Arden Quesinberry

95TH BOMB GROUP

ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

2005 REUNION         DAYTON, OHIO

 (Interviewed by Janie McKnight) 

JM:  This is Janie McKnight from the 95th Bomb Group Legacy Committee.  And today we are here with Arden Quesinberry.  Arden, for the record, will you state your name, today’s date, and where we are.

AQ:  Okay.  My name is Arden Quesinberry – want me to spell it?  (“No”)  Friday, Dayton, Ohio, September the 30th, 2005.

JM:  What were your dates of service with the Army Air Corps? 

AQ:  Okay, I was inducted into the field artillery June the 30th, 1943.  And I took basic training in ________________, Texas.  I went from there I took physical and some test to the Air Force.  I was sent to Shepherd Field, Texas.  And I got there a little bit too late to get to be a pilot.  They sent me to armament school in Denver, Colorado.  And that tour started about Christmas of 1943 and ’44.   From there I went to Kingman, Arizona for gunnery school.  That ended in June of 1944.  From there to Tampa, Florida where we formed a crew.  After that with some training in Savannah, Georgia we went overseas.  We got over there in about October of 1944.  I was assigned to William Dunwiddy’s crew, which is the same crew that Arl Cross was in.  We flew our first mission on November the 30th, 1944.  I’ll recite the first mission since that happened to be the worst.  It wasn’t the worst because it was first.  It was just the worst.  It also involved a crew, which I didn’t know any of them.  But I happened to know the details of how they went down, if anybody in the future wants to know really what happened, I can tell it.  I’ve seen a couple of versions of it which didn’t say much about it.  But our first mission was Merseburg, Germany – an oil target.  And of course I was brand new, hadn’t been to any before.  We went to briefing, and when they looked at the map up on the wall it showed where we were going.  When they uncovered that, everybody went ooohhhh, and I knew it probably would be a bad one.  So we took off, like you’ve heard many times before to get into formation.  Of course the shoot, different groups shoot different color flairs into the air.  People form around the lead plane shooting those flairs.  And everything was normal until we got to the target.  We were supposed to follow another group in and behind and they’d come and bomb a certain direction which didn’t have any headwind.  But then they screwed up and went around, missed it, and we had to come back around.  We faced an 80 mph headwind coming in to the target, and it was a very long time.  So anyway the first thing I saw of course was the big dark cloud that was ahead – flak.  We got on in, why then the flak started hitting us.  I knew I was really into the battle at that time.  I was in the plane that was under the top plane.  Of course there was planes on each side.  But the plane that was up ahead of me, turns out that was Charles Wicker’s crew, I found out later, I saw a ball of fire form under the left inboard engine.  And that immediately went to an explosion.  The wing separated and went this way, and the plane made a 270 degree roll in less than a second, twisted the fuselage in two at the radio room, and the one wing in the fuselage was going down on the right hand side with one wing up, just falling straight down.  The fuselage was by itself, down to my right.  It looked just like it was still flying with somebody in it, because it stayed horizontal.  If somebody could have survived, I think that would have been where it was.  As I understand, I don’t think anyone survived.  And the wing that had come off on a lift, it was smoking with the engine attached, and it was floating toward – I thought it was going to hit me in the face.  It came right down and just barely missed the prop arc underneath the left side.  I realized I had been in battle at that time.  I looked back and the pilot, he was, he must have been out of control, because he was kicking like he’d been shot.  So I guess it was a good thing the co-pilot aboard.  He had sort of panicked and had pulled the bomb bay cord which gives an emergency release in case we don’t drop the bombs.  I was the toggelier.  I was supposed to drop the bombs.   And I’d already dropped them, but then he pulled that because he didn’t know they’d been dropped.  And the bomb bay doors were down.  That slowed us down.  We had to sort of fall back out of formation.  We eventually cranked the bomb bay doors up and ____________________________ back into base.  The hydraulic system was shot out.  The pilot directed the tail gunner to tie a parachute to the rear gear, rear tail gear.  And when he told him to throw it out the tail gunner’s entrance back there, which he did.  We came in with a parachute to slow us down, but we still went off the end of the runway.  They weren’t doing too much of that in those days.  That’s a common thing to do now, slow it down with parachutes.  So after that mission, there were no good ones, but they weren’t nothing like that anymore.  They went from sort of terrible to ugly to good.  That’s about all I think is necessary to tell about the real war part, unless you want to hear anymore.  When my crew, Dunwoody and company, when they hit the, when they were on a mission, I was in the hospital with appendicitis.  I took appendicitis for a couple of days before they went on their bad mission.  And when they were coming back, of course, everybody knows they ran their tail into another airplane.  Half my crew bailed out and were lost.  So I missed that one.  After I got out of the hospital, they assigned me to another crew and I flew a total of 26 missions.  But the last four or five were really good missions, because we were dropping food in the Chow Hound missions over Holland.  On those missions the people were so happy – all the rooftops were covered with people waving and so forth.  And we were flying 300 feet above the ground.  And it was just like watching a football game.  I could see everything that was going on.  In those days I could see – 20/15 vision – I could see, almost recognize somebody.  So we were supposed to make a pass over a racetrack.  And what you would do, you’d fly around, over it the first time to make sure it was the right place.  It was supposed to be cleared at that time.  People give them a chance to get off.  But they, as we came around for the first pass, which we weren’t suppose to drop anything, and didn’t, the people were running to the edges of the woods, out on the side.  One thing sticks in my mind.  There was a team of horses there with a nice, beautiful wagon.  They had loaded up all the food that they could get on it.  But I guess he thought we were going to drop them on top of him.  He was whipping those horses, and they were running, and they went into the woods on the side.  Some of the stuff fell off.  That was just a picture that’s still in my mind.  And then on the real mission where we came around to drop them.  Of course I could look down, and I looked down with a lady in the garden.  I couldn’t tell her age, but I assume she looked like she might have been middle age or something.  She was so happy that she reached down and took a hold of her skirt, and skinned it up over her head, and bent over and waved that thing at us until we passed and couldn’t see her anymore.  And that’s another picture that I’ll always remember.  At least it really made somebody happy it looked like.  And so I flew about four or five of those.  And survived the war.  And I’ve been enjoying these reunions since about 1994, I guess – Spokane one.  Anything else?

JM:  What squadron were you in?

AQ:  I was in 336th squadron, 95th Bomb Group.

JM:  And your principle job with the 95th?
AQ:  Was a togglelier and a nose gunner.  And being that, it was my job to pull the pins out of the bombs when we took off.  You know, you had to disarm; you had to arm them rather.  They had cotter pins in there that if you dropped them without pulling those pins out they wouldn’t explode.  So they just go down and be a wasted mission.  So you’d take those out while we were flying up and getting in formation.  And then the thing that kept them from ever going off in the airplane was that they had a propeller on the end of them, like a windmill, and they had a safety wire that ran into that.  And when they dropped that and stripped that out, then it was really armed and the thing would turn ____________________ went down exploded.  And if you couldn’t complete the mission, for some reason you had to come back, had you out there and put those cotter pins back in.  Lots of times you straddled out over the bomb bay, the North Sea below you, and you put those back in.  And then drop them into the North Sea most of the time, but they wouldn’t explode.  That happened about three times, I guess, with us.  So those are a duty that gave me one extra stripe (chuckle).

JM:  Were there any memorable experiences on base, the barracks, or any characters that you particularly remember?

AQ:  Well, yeah, there were a lot of characters.  Everywhere you go there’s characters.  When you go from one group of people to another, I noticed, when you were shipped around during training, there’d be different looking people with different names, but there was always the same number of characters in the thing, doing about the same thing.  So people are mixed about the same all over, I believe.  I can’t think of anybody in particular right now.  It was a good crew I was in.  Unfortunately, most of them were lost.  

JM:  Most of them were lost during the war?

AQ:  Yeah.  When they were coming back from the mission when I was in the hospital, the ___________________ plane had a topographer aboard, and they wanted to pull out of formation ahead of the rest of them so they could get in, land, and they could go develop a film.  In the process of doing that, they drove the vertical _________________ into the belly of another plane above and sheered that off.  He gave the alarm for them to bail out.  And most of them did, but there was some up front who could see that England wasn’t that far ahead.  So they did manage to keep flying until they got over land.  But the back didn’t know that. They’d had an alarm to bail out.  So all that bailed out there were lost.  The one, the navigator unfortunately didn’t open his ‘chute, even though he came back over land, which was bad.  But I can’t think of anything now that was unusual.  

JM:  I have a question about the Chow Hound missions.  I know there was shortage of food during the war.  At the end of the war, at the end of the war when you were dropping all that food, where did that food come from?
AQ:  I don’t know.  They loaded it up.  I guess it was English food.  I don’t know where it came from, but they loaded it in at the base, of course, where we took off in Horham.  It was bags of stuff.  Sometimes you’d see a bag burst.  I don’t know what they had – beans or grain or what in the thing.  Of course the land there was pretty wet, and the spray.  We would sort of come up to.  Grain spilling out sort of looked like water spraying.  But they dropped all kinds of stuff.  I guess it was donated by the English, probably initially came from Americans I guess.  Some of it would bounce up into trees.  You’d see people up the trees pulling it down.  The others were loading it on wheel barrows and wagons and so forth.  But apparently were in pretty bad shape there.  I know they had signed a truce with the Germans not to be shot at while they were doing that, but I understand we did lose a plane because they did get shot at on some of those missions.  Somebody may have told you all about that before.  Actually they gave you some credit for flying extra missions because it wasn’t really safe doing that.

JM:  Were those volunteer missions that you flew, the Chow Hound missions, were they volunteer missions?
AQ:  No, we had to do like you always do when you’re at war.  You do what they tell you, you know.  But when they assigned me to another crew after the hospital, they put me in a crew that the guy who flew in the front seat before, the togglelier, had a received a fatal wound in the forehead.  The guy that I took his place, was supposed to, he wouldn’t fly.  He was superstitious.  So they asked me.  I said I’m not superstitious, so I flew it.  But were interesting, good missions.  The others are nowhere – something you had to do.  

JM:  When did you come back to the United States?

AQ:  Okay, I flew back with Jackman’s crew – I forgot his first name.  Started back somewhere around June the 15th, 1945.  We landed in Iceland, then Greenland, the Bradley Field, Connecticut.  So I got home about the last of June, 1945.

JM:  How was your homecoming?

AQ:  Wonderful.  I went to see my girlfriend, who became my wife, first.  So I took her home with me to see my mother and father next.  (Laughing)  So it was great.  Stayed there – had a 30 day furlough – and got married.  Went to Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  The war ended while I was helping the farmers out in the potato field.  Didn’t have anything else to do – picking up potatoes, when they dropped the atomic bomb.  I got discharged in October 1945.  And then I went to Virginia Tech.  I got a degree in Engineering.  My life since then has been associated with aviation.  I was one of the designers of the________________transmitter, the F-16 radar transmitters, and ___________________ group for many years there.  I’ve been with aviation.  I guess the exposure then helped me out later get the right kind of a job which I liked.  That’s most of my story, I guess.

JM:  On your time off, when you were in Horham, what did you do, and who’d you do it with?
AQ:  Well, we’d go on pass every chance we got.  And most of the time we went, well on the time that we got a three day pass, we would go to London usually.  And we’d just run around and try to find a place where they had good food. Talked to a few girls every once in a while and so forth.  But then during the week sometime, we’d go to the local town – Eye there – or some little pubs around that was close by to have fish and chips.  We’d get out and ride the bicycles around the perimeter of the airport quite a bit.  And then we’d fly, of course.  Sometimes the training flights – they weren’t all missions.  Just tried to stay alive and do the best we could.

JM:  Well, are there any other things that you would like to add for the record?
AQ:  I don’t think so.  I’m happy to be here.  I want to come back next year.  I tell everybody, if I’m still above ground, I’ll be back.  I can’t think of anything.

JM:  You said you started coming to the reunions in 1994.  How did you find out about them?

AQ:  Arl Cross, they started before them sometime, I think.  I don’t know either.  No, Gabe Chapra, who was a radio operator  on my crew, and he’s still living as a matter of fact.  I think he and I and Arl Cross are the only ones.  He called me and I think had been talking to Arl, and told me about the fact that they were having these meetings.  Gave me a contact, which was Dorsey in Pennsylvania.  And I called him.  Of course at that time the reunion was only about two weeks away.  But he told me, if you want to go, I’ll fix it up for you.  But I just couldn’t.  Other things kept me from going.  So I did sign up to join the group to go the next year, which turned out to be Spokane, Washington for the first one.  I think it was ’94.  And so I’ve missed two since then.  Had colon cancer – I missed one when I had that.  And another time I missed it because, I forgot what the reason was on that.  So I’ve gone to all of them since then except two.  

JM:  Well thank you so much for taking the time today.  Thank you especially for your service to the Army Air Corps and the 95th and our country, and the world.

AQ:  Thank you.