World War II Experiences
"Timeless Voices" Oral History Project
Interview with
Paul J. Keenan, 398th Bomb Group Pilot
603rd Squadron, Eighth Air Force
Interviewer: Randy Stange
Interview conducted at the
398th Bomb Group Annual Reunion
Covington, Kentucky, September 13, 2003
Background:
The 398th has been interviewing its members as part of the Timeless Voices of Aviation project. More information about the project and a current list of video interviews can be found at 398th Timeless Voices Interviews. In addition to the video interviews, some of the interviews have been transcribed to text.
Interview with
Paul J. Keenan, 398th Bomb Group Pilot
603rd Squadron, Eighth Air Force
RS: Interviewer, Randy Stange
PK: 398th Pilot, Paul Keenan
Time of Interview: 0:28:49
RS: For the record, ah, the interviewer is Randy Stange, we’re interviewing Paul Keenan with the 398th Bomb Group. Ah, it’s September 12, 2003, it’s the [slight pause] 13th… September 13 2003. We’re at the Radisson Hotel Covington Kentucky. Paul could you state your name?
PK: Name is Paul Keenan, K-e-e-n-a-n
RS: And where were you born and raised?
PK: Rochester New York. Lived there until I went away to college and spent very little time in Rochester thereafter.
RS: Did you have any siblings, brothers, sisters?
PK: Yes, I had a brother, an older brother who served in WW2 in the anti aircraft artillery in the Pacific and a younger sister.
RS: What did your parents do?
PK: My father was a, worked with his brother who owned a correspondence school and my mother was, as most women were in those days, housewife and mother.
RS: What do you remember of the years leading up to the war?
PK: Ah, just normal I guess. Um when I was a young man, and a young kid really, I was really captivated by aviation. I wanted to be a pilot real bad from day one I think and I spent a lot of time at the local airport just hanging around, that’s how I remember a lot of the old airplanes that I’ve seen at EAA., the old antiques now.
RS: Yeah. What do you remember about Pearl Harbor? Where were you? Do you have any particular thoughts?
PK: Everybody remembers Pearl Harbor. The day it happened I was walking down State Street in Ann Arbor Michigan, coz I was a student at the university of Michigan, with some of my friends and somebody came up and said; “hey have you heard they bombed Pearl Harbor today?” ‘Course most of us didn’t even know where Pearl Harbor was, ‘til we found out it was Hawaii. That was a big impact.
RS: And were you drafted or did you enlist?
PK: Like many people I stayed in college as long as I could, and the draft situation was starting to change, I suspected I might get drafted so I decided I wanted to go where I wanted to go, so I enlisted in the Air Force, in the enlisted reserve cadet program.
RS: What did you think about your first days in the service?
PK: First days in the service were a troop train from Detroit to Miami beach and those were miserable days and when we got to Miami Beach we all stayed in one of those fashionable little hotels on South Beach, no air conditioning, nothing, and when we arrived in the train at the train station there were a bunch of other guys leaving and they were all chorusing “you’ll be sorry!” But it wasn’t bad, it was hot but it wasn’t bad.
RS: Yeah. What did they teach you at Miami, was that your basic training or was that…
PK: That was Army basic. They taught us mainly close order drill and a little bit of KP and um PT and that was about it. They called in everybody in the enlisted reserve at the same time in the cadet program and they had three or four bases around the country just were loaded with people. Basically they processed them out of there to colleges all around the country (RS: right) college training detachments.
RS: Right. Where did you go from Miami?
PK: To Kutztown State Teachers College in Kutztown Pennsylvania. They had a group of about 240 of us and divided into classes of six different classes. I was in the first class out so we left after a month.
RS: Do you remember any of your instructors there?
PK: Yeah, I remember the head of the detachment was Captain Poche [sp?] and there was a lieutenant tactical officer. I don’t remember his name but I think it was Brashshere [sp?] or something like that.
RS: Where did you go after your basic? I assume that was your basic flight school?
PK: No, that was just a stashing point for all those people they dragged in at the same time, and they sent us, when I got out of training at Kutztown we went to San Antonio to the Aviation Cadet Center in San Antonio and that was where we went through classification and pre-flight. I was classified in the pilot group and we just went across the road to pre-flight from there.
RS: After pre-flight where was your training?
PK: My next stop was in Fort Worth at a civilian primary flight school called Hicks Field. It was a nice little place. I enjoyed my time there.
RS: And what was after that point?
PK: The next stop was Perrin Field in Sherman Texas. It was only another seventy-five miles up the road and beyond that was in basic flying school and after two months there went on to Ellington Field in Houston where I was in twin engine advanced training, flying AT-10’s
RS: Was that what you wanted or that what they gave you?
PK: Not really, most of us wanted to be fighter pilots and when I got down there, I was a little bit disappointed but it was alright and you know glad to be flying anything really. After graduation they made me an instrument flight instructor at the same place, so I went from student to teacher overnight.
RS: How long were you an instructor there?
PK: I did about three months of that and then through different configurations I ended up at Second Air Force and they asked me about the amount of time I had compared to the typical cadet [and] Did I prefer to fly B-17s or B-24s? That was the only choice I ever had in the service. So I got what I wanted, so I asked for B-17s and they sent me to Sebring Florida and I went in a proficiency class. Only got forty hours there and we were graduated and we were sent back to Lincoln.
RS: At Lincoln did they classify your group?
PK: No, I was sent to Ardmore Oklahoma where a new transition group, not transition, but a crew training group was forming. I inherited a crew that had an interesting background. Most of the people in that crew had been in the traffic pattern landing about three months before, and the plane caught fire. They bailed out and most of them did successfully, except for one man who apparently threw his parachute out the door and bailed out on someone else’s back and was torn loose at the time the chute opened. He was killed, several of them were killed. These boys had not flown since that time. It was an interesting progression for these guys. The first time they flew with me they were all lined up at the back door ready to bail out again. It took several months for some of them to feel at home in the airplane.
RS: And did you stay with that crew then?
PK: Yes we did. We flew overseas together and flew our missions together and flew home together.
RS: From Oklahoma then you went to Rapid City?
PK: I’m sorry?
RS: Did you go to Rapid City from Oklahoma then?
PK: Oh no. We went back to… our training was finished and we went to Lincoln. There was a Second Air Force headquarters, I guess.
RS: And from Lincoln?
PK: We got a new airplane at Lincoln and flew it overseas.
RS: Did you take the northern route or the southern?
PK: The northern route in the middle of the winter.
RS: So Bangor to?
PK: No, we flew from Lincoln to Manchester New Hampshire, Grenier Field there. Goose Bay to Labrador. Bluie West One in Greenland. Meeks Field in Reykjavik and then on down to Valley Wales. It took us a little over almost four weeks because when we got to Goose Bay the weather got bad. Almost like permanently it was either bad in Goose Bay or bad in Iceland or bad anywhere else. We sat in Goose Bay, excuse me BW-1 for about three weeks.
RS: What did you do while you were there?
PK: Played a lot of pinochle and bridge, and hearts, and read books, and all sorts of things. Nothing really exciting.
RS: Did you ever travel prior to WW2?
PK: You mean as a civilian?
RS: As a civilian or did your parents ever travel?
PK: Not really, not to amount to anything. Family vacations here and there but never more than 2 or 3 hundred miles from home.
RS: What about, after you got to Scotland? You were assigned a base somewhere I assume.
PK: When we landed in Wales, we spent the night there at Valley Wales Field and then, [my] memory’s a little bit fuzzy on that, but I believe we took the airplane and flew it over to a depot somewhere and then we ended up in Stone I think it was, and I remember our group a lot of our people went in six by sixes in two and a half ton trucks for quite a distance and we went through, I think, Liverpool. We were impressed by the number of young ladies there pushing baby carriages. Not something that was familiar in the States. Then we were sent to a depot and were stored there for a couple of days until we were reassigned, my group, my crew were assigned to the 398th.
RS: So then you went to Station 131?
PK: Yes I did.
RS: Can you remember when you arrived there?
PK: It was probably around the twentieth or the twenty second of March ‘45. I was a late arrival. My whole crew was.
RS: Did you, what did you think of Station 131 when you got there?
PK: It was, it was, I didn’t know really what to expect, but I had seen enough pictures of Nissan huts and the kind of things you’d see in those days. It was more or less what I expected, I guess.
RS: Did you get the pleasure of spending the winter in one of those Nissan huts?
PK: [cough] Well late March, late March, it was kind of cold. Yeah, we had the little pot-bellied stove there with the fuel oil or whatever it was in the middle of the barracks. That was about all the heat we had and the three pad mattresses.
RS: How many did you manage to go on, any combat missions?
PK: The missions were either nine or ten actual missions. I saw a lot of flak but did not see a German fighter. We heard ‘em, them being talked about attacking the bomber stream but we were not attacked by German fighters.
RS: Any memorable experiences during combat?
PK: Ah, not too much major. I was fascinated the first mission and ceased being fascinating after the first mission. We were all a little bit afraid, (RS: sure), frankly. And ah, but we just flew them and I can’t imagine how tough it was for the guys who preceded us by about two years in ’42 and ‘43 when their chances of survival were very limited.
RS: Any casualties on your crew?
PK: No, we never had a casualty. We were shot up some. We had one bomb mission we were unable to close the bomb bay doors after the bombs were dropped and it turned out that apparently some flak had come through the bomb bay while the doors were open, before the bombs were dropped. It damaged the electrical mechanism or whatever it was that allowed us to close the doors electrically, and so we had to crank them shut. But we enjoyed speculating later on suppose that stuff had hit the bombs in the wrong place, ya know? (laughs)
RS: Where did you go from after the war ended in Europe?
PK: Ah, there was one interesting mission after the war ended and that was when a number of our airplanes was sent over to B.W., I mean to Stalag Luft One to pick up troops who had been shot down, almost all Air Force people. That was a gratifying mission because we took three or four men over there in the airplane of our own people and put a floor in the bomb bay and loaded up about a, maybe twenty released prisoners and brought them back to France. And that was a very satisfying mission, no bombs being dropped or anything like that. We enjoyed that. We had been warned ahead of time that nobody knew the condition these men were going to be in, these released prisoners. They might have been mentally disturbed or starving to death or whatever but we found out that the men we picked up were very well fed because the Russians had freed the camp up and had driven in German cattle for food purposes. (RS: right). Which means they were eating better meat than we were!
RS: They had to fatten them up a little bit I guess prior to you getting there.
PK: They were and their morale was great. They were very happy.
RS: What were your impressions looking around at Stalag Luft One? I know you weren’t supposed to leave the planes and whatnot ‘cos there was still combat going on but were you able to see anything of the area when you were there?
PK: When we picked up the…
RS: When you picked up the prisoners.
PK: No, we flew in in formation, peeled off, landed, never cut-off our engines. They’d open the door, the back door, 15 to 20 men would jump in there, they’d slam the door then we’d take off again. That was the end of it. We never got out of the airplane.
RS: Did you get any flak leave or anything while you were over there probably...
PK: No, we were not there long enough to get any flak leave. No.
RS: You had a couple of 2 or 3 day passes?
PK: Oh yeah, went to London a couple of times.
RS: How did you get home?
PK: Flew the same route backwards. Left the airplane at Windsor Locks Connecticut at Bradley Field. I guess we took the train, I think it was the train or buses or something down to New Jersey and got leave from there. After leave was over, we reassembled. We all ended up at Drew Field in Florida and sat around for a long time.
RS: What did you do while you were on leave? Did you visit, ah, your family?
PK: Went down to Texas and got engaged.
RS: Oh okay
PK: (laughs)
RS: What did you do after… before that, what did you think when they dropped the Atomic Bomb in August?
PK: We were sitting around in the Officers Club in Drew Field playing cards which we did every day, a bunch of us from the 603rd, and it seemed rather, well it was interesting because we felt this might shorten the war. A lot of us expected we might be sent over to Japan. In fact, I was on orders at one point to go fly B-29s at Roswell but that was cancelled, just about everything was cancelled. And they immediately started to put through terminal leave stuff for the men in the group.
RS: Right
PK: It wasn’t long before I was a civilian.
RS: What did you do when you were discharged?
PK: Um, I returned to Iowa where I had left my car that I happened to have when I was instructing, drove to Rochester, picked up my brother who had just come back from overseas. No excuse me, I’m wrong there. I went back and took one semester of schooling at University of Michigan. Finished my education there and got my degree.
RS: Did you use the G.I. bill for that?
PK: Yes. Then I went back to Rochester picked up my brother, bought another car, drove to Texas and got married.
RS: Did you keep in touch with your crew members?
PK: Not really. Just my bombardier who happened to live in Milwaukee where I lived also for most of the years since the war. And, ah, the crew wasn’t a tightknit group. They'd had their own history I think with that crash that they went down in, so we weren’t that close… and it was only a 10-mission bombing life, if you will. We got along okay.
RS: What were the circumstances of their crash? Do you know?
PK: Um, they were on a traffic pattern getting ready to land and apparently one of the engines caught fire, and they were at, you know, a thousand feet above the ground. They rang the bailout bell and some of them, as I pointed out earlier, some of them got out just fine and some didn’t. The bombardier had not showed up that day so he survived. The pilot and co-pilot were in hospital when I got there, they had been in the hospital for a couple of months, they had crashed with the airplane. So it was a stressful career for those boys.
RS: What did you do after you were married? Where did you end up living?
PK: I would have liked to have continued a flying career, maybe an airline pilot or whatever but they were all… airlines had lots of people coming back of their own from the service and air transport command and so on. They weren’t hiring and a I needed a job, so I became a sales person and stayed in that pretty much the rest of my career. Not the same job but the same field and ah, started a family right away. We had three daughters. Now I have three granddaughters also. No males.
RS: Congratulations, I guess!
PK: [laughs]
RS: Where did you end up living after the war?
PK: After the war I lived briefly in Detroit and then several years in Dallas and then when I joined Sylvania Electric, in ‘52 I believe it was, we moved to Lubbock Texas and spent three years there and then I was transferred to Milwaukee and stayed there until 1982 with Sylvania at which time I retired. I had set up a little side career, I was a local politician in the city that I lived in. I lived in Waukesha Wisconsin, I was on the City Council for several years and then I ran for mayor and was elected there and stayed as mayor for four years.
RS: Congratulations
PK: Thank you
RS: Ah, when did you join the veteran’s organizations? What organizations have you joined besides the 398th?
PK: I don’t believe I ever joined any of the veteran’s organizations. And I didn’t really realize… I was out of touch with the 398th for some reason or other, and I heard that they were going to have a meeting, a convention, in Oshkosh which is only 80 miles from where I live. I thought, I’m going to that. I got my navigator and took him up there. That was my first convention and this is my third one right here today. So that was my experience with the 398th group.
RS: Glad you joined. Is there anything else you can think of Paul that you would like to say?
PK: No, when I look back, I am very glad I had the experiences I did with the 398th in the Air Force. They taught me something very valuable. I wanted to fly and I got to fly. I wish I could have done more of it but I did not get to do so. And that’s alright too but it was very good experience and the 398th are a great group of people.
RS: Well thanks for your time Paul
PK: Thank you Randy
Kathy: Can I tell you something (Randy: go ahead) one of things you've [referring to Paul] talked about is you being young kids about your dog fights, tell them about your dog fights, it was just a fun thing it was like kids, like boys.
PK: What Kathy is saying is that in primary training after we'd had about 12 hours in the air total, including about 8 or 9 hours in dual time, and then four or five hours solo time, we all thought we were the greatest pilots in the world at that point as you might suspect. We were up there, a friend of mine and I were up there dog fighting over the practice area and we were having a wonderful time until we discovered there was a third airplane in the dog fight and it was an instructor who waved at us and told us to get down on the ground. We got chewed out royally for that. We thought we were just real hot pilots at that point.
RS: Most kids do
PK: Well that’s right, that’s right. What was the other thing I was going to mention there?
RS: Your long-distance flight?
PK: Oh yeah. The Air Force never seemed to worry too much about our flying on our own and they sent us, in Ardmore, the big adventure was a thousand-mile cross country. We flew from Ardmore to North Platt Nebraska and then turned around and flew back again. We didn’t even land, just flew out and back and that was the only distance flying we ever did in training. And then when the training was over and they gave us an airplane, in fact we’d never landed at any place except at Ardmore or Sebring, when I was down there. Then we fly to New Hampshire, Goose Bay, Labrador, Greenland, all these other places over water, over icebergs down there and we were not really prepared for that but we did it anyway and it was interesting, just flying and landing I guess you would have to say but there was very little preparation for that kind of travel.
RS: That’s true, that is true.
PK: But they couldn’t afford to do it I suppose.
RS: I dunno, they couldn’t afford not to really, at that time.
PK: Most of us got there. It would have been better, I think, if we had been better prepared for that kind of traffic but we didn’t do it so but I don’t remember losing too many people that way.
RS: Were you pretty nervous when you did your first mission and were forming up? Or did you have pretty clear weather and it wasn’t as bad?
PK: As I said earlier, I was fascinated the first mission. Everything about it. l must have been very wide-eyed you know. But there was one mission where our squadron was forming up with other people, I don’t know who they were, but it was soupy and cloudy and all of a sudden through a break in the clouds we saw another squadron coming directly at us and not very far away. Everybody scattered everywhere including the other bunch too. It got kinda hairy.
RS: Yeah, I’m really amazed there weren’t more mid-air collisions during the logistics trying to form up the bomber stream.
PK: In modern day air traffic control would not tolerate something like that.
RS: Not at all.
PK: Okay
[TIME OF INTERVIEW 0:28:49]
See also:
- Keenan's Crew (partial) - 603rd Squadron - April - June 1945
- Bob Armstrong, 398th Ball Turret Gunner- Keenan's Crew - 603rd Squadron Video Interview (25m 56s)
- Return to 398th Timeless Voices Interviews to view and listen to the interview, Paul Keenan, 398th Pilot - 603rd Squadron (28m 49s).
Notes:
- Lt. Paul J. Keenan was a Pilot in the 603rd Squadron.
- The above transcription was provided by Amanda Cockcroft. She is a big 398th BGMA supporter and also maintains the DeCleene Crew crash site at Birchenough Hill in England. Amanda is a volunteer transcriber
- The transcription was obtained from a video file.
- Punctuation, grammar and minor word changes may have been made to improve readability.
- Additional information may be shown in brackets [ ].