Coronado vet recalls famous WWII escape

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. Read the entire Union Tribune article here.