By Patricia Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
As a fighter pilot in World War II, Quentin C. Aanenson fought a very dangerous war.
He first saw combat on D-Day, and in the ensuing year, he dive-bombed and strafed tanks, bridges and German infantry at low altitude. He took direct hits from antiaircraft shells and flak on more than 20 missions and survived two crash landings. He watched so many of his fellow pilots in the 366th Fighter Group die that he stopped making friends with the replacements.
After 75 combat missions, Mr. Aanenson rotated home for a short break. He married the girl he'd met during basic training and went to see his parents in his southwestern Minnesota home town. There, he picked up his boyhood hunting rifle and shot a pesky gopher. As he watched it die, "something snapped," he said. "I resolved never to kill again."
Fortunately, he was never asked to. By the time he was due back for duty, the war was over.
Mr. Aanenson, 87, who became a life insurance executive after the war, died of cancer Dec. 28 at his home in Bethesda.
A trim, modest man who looked like the unassuming grandson of Norwegian immigrants that he was, Mr. Aanenson's reflections on the brutality of combat deepened the understanding of war among millions of television viewers. He had rarely spoken of his military service until after he retired, when his children suggested that he document what he'd gone through.
The result became a movie, "A Fighter Pilot's Story," which he intended as a private family memoir. In 1992, he showed the video to a reunion of the 366th Fighter Group Association. Fellow veterans urged him to get it into wider distribution. WETA aired a three-hour version in November 1993. By that June, the 50th anniversary of D-Day, more than 300 PBS stations had broadcast it.
Filmmaker Ken Burns heard about the video while he was researching his World War II documentary. His interviews with the eloquent Mr. Aanenson led Burns to Minnesota, where he found a treasure-trove of wartime newspaper columns written by the editor of the local Rock County Star Herald. How the farm town dealt with the loss and heroism of its sons formed the narrative underpinning of Burns's 2007 documentary, "The War."
A principal officer at Mutual of New York for 32 years, Mr. Aanenson received some of his profession's highest managerial honors. He was selected its "Manager of the Year" from a field of 147 before his retirement in 1986.
"That helped me come to peace -- this sounds strange -- with the dealing in death," he later said of his career in life insurance. "You have to choose life over death. I don't mean to be melodramatic about it, but that was the motive."
But the war never entirely left him. He was haunted by the fear that he had once mistakenly fired on Allied troops. The first time he fired on a column of German soldiers along a roadside, the impact of his shells pitched their bodies into the air. He knew he was doing what he was trained to do, "but when I got back home to the base in Normandy and landed, I got sick. I had to think about what I had done. Now that didn't change my resolve for the next day. I went out and did it again. And again and again and again," he said.
He wrote affecting letters to his fiancee, not all of which he mailed. Later in life, after nightmares kept him from sleep, his right hand, the one that controlled the fighter's guns, would not work well enough to hold a coffee cup. Blinding headaches from a wartime concussion plagued him for decades.
Born April 21, 1921, on a 160-acre farm five miles from Luverne, Minn., Quentin Aanenson grew up dreaming of flight. He spent two years at the University of Minnesota, and in the summer of 1941 moved to Seattle, where he got a job at Boeing and attended the University of Washington. Pearl Harbor was attacked in December, and the United States entered World War II.
Although Mr. Aanenson had hoped to become a pilot, he was disqualified because of colorblindness. But he took the eye test enough times to memorize it, and by 1943 was accepted into the U.S. Army Air Forces. After flight training and fighter pilot training, he was sent to England. His first combat mission was June 4, 1944, flying his P-47 Thunderbolt to Normandy, where he was among those who attacked the German positions behind Pointe du Hoc in advance of the Allies' landing.
Almost a year of vicious combat awaited him. In July 1944 over Rouen, France, he took a direct hit from an antiaircraft shell that failed to explode. On Aug. 3, 1944, on a mission over Vire, France, his plane was hit by flak and caught fire. Unable to bail out, he dived straight toward the earth, and the high-speed plunge extinguished the flames. He managed to line up with a nearby runway and crash-landed, blowing a tire, damaging the landing gear and spinning the fighter around until it broke in two. Mr. Aanenson dislocated his shoulder, cracked three ribs and whacked his skull against the gunsight. He was pulled, unconscious, from the wreckage. Ninety minutes later, a photographer for Picture Post, a prominent English photojournalistic magazine, captured the bruised and battered pilot beside his collapsed fighter.
As soon as he recovered, he flew again. During the Battle of the Bulge, he coordinated close air support on the ground. For 36 hours, he and his radio man were trapped behind enemy lines in the Ardennes.
After the war ended, he graduated from Louisiana State University and joined the life insurance company where he spent his entire career. He moved to Bethesda in 1956 and had lived in the same house since then.
Among his military awards were the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Purple Heart and the Air Medal with nine oak leaf clusters. Fifty years after the liberation of France, Mr. Aanenson was made a commander of the Legion of Honor, an honor he accepted, he said, on behalf of all American pilots, living and dead, who served in the war. His home town renamed its airport Quentin C. Aanenson Field.
Survivors include his wife of 63 years, Jacqueline G. Aanenson of Bethesda; three children, Vicki J. Murphy of Ellicott City, Jerry L. Aanenson of Boyds and Debra D. Pyers of Chicago; a brother; a sister; and nine grandchildren.
He told The Washington Post in 2007 that he considered himself "just damn lucky."
"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 said. "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 . . . not to waste this life, to do something that counts in a positive way. . . . I tried to live with purpose."