Now, Six Decades Later, He Can Talk About It
Old Fighter Pilot Avoids Tailspins By Confronting WWII's Horrors

By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 23, 2007

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.

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."

Burns calls Aanenson "one of the great heroes of the Second World War," and says that telling his story is "one of the great privileges of my professional life."

The Aanensons appear throughout Burns's saga, but most affectingly in the fifth episode, about the hard fighting in the months after D-Day. One passage recalls his mission over France on Aug. 3, 1944, when Aanenson's plane -- nicknamed "Rebel Jack," for his future wife -- was rocked by flak. As flames sprouted in his cockpit, scorching his legs, Aanenson tried to bail out but found that his damaged canopy wouldn't open more than a few inches.

On instinct, Aanenson put his plane into a steep dive; the rapid change in air pressure sucked the fire through the canopy gap, extinguishing it. But his return to base was calamitous. Aanenson brought his plane in at 170 mph with a flat tire and collapsed landing gear. As it hit the airstrip, the fighter spun around, snapping Aanenson's shoulder harness and throwing him violently around the cockpit. The impact dislocated his shoulder, cracked three ribs and slammed the back of his head into his gun sight. He was pulled unconscious from the plane with an injured skull.

Within a week, he was flying again.

On another mission, Aanenson caught a column of German soldiers along a roadside. Opening the Thunderbolt's eight .50-caliber guns, he saw bullets tear into the men with such force that their bodies went flying. When he returned to his base in Normandy, he was sickened by the experience. Then, he tells Burns's cameras, "I went out and did it again and again and again and again."

The violence accumulated until it was almost banal. One day in February 1945, Aanenson, promoted to captain, worked as a ground-spotter, coordinating airstrikes in the Ruhr Valley of western Germany. Suddenly, an artillery shell crashed through a window of his building. The burst tore the head off a colleague who was standing 30 feet away. Shielded by a column, Aanenson was unhurt, but the explosion blasted the other man's brain tissue and flesh into Aanenson's hair, face and jacket.

As he cleaned off his colleague's remains, Aanenson continued to call in airstrike coordinates.

Like many combat veterans, Aanenson rarely talked about the war, and the feelings it stirred, for many years. Only Jackie, still vivacious at 84, was privy to his nightmares and the blinding headaches that bedeviled him for almost three decades. She knew to pass his morning cup of coffee to his left hand when his right hand -- the one that controlled the Thunderbolt's fearsome guns -- would stop functioning after a trying night. "When you've never seen real fighting," she says, "you can't begin to conceive what it was like. But you see how it affected them."

Aanenson's "therapy," as he calls it, was a concentrated act of remembering. At the urging of his three children, he began to pull together remnants of his military service -- photos, articles, combat footage, etc. -- in the early 1990s. Helped by his son-in-law Tom Pyers, a film editor, Aanenson fashioned this material into a three-hour documentary, "A Fighter Pilot's Story." The film aired on WETA in 1993 and nationally on PBS stations in 1994, winning acclaim and eliciting an enormous response. Aanenson received thousands of letters and calls from veterans, their families and others, including former German enemies.

Among the remarkable stories in that film is one in which Aanenson was called in to assist U.S. troops under attack by a German tank. Aanenson initially begged off, saying that the tank was too close to the troops and that his attack might hit his own men. The commanding officer insisted, and Aanenson managed to knock out the tank cleanly. A few years later, Aanenson was chatting with a neighbor, a man he'd just met. The man started to tell him about how a fighter pilot had saved his life during the war. Aanenson finished the story for him.

Burns heard about Aanenson's film from a public television executive as he began to research "The War" six years ago. He contacted Aanenson and in January 2003, two of Burns's associates, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, interviewed him at his home for five hours (an experience Aanenson likens to "a deep-penetration mission to Berlin"). A few months later, they recorded Jackie's recollections.

The Aanensons' participation led Burns to another critical element of "The War." While researching Aanenson's boyhood in Luverne, Burns and his production team found the wartime newspaper columns of Al McIntosh, editor and publisher of the local Rock County Star-Herald.

McIntosh's poignant stories led Burns to feature Luverne and McIntosh, whose columns are read by Tom Hanks in his film. The farming community became one of the four U.S. towns that form the narrative backbone of "The War."

One of "The War's" dramatic highlights isn't about the dead and dying, but about the cost of the war on the living. By early December 1944, Aanenson was so emotionally depleted that he feared he couldn't continue. He poured his confusion and doubt into a letter to Jackie, which he reads in one episode. In part, he wrote:

"So far, I have done my duty in this war. I have never aborted a mission or failed to dive on a target no matter how intense the flak. I have lived for my dreams for the future. But like everything else around me, my dreams are dying, too. In spite of everything, I may live through this war and return to Baton Rouge. But I am not the same person you said goodbye to on May 3. No one can go through this and not change. We are all casualties. In the meantime, we just go on. Some way, somehow, this will all have an ending. Whatever it is, I am ready for it."

Aanenson put the letter in his footlocker and never mailed it. He thought it would be too cruel to send it to the woman he would marry five months later.

After the war, Aanenson finished his education at Louisiana State University. He entered the insurance field -- life insurance at that. He joined a sales training program run by Mutual of New York, in 1948, and spent his professional career with the company. The family moved to the Washington area in 1955, when Aanenson took over the company's local office. He retired 21 years ago.

Over the decades, Aanenson has ruminated on the meaning of the war, and his role in it. He has pondered many times the most personal and profound question of all: Why did he survive when so many of those he went to battle with did not?

"My wife is a sincerely religious person," he says. "She has said, 'You were spared by a power greater than any of us. I know you survived to tell your story.' " He finds this suggestion "much too heavy-duty."

Instead, he says: "How can I say this? I was just damn lucky. I was in as brutal a war as any fighter pilot could be. I was just very, very lucky."

Aanenson remembers going to a park in Baton Rouge a few years after the war, and spending hours sitting on a bench, thinking about the future. He vowed then, he says, to live a life "with purpose," one that would justify all of the sacrifice, if only in some small way.

"It's hard to understand why the guy next to you was blown apart and why you're able to go on to have a wonderful life," he reflects. "There's a sense of responsibility we assume, or should assume. I tried to make a contribution, to my family, to the business world, to live with high ethical standards."

He resolved, he said, "not to waste this life, to do something that counts in a positive way."

Aanenson pauses. "This is going to sound maudlin, but I tried to live some of the life that my buddies did not have. I'm not finding the right words. I tried to live with purpose."