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How to Start an Engine. As captain, Quesada had been on assignment as adviser to the Argentine Air Force for close to three years when he was ordered back to the States in late 1940. On his own, he took off in an old Grumman amphibian that the U.S. Navy wanted returned to the country. Laden with five 5-gal.gas cans, a pair of pliers, a tire casing and some safety wire, Quesada chugged along having himself a fine time. He fished in the lake region of Argentina, threaded through the Andes ("with the Christ of the Andes above my head"). One day he set the plane down in the ocean about 50 miles off the coast of Ecuador ("I got very thirsty"). But when he tried to handcrank his engine for a takeoff, the inertial starter clutch failed. "There I was," he says, "drifting to Honolulu. I cranked myself to exhaustion." After long minutes of finger drumming, Quesada suddenly recalled an old aviator's superstition. He went back and urinated on the tail. Naturally, the engine started up with the next turn of the crank.
Notwithstanding his brash independence, Quesada ably fulfilled his jobs in the demanding years that followed. He was commanding general, Twelfth Fighter Command in Africa, deputy commander Northwest African Coastal Air Force, and before D-day took over the Ninth Fighter Command. On D-day plus one, Quesada landed his own P-38 fighter plane on the Normandy beach ("My first step was not on European soil—it was on a dead German").
Right Flank March. A month later, he put Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower piggyback in the cockpit of a P-51 and took him on a go-minute ride along the beachhead ("Eisenhower was very pleased, but we both caught hell from the Joint Chiefs of Staff"). During the great armored-tank drive across Europe, Quesada's Ninth Tactical Air Command, rather than troops, became Lieut. General George Patton's "right flank": he had put a fighter pilot in each of Patton's lead tanks "so that we would have quick communications with fighter pilots. I wanted somebody in those tanks who could talk fighter pilot lingo." Quesada chalked up 90 combat missions before war's end, went home with the Distinguished Service Medal, Air Medal with two Silver Oak Leaf Clusters, Distinguished Flying Cross, etc., and a drawerful of assorted foreign decorations. He also went home with his facility for the flippant still intact. Once he landed his 6-26 onto an icy airstrip at Long Island's Mitchel Field, skidded the length of the runway, up an embankment, across a busy highway, through a steel fence, stopped at last on the polo field of the Meadowbrook Club, got out and asked: "Where are the horses?" He served for close to three years as commander of the Tactical Air Command, and in 1949-51 was top military commander of the crucial Operation Greenhouse, in which the U.S. exploded the first hydrogen bomb at Eniwetok. In 1951, at age 47, Lieut. General Quesada retired. He worked for a while at California's Lockheed Aircraft Corp. (vice president of the missile-systems division), but quit in a row over policy. When Ike called him to Washington, Quesada was dabbling successfully in investments with space-age inventors.