Now, Six Decades Later, He Can Talk About It

Old Fighter Pilot Avoids Tailspins By Confronting WWII's Horrors

In Quentin Aanenson's vivid retelling, the war was never glorious. It was ghastly. Death was the prefix and suffix of almost every moment of his 10 months as a U.S. fighter pilot during World War II. Men died around him in fires and accidents, from explosions and gunfire.

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Aanenson dreaded death, administered it, escaped it -- and struggled for years afterward with its consequences.

But he remembers love and longing, too. Love of home and family kept Aanenson flying through murderous flak barrages and burning cockpits. Thoughts of the girl he had left behind -- the woman who would become his wife, Jacqueline Greer Aanenson -- kept him going when he thought he had reached the end of his emotional endurance.

Those two extremes -- death and love -- mark the Aanensons' considerable contribution to Ken Burns's massive, seven-part PBS documentary "The War," debuting tonight. The Aanensons, who live in Bethesda, are among the principal storytellers in the 14 1/2 -hour film, bearing witness to events that formed what Burns rightly calls "the greatest cataclysm in human history."

Quentin Aanenson, 86, grew up in the tiny farming town of Luverne, Minn., dreaming of flying during his boyhood in the 1920s and '30s. He got his wish as a young man, and then some. Trained to fly the P-47, the fast and lethal Thunderbolt, Lt. Aanenson went into combat for the first time on the morning of June 6, 1944. D-Day. He would provide close air support and later coordinate airstrikes for Allied troops advancing across France and Germany almost until the war's end in Europe.

More than six decades later, Aanenson relates the details of his military service precisely and earnestly, but with little evident enthusiasm. Sitting in the comfortable suburban home he and Jackie have shared for 50 years, he speaks in a dry, calm, almost affectless voice, which has the unintended effect of intensifying the horror that he witnessed.

Aanenson is a trim man, neatly attired this day in slacks and a crisply pressed dress shirt. The passage of time has wizened him; he looks only vaguely like the lanky young pilot captured in front of a P-47 in a painting that hangs in his family room. It's the only visible evidence of his wartime career in the house.

Much more is locked in memory. As he notes in a lengthy interview one fine afternoon, there was too much dying to forget. "We went out as a bunch of kids," he says, "and we came back maybe looking the same. But inside we were different. Nobody can really know, nobody can really understand it."

During training at Harding Field in Baton Rouge (where he met Jackie, a base secretary), five of his comrades lost their lives in accidents. By the war's end, 90 of the 125 pilots in his unit, the 366th Fighter Group, would be dead.

The odds of survival against massed German antiaircraft fire were so long that pilots in Aanenson's unit were ordered to draw up their wills. According to Army procedure, three other pilots were to witness each pilot's will. Within six months, the three who witnessed Aanenson's decree were dead. Two of the four pilots with whom he shared quarters also died.

The anguish grew so deep that Aanenson stopped befriending his fellow fliers, lest he face their deaths, too. Once, on a brief visit home to Luverne, Aanenson instructed his sister to prepare his parents for what seemed inevitable.

"He lived through chaos, chaos we can't even imagine," says Burns, who attended "The War's" world premiere in Luverne with the Aanensons this month. "The war lives in him every single day. He masters it, but it haunts him."