Robert A. Walsh (1920-1943)

Robert Walsh was born in Plains, Pennsylvania in March 1920 and graduated from Plains High School in 1937. He spent one year at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania as a member of the class of 1941 between his freshman year at Pennsylvania State University and his graduation from the University of Scranton. While at Dickinson he was a pledge of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity.

He enlisted in the Army Air Corps three weeks after Pearl Harbor; he trained in Alabama before basic flight school at Shaw Field in South Carolina and advanced training at Marianna Field in Florida, where he was commissioned in December 1942. He left the United States for active duty in March 1943. Walsh became part of the India-China Wing and on May 15, 1943 was posted as missing in action when his aircraft failed to return from a flight between India and China. Early in the following year, his parents received word that his body had been found with his crew in the wreckage of his aircraft in northern Burma, the victims of Japanese fire, and he was declared as killed in action.

More information about other Dickinson war casualties can be found through the online project "In Remembrance" (see link for related entries below).