World War II Army pilot memorialized 76 years after being killed in action

Seventy-six years after 1st Lt. Robert M. Leety was killed in action during World War II, his family dedicated a stone in his honor at Mt. Royal Cemetery in Shaler on Saturday.

Four generations of his relatives gathered for a memorial service at the cemetery, where an honor guard offered a gun salute, played taps and presented a neatly folded flag to his niece, Sally Leety Stevens.

His family recalled his service as they dedicated a new stone that sits on the site of his sister Marie’s grave plot.

Leety, who was born and raised in Glenshaw and graduated from Shaler High School in 1942, enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1943. After about a year of training to become a pilot, he was shipped oversees, first to England, then to France, according to Stevens. She researched her family history and read letters the family preserved from Leety’s deployment.

Leety was a fighter pilot, flying P-51 Mustangs and P-47 Thunderbolts.

The day after Christmas in 1944, he was promoted to the rank of first lieutenant.

He racked up 175 combat hours in more than 75 missions, including during the Normandy invasion and the Battle of the Bulge.

Because he had flown so many combat missions, he was given the opportunity to return home to assume a military role in the United States.

But he chose to continue flying.

“He knew his odds of survival were not great, but he wanted to finish what he started when he first enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces back in March of 1943,” said Karen Nonnemacher Mills, one of his nieces. “He wanted to help the Allies defeat the Axis powers and create a peaceful post-war world.”

He wouldn’t live to see that.

On March 15, 1945, as he returned from a mission, he was shot down in France, near the German border.

He was 20 years old.

His remains are buried in the Lorraine American Cemetery in St. Avold, France.

Back in the United States, two weeks after his death, his family received a telegram informing them their son was missing in action. Three weeks after that, they received the news he was killed.

Leety’s father — who had written about 340 letters to his son while he was overseas — later received some of his letters back, marked “Deceased.”

Sally Leety Hunter, Leety’s sister, recalled the day she learned her brother had been killed in action. She was 11 years old.

“I had the only temper tantrum I had in my life that day,” Hunter said.

Her family hung a Gold Star flag on their door after they got the news.

Not long before he died, Leety bought her a doll in France. She brought the doll to the cemetery Saturday.

“He was always smiling,” Hunter said.

Though Leety’s body was buried in France, his family is now beginning to get some closure.

In 2016, one of Leety’s nephews connected with a Frenchman named Pierre Lindauer. He owned the property where Leety’s plane crashed.

Stevens and her husband traveled to Lorraine American Cemetery in 2017 to see her uncle’s gravesite. She met with Lindauer, who had recovered Leety’s flight wings from the crash site during the war. He returned them to Leety’s family, along with a piece of the plane Leety had been flying.

Though Stevens said she was glad to be able to visit the cemetery in France, she wanted to have a memorial for her uncle close to home, too.

“The fact that he’s across the ocean, it’s not an easy place to visit,” she said. “The family wanted something that was accessible so that there would be a reminder in the place where he grew up.”

During the ceremony, they displayed his flight wings, a piece of his plane Lindauer had given them, the doll he bought for his sister and several medals, including the Air Medal and the Purple Heart, which he was awarded posthumously.

“Today we are here to bear witness to a life that made a difference,” Stevens said during the ceremony.