Golden Gate Wing Guest Speaker Archive

Presentation Date: September 28, 2006

TSGT Adelbert W Dell Kenyon USAAF

Speaker Photo

Ball-Turret Gunner & Flight Engineer, B-24 "Liberator"
723rd BS, 450th BG(H) "CottonTails", 15th AF, Manduria, Italy

* Drafted into US Army, USAAF, January 1942
* Trained originally as Flight Engineer & Top Turret Gunner, but asked to take Ball Turret
* Arrived at Mitchell Field, NY via train with crew to acquire their B-24 Liberator
* March 1944 flew to combat theater via "Southern Route": West Palm Beach, Trinidad, Casablanca and, finally Manduria, Italy, their base of combat operations
* Flew 30 combat missions; 1st target Toulon, France (shot at by another B-24 that had been captured by the Germans!); 4 missions over Ploesti, Romania; Vienna, Bucharest, ...
* Fighter escorts by P-47s, P-38s, no P-51s; flak was the worst peril, although hit by fighters
* 30th mission, on April 25th, '44, expected to be a "milk run", but shot down by FW-190
* POW at Stalag Luft 3 for 1 year and 5 days; liberated April 29th, '45 by Patton's 3rd Army
* Decorations and awards include PH, AM(6), POW, Caterpillar Club, ETO Ball-Turret Gunner & Flight Engineer, B-24 "Liberator"
723rd BS, 450th BG(H) "CottonTails", 15th AF, Manduria, Italy

* Born December 27, 1922, San Francico, CA
* Played in band during high school: clarinet, saxophone, harmonica, piano, banjo
* Drafted into US Army, USAAF, January 1942
* Various training in Monterey & Fresno, CA; Laredo, TX; Biloxi, MS; Salt Lake City; Clovis, & Alamogorda, NM; Charleston, NC
* Trained originally as Flight Engineer & Top Turret Gunner, but asked to take Ball Turret
* Arrived at Mitchell Field, NY via train with crew to acquire their B-24 Liberator
* March 1944 flew to combat theater via "Southern Route": West Palm Beach, Trinidad, Casablanca and, finally Manduria, Italy, their base of combat operations
* Flew 30 combat missions; 1st target Toulon, France (shot at by another B-24 that had been captured by the Germans!); 4 missions over Ploesti, Romania; Vienna, Bucharest, ...
* Fighter escorts by P-47s, P-38s, no P-51s; flak was the worst peril, although hit by fighters
* 30th mission, on April 25th, '44, expected to be a "milk run", but shot down by FW-190
* POW at Stalag Luft 3 for 1 year and 5 days; liberated April 29th, '45 by Patton's 3rd Army
* Decorations and awards include PH, AM(6), POW, Caterpillar Club, ETO
* After war, skilled mechanic/ problem solver for automobile dealers, then PG&E for 11 years
* Retired; avid collector; married to wife Viola "Vi" since February 8, 1943

Drafted into the U.S. Army in January 1942, “Dell” Kenyon thought the Air Corps made new enlistees a pretty good offer.
“You had to volunteer for gunnery school at that time. They said if you go to gunnery school, five weeks later you’re a buck sergeant.”
Kenyon’s training started in Monterey & Fresno, California, followed by more training in Laredo, Texas. When he graduated, he was told he was a Private First Class. That fostered some skepticism about the government’s honesty in recruiting, but didn’t prevent the young Californian from learning many “tools of the trade” required to keep bombers in the air, to and from targets.

Born December 27, 1922, in San Francisco, Adelbert “Dell” Kenyon played a variety of instruments in the band during high school: clarinet, saxophone, harmonica, piano and banjo. Musically, he was a young man of many-talents.
Kenyon’s ability to develop many skills would lead to training as a B-24 flight engineer and top turret gunner, but see him spend much of his combat days in World War II as a ball-turret gunner.
After his first rounds of training, Kenyon thought it would be a good idea to sign up for mechanic school in Biloxi, Mississippi.  He now speaks of that city as, “the worst place in the world. I think it’s gone now.”
Kenyon’s sweetheart, Viola (they were married February 8, 1943) followed him down to Mississippi, where Dell had completed his mechanic training and become a sergeant. More training followed in Salt Lake City, and then the newlyweds were back to California—this time to Clovis—before continuing the second phase of gunnery training in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
“That was beautiful down there,” recalls Kenyon of the friendly, rural flavor of the southwest town. “It was like stepping back in time. People would say ‘Good evening’ and ‘How are you doing?’ It was wonderful.”
The whirlwind of training bases led Kenyon next to Charleston, South Carolina, and soon after that he was sent by train with the rest of his new crew to help pick up a B-24 Liberator at Mitchell Field, New York. Among other things, he learned about equipping the bomber with a fuel tank in the bomb bay for the upcoming long-distance haul to Europe.
From Florida, his B-24 took off in March 1944 to fly to its combat theater assignment via the "southern route":  from West Palm Beach to Trinidad, then to Casablanca and Manduria, Italy, the operations base of the 450th Bomb Group.

Kenyon’s first combat mission involved a target at Toulon, France.
“The first mission’s always nerve-wracking anyway… but here came this B-24 shooting the hell out of everybody. We were thinking it was a runaway gun or something and we didn’t dare shoot at it.”
“It later turned out to be a B-24 that had been captured by the Germans. I think it shot down two bombers before it peeled off and left. We didn’t have any fighter escort to chase it.”

Life with the 450th Bomb Group, much as with any other Air Force bomber unit, involved multi-tasking. And “Dell” took that challenge to a higher level than most.  He says when his B-24 would take-off, he would first perform his flight engineer duties, monitoring the bomber’s four engines and other systems.
It turned out the ball-turret gunner on his crew was not fond of crawling down into the turret and hanging from the bottom of the bomber. So, rather than break up the crew to find another ball-turret gunner, Kenyon volunteered himself to man that pair of .50-caliber guns. He’d finish his flight engineer work, open the turret’s back hatch and squeeze into the metal and Plexiglas sphere.
Kenyon thought the ball turret was one of the safest places to be in a B-24. “It’s basically at least 3/8” thick aluminum. You could (by contrast) take a pencil and punch a whole in the side of the plane. We got hit lots of times by flak—it just came on through. The turret’s faceplate is four inches thick. It would take a direct hit to get through that.  And that’s how I became a ball-gunner.”
On the down side, the ball turret’s confining space meant Kenyon had to leave his parachute back up in the fuselage instead of having it strapped to his back or belly as the other gunners on the B-24 did.
Kenyon recalls having little use for the “creature comforts” of high altitude crew gear. He says the electrically heated flying suits were “Mickey Mouse”, subject to short-circuiting, and heated gloves tended to catch fire. The British fur-lined airmen’s boots were a highly prized item, frequent targets of “appropriation” by U.S. aircrews. Kenyon admits he never had an opportunity to try them because they ran only in smaller sizes.

On Kenyon’s thirty missions, P-38s and P-47s sometimes provided fighter escort, but they were limited by range. And, although enemy fighters occasionally attacked the 450th Bomb Group, flak was the greatest threat.
Dell says that on one high altitude raid over Ploesti, Romania, German antiaircraft units followed the bomb group to the target, firing large caliber flak guns mounted on railroad cars.
“The flak was solid for thirty-five minutes. We didn’t get a scratch on that one. But the plane right next to us was hit and caught on fire. We were hollering, ‘Get the hell out of it!’ The waist gunner was trying to get out… he was on fire and his chute was on fire. It was a hell of a mess. And finally the thing blew up.”

It was on his bomber crew’s 30th mission, April 25th, 1944—a mission expected to be a "milk run" bombing an aircraft factory in Varese, Italy— when their luck ran out.
His B-24 was to be one of two Liberators lost in a Luftwaffe fighter attack.
Kenyon remembers having pulled the safety pins on the bombs and then extending the ball turret underneath the bomber, when he heard his pilot scream “Fighters at 12 o’clock!”  Next, the B-24 was hit by cannon fire from a FW-190 fighter.
Kenyon saw the Liberator’s wheels drop down, a sign of surrender.
“I saw this parachute go by, and I thought, ‘Gee, I hope to hell that didn’t come out of this plane.’ But it was the co-pilot, whose leg had been shot off below his right knee. I turned the ball around, went back into the bomber, opened the hatch on top and got out of it.”
Kenyon says he went to the bomb bay, where he saw the bombardier sitting on the catwalk. Blood was spraying all over the bomb bay, a clear sign the bombardier was badly wounded. Kenyon says he walked back to tell the waist gunners to jump from the stricken bomber, and then put on his own chest parachute. No sooner had the waist gunners jumped than the B-24 pitched violently onto its right wing and began spinning, pinning Kenyon face down to the floor. Behind him, the tail gunner had also been pinned as he came forward from the turret, but the tail gunner was on his back and was immobilized.”
Kenyon was able to pull himself to a hatch, get out of the plane and open his parachute. The tail gunner remained inside as the bomber plummeted to the earth. Kenyon parachuted down to an Italian hillside, missing a big grove of trees. Shedding his parachute, he hid in some bushes, but was soon rousted by a civilian shakily pointing an automatic rifle at his head. Kenyon was soon turned over to German soldiers.
Before long, Kenyon says he was taken to Verona, placed in solitary confinement for three to four days and then interrogated.
“The guy interrogating me spoke better English than I did.”
Kenyon was also surprised by how much the Germans knew about the 450th and about Dell, himself. The interrogating officer read out loud the ball turret gunner‘s military dossier, including the number of missions Kenyon had flown.
Shipped to Stalag Luft III, Kenyon arrived at the camp two weeks after a major escape by Allied airmen. Despite a Luftwaffe crackdown after the escape, the camp remained one of the better places to be incarcerated in Germany.
“It was clean and well organized, had a library and showers,” Kenyon says, also recalling that the food was good, “while it lasted.”
While in camp, Kenyon made a crochet hook from an old toothbrush handle, and used it to make himself a hat from some surplus British wool sweaters.
In late December, 1944, the Soviet Army was swiftly driving West, and the Germans began moving prisoners of war to other POW camps. Kenyon says he was among tens of thousands of POWs under guard, walking on roads in freezing sub-zero temperatures away from the advancing Soviets.
At nightfall on the first day, a few of the POWs staggered into a barn, where Kenyon found temporary escape from the cold.
“I saw a pile of cow manure, made a hole underneath and went in feet first with just my head sticking out. It was a little smelly but I kept warm until morning.”
He picked out a large airman to buddy-up with, figuring the big man would be able to help if Kenyon got in any trouble. Unfortunately, the man proved to be more of a liability than an asset, as one day he threw away most of the items he was carrying, including his own rations.
“A couple of days later, he was just kind of staggering along. In one of my Red Cross parcels I’d gotten a D-bar, a chocolate bar about one inch, by one inch, by four inches, and some M&Ms.”
Kenyon shared his M&Ms, then offered the chocolate, only to watch the entire bar disappear into the other man’s mouth.
“I quit him, and went over to somebody else.”
The POWs marched about sixty miles to a site about five miles outside the city of Nuremburg. There, at Stalag VIIA, facilities were anything but comfortable due to bed bugs and lice. Pea soup was served with bugs in the peas. And Kenyon remembers a dehydrated cabbage soup the POWs called the “Green Death.”
Among Kenyon’s many strange experiences during these weeks was a night raid by a British Lancaster bomber. He says the plane must have dropped a 12,000-pound bomb far from its intended target in Nuremburg. The six tons of explosives detonated as close as 600 meters from the camp with a tremendous boom. The concussion moved the barracks wall about six inches, shattered the windows and startling prisoners and guards alike.
He also recalls the cacophony of nighttime anti-aircraft fire and the hair-raising whistles of falling debris from exploded flak shells. One of the most unnerving sounds in the darkness came from “window”—long strips of aluminum foil used to confuse radar operators—fluttering down in the inky stillness of the night, scaring Kenyon as much as the large bomb had.
Approaching Allied ground forces were the reason Kenyon and the POWs were rousted once again for a final trek to yet another camp at Moosburg, where living conditions were the worst. Built to house 14,000 prisoners, the camp ultimately confined 130,000 men of all nationalities and ranks.
Fortunately, on April 29th, 1945, Patton’s Third Army liberated the camp, sending the POWs to Camp Lucky Strike in France. There the men could regain some strength before being repatriated to their home countries.
Kenyon sailed on a ship back to the United States, finishing the final leg of his homeward trek to San Francisco on a bus. He called Viola and told her to meet him around the corner from where Kenyon’s mother lived.
“I told the guy sitting next to me on the bus that I’d just gotten out of a prisoner of war camp and was meeting my wife in a couple of blocks. Of course he had to tell everyone on the bus.”
 “And there on the corner was my beautiful wife. I jumped off the bus, gave her a big hug and a long kiss and everyone one on the bus clapped and shouted. They stayed there until we walked away.”

Kenyon’s decorations and awards include six Air Medals and the Purple Heart. For having parachuted from his B-24, he’s a member of the Caterpillar Club.
After the war, he was a skilled mechanic and problem-solver for automobile dealers, before working 11 years for PG&E.
Now retired, and married to Viola for 63 years, Dell Kenyon says he has been an avid collector of antique steel toys, until recently, adding, “You just can’t find ‘em any more.”
He says the same things about other items he’s been collecting—including his latest passion, brass powder horns for muskets—sure signs Adelbert Kenyon still keeps sharp his multi-tasking skills.

 

Dell’s 30th Mission
DATE: 25 April 1944
TARGET: VARESE, ITALY - AIRCRAFT FACTORY
29 B-24''s took of to bomb Varese. 17 dropped 43 tons of bombs on marshalling yards at Ferrara, Riomaggiorie, and Piacenza.
FIGHTERS: Ferrara hit, bombs fell short at other targets.
FLAK: Slight, inaccurate, heavy at all targets.
FIGHTERS: 26 enemy aircraft attacked. After 30 minutes, attackers broken off by P-38's.
CASUALTIES: 2 B-24's by fighters, 10 chutes seen to open. 4 B-24's missing. 6 received minor damage by flak. 2 crew members wounded by flak. 2 crew members bailed out of #205 as plane went into a spin. Our Claims: 2 ME-109's, 1 FW-190 destroyed.
Source:
http://www.450thbg.com/real/s2/1944/april.shtml