Oral History Program Gale Bramwell Alyssa Chaffee 26 July 2017 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Gale Bramwell Interviewed by Alyssa Chaffee 26 July 2017 Copyright © 2018 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The World War II "All Out for Uncle Sam" oral history project contains interviews from veterans of the war, wives of soldiers, as well as individuals who were present during the war years. The interviews became the compelling background stories for the "All Out for Uncle Sam" exhibit. The project received funding from Utah Division of State History, Utah Humanities Council and Weber County RAMP. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Bramwell, Gale, an oral history by Alyssa Chaffee, 26 July 2017, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Photograph Gale Bramwell sent to his wife during WWII. Written on it: “Sincerely your loving husband Gale” circa 1940s Gale Bramwell 26 July 2017 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Gale Bramwell, conducted on July 26, 2017 by Alyssa Chaffee. Gale discusses his life and his memories involving World War II. Michael Ballif, the video technician, is also present during this interview. AC: Today is July 26, 2017. It’s about 1:00 pm. We are visiting with Gale Bramwell about his experiences during World War II. My name’s Alyssa Chaffee and I’m here with Michael Ballif. So, Gale, when and where were you born? GB: I was born in Rigby, Idaho. That was July the thirteenth, 1920. AC: You were probably about ten when the Depression started. Is that right? GB: When the Depression started, that would be in 1931 or so. I was probably twelve years old. AC: What do you remember of the Depression? GB: Everybody was poor. I lived in a farming community and everybody had plenty to eat. We harvested timber from the local woods so we were warm. We got along pretty good. AC: What kind of farm did you have? GB: My father had three hundred and twenty acres. It was quite a large farm. It was hay, and grain, and cattle, and so forth. AC: Did you also grow food for yourselves to eat? GB: Oh sure. We had gardens, fruit trees, and things of this nature. AC: Who did your dad sell his hay and grain to? 2 GB: Well, we had what we call elevators, which were people who purchased the grain. He would harvest the hay and the grain and he would feed the hay to his cattle, most of the grain. Then, he would sell the rest. Primarily, his cash crop was potatoes. He raised a lot of potatoes. AC: How many siblings did you have? GB: I was actually raised as an only child. My father and mother had only one child. MB: What were your parent’s names? GB: My father’s name was Heber Mark Bramwell and my mother’s name, Eleanor Deely Williams. AC: What did you do for fun as an only child, since you didn’t have brothers and sisters to play with? Did you have neighbor kids that you played with? GB: I had a very fine pony. I would herd the cattle and things of that nature, and help with the farm work as I could. That’s pretty much what we did. We didn’t have a lot of things like the people do nowadays. I lived three and a half miles out of town, therefore, our nearest neighbor was about a half mile away. I didn’t have any young people as friends except at school. MB: Where did you go to school? GB: Went to school in Rigby, Idaho. MB: Was that elementary and high school? They were both up there? GB: I went to elementary and junior high and high school in Rigby, Idaho. AC: If you born in 1920, that means you were 21 on the day that Pearl Harbor was bombed, right? 3 GB: Yes. I enlisted in the Air Force in October 10, 1940, which was before the war started, so I was a member of the Air Force. My first job in the Air Force was a clerk typist and then I became a weather forecaster. They sent me to school. Also, I became a pilot. I flew B51s, B80s, and B29s. The recruiting office is in Idaho Falls which was thirteen miles away. I went there and they signed me up and I went to March Field, California, my first assignment. MB: What made you want to join the Air Force? Why did you decide to enlist? GB: Well I was the right age and I was unmarried. I knew I would be drafted if I didn’t go into the Air Force. I decided that I did not want to be a rookie in the rear ranks, so I went in and was trained. AC: You said that you knew that you’d be drafted if you didn’t enlist. Did you have some kind of a hunch about World War II? GB: Oh yes. We knew there was going to be a draft and I knew I’d be I-A, so you’d just as well get ahead of the game. AC: Were you guys pretty aware of the war going on over in Europe? GB: Very much so. AC: Why the Air Force specifically? Have you always wanted to fly? GB: I don’t know that flying had really a whole lot to do with my enlisting in the Air Force. I wanted to get the training that they had so that was my primary reason for going into the Air Force. I thought I could get some good schooling there. AC: Where did you go to boot camp when you first joined? GB: Riverside, California, March Field. AC: How long was boot camp back then? 4 GB: Well let’s see now, I think about six weeks. AC: Where were you stationed once you got out of boot camp? GB: I was selected to go to work for the weather service as a clerk typist and that’s how I got in the weather. Then they sent me to school for additional training. AC: Was that out in California as well? GB: Yes. Then we went up to Sacramento. I was up by McClellan Field, Sacramento for a period of time. From there, I went to the military school in Illinois. AC: What do you remember of the day that you heard Pearl Harbor had been attacked? GB: Well, I was working in the weather office in Hill Field here in Ogden. They needed some guards and it was coming on to Christmas. I remember that I was drafted to be a guard. They gave me a Thompson sub-machine gun and put me out guarding B26 aircraft. AC: You were stationed at Hill Field at that time? GB: Yes. AC: Did you hear about it through the radio or did someone tell you? How did you find out? GB: It came over the radio. We had radios, we could listen to them. We heard about Pearl Harbor that way. AC: Were you surprised or did you kind of see that coming? GB: Very much surprised. I didn’t have any idea that would happen but when it did, I was already in the service and already working. AC: What happened after that? Did you stay at Hill Field for a while? 5 GB: From Hill Field, they sent me back to Chanute Filed, Illinois for training as a weather forecaster. That took a period of time. Then, as a forecaster, I came back to California. I was the forecaster during the time that Patton was training his troops in southern California. We were well aware of what was going on. AC: Did you stay in the states during the whole of the War? GB: Yes. I spent a period of time in England when I was in the service. I was flying B29s at that time; so I was flying weather reconnaissance for the Berlin Air Lift. MB: What was that like, flying weather reconnaissance for them? GB: Well, people don’t understand what weather flying is. We did not have radar and all the things that they have nowadays. We’d actually fly through the storms, and sometimes it got to be quite interesting. Our route to fly was from California. We’d fly out over the ocean and then we’d fly up to the Alaskan peninsula, out of the ocean and then into Fairbanks, Alaska. When I thought about it after I had done it for years, actually there wasn’t any place we could land our B29 between the time we took off and the time we landed. Had we crashed into the ocean, we’d have died. Some of those storms were very severe. I could tell you stories about those that’d curl your hair. The B29 was a really good airplane for that. AC: Did they lose a lot of airplanes flying straight into storms like that? GB: I don’t know that they did. We were trained for it. We were what they called instrument pilots and we were trained to fly regardless of weather conditions. As a matter of fact, we would take off when it was so foggy you could hardly see, and landing was the same thing. We were highly trained instrument pilots. AC: What was training like for that? How did they train you for the situations? 6 GB: It took many hours of training to do that. We had what we call link trainers. They were stationed there in little units that would simulate the flying of the airplane, and you would control it. You had your instruments and you learned to read them and so forth. AC: That was probably pretty high tech for the forties. GB: Very high tech, the highest at that time. I was flying a route from Fairbanks back to California out over the ocean. I was living in California in an apartment with my wife and two children and there came a knock on the door when I got home. An MP was at the door and he says, “Is Lieutenant Bramwell here?” I heard my wife say yes and he says, “He needs to come to the base with us.” I said, “Tell him I’ll be right out. He says, “No sir. You’ve got to come with me right now.” That was the time that we discovered that the Russians had exploded their first atomic bomb. We were part of the intelligence program that discovered that. MB: On your flight to and from Alaska, would you also spy on the Russians at the same time? GB: We didn’t have any contact with the Russians. AC: Did you and your wife get married during World War II? GB: Yes. It was just before World War II. MB: How did you meet your wife? GB: I met her in college; Rick’s College, Rexburg, Idaho. AC: Were you both students there? GB: Yes. AC: What was she studying? 7 GB: She became a teacher. She was studying education. AC: What year did you guys get married? GB: 1942. AC: Were you stationed in several places during the War? GB: Yes. It’s an interesting question because I was in weather reconnaissance and we would fly almost anyplace around the world chasing storms and identifying air masses and this type of thing. AC: Did your wife get to move with you or were you away from her often? GB: We were together most all the time except for a period of time when I was in England. I was very fortunate that way. AC: How long were you in England? GB: Three months. AC: Did you have any children during that time as well? GB: We had two children, but that was before I went to England. AC: What’s your wife’s name? GB: Izetta. AC: You would chase storms all around the world. Would you have to land in other countries pretty often as well? GB: No. We’d usually return to our base. Our flights would last twelve to thirteen hours usually, sometimes more. I’ve had that airplane there for twenty-five hours at a time sometimes and you can cover a lot of ground. MB: Would you have to refuel in the air for that long of a flight? 8 GB: No. We carried belly tanks. The B29 was a bomber so instead of having bomb racks, we had extra gas tanks. AC: Did you have a co-pilot up there with you as well? GB: Oh yes. AC: Anyone else on the planes or just you and the co-pilot? GB: There was usually seven or eight of us in the crews in the 29. You’d have the navigator and two pilots and the engineer. We’d have at least six or seven people, usually, on board. AC: When the war ended, where were you? GB: I was in California. When the war ended, I was a B29 pilot and a weather forecaster. We went back to Idaho and bought a farm; still got the farm. AC: What do you remember of V-Day, the day that the war ended? GB: Well we sure celebrated. It’s hard to describe because you were never certain where you were going to go and when you were going to get back. When the war was over, why there was no more use for me so I got out of the service and went back to Idaho. MB: Did you just farm for your career after that? GB: No. I went into real estate. I had a real estate office and sold real estate. After that, I was a professional photographer for a period of time. AC: What would you usually photograph? GB: I did weddings and portraits and things like that. MB: Did you have your own studio? GB: Oh yeah. 9 MB: Was that also up in Idaho? GB: Yes; in Rigby. The studio’s not there anymore. MB: How long did you do that for, the photography? GB: About ten years. AC: You said your wife became a teacher. What grades did she teach? GB: She taught the third through the fifth grade usually. AC: Did she do that all throughout your kids growing up years as well? GB: No. She didn’t teach until our kids were fairly well grown and then she went back to teaching. AC: What are your kid’s names? GB: My son’s name is Denton and my daughter’s name is Marteen. AC: How far apart are they in age? GB: About four years. AC: How do you feel like serving in the War has affected you as a person and your life as a whole? GB: I spent about ten years in the service and I had a lot of experiences. When I got out of the service I went back to just living on the farm. It’s where I raised the kids. That’s the best place in the world to raise children. AC: What did you grow on your farm? GB: Hay and grain mostly. AC: Did you have animals as well? GB: Oh yeah, I had cattle. 10 AC: How was that, having cattle on your farm? Was that pretty tough to try to keep them all? GB: No, it was fenced. We had good fences. We didn’t have a problem with that. AC: So you wouldn’t turn them out to pasture in those big areas like all the people do? GB: No, we’d keep them all on the farm. Our farm was an irrigated farm so we would grow the pasture for our cattle. AC: You said you flew B29s towards the end of the war, is that correct? GB: Yes. I was trained as a fighter pilot in B51s. Then, in my assignments, I was assigned to the B29 for flying weather reconnaissance because I was a weather forecaster. AC: Those were the two main planes that you flew then? GB: Yeah. MB: Do you have any other experiences you’d like to share with us before we turn the camera off? GB: Well, I’m glad to have been a member of the service. I feel that patriotism is something that people are lacking nowadays, in my opinion. MB: Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your life and your experiences with us today. GB: Thank you