Mr. Frank H. Kuehn
[b. 8/31/1924]
Today is October 12th, 2006. I am Allie Hanley and interviewing Mr. Kuehn at Park Tudor School. My Kuehn is an acquaintance of Mrs. Lerch. He is 82 years old and was born on August 31st, 1924. Mr. Kuehn served in the World War 2 and Korea. He was in [376th Bomb Group] was the Air Force and Army Air Force and held the following rank: Technical Sergeant.
[003]
Allie Hanley: Can you tell me your full name?
Frank Kuehn: Frank H. Kuehn [pronounced kee-an].
AH: Where were you born and when?
FK: I was born in Chicago, Illinois on August 31st, 1924.
AH: What was your childhood like?
FK: It was a very comfortable childhood; I had good parents and I had a good life.
AH: Where did you attend school and when?
FK: I attended elementary school in Chicago. Then I went into high school in Chicago. Then I went to Northwestern University and then finished in— at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan—I was transferred there.
[012]
AH: Were you drafted or enlisted?
FK: Enlisted.
AH: What did your family think about you enlisting?
FK: It was just my mother, and she had to sign for me because I was eighteen.
AH: Why did you join?
FK: Because my friends were going also.
[016]
AH: Why did you pick the service branch you joined?
FK: I didn’t. I picked the—I wanted to be a parachute trooper, but at the end of the examination they advised me that I didn’t weigh enough, that I would have to take another branch of service until I could gain the weight, and then I could always transfer. But by that time I had finished my school at Maxwell Field and I joined the Air Force—went to Maxwell Field finished the service and by that time, I was well acquainted with the Air Force and I decided to stay with that.
AH: Can you tell me a little bit about your boot camp?
FK: Same as everyone, I had the basic training and then I went to Keesler Field, Mississippi, for my engineering technic, and then I went to St. Louis and was transferred over to Sacramento, California, and shipped over seas.
AH: What was your job assignment?
FK: My job assignment. I was a mechanic and I was sent over to North Africa to the 376th Bomb Group. I served with the 376th Bomb Group through North Africa from Benghazi to Enfidaville, [in southern] Tunisia, then went on into Italy. Then I served as a mechanic and then one day, the bomb crew came out—the engineer was reluctant to fly on a mission and the line officer requested if I wanted to go on to flying status. After being there almost two years, I figured I was never going to get home, so I decided I would fly my 50 missions to go home. So I flew the mission on the 23rd of February to Steyr, Austria and was shot down. [mission #216 to Steyr Aero Engine Works, Austria]
[035]
AH: Can you tell me what some of your most memorable experiences was?
FK: Memorable experiences? I had quite a few, with the 376 shot down, then back and went to Korea and Japan; served with the 437th Troop Carrier for about almost two years— two and a half years, then came home.
I guess the most memorable was trekking through Iraq. After I was shot down, I was able to join the Yugoslav Partisans with Marshal Tito. I was with a group with them, and then I stayed with Marshal Tito until an approximately 2 ½ months. Then I was able to be flown out of there (in a town called Petrova in Yugoslavia, which was Tito’s headquarters.) In fact, Churchill’s son [Maj. Randolph Churchill] was there as a liaison for the British—the partisans. Then after I had flown out of there, a lend lease C-47 came in with a Russian pilot, dropped off some supplies for the partisans because they were communist and they were being supplied by the Russians—and then—and the British also—and then they—after they unloaded some officers and some supplies, they took what crew’s were available by seniority, and I was flown to Bari, Italy. From Bari, Italy I was taken to my bomb group and gathered my clothing and whatever I could get together. Usually there’s a period when you’re shot down, there was this tendency for the other crewmen of the base to take whatever they might need, of the crew [?] that was missing, so they all brought their stuff back to me; I gathered my stuff and was flown home from Mitchell Field, New York and then to Chicago.
AH: How did you stay in touch with your family?
FK: I wrote once in a while, my mother was my only contact.
AH: What was camp like, what was the food and entertainment like?
FK: Oh, we always had entertainment. There were USO shows. Many of them would come over; you wouldn’t remember them, but there was Joey Brown, and I can’t even recall them. We would see them, and the Air Force life itself was entertaining.
AH: What was the food like?
FK: I have no complaints; I’m one of the great ones, who enjoyed Spam.
AH: Were there plenty of supplies?
FK: Plenty of supplies? Always.
[064]
AH: Did you ever feel great pressure or stress?
FK: Oh no, no, Sure. Usually it was the night before you that would think about where you were going to go. You would check with operations the day before; they would tell you where you were going to go or where you were going to fly. It was primarily true also in Korea. And then there’s that night before, it would be—you would think about all the things that could happen—wonder what’s going to go on.
AH: Did you ever have a good luck charm or something that you had with you for good luck?
FK: No, not really.
AH: Where did you travel while you were at the service?
FK: Quite a few places, ah, Mississippi, California, North Africa, Italy, and Yugoslavia. Back again, I was stationed as—became an instructor, in Galveston, Texas, and stayed in Galveston, Texas. Then went on into, Colorado Springs, and I was going to go to B-29 school, then the war was over and I took my discharge. I joined the reserve. And then in 1950, we were recalled to Korea—the whole group as a troop carrier outfit—all reservists went to South Carolina. South Caroline flew—then flew—got our airplanes out of San Antonio, Texas and flew into California, then on over to Hawaii, and some of the islands, and then on our way to Japan. Was stationed in Japan then for a couple of years.
AH: How did people entertain themselves?
FK: Oh, various ways—always in the service, you had the officer clubs, you had the NCO club. We had clubs that we would go to, and we said, we had shows—we would always have something going, maybe card games, or baseball, football, and something like that, that we would play. Usually in Africa, when the planes took off—then mechanics and crew, we would usually go down to the Mediterranean and swim all the time.
AH: You said you had chores what were your chores?
FK: Chores. Oh, I suffered the same chores as any recruit would come in to the Air Force, I had KP duty, guard duty, and then later on, it was primarily my job was to maintain the aircraft as a mechanic. Then, when I went on to flying status, I would make sure that planes stayed afloat.
AH: Do you recall any humorous or unusual events?
FK: Unusual events? Getting shot down was an unusual event.
AH: Did you pull pranks on any of your friends in the war?
FK: No, not really.
AH: Did you know anyone that was ever held hostage?
FK: By the enemy? Yes, mostly after the war, I met people that have been interned and captured and so forth.
[107]
AH: How can you describe what it is like to get shot down?
FK: You don’t really think very much when you’re getting shot down. We were—came in on the target. We lost eight aircraft that day and mostly it was from flak and when we were shot up a little bit, then the fighters would come in and try to finish us off. I was fortunate enough to make my way down closer to the Yugoslavia border before I bailed out. But we had a fire in the engine and we got that fire out, and as the group slowly went away from us, we were by ourselves and fighters came in and attacked us. Finally, we just had to bail out. When I bailed out, I had a—it was the 23rd of February and there was snow on the ground. So I took one of those fleece lined jackets and I tried to throw it out through the Bombay. It kept blowing back again and finally it got caught in the wind and I jumped after it. It was the first time I ever parachuted and I didn’t realize what I had. So I had a chest pack and when I pulled the pack, nothing happened and it was just a spring in the front that I had pulled and a little parachute came out. And I thought, “my God, they game me the wrong parachute. I had one for supplies. When I get back I’m going to beat the heck out of them. Then all of a sudden, the big chute came out. I slowly drifted down, a P-38 that was an escort for us, he flew around me for a while to see if I was alright. I landed in the snow on the top of a mountain. Coming down I had seen a village and I figured that was the place that I was going to head for. So I came down in—grabbed my chute—I had no weapon— I didn’t want to carry a weapon, because I figured if I was shot down, I wasn’t going to fight the war anyhow. So I took the parachute up with me and thought that I could make up a hammock, if I had to stay in the forest for a while, but as I started walking down toward the village, I had a very difficult—because the snow was very deep, and I turned around and there were two civilians behind me and they were on skis. I surrendered to them. The difficulty I had there was I had surrendered, told them I am an American, “I surrender.” They didn’t say a word to me, and then I said well, “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” [do you speak German?]—that I spoke German. Now they didn’t know who I was—if I was German or American. But they took me into the village, they fed us there, and helped us that night get in touch with the Yugoslavian Partisans across the border, and then I was with the Yugoslavian partisans for quite some time.
AH: Can you describe what life was like in Africa?
FK: What life was like in Africa? It was hot, dirty and it was strange. We were out in Benghazi, on the Libyan Desert, and then we went up towards Enfidaville, near Tunis—went to Tunis a couple of times. It was very arid, I didn’t enjoy it. You were asking about what we would do for sports. Sometimes we would have fights with scorpions, you would bet on which one would survive.
AH: How long were you there?
FK: I got over in end of 1942 in to Benghazi, and then made my way up until—after I got shot down I came back around June of 1944—that was in Africa; then in Korea, I served— I went over on the 10th of August 1940—1950, and I came back in 1952—about July ‘52.
[152]
AH: When you got shot down what was the objective to that particular mission?
FK: It was a raid on Steyr, Austria with the ball bearing factory, and it was an all out effort to—it what we were trying to do was, to destroy the ability for the Germans to make airplanes. We didn’t like them shooting at us all the time, but it was the first raid on Steyr and it was a bad one, they knew we were coming, I live in Austria now and I go to the area sometime where we were, but I never knew it. But there was a large German fighter base, near Steyr called Wels, Austria, and they knew we were coming and they were waiting for us, when we arrived.
AH: Where did you go after the service ended?
FK: I went back home to Chicago and I worked in Chicago, joined the reserves, then was recalled as I said, to Korea.
AH: Was language an essential for you in Austria?
FK: Yea, it helped, as I said, I spoke German. I knew the German language, but they understood me and I understood them—and I still do. I live there now six months out of the year. My wife is from Vienna and she inherited a bed and breakfast there that her folks had, and we keep that as our home now. It’s in a little town called, Mönichkirchen, between Vienna and Austria [sic]—100 miles south of Vienna in the Wechsel Mountains—a little ski resort are for people in Vienna and Hungry. It is close to the Hungarian border.
AH: Where were you at when you service ended?
FK: Service ended for me when I was discharged and I was at Colorado.
AH: When you went back to Chicago, did you go back to work?
FK: Yes I did.
AH: What did you do?
FK: I went to school first to the deForest Institute—radio work. I wanted to become an airline mechanic. Then took a job, though, then as a repair man for jukeboxes for Seeburg.
[184]
AH: Did you gain any close friends in the service?
FK: Yes, I always had close friends, but after you apart and are away for a while you kind of lose them. I belong to an organization, the 376th Heavy Bombardment Group Organization, and we meet year. In fact, we just came back now from Wichita in which we had our 32nd reunion and I meet old friends there once in a while. And I still correspond with some.
AH: Do you write to them or call
FK: We write together or we call each other on the phone.
AH: Where did you meet your friends?
FK: In the service.
AH: In which country did you meet them?
FK: Well. They came up with me through Africa and Italy and then the ones in Korea, the same way and Japan. Some of them I knew and when I went to Korea, I had talked a school friend of mine to join the reserve and after he joined the reserve, we were recalled and he became my radio operator; and we correspond quite a bit.
[199]
AH: Can you describe a typical day as an engineer or mechanic?
FK: As a mechanic, a typical day? Usually, you got up at 4:00 in the morning, you had your breakfast, went out to the airplane and got it ready for the crew to come out, and after it takes off we would go out—mostly down to the Mediterranean and swim for a while. When we were in Italy, we’d just take our pass and maybe go somewhere in some town. We knew when the planes were supposed to be coming back, and then we would get back to the base, wait for the ship to arrive; and it is the same way in Korea with the troop carriers. When we made our missions, we would get back and wait for—while there I was actually on the crew—we would just park the aircraft, then go on into the town, to a club or something like that mostly.
AH: What was life like with the Yugoslavian Partisans?
FK: The Partisans? What was life like for them? The partisans were very, very poor and didn’t have much, but what they had, they shared with us. And of course, Tito was from the Serbian side of the Yugoslavia, and they weren’t well liked. They had the same problems they have today; they had various, different groups, parties, that was to say who was for the king, and the partisans, and the Chetniks with [General Draza] Mihailovich who were the Croatians. Those groups fought among each other. Also about the same is true today. [go to website for more information: http://meltingpot.fortunecity.com/grenada/543/pics.html and http://koz.vianet.ca/jack5.htm] [Note: the Chetniks (Croatians) are not the same as Tito’s Serbian partisans]
AH: How long did you stay with them for?
FK: The Partisans? Oh, about, close to, I would say, about two months, two and a half months.
AH: Who all stayed with you?
FK: The crew that was with me on the mission that was shot down. We all all got down.
AH: You mentioned the mission that the A-plane was also shot down, how did this affect you guys?
FK: I didn’t know it until afterwards. There was so much going on around you. I saw some ships next to me get blown up, but I never realized that we lost eight ships that day.
AH: Did you loose friends?
FK: No, not really, because as I said, I was a mechanic and was my first mission and I didn’t know the bomb crew. The bomb crew and the ground personnel, they each kept in their own group.
AH: How did this affect you life?
FK: It made me appreciate it more.
AH: Do you have any final comments?
FK: No, not really.
[2.36]
Mrs. Lerch: You went across North Africa to Benghazi, did you go further east?
FK: We went all the way from Benghazi. I went over to Africa by boat on the SS America and I went into Cairo. From Cairo I went up to the group at Benghazi then I joined them there, and then we went from Benghazi to Enfidaville, from Enfidaville to Tobruk, then over to Italy.
Mrs. Lerch: So you saw a lot of what had happened earlier.
FK: Oh yea.
AH: What was left over all over the dessert?
FK: Oh yea, we saw a lot of the remnants were there, both the German and the English; tanks, planes, things like that.
AH: What was your impression of that? Your first sight of Europe really.
FK: Yes, it was and it was not really—, I just said “I’m glad we got that one.” The reaction was, “glad it wasn’t me.”
Mrs. Lerch: Was there anything surprising about Africa, that you hadn’t anticipated? Anything unusual or things that you remember now?
FK: No, other than the fact that it—to me it was hot, dry, dirty, dusty—it just—I had no real appeal for it. Yea, I don’t know if you are familiar with the ship, “Lady Be Good”—it came from our group and it was lost on its first mission. They never came back and we used to search for it out over the desert and it’s quite a story, in fact the story is in the manual there that I gave you and its quite interesting. They went on a mission to Italy and when they were coming back, they got lost, and then flew past the base, went into the desert and bailed out, and the plane crashed; but thirty years later someone found—an oil exploration team found the aircraft and it was pretty well intact.
AH: That was their first voyage?
FK: Yea, that was their first voyage—mission also.
AH: Did you feel jinxed after that?
FK: No, we never really saw it. They tried to walk out; they all died on the way trying to escape through the desert; they found all the bodies except two.
[260]
FK: There are usually ten men to an aircraft on bombers; and the troop carrier was just the pilot, co-pilot, navigator, radio-operator, and myself as an engineer.
AH: How old were you when you enlisted?
FK: Eighteen.
Mrs. Lerch: You mentioned you spoke German, did you learn from your mom?
FK: My parents were German, and I spoke German at home until I started school and then they sent me and my mother a note, suggesting that she speak English to me, from there on out. So from six years on I started speaking English.
AH: Where were your parents from?
FK: Germany. My mother is from Stettin and my father comes from a little town called Greifenberg, near Berlin.
Mrs. Lerch: So in eastern Germany?
FK: Yea. Greifenberg is too up near Berlin.
AH: So your parents then immigrated to this country?
FK: Yes they did. They were married here. mMy dad and mother met and were married here.
AH: Did they come over before World War I?
FK: Yes.
AH: Maybe they were leaving before the draft in Bismarck?
KF: No, no. It was much earlier then that. My mother was very young when she came here. My dad was a little older. They met here.
[286]
Mrs. Lerch: Was it difficult for you as a German-American knowing that you were going to have to go over to your homeland?
FK: It never bothered me a bit. You hear stories where they’d say, “well, I hate to go over. I might be bombing my relatives, or something like,” but I never met anyone that ever had any kind of feelings of anguish about that. We were there just to do a job.
AH: Was your crew happy that you knew German, in case you landed in the wrong place?
FK: Well, it happened it was well for us, because I was more or less the spokesman in Yugoslavia (they spoke German). I couldn’t speak Croatian with the Yugoslavians, but a lot of—you know it’s like even now today people go to Europe today, and there are many, many people that speak English. You don’t have any difficulty. You don’t have any difficulty. The only place different is Spain you go to Spain and they speak nothing else but Spanish. If you don’t speak Spanish, you’re in trouble.
AH: When you met the people in Germany how did you get along with them?
FK: I think we got along well. They are interested in you and you are interested in them and there is a good dialog taking place between you.
AH: Any difficulty communication with the Germans?
FK: Oh sure, but it’s ironical, because you always find a way to communicate, whether by example, by hands, or by demonstration, or voices, but sooner or later everybody seems to understand.
AH: Where there a lot of people older than you?
FK: Well, in the service they were about my age. We were all together Americans [?], some older, some younger. People I would meet on the outside and so forth were usually older. Like I would go in to a little town in Gallaci [?], Italy—we were stationed at San Pancrazio (which is near Bari), but I would go into a little town called Leche, and I met a family there, and they were older, but we would just talk. They would invite me to dinner if I would bring the dinner. So that was the first time that I ever realized it, but spaghetti didn’t come from Italy. It comes from China. And they didn’t know what I meant by spaghetti when I talked about spaghetti. So I would bring spaghetti, she would cook it.
AH: Did you get to stay with this family often?
FK: I made it a point to travel around quite a bit, especially in Japan—I visited quite all of the islands—forty islands in Japan. But in Europe we didn’t have a chance to get around that much but where I was near Tachikowa [?], we tried to get around.
AH: You mentioned you were in Korea for two years.
FK: Just approximately.
Mrs. Lerch: From 1950-1952 could you tell us more about you experience there; what was going on, what were your responsibilities?
FK: I was a flight engineer, we were flying troop carrier, we would take supplies and so forth into Korea from Japan base. I was stationed first in Dosuki [?], and then I went to Tachikowa near Tokyo, and then we would—our squad would fly, pick up supplies and take it into Korea and then bring the wounded back. Troop carriers were—then I also made parachute drops—on—Inchon, when General MacArthur wanted to make that break and he planed that invasion of Inchon, to see if he could cut off the troops; we dropped paratroopers then. I also went into the Chosin Reservoir and was flying out of there to bring the wounded and so forth back when the Chinese first came into the fracas in the 1950s.
Mrs. Lerch: Can you explain a little more about the Chosin Reservoir and what happened there?
FK: Well, the Chosin Reservoir is where our troops were well-up into towards North Korea and then, when Red China came in, we started to move back—we were pushed back, pushed back and finally Chosin Reservoir was an area down in the valley that was [where] we could fly into and bring out the wounded and bring out the troopers that came in there and so forth.
Mrs. Lerch: Now the weather there was a little bit different.
FK: It was the coldest place in the world—to me it was.
[353]
AH: What was it like flying and what kind of plane did you have?
FK: It was a C-46.
AH: Oh my, okay. So it didn’t fly terribly high, but you had a lot of weather and . . .
FK: Yea, I always said that Japan was the worst place in the world that I ever flew, because I could never see the ground half the time, because we’d come in under bad weather or something like that sort. And some radar and ground control would talk us in.
AH: You said that you brought in wounded, how did you deal with that?
FK: All kinds of things. You take the—you’d try to carry head wounds up front so that the pressure isn’t too high in the airplane, and then we put the other wounded towards the back like leg wounds. There was always a nurse with us— that flew with us. She would see which people would go where and we would load them in that way. We carried four stretchers on each side and it carried about [counting] about close to twenty-some wounded.
AH: How did you heal them?
FK: [We had] M.A.S.H.—a field hospital. They issued treatment, and then we took them back into the hospital in Japan.
AH: Was there lots of blood?
FK: Not, that I would see; some of the bandages were some bloody, but not that much.
Mrs. Lerch: They had transfusions then too.
FK: Oh, sure they did.
Mrs. Lerch: It saved a lot of lives.
[373]
FK: It did, the television program M*A*S*H is very realistic. They had a field hospital, and we got troops in there as quick as they were wounded. They got fixed up temporarily and then we flew them back into the hospital in Japan.
Mrs. Lerch: How many missions did you have to do? Did you get so many days off then on?
FK: Mostly everyday, in fact, it would get to me a little bit. This radio-operator I talked about before, his parents never forgave me because I talked him into joining the reserve and in a few months we were all called to Korea. He was quite a character; he knew that I had been shot down in World War II and sometime when we had bad weather, he would walk up to me and have his parachute on and everything (and we would never wear our parachutes while we were flying). We kind of kept them by the door in case I’d [we] need them. And then all the sudden, we would get a little worried and the pilot would call for his chute, and the co-pilot, and then I would get my chute and put it on. Then he would go back and take his off and then walk up—look’d at us like we were cowards or something—why are you wearing our parachutes? But I had a habit—I am kind of a perfectionist. I always wanted to know what was going on. He would get on his radio and all of a sudden get very tense and start dictating, start working very hard—I’d say, what’s the matter Dominque? He would say, “shhh, shhh: and he says, “Oh my God, Red China just came into the fracas. All aircraft in the vicinity have to land immediately,” and it was bad weather to begin with. And I went to the pilot and I said, “Tony, did you hear what Dominique was saying?” “No, no,” he said. “Just the pilots at the base did. They want them to return immediately. So we went back on to Japan. But he would do little things like that. He would say this to himself [?] “Never let them take you alive, Frank!” He was just a real character, but he was a very good friend. We had been school chums and grown up together. But as I said, his parents never forgave me for talking him into the reserve. I was his best man at his wedding. So it turned out all right.
Mrs. Lerch: Now you mentioned MacArthur, of course, and he did get into trouble by crossing a particular river. What was the warning for MacArthur?
FK: Well, MacArthur wanted to go across the Yalu into—and—because all the supplies and everything for China were just across the river and they had everything there working for them. So, he wanted to go across there and destroy it. Korea was a political war and he couldn’t do it. He finally used some of his own tactics all the time and finally the politician Truman—and God bless him—I loved Truman but he, just couldn’t take it anymore. He was Commander-in-chief, not MacArthur. MacArthur was a loved man in Japan. He was their idol.
Mrs. Lerch: For good reason.
FK: He treated them well.
AH: How did you prepare for each of your wars?
FK: You don’t prepare for them. You just take them as they go—the day-by-day life. There is nothing to prepare for really.
[440]
Mrs. Lerch: You talked about your training before war, how much of that were you able to use in war? Or , at least the ability to think about how to solve something?
FK: Actually, as a mechanic you can always use it; no matter where you are going, if you have a little bit of mechanical ability it always helps in this world. My training—actually what I received in the service, because when I eventually came back out of Korea I went into the real estate business and from there, I went into—with the Department of Veterans Affairs—the Veterans Administration. Then I was thirty-some years with the Veterans Administration and traveled around some.
AH: Got to see the world a little bit more.
FK: Yea, all little bit more. I went from Chicago to Detroit to New York, Washington, places like that, and then I was transferred here in 1970 and I fought to stay here. I wasn’t here a year and then they wanted to send me to New York. I’m a great golfer and I love to play golf, and I told the director up there, “if I go to New York, I will have to get up at four in the morning, drive forty miles, put my ball on the rack and I will be lucky if I can tee off by noon.” I said, “ In Indianapolis I can go out at anytime and just play, because they have more golf courses there per capita than I have ever seen—like Myrtle Beach.
AH: Do you have any siblings?
FK: No.
AH: Did you go to the doctors a lot?
FK: Oh sure. Not so much in Europe, but in Japan that worried me. I had a crooked tooth in the front and I went in for a cleaning at the dental base and he said you know we could straighten that tooth for you if you want. We can give you a partial in there and it would straighten your teeth. And I said, “well, there’s was nothing wrong with it.” And he says, “no, but it would make you look better.” It was just a little tooth crooked and I said, “no.” But I went over to operations and there was my name on board to fly in to Korea again to stay for a few days. As I said, that is the coldest place in the world, and I have never been so cold in my life. I went to the dentist and said, “really, can you fix it? He said, “sure.” He pulled the tooth, and I went back over to the base and I said, “look, I can’t fly that week, I can’t eat, I can’t . . .” So they took me off the mission. I would do anything to get off that mission. I even took off of K-10 one time with just one engine, just to make sure that I would get out of there. I didn’t want to stay in Korea. It held no charm for me.
[448]
Mrs. Lerch: There was K-10, there was K-12. They were all numbered
FK: Yea, they were all numbered.
AH: Now you were down south in Tague?
FK: Pusan.
AH: Pusan?
FK: Yea, I went in there as I said. Chosin Reservoir wasn’t really a village or anything. It was just where all the troops have congregated or were pushed down into the valley, but there were other cities that we landed in. They were called ‘K-10,’ ‘K-12,’ ‘K-14.’—fly in there. Our group later on became a type of air transportation for people going on R & R. We would fly into various bases on scheduled routes, pick up men that were going on leave -----[?] and fly them into Japan, then take them back when they were through with their week’s vacation, so we had pretty good duty then, too.
Mrs. Lerch: It was a good trade off.
FK: Yes it was. Although, it did—we split it up a lot. It was in between the missions that we would fly with the crews. There was another thing that I learned, too. A lot of the food that was served in Korea comes from hydroponic farms. These are all farms in Japan that were grown under glass—all the vegetables. We would fly into that base, they would load it up with tomatoes or fruit or whatever they grew and we would take it back.
[520] [45 min] Side 2
AH: What was your favorite experience (besides the shot down)?
FK: Well, that would be number one. Some of the Korean experiences too come to mind but other than that—Well it’s a kind of funny story, but I will give it to you. It was Christmas and I went from Fukio up to Tachikowa, Japan, and I had trouble with the heater, and I was working on it and anther crew came in from our base and he said, “Frank, they are looking all over for you—the Provost Marshal is looking for you. And I said, “why?” He says, “well, we don’t know but they look like—.” And I said, “well, I won’t get back to the base for a couple of days. I’m going into Korea and then coming back.” What happened around Christmas one time I went into—we went in—this radio operator and myself—we went into Tokyo. I says, “You know, Dom, we ought to find someone that can speak a little English, help us in buying some Christmas goods. Maybe they can get us a bargain and so forth on that basis.” “So,” he said, “let’s see if we can find someone who could speak some English.” So I was getting a shoe shine and a girl went by and I said, “hi.” She says “hi.” I said, “you speak English?” And she said, “Yes.” I say, “look, my friends and I want to go Christmas shopping. Will you go with us and I will pay you for it, pay you for your time? So she went around and we were having dinner and I said, “thank you very much” and I gave her a couple hundred Yen. I told her, I said, “ if you are ever down in Tachikowa—or rather in Fukioka (because I was in Tachikowa at that time, but she was from Tokyo). And I said, “if you are ever down in Fukioka, I would be happy, you know, to take you out to dinner sometime, but I thank you very much for the help.” Well, when we had taken off and gone, she came in and she went to the gate and asked for me. The gate—turned out they said she was the number one communist spy in Tokyo. And they said, “where did you . . . ?” When I finally got back to the base, and they said get up to the provost marshal as fast as you can. They are waiting for you. I got up and they called me in. He said, “here is this little notebook. What did you tell this girl? I said, “I didn’t tell her anything.” I just explained to them what we did, she was helping us by some Christmas gifts and so forth, that was all it was. I told her if she was ever down in Fukioka, then I would be glad to take her out for dinner. He said, “well, you met with the number one communist spy in Tokyo.” “Oh, it wasn’t true. Really, she was no more a spy than a target ----[?]. Then they called my radio operator and because I said if I am that dumb, I will take you out.” Then he said, “why did you give her my name for God’s sake?” We went into town and they told us if you ever see her, call the MPs. So we went to town and we were walking and suddenly we heard this, “Frank, Frank!” and turn around and here is this girl. “Why didn’t you tell me you were a spy?” She said, “I’m no spy. I would never do anything like that.” But they were paranoid on the base. They were always making rounds and afraid we were going to get bombed or something like that, or the communists were going to come in and tear up the airplanes or something. They were always paranoid about this, but anyways she never was, but when she called me, Dominque got in front of me and says, “Stand back! MP! MP!” I said, “let it go” and she never admitted—was [a spy] I am sure of . But is always the funny thing that can happen to you.
Mrs. Lerch: This was the height of the Cold War.
FK: Yes, it was. It was.
Mrs. Lerch: This was very complete. Thank you very much.
FK: Thank you.
End of interview
