Mary Joan Regan was born on October 10, 1915, in Boston, Massachusetts. Her father, a graduate of MIT, worked as headmaster of Dorchester High School. Her mother was a graduate of Radcliffe College, the women’s coordinate institution at the all-male Harvard. After receiving a bachelor of arts in art history from Radcliffe in 1937, Mary spent the next year traveling in Europe and Asia. In Munich, she witnessed the growing threat of war when she attended a public speech by Adolf Hitler. In Japan, she studied Asian art as a Radcliffe fellow under the sponsorship of Langdon Warner, revered Harvard professor and later Monuments Man in postwar Japan. She then returned to Radcliffe for her master’s degree, where her professors included Mason Hammond, who would later serve as a Monuments Man in the Mediterranean theater and western European theater, and Paul Sachs, associate director of the Fogg Museum and future prominent member of the Roberts Commission. After graduation, she spent the next two years working as a high school art teacher in Grafton, Massachusetts.

In July 1942, Regan enlisted in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), the first female unit to serve in the US Army in a capacity other than nursing. She was sent to Fort Des Moines for officer candidate school and commissioned as a third officer. In July 1943, the WAAC was awarded full military status and redesignated the Women’s Army Corps (WAC). Regan was promoted to lieutenant and returned to Boston as a WAC recruiter. She was soon promoted to captain. It was during this time that she met Mary Churchill, daughter of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, during the Churchill family’s visit to Harvard.

After a brief assignment in St. Louis, Missouri, Regan was flown to England in 1944 accompanying a group of American B-17 bombers being delivered to the United Kingdom. She was then assigned to US Eighth Air Force under the direction of Lieutenant General James “Jimmy” Doolittle. At the headquarters of the British Bomber Command, she underwent training to assess bomb damage from aerial photographs following air raids. She used this training at the Royal Air Force (RAF) base at Medmenham, England, where she interpreted reconnaissance photographs to assess damage from the bombing raids and identify important monuments.

After the D-Day landings in June 1944, Regan managed the headquarters of Lieutenant General Carl Spaatz, commander of the US Strategic Air Forces in Europe who directed the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces, first in England and later in France at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. As company commander of 550 WAC officers, she managed two mess halls, converted a garage into a recreation room, and installed a juke box so the officers could dance. For her extraordinary leadership during this time, she was awarded the Bronze Star.

Following the Allied victory, Regan participated in the “Victory in Europe” (VE) parade in Paris and attended an art exhibition for soldiers at the Louvre. Soon after, she was assigned the task of delivering an antique desk to the airbase in Wiesbaden, Germany. By this time, she had read in the Stars and Stripes that officers with an art background were needed as Monuments officers. Despite having more than enough points to return home, she traveled to the MFAA office in Berlin. There, she was greeted by her former Harvard professor, Monuments Man Lieutenant Colonel Mason Hammond, who was so happy to see her that he ignored her official salute and gave her a big hug instead. She immediately volunteered for service and was soon named an information and reports officer assigned to headquarters of the MFAA Branch of the US Group Control Council in Berlin in September 1945. She continued her duties with the MFAA Section of the Office of Military Government, US beginning the following month, when the MFAA function was reorganized under the US military government. In this position, she traveled to the various central collecting points to examine looted works of art and cultural objects before repatriating these items to their countries of origin.

By mid-1946, Regan was assigned the duties of art intelligence research officer in the MFAA intelligence subsection. In this position, her task was to provide the information necessary for active MFAA officers to effectively protect cultural property and monuments. Her field reports reveal her many correspondences with foreign offices, management of intelligence documents, updates on the proceedings of high-profile looting cases, and even the whereabouts of suspicious art dealers currently in the American Zone of Occupation. She made sure the Monuments officers in the field were up-to-date on the current customs regulations for art objects and distributed copies of similar information. When three paintings were stolen from the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin, she was informed of their suspected location, interviewed the middleman, Wolf von Appen, and took the paintings into US custody after they had been confiscated from the art dealer Herbert Klewer, who had purchased them illegally.

Such a role as the eyes and ears of the MFAA in Berlin established her as a trusted source of information. She believed that looting by American personnel was an embarrassing fact that the US Army failed to effectively prevent or control and kept meticulous records on the topic. Regan remained committed to the pursuit of the common good for displaced works of art. In a special report to headquarters, she recommended “that international discussions be initiated to solve the intelligence problem presented by the removals, generally accepted as illegal, of German art treasures by governments and individuals of occupying powers, whether the objects removed are considered as ‘War Trophies’ or ‘Reparations.’”

Regan returned to the United States by 1948 and later taught humanities at the University of Florida for twelve years. She married Tim Quessenberry in 1965 and the couple moved to Tarpon Springs, Florida, where she taught at St. Petersburg Junior College. While her husband passed away in 1978, she remained in Florida until her return to Massachusetts in her later years. In 2008, she was presented with a state resolution honoring her incredible wartime contributions.

Mary J. Quessenberry (née Regan) died in Massachusetts on April 8, 2010.