Ace served with Flying Tigers in China

MARION – Don Quigley dreamed of flying airplanes, much like a lot of young boys growing up in the 1930s.

The 1937 Harding High School graduate was working in the engineering department at Marion Power Shovel, but followed the exploits of Royal Air Force pilots defending the skies over England.

Quigley said he felt America's entry into the war was only a matter of time.

"I wanted to be a pilot. Everyone wanted to be a fighter pilot. I knew if you could walk, talk and had two years of college, you could get accepted into flight school," he said.

Quigley hadn't attended college, but he decided to travel to Patterson Airbase in Dayton to take an entrance exam, along with his friends Don Renwick and Jay Maish Jr. Quigley and his friends were accepted and began training in two-seated biplanes in Sikeston, Missouri, in March 1941. Quigley graduated from flying school five days after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

On May 20, Quigley and the 77 surviving fighter aces were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in Washington, D.C. A fighter pilot receives the title of ace after accumulating five confirmed kills in aerial combat.

Quigley, 95, and his wife, Irene, reside in an assisted living facility in Marion. Quigley's daughter, Lynn Quigley Kolarik, traveled to Washington to attend the ceremony on her father's behalf.

Served in China

Quigley served as a fighter pilot and commanding officer with the Flying Tigers 23rd Fighter Group/75th Fighter Squadron stationed in Hengyang, China, during the war.

The Flying Tigers began as a mercenary fighter group of American volunteer pilots under the command of Claire Chennault before America was officially at war. Chennault's fliers and about 55 P-40 Warhawk fighter planes shot down 297 Japanese planes before the U.S. Army Air Force took over the unit on July 4, 1942.

Quigley was assigned to fighter group a year later after serving in Burma escorting supply planes.

"The P-40 was the best plane we had at the time. The Japanese Nakajimas and Zeros we faced were more maneuverable. They could turn tighter and get inside of you," said Quigley, who said that Chennault, who was recommissioned as brigadier general after the Army took over the Flying Tigers, taught his pilots to exploit the P-40's strengths: the planes were sturdy and faster in a dive. The plane's six 50-caliber machine guns made it a formidable gun platform. Hit and run was the most successful tactic for the airmen.

"We called it boom and zoom," Quigley said.

"You had to keep your head on a swivel. You learned to have eyes in the back of your head, or you'd be in trouble real quick. But you could you could do real damage with those six guns," Quigley said.

The squadron's main mission was to attack convoys and troops moving south toward the Americans' area of control. A group of five or six fighters would fly on a mission, with two planes circling the attackers high overhead to provide cover from the Japanese fighters, based less than 150 miles away.

Quigley recalled his first kill on a routine patrol.

"I was flying at cover altitude, and I spotted a 'beehive' of six or eight enemy planes flying in formation below me. I dived into them, and shot down two of them that were confirmed," said Quigley who estimated he participated in a dozen dogfights during his 136 missions. He tried not to think about the lives of the men in the enemy planes.

"I figured most of those guys were just like me; they got into it to fight," said Quigley who was promoted to major while leading several missions a day, even though the Japanese continued to advance.

Brother shot down

Quigley eventually shot down five Japanese aircraft on the way to earning a Silver Star, a Distinguished Flying Cross with Oak Leaf Cluster, and an Air Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster while flying bombing and strafing missions against invading Japanese troops moving south to occupy Hunan province in southeastern China, a major rice producing region.

His luck ran out on his 137th mission. In 1995, Quigley committed his memory of that day into a journal that became a short book dedicated to his younger brother, Jesse, another fighter pilot who was shot down over Austria. His brother never made it home.

Quigley was leading a group of four fighters traveling south on a road parallel the Xiang River when he came under fire from a pair of camouflaged trucks tucked into a bend in the road.

In the journal, he wrote: "Oh Oh, I've got a big problem! The smoke is rollin' past the canopy-panic time. No, don't panic. Gotta get out of here, getting worse-oil pressure is gone. I'm about 400 or 500 feet just pulling up from a strafing run on some Jap trucks. Roll the canopy back and then hit the silk. Smoke is being sucked into the canopy-gotta close it until I get unbuckled and ready to go over the side. Now roll her back and go."

Held in POW camp

Quigley was shot down Aug. 10, 1944, and was held as a prisoner of war for 13 months before his release at the end of the war.

He was captured immediately by the Japanese troops, and he was pounded with rifle butts before being taken to a farmhouse used as headquarters and bound to a post while under guard. Quigley, one of 12 fighter prisoners who dubbed themselves the "Diddled Dozen" were kept segregated from other prisoners and taken from one prison camp to another during the war until they were eventually taken to Japan.

The men were mostly kept in solitary confinement, although Quigley, listed as missing in action, eventually passed word to other prisoners during escorted trips to the latrine that he was still alive.

Quigley survived the loneliness and deprivation by keeping his mind occupied, sometimes with elaborate escape fantasies. He learned a prisoner held in a basement jail cell three doors down a hallway was Don Watts, from Marion. Quigley learned by passing notes between cells that he knew Watts' sister, Florine Watts, from school.

"The only way of telling time was by the delivery of meals, one bowl of rice along with a bowl of tea in the morning, and again late in the afternoon," Quigley said.

Quigley holds no lingering animosity against his former enemy, and although perpetually hungry and cold, he never considered himself mistreated or tortured during interrogations. After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the Japanese surrendered and treatment of American prisoners improved.

Quigley was reunited with Irene in the autumn of 1945.

"We had a good outfit, and I was proud of them," said Quigley, which meant more to him than the Congressional Medal of Honor.

"And I'm proud we helped the Chinese people during that awful time. Most of them really appreciated us being there. If I would have landed a mile away from the Japanese when I bailed out, they would have hidden me, protected me, and got me back to my people," he said.

Quigley lamented the toll the war had taken on all the nations who fought and endured World War II in the final passage of his journal devoted to his fallen brother Jesse.

"God forbid that such a wide conflict should ever happen again."

jsmiller@gannett.com

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