[Annotator's Note: The interview starts with the interviewer and interviewee talking.] Norman Kinsey's mother was unhappy with how dead Dallas-Fort Worth [Annotator's Note: Texas] was. She went to a business school and learned to operate a massive machine that was a precursor to a calculator. She moved to Shreveport [Annotator's Note: Shreveport, Louisiana] and met his father. Kinsey was born in January 1921. He was an only child. His mother stopped working then. When he was very young they moved to the only home he ever knew. He went to school nearby. In 1935, the first ROTC [Annotator's Note: Reserve Officer Training Corps] unit was established at his high school. He joined and became an Infantry Captain. They had a battalion with 700 cadets. After high school, he attended LSU [Annotator's Note: Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana]. All males had to spend two years in ROTC. They then applied for advanced ROTC for two more years. He did so and in 1941 he had finished. The draft had started. He was commissioned on 18 May 1942 and ordered to active duty on 9 June. By the middle of the winter 1941 to 1942, the government realized that all officers in the Army Air Corps were flying officers but there had been very little flying. They realized they needed administrative officers. Kinsey volunteered and he left the infantry and joined the Air Corps.

Norman Kinsey attend ROTC [Annotator's Note: Reserve Officer Training Corps] summer camp at Clemson [Annotator's Note: Clemson University in Clemson, South Carolina]. This was between his junior and senior years. This was not boot camp, but it was a lot of training, including gunnery. It was hands on and he enjoyed it. He did not care for submachine guns. They graduated in May 1942. LSU [Annotator's Note: Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana] at the time had field artillery, infantry, and engineer corps. Kinsey did all of his training in infantry. He thought the Army Air Corps was the thing he wanted to do. He had been studying business administration and law in college and that got him into the Air Corps. He was concerned about his health. He had had a hernia operation years before but he passed his physical. He boarded a train to Tampa, Florida and then was sent to Morris Field [Annotator's Note: Daniel Army Airfield], Augusta, Georgia, to the 16th Observation Squadron. It was regular Army with reconnaissance planes. He stayed there two or three weeks and got orders to maneuvers at Greensboro-High Point Airport [Annotator's Note: Greensboro, North Carolina]. They had to camp in the woods. He had been a Boy Scout. They set up a mess tent and his job was to buy food in town. They left there for Charlotte [Annotator's Note: Morris Field, Charlotte, North Carolina] in June. The 16th was paired into a group that had a squadron from New Orleans [Annotator's Note: New Orleans, Louisiana] and one from south Arkansas. The group was ordered to Langley Field [Annotator's Note: Langley Field, Newport News, Virginia; now Langley Air Force Base] in September. They were being trained and they did not know what it was. They were told to pack. They were split onto two ships at Hampton Roads [Annotator's Note: Hampton Roads Port of Embarkation, Hampton Roads, Virginia]. There were six officers in a cabin that was designed for two. They did not know where they were going. As they got to sea, they saw other ships. Every morning for a couple weeks, there were more including the USS Texas (BB-35) and USS Augusta (CA-31). After four days at sea, they were told they were landing in North Africa. His group would be in Morocco.

On 9 November 1942, Norman Kinsey was offshore of Casablanca and Fédala [Annotator's Note: both in Morocco]. He awoke to explosions; the USS Texas (BB-35) was firing. He only had eight to ten men in his group on his ship. The remainder were on another ship. They were firing on the French. On the third day, he got into a Higgins boat [Annotator's Note: Landing Craft Vehicle, Personnel or LCVP] and started in. They got to the docks. He found the bulk of his organization in a cork factory. That night, a wolfpack of submarines arrived and started sinking the troop ships. One of the Higgins boats was offshore in five foot seas. An old French airplane was strafing the beach. The engine quit on the boat and the vessel turned over. All of the men had their gear on their chests and went straight to the bottom. Kinsey's first job was to fill out 12 killed in action reports. They moved to the airport at Casablanca [Annotator's Note: Casablanca, Morocco], but all of the flight crews had been sent to England. They stayed there for a week or so, and then took a train east to Oujda [Annotator’s Note: Oujda Airfield, Oujda, Morocco] in December 1942. It was miserable. The men were in foxholes with water and they were freezing. Six officers were in the bed of an abandoned truck. He wondered how he had gotten into this mess. He was feeling sorry for himself but realized he was not being shot at. They had no hot water or running water. Every few weeks they would go to a French bath house and spend a whole day to get a hot bath and new clothes. Pilots and crews eventually showed up for sub patrol off of Morocco and Algeria.

Sometime in the early summer of 1943, Norman Kinsey moved south of Casablanca to Berrechid [Annotator's Note: Berrechid Airfield, Berrechid, Morocco]. They set up a fighter training center. The pilots had not seemed to be training well in the United States. Their instructors were combat pilots. Kinsey took care of that. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer backs up to Oujda Field, Morocco and the anti-submarine patrols.] The aircraft were DD-7s [Annotator's Note: unable to verify aircraft]. There was an observer in the nose, a pilot, and a tail gunner. He was told they sunk one sub. Kinsey's job was taking care of the men; feeding them, paying them, promoting them, maintaining records, etc. When he first got to Oujda [Annotator's Note: Oujda, Morocco], just before Christmas of 1942. They had only had canned rations up to that point and it was tough. He took two mess sergeants and machine guns and got a car to find a farmer with a pig. Admiral Darlan [Annotator's Note: French Navy Admiral Jean Louis Xavier François Darlan], the head of the French that surrendered, had been assassinated. They bought a pig, butchered it, and brought it back to the mess hall. By the time it was cooked it was pitifully small. They went and bought two more pigs. The farmer insisted that they share dinner with his family. They did and then went back. Kinsey had some cognac and he gave each man a shot. That was Christmas dinner. The farmer was French. They did not speak each other's language, but they had a French-English dictionary. The fighter training center lasted through the summer and fall. Berrechid [Annotator's Note: Berrechid, Morocco] was abandoned and they moved to Algeria. There was an old Roman outpost, Timgad [Annotator’s Note: Timgad, Algeria], there were still mosaics on the ground and nobody was there. The French had done some work on the walls there. This was October 1943. He got V-mail [Annotator's Note: Victory Mail; postal system put into place during the war to drastically reduce the space needed to transport mail] from his mother. His father had a big discovery in the gas business in Texas. He did not know how good of news it was. He is still operating that field [Annotator's Note: at the time of the interview]. V-mail was given priority to facilitate information back and forth.

Norman Kinsey felt the operation he was in was not going anywhere. A call came out for a cadre to form a new organization. He volunteered. They were to report to Tunis, Massicault [Annotator's Note: Massicault, Tunisia; now called Borj El Amri]. When they got there, it had been raining and it was a sea of mud ten to 12 inches deep. It was cold. Rommel [Annotator's Note: German Field Marshall Johannes Erwin Eugen Rommel] had been pushed out and the Germans were on their way to Sicily. The cadre was headed towards Italy. He was on an LST, landing ship, tank, a fair-sized vehicle. It was sparkling clean so he took his clothes off and walked in it naked so he could take a shower. They landed at Naples [Annotator's Note: Naples, Italy]. There were sunken ships in the harbor, and they built a ramp across two sunken ships to offload. This was late 1943 or early 1944. He wound up in Manduria, Italy. He was assigned to a structure like a castle. There was no electricity and water was in a cistern. Their mission changed there. This was the 885th Bombardment Squadron (Heavy) (Special). They had a full colonel as commanding officer and Air Force Headquarters as administration. Their chief customers were the OSS [Annotator's Note: Office of Strategic Services; pre-runner of the Central Intelligence Agency], the ISS-U6 [Annotator's Note: SIS; Secret Intelligence Service, United Kingdom], he saw Wild Bill Donovan [Annotator's Note: US Army Major General William Joseph Donovan] who formed the CIA several times. They had B-17s [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber], B-24s [Annotator's Note: Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber], and B-25s [Annotator's Note: North American B-25 Mitchell medium bomber]. They were going on lone night missions carrying arms, ammunitions, supplies, and agents. He did that the rest of the war. It was so secret they did not tell him what was going on, he just kind of figured it out.

[Annotator's Note: Norman Kinsey worked with military intelligence units in World War 2.] There was a lot of protocol. The agents were out and wandering around bars and bazaars to find refugees from France. They would recruit them. They would be blindfolded on the way to the training areas, would not know where they were and taught how to parachute and what to do. That lasted all summer long. They moved from Italy back to Algiers [Annotator's Note: Algiers, Algeria]. They had been doing work in Albania and Yugoslavia. Later, they returned to southern Italy and then northern Italy to Castiglioncello. In some places they had to live in tents. He only got one individual decoration when they moved in Italy. He organized the outfit for the move. They had an unlimited number of DC-3s [Annotator's Note: Douglas DC-3; civilian variant of the Douglas C-47 Skytrain cargo aircraft] coming in. The whole thing was done, and nobody got hurt and the unit [Annotator's Note: 885th Bombardment Squadron, 2641st Special Group (Provisional), 15th Air Force] was only down for four days. He got a Bronze Star [Annotator's Note: the fourth-highest award a United States service member can receive for a heroic or meritorious deed performed in a conflict with an armed enemy] for that.

[Annotator's Note: Norman Kinsey worked with military intelligence units in World War 2.] He never processed anything sensitive. VE-Day [Annotator's Note: Victory in Europe Day, 8 May 1945] was the main thing he was interested in. There were a lot of troops and equipment in Europe and they had to think about taking care of Japan. The people had to be processed, sent back to the United States, and then sent to the Pacific. He had enough points to return home as he had been there [Annotator's Note: between North Africa and Italy] almost three years. He was sent to Naples and started processing people. They were busy for almost a month. He had 500 men and jeeps, trucks, all military equipment. They lived in apartment houses. The mess rations suddenly became plentiful. Officers had finally gotten a ration of one bottle of American whiskey per month and six cans of beer a week. The stuff was piling up and the customers were gone. Kinsey's biggest problem was to keep the men from going nuts. He organized trips to the beach and other things. There was a young Italian boy who had attached himself to a floor of officers and he would go get ice for them in the afternoons. The officers would go home, get together for drinks, and then go to town. This started to bother Kinsey as he started looking forward to having a drink every evening. He decided to not drink anything for one week. If he could not do it, he would get help. It was not easy, but he did it. Things ran that way until early October [Annotator's Note: October 1945].

[Annotator's Note: Norman Kinsey worked with military intelligence units in World War 2.] He then had to take all of the base records and do an inventory and ship them to Virginia. He came across the KIA file, Killed In Action. He had turned in 125 KIA reports. He was the one who wrote the next of kin for most of them. The first one was traumatic, but it became easier. He was the ghost writer. He had to assure the family that their loved one died honorably. He could not give much information due to being in a spook outfit [Annotator's Note: spy outfit]. You could not tell any details. When Kinsey started home in October [Annotator's Note: October 1945], he took a ship across the North Atlantic. The weather was tempestuous. He went into the engine room. They got into seas that produced a 35 degree roll in the ship. Sometimes the seas were 45 foot. The ship would shudder. He remembers laying in his bunk, and he would slide and bump his head. Then he would slide and bump his feet. This was for hours at a time. He did not get seasick. He arrived in New York Harbor [Annotator's Note: New York, New York] and had tears in his eyes. He had been gone for three solid years from the age of 21 to the age of 24. They docked in New Jersey and he took a train to Fort Dix, New Jersey. The mess hall had fresh food that they had not seen in a long time. They took a train to Camp Shelby, Laurel, Mississippi for processing. He took buses home and his parents were waiting for him at the bus station. He stayed there for a week or so. You could not buy automobiles at the time, but a lady sold him her car. She had not driven it much due to gas rationing.

[Annotator's Note: Norman Kinsey arrived home from Europe in October 1945.] He drove down to Baton Rouge [Annotator's Note: Baton Rouge, Louisiana] to see the registrar [Annotator's Note: at Louisiana State University, Louisiana]. He wanted to finish law school. Since it was November, she suggested correspondence courses until the next term. He went to see the Dean and explained his situation. They agreed to let him do the lessons as quickly as he could. He would wake up and read his books, have lunch, and then take the tests. In 34 days, he had only four hours left to get a degree. He got into law school. He lacked one hour to graduate, and the registrar had him take a typing class. He finished up in 1947 with two degrees. He went with his family to Estes Park, Colorado where his father had some associates. One of the persons was the head of the railroad commission of Texas. That fall, he moved into working in Carthage [Annotator's Note: Carthage, Texas] with his father. He has not stopped since.

Norman Kinsey had a good basis of organization. One of the things learned in the military is that he was not an individual, but part of a team. One of the most important things learned was that if you are a leader, it is true that rank has its privileges. But if you have people who are your responsibility, the first thing you do is take care of them. You are not the king. He has always felt that to have responsibility you have to have authority. You cannot separate the two. He has tried to give himself to his state and his city. He served on councils. You have a responsibility to do for other people. When you see a school or a hospital, each one of those things were put together by busy people. Leaders take advantage of that and to do so, you have a responsibility to leave something for them. Kinsey was discharged as a Major.