Cpl. Frederick 'Fuzzy' Kuszmaul
also known as Fred Kuszmaul; Fuzzy
Robert Earl Wildermuth’s best friend on the B-24 crew — per Robert Earl’s own memoir, where Fuzzy is the only crewman explicitly named that way. He was the radio operator on the crew and held the rank of Corporal at first, Technical Sergeant by war’s end.
Logansport and Indiana University
From Logansport, Indiana — the small Wabash-River town in northern Indiana — and a second-year pre-med student at Indiana University before he enlisted. He was one of the hundreds of aviation cadets who had washed out of pilot/bombardier/navigator training at the Nashville Classification Center:
“Cpl. Kuszmaul was a second year pre-med student at Indiana University and he was one of the hundreds of men eliminated from cadet training at the now infamous Nashville Training Center.”
Robert Earl, who had passed Nashville and gone on to navigator school at Selman Field, met Fuzzy after Nashville when the two were assigned to the same B-24 crew at Gowen Field, Boise, Idaho. Their shared pre-med background — Robert Earl had been pre-med at Marietta before the war and would return to it at Stanford after — was almost certainly part of what made them best friends in the Pacific. Two would-be doctors, both interrupted by the war, both flying out of Biak and Tacloban and Ie Shima.
The trip home
When the war ended and the crew flew back to McClellan Field, California, the ten men said their goodbyes and scattered:
“We left the airplane at McClellan Air Field, got railroad tickets to the nearest military installation to our homes; said our goodbyes to each other and to this day none of us has ever met again.”
But Robert Earl and Fuzzy lived close enough together — Logansport and Marietta — that their nearest military installation was the same: Wright-Patterson Field in Dayton, Ohio. They traveled together across the country by train, had what Robert Earl described as a “scrumptious last meal together in the swankiest restaurant in Dayton, Ohio,” and parted at Wright-Patterson on 30 November 1945. It is the only post-war farewell of the crew Robert Earl describes in detail.
He is named in Robert Earl’s combat log The Big One. His post-war life, whether he finished pre-med and became a doctor, and whether he and Robert Earl ever met again after the Dayton dinner are open research.
Sources: Robert Earl Wildermuth’s 1989 memoir; The Big One.
