Coronado vet recalls famous WWII escape Coronado vet recalls famous WWII escape Ex-POW aided in bravery immortalized in movie By John Wilkens Union-Tribune Staff Writer 2:00 a.m. May 25, 2009 Coronado resident Richard Kenney with a rendering of the P-38 Lightning aircraft he flew during World War II. (Bruce K. Huff / Union-Tribune) - Richard Kenney leafed through personal memorabilia from his service in World War II, including his identification photo from when he was held in the German prisoner of war camp Stalag Luft III. (Bruce K. Huff / Union-Tribune) Richard Kenney is living proof that some penguins fly. The Coronado resident spent 22 years in the military as a pilot. Like a lot of fighter jocks, his career was punctuated by the sudden clipping of wings – either his or the other guy's. During World War II, he shot down four enemy planes and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross before anti-aircraft fire knocked him out of the sky over Sicily. He was captured and sent to Stalag Luft III, a German prisoner of war camp soon to be famous for an event both cunning and tragic. Hollywood would immortalize it as “The Great Escape,” starring Steve McQueen. This year marks the 65th anniversary of that mass exodus of Allied aviators. Kenney wasn't one of the escapees, but he helped make it happen. He and others hid pouches in their pants filled with dirt from the escape tunnel, surreptitiously scattering it as they walked around the prison yard. Waddled, actually, which is how they came to be called penguins. Kenney is 89, and for him and other veterans who have known death and hardship in wartime, every day is Memorial Day. There are some things they never forget. On June 15, 1943, the day he was shot down, Kenney was the flight operations officer and had been serving overseas about nine months. He assigned himself the final slot in a strafing formation aimed at a radar installation in Sicily. He knew the anti-aircraft guns probably would be locked in by the time he made his pass. The left engine of his P-38 Lightning got hit and caught fire. He went down on a farm, where a woman took him inside. She was tending to burns on his arms and legs when he was captured. The Germans sent him to a hospital in Palermo, Sicily, then to an interrogation center. He was grilled off and on during 17 days of solitary confinement – he said a gun was once pointed at his head – then he was taken to a camp that eventually housed 10,000 Allied fliers. Back home in Coronado, his family got word of his imprisonment. His niece, Dorita Mickelsen, then a young child, remembers Kenney asking for a watch he could trade with the guards. She sent him her Mickey Mouse one. Escape was a common enterprise at the camps, but Stalag Luft III, built in what is now Zagan, Poland, about 90 miles southeast of Berlin, was designed to be tunnel-proof. The subsoil was sandy and collapsed easily. The huts were on stilts to allow guards to see under them. Motion detectors were installed along the ground. Undeterred, the prisoners began planning three tunnels, called Tom, Dick and Harry, in early 1943. After a few months, Tom was discovered by guards and destroyed. Dick was turned into storage for escape supplies. That left Harry, hidden under a wood stove in Hut 104. It went down 30 feet, then horizontally 300 feet and under the fence. The tunnel was buttressed with wood taken from bunk beds. Underground, prisoners improvised a ventilation system, lighting and a rail car to move the dirt. Others made civilian clothes for the escapees to wear or forged documents to get them past checkpoints. Kenney said his injuries limited his participation in the plot. Some days he was a lookout. Some days he was a penguin. The dirt pouches, made out of long underwear, socks, coat lining or towels, were opened with a string pulled from inside a pocket. “Walking around was how we got exercise, especially along the perimeter,” he said. “You'd dump a little here, a little there.” He remembers dirt being shoved under the floor of the camp theater, too. On March 24, 1944, a cold, moonless night, all was ready. About 200 POWs were picked to go, most by lottery. American pilots had been moved to a separate part of the camp by then, and Kenney said he wouldn't have been able to go anyway because of his injuries. The first prisoners through the tunnel found the exit was short of the tree line and close to a guard tower. They had to proceed slowly. Only 76 had made it out by about 5 a.m. That's when a guard making rounds along the camp's perimeter discovered the escape. The hunt was on. All but three – two from Norway, one from the Netherlands – were soon recaptured. An angry Adolf Hitler ordered the Gestapo to execute 50 escapees. They were cremated and their ashes sent back to Stalag Luft III. The commander allowed the POWs to build a stone memorial. It, unlike most of the camp, is still standing. The war ended for Kenney in a camp near Munich in April 1945, when Gen. George S. Patton's 3rd Army rolled up to the gate. All they had was white bread for the hungry prisoners. “Give us back to the Germans!” some yelled to the liberators. Their sense of humor, at least, had survived. So had Kenney's desire to fly. He stayed in the military, became a flight instructor, trained bombing crews. Aware that one more aerial kill would give him five, granting him legendary status as an ace, he volunteered for the Korean War. On his way to Korea in 1953, the war ended. “They heard I was coming,” he joked. Five times Kenney was put in charge of a squadron, a rarity. He moved around to different bases and up the ranks to colonel. One constant: a desire for jobs that would keep him in the cockpit. He logged 6,000 air hours. “That was my life – flying,” he said. When that was no longer possible – the brass wanted him to take a desk job assigning air support for the Vietnam War – he retired in 1964. His last hurrah was in an F-100 for a nine-hour flight from Myrtle Beach, S.C., to Norway that required five aerial refuelings. “I went out at the top of my game,” he said. Kenney settled in Lake Tahoe, where he ran a Nordic center and was active in ski federations. Another passion, fly fishing, had a double meaning for him – he often flew himself to remote lakes and streams. He also visited family in Coronado. “He would fly in and out at different times, just sort of pop up,” Mickelsen, his niece, said. “I remember my mom had a sixth sense about him: Richard's coming in.” In 1983, he moved to Coronado full time. He grew up there in the 1920s, graduated from Coronado High School in 1938, and had fond memories of the town as a wide-open place where even a poor kid could go sailing and ride horses. It's where he first dreamed of being a pilot, watching planes come and go at North Island Naval Air Station. Kenney doesn't fly anymore. He grounded himself after a stroke in 2003. Instead, he rides a bike to the harbor almost every day to spend time on his 36-foot trawler. Never married, he lives in a modest house just off the San Diego-Coronado Bridge. There are pictures from his military career on what he calls his “Love Me Wall” and a scrapbook tucked away upstairs with newspaper clippings. But that's about it for basking in glory. “There are a lot of people who like to talk about their exploits and identify themselves by what they've done,” said Dot Harms, a friend. “Not Dick. You have to pry it out of him.” When Kenney looks back, it's in wonder, not at what he did, but at how he's survived. “Most of my longtime friends are looking at the brown side of the turf,” he said. Every day he's still around feels like its own great escape. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- John Wilkens: (619) 293-2236; john.wilkens@uniontrib.com John Wilkens: (619) 293-2236; Click here to hide comments Notice: This improved Comments system is using new technology, so you'll need to sign up for a new Comments account with Disqus. Terms of
I'm, not sure what type of comments you want David, there were some USAAF men who helped with the tunnel, spreading dirt and keeping the guards busy doing other things so to allow Harry to be built. This has been acknowlegedin many writings on the subject. Unfortunately the movie was Hollywood at it's best. As your piece shows the USAAF men were transferred away to another part of the camp before the could get stuck in with the British & Commonwealth men and escape. He certainly has had a life of adventure, 6000 air hours and 4 confirmed kills,, and command of 5 Squadrons, pity he didn't get a Mig as his 5th kill as that would of been one to talk about, not that four (4) Germans is no mean feat. I say well done to the fellow, and hope he can somehow get back to some flying again.
Their was apparantly a American who had joined the RAF and was possibly captured early in the war anyways he remained a RAF man who apparently was very helpful working with many aspects of the escape.
The transfer from the main compound to the North Compound (the RAF where the Great Escape occurred) happened in March1943, and the South Compound (for USAAF personnel) in September 1943.
