Alan Richwald

Alan Richwald was an American explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) expert in the U.S. Army.

Personal life Alan Richwald was adopted by advertising executive Marvin Richwald and his wife Martha. Martha died when Alan was four, and Marvin soon married a second wife, Ann. Richwald was raised with stepsister Ina and half-brother Gary.

After World War II, young Richwald acted as a volunteer plane spotter. Richwald attended boarding school, and after graduation, he entered the U.S. Army as an EOD specialist in 1956.

He married Christina Richwald in 1967, fathering three children. He entered the Catholic Church in 1990. He was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease in 1997. He retired and moved to Maryland in 2019 and died peacefully in 2022.

Explosive Ordnance Disposal Starting with his EOD training in 1957, Richwald identified, catalogued, defused, and wrote guidebooks about thousands of enemy bombs, mines, shells, and grenades. He served as an EOD specialist in the Vietnam War and spent several years of service in Korea, Japan, and Germany.

In 1971, Richwald was assigned to Picatinny Arsenal in 1971, where he established the EOD Foreign Ordnance Section. Richwald was an expert in locating, recovering, and rendering safe hundreds of first-seen foreign explosives, a quality that led to his being regularly consulted by the intelligence community. He leveraged this experience into training for EOD specialists in person and writing over a thousand reference books on the identification and defusing of foreign ordnance.

As Picatinny Arsenal's Quick Reaction Team's team lead,

The many publications Richwald created on identifying and disarming enemy ordnance have been used to train soldiers from all four branches of the U.S. armed forces, saving many lives, 2010 Ordnance Order of Samuel Sharpe 2014 Patent: Secure disrupter unit for explosive ordnance disposal operations and breech plug for same 2018 U.S. Army Ordnance Corps Hall of Fame