch sees his safety inventions as a means of bettering his world. “I like to think that my work in safety is compensation for my time as a wartime pilot,” he says. “It’s a form of paying back the human community.” Fitch collided with the tail of the plane while pulling his ripcord and was temporarily stunned. His parachute opened, lifting him just above his plane as it crashed into the frozen ground. Landing a few feet from his burning craft, Fitch quickly shed his parachute and crawled under the low boughs of a nearby pine forest—just in time. A “reception committee” of German farmers arrived to capture the grounded pilot. When they saw the burning parachute beside the plane, most curtailed their search, assuming that Fitch had died in the crash. One curious farmer broke away from the group and PILOT DOWN! Fitch enrolled at Lehigh University in 1936 to study civil engisearched the surrounding area, including the neering, but left after a year. He headed to Europe, and while he was abroad, World War II bushes that sheltered Fitch. “Instinctively, I erupted. After trying to enlist in the Royal Air Force (RAF), he returned home to volunteer employed the same defenses as a wounded aniwith the Army Air Corps in 1941. As a member of the Fourth Fighter Group of the U.S. mal in hiding: utter silence and immobility,” 8th Air Force, Fitch and his fellow ﬁghter pilots frequently escorted bombers on raids. On Feb. 20, 1945, after one such mission, Fitch and his fellow pilots were free to expend Fitch wrote. their remaining fuel and ammunition on opportune targets, such as trains. It worked. The farmer quit and rejoined Spying a German locomotive below, Fitch attacked. “My ﬁre thoroughly peppered the his companions. After they were gone, Fitch main tank, causing geysers of steam, but missed that critical high-pressure boiler,” he wrote swallowed a few energy pills provided in his in an unpublished memoir. He missed the boiler on his second attempt as well, so he decided to hazard a third pass. “By now the gunners below were starting to zero in on me, and the sky was ﬁlled with bursting ﬂack— like a ﬁeld of dark ﬂowers suddenly blooming.” Just as he positioned himself over the train, Fitch’s P-51 Mustang ﬁghter plane shuddered violently. “The smell of hot oil told me what I didn’t want to believe. Incredibly, impossibly, I was hit!” he recounted. But before he could bail, Fitch’s parachute straps became entangled in the plane. “I was wedged halfway out against the now shrieking slipstream of the crippled plane as it plunged to the ground,” he wrote. With a few desperate twists, Fitch wrenched himself free, but not without a parting blow. 24 lehigh alumni bulletin

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Alumni Bulletin - Winter 2008

Alumni Bulletin - Winter 2008 Contents From the President's Desk Mailbox On Campus Research Arts & Culture Sports Ugly is in the Eye of the Beholder Fitch's Law of Motion A Blessing to the Community The Amidonian Acclamation China Trip Bridges Cultures, Generations From the Publisher's Desk Alumni News The Last Word

Alumni Bulletin - Winter 2008

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