i Oral History Program Ralph Crandall Interviewed by Steve Crane 17 September 2014 ii Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Ralph Crandall Interviewed by Steve Crane 17 September 2014 Copyright © 2014 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 Weber and Davis County Communities Oral History Collection includes interviews of citizens from several different walks of life. These interviews were conducted by Stewart Library personnel, Weber State University faculty and students, and other members of the community. The histories cover various topics and chronicle the personal everyday life experiences and other recollections regarding the history of the Weber and Davis County areas. ____________________________________ 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: Crandall, Ralph, an oral history by Steve Crane, 17 September 2014, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Ralph Crandall September 17, 2014 1 Abstract: The following is an interview with Ralph Crandall conducted on September 17, 2014 by Steve Crane. Ralph discusses his experiences as a Navy pilot during World War II. He served in the Navy from December 24, 1942 to December of 1945 earning the rank of Lieutenant and receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross award for his service. Also present is Stacie Gallagher, the video technician. SC: This is part of the veteran’s history project through Weber State University and Ogden Rotary Club. Our special guest today is Ralph Crandall. He was born July 22, 1922. Today’s date is September 17, 2014. Mr. Crandall’s age is 92 and his branch of service was the Navy. His dates of service were from December 24, 1942 to December of 1945 and his highest rank in the Navy was Lieutenant. His job description was Navy pilot and he received the Distinguished Flying Cross as an award for his service. Thank you for being here. I appreciate the opportunity and am looking forward to chatting with you about your military service. Can you tell me what you were doing before the war? RC: Well, before the war, as with most men my age, I just got out of high school in 1940 and that summer I went and worked at the Ogden City cemetery on the north side of 20th and Jefferson. Right after the summer time I went into the CCC camps for six months and went down near St. George in a little place called Veyo, Utah. After that, since Pearl Harbor came, I had to get ready to go to war. A Navy board visited the area for recruitment and I was a high school graduate, but if I could pass a certain college test I could enter the training, which was a civilian pilot training program that was administered by Weber State College for 2 the U.S. Navy, at which time I passed the test and was accepted. The only thing is I had a little medical thing and I had to have an operation—a bilateral hernia actually because being a pilot, that was something that was necessary. Other than that, subsequently, the summer we went into civilian pilot training also by the Weber State and that was Principles of Flight, Navigation, Weather and that type of thing. I first soloed a Piper Cub in Ogden on the old runway out on Adam’s Avenue on October 16, 1942 and my actual entry into the Navy was December 24, 1942 to pre-flight school in northern California in the Bay area at St. Mary’s College. SC: So that’s where you took your pilot training then? RC: That’s where I took preflight school. SC: Okay, and was there flight school after that? RC: Flight school was after that. I went to Los Alamitos Naval Air Station near Long Beach, California for the regular pilot training. You fly what is called a steermen. It’s a biplane open cockpit. That was my primary training. From there I went down to Corpus Christi Texas and got my wings and commission on October 16, 1943, just a year after I first soloed the Piper Cub. SC: What aircraft were you trained to fly in? RC: Well, if you’re in the Navy, everybody thinks of a carrier pilot. I wasn’t good enough in flying, and I couldn’t land in such a way that I’d catch the hook on an aircraft carrier, but they cleaned that up and I was okay. But when I got to Corpus Christi, they also wanted multi engine pilots and they put me in multiengine 3 because of my previous history at Los Alamitos, which was actually okay by me because it was more training and more serious and I got commercial ratings when I was released from the Navy. SC: So you were happy to have been trained in multi-engine aircraft. RC: Oh definitely. The first plane I flew down there was called a PBY, Catalina, it’s a slow patrol surveillance type of boat plane. From Corpus Christi I was sent to Jacksonville, Florida for a couple of months. In the Navy, your assignments are all done at the end of the year in December and then you start out the New Year with whatever your new assignment is and that’s where you would go. The funny part about dates is they sent me from Jacksonville Florida on December the 24th 1943 and put me on the train to come back to Ogden. SC: Did you feel like your training was adequate once you got overseas? Did you feel like your training was appropriate and adequate? RC: No, I mean, whatever they do they do for the good of the individual. I didn’t expect where I was going, it’s just that I had to take the orders from them and they would do what they had to do. I thought that I would be sent to train in a combat type aircraft for a couple of months, but when I got back to Norfolk for reassignment they sent me straight to England because they needed pilots over there to fly four engine aircraft, so training was done on patrol. SC: Was England your only station area, your only assignment? RC: It was where I spent the whole year of 1944 in England. That was the assignment and that was my whole purpose of being a multiengine pilot, which was—Gen. 4 Eisenhower was the supreme commander over there and the British Coastal Command, similar to our Coast Guard was the group that was in charge and my actual assignment was an anti-submarine co-pilot, keeping the submarines from sinking our supply ships. SC: What aircraft were you flying at that time? RC: I was flying a PB4Y-1 liberator, which was set up to use radar underneath the aircraft and for the purposes of surveying the surface of the water for the supply ships to come in and to keep the German U boat from surfacing. They couldn’t sink our ships unless they surfaced. They’d had scrimmages before I got there with aircraft and the U boat didn’t make out too good, but in my case it was simply a 42 mission 13 hours in the air each mission just flying to keep the German U boat from surfacing. SC: Okay, that was your assignment. Tell us some of your experiences as you flew surveillance. RC: Well, actually it was kind of a hum-drum type of a thing really. It got to be pretty monotonous. The first thing that happened that was exciting, we knew that D-day was coming soon. I’d taken off at 5:30 in the morning that day and the gliders and the aircraft were all in the air heading for France to take the U.S. troops over there and that was an exciting thing. We had to be on patrol by 6:00, but it was a half an hour from our station out to the water where we flew, but we did see all the aircraft and the gliders that were heading from England to France. I suppose the other interesting thing happened that everybody should know about is in the ONI manuals, which were Office of Naval Intelligence, but to eradicate the 5 German U Boat, the high officials devised a plan I was down the coast of France. It was a dry dock, or a repair area for the submarines and the bombs in those days were only 500 pounds and the cement concrete over that area was stiff enough that the 500 pound bombs just didn’t do anything, they just bounced off. So our forces made a plan where they took a retiring aircraft that was ready for being taken out of service. They stripped all the armament out of two of them. They filled them full of torpeks which is about a half again more volatile than TNT and they armed them with igniters to blow up and they had the plan was to fly them right into the opening where the U boats went in for repair, which was obviously a good strategic thing to do. The planes were taken over by radio control by a pilot in another airplane close by, but you can’t take them off the ground on radio control, you’ve got to be manned in the plane, so two individuals were called to fly off the ground and get air borne and then turn the planes over to a pilot by radio control in another plane. A man by the name of Spalding and a man by the name of Kennedy, which was Joseph Kennedy. He was the Kennedy Family’s oldest son. It so happened that they just drew straws. But anyway, the idea was to get air borne make radio contact with the “mother plane,” as they were called, and when the contact was made they would flip the switch to automatic pilot and then bail out of that plane. The chosen place was the English Channel between England and France because there was air sea rescue there. Spalding was off first and he flipped the switch and bailed out. Kennedy was ten minutes behind him and he made the contact with the mother plane and when he flipped the switch his airplane blew up. That was it regardless of whatever stories 6 you hear about Joseph Kennedy of how he lost his life. That was it regardless of whatever else, fiction books or anything else said, that was it. It was a sad situation but that’s the fortunes of war. The other plane flew down the coast to Renes, France and the weather was involved, known as fog was on the coast. They made their flight take off to coincide with good weather down there but unfortunately when the spalding plane got down there the fog had abliterated the site so they had a plan B which was a German air field in France. Obviously that’s the kind of strategy that you have to have because you couldn’t waste all of that except for this next plan and they flew the airplane into the closest air field, and aimed it to the administration buildings and the tower and the area in which the most destruction could be and when the plane hit the ground it didn’t blow up. The skidding along the ground caused so much friction and sparks that the airplane did blow up. The bonus of the whole thing was it was an ammunition dump, which we didn’t know about and when that airplane blew up a lot of structures that held the bombs and the airport as well. It was a good destruction job at that. SC: Was there a time in your surveillance flights when you detected U boats? If so, what would you do then? RC: We never detected U boats in our plane, but there were lots of planes that were doing this very same thing. In 1942-1943, I never did see even a snorkel come to the surface. But we had a plan as far as that part is concerned. If we did see a U boat, our purpose was to be able to destroy that submarine. So we had sound buoys that we could throw out of our plane that had dye packs on them and we 7 could, through a system of surveillance we could track the submarine by sound and identify each buoy because of the colored dye over the surface. It was a plan figured out so that if even we did find something we carried a couple of depth charges on the aircraft and we could destroy the sub if it turned up. But it didn’t happen with me in my aircraft. The only other thing that I could tell you about besides the 42 missions in the air was that at the end of my stay over there just in the last couple of missions we were flying on patrol and we had just reversed our course from coming off the ocean area and headed back across the ocean and one of the crewmen sent a message to the pilot to me actually, that there was a German fighter bomber underneath that looked like his intention was to straif us from underneath. Our instructions were to out range enemy aircraft because they couldn’t damage us if we flew away from them, they’d run out of fuel before they could do the damage. But we didn’t get notification they were coming. Our forces are supposed to pick them up on radar, but if enemy aircraft did fly low enough the radar can’t get into the trees to see about them. Anyway, I was not the command pilot in our plane, but the command pilot turned to me and said, “What shall we do?” I said, “The best defense is offense. He said, “I got you.” So, he turned our plane around and as he turned the enemy plane around toward the plane that was underneath us, they turned around and I gave instructions for the bow gunner, the front gunner to wipe him out if he could, and we did hit him. We sent him home smoking, we sent him back to his base on fire, but I was observing and I never did see the plane go down so we never did know if that happened. So there was no structural damage for us. In fact, they were 8 flabbergasted I believe to think that we turned our big plane. It’s pretty tough to do what you call a shaundell in a B-24. It’s a reverse thing and not to high off the ground anyway. Then come the end of the year. That was the end of my duty overseas. I came home for reassignment. SC: So you were flying a B-24 at that time and did that have several gun turrets? RC: Well, there was a bow and two waist hatches. They stood up in the waist and then there was a rear turret and a top turret. We were full of fire power with many machine guns. SC: How many people were in the crew? RC: A total of twelve. Three officers, a chief over the enlisted men, the chief was in charge of the actual maintenance of the aircraft itself and then there was a command pilot, a co-pilot and a navigator non-pilot in our case. I was the co-pilot in the cockpit that entire time. SC: Were you aware of other aircraft that actually spotted U boats and destroyed them? RC: Not while I was there. That didn’t happen. It happened before I got there, just the reading of what happened previous is all. SC: I’m assuming you were never wounded. RC: I was never wounded. I never shot a gun or dropped a bomb really. It was just a fortunate thing for me and a lot of other people the same, but we kept the u boat down and they in the U boat knew that they didn’t want to tangle with planes like the ones that had done previous. That was the sum total of that. 9 SC: I’m interested in the time when you said you were flying and you were aware that D-day was occurring. RC: That was what I told you about. We were going on patrol and we noticed all these airplanes and gliders in the air as we went out and that happened in June of 1944. SC: Did you realize at the time what was happening? RC: We knew that it was coming, but we didn’t have the date. We had already been warned that D-day was about to happen like a week before it actually did, but other than that we didn’t have any knowledge of that. Obviously, the high officials did. SC: So when you saw all those planes flying, did you think to yourself, “Aha, the day has come.” RC: Well, yeah. There are two islands that had lighthouses in the channel called Guernsey and Jersey—like in cows—that was where the cows and names came from in the United States. We went right by those. We actually went off course a little bit to see and by the time we looked at those, our fighter planes had straifed them and there were Germans in those lighthouses with fire power, but they had been eliminated. It was early in the morning and it was daylight and those lights were just blasted off with fire power from U.S.A. fighter planes. SC: On D-day? RC: Yes, the 6th day of June 1944. 10 SC: Okay. Do you have any other memorable experiences either in flight or during your time in Britain that you’d like to share with us? RC: Well, yes, there were things that happened as far as our off duty liberty and we went to London one time when we had a little stretch more than just in between flights and the only thing that was interesting personally was that we were in a hotel called Governor Hotel. It was pretty famous at the time. While we were there, a buzz bomb warning came and we evacuated the hotel and went into the underground and waited for the all clear. The buzz bombs were launched in France and Germany and their only method was they had a gyro on them and the only way they could gauge their effectiveness was when they would be over London was when the fuel ran out. When the fuel ran out, then they’d come down and they did their bombing when they hit the ground. One interesting thing that happened that day for me was we went into the underground and when we came out and were walking on the sidewalk going back to the hotel, I saw a coin on the sidewalk and I reached down and picked it up. There was no one else that had seen it, there had been other people walking by, but I guess no one noticed it, but I noticed it and it was a German coin. It surprised me knowing that I’m in London and I’m finding a German coin on the sidewalk. The first individual that I came from England I could ask. I said to this man, “Why have I found this German coin on the sidewalk?” He said, “Well, the money over in Germany isn’t any good and they’re using it for shrapnel now. I still have that coin. We went to dinner that night and big surprise, I’m sitting waiting for my meal to be given and guess who should walk in but General George Patton. He sat next to our table. 11 He had two pearl handled revolvers one on each side and just the type of a man that he was, real famous. I wished for his autograph, but I couldn’t find anything to write on and I lost my courage anyway, but I saw the old boy and he was something else. I’ll tell you, he was the epitome in my eyes of the type of person that would lead men. SC: Was he with an entourage of people? Who was he with? RC: No, he was by himself. At least if there was anybody else they weren’t obvious. I imagine he had body guards, but their type of espionage or whatever they expect to do, they weren’t beside him. SC: How did you know it was him? RC: Well, I think anybody that in history had read about him knew what he was and I’d had time in between our missions to read things like that. I’d seen his photograph a time or two and his character was that he had this type of an Eisenhower jacket and he had boots on, but the two pearl handled revolvers, one on each side, was kind of the key thing for me. SC: Have you seen the movie, “Patton?” RC: I’ve seen the movie Patton and I enjoyed it. It was, I don’t know how accurate, but from my perspective it was fun to watch and entertaining and full of good history about what his job was over there. SC: Did you make any close friends during your time in the service? RC: A close friend that I met was the man that I flew with. When I first got over there the day that I landed, actually, I went on the Queen Elizabeth and spent five days 12 on that transportation out of New York to England and there were about 13 of us that were doing the same assignment that I was and we went to various places to check in the evening before the day that I was supposed to meet the commanding officer of the unit that I was attached to. After chow it was in a recreational area and there was a man playing the piano. He was playing the kind of songs that in those days that we all enjoyed and I knew them and I was standing by this big grand piano and I got a swat on the back and somebody said, “You’re new here,” or something like that and it was pretty severe and I didn’t know if I was in for some sort of trouble or not and I thought, If I’m in for a fight and I get the first blow in I might be able to settle this quick.” I turned around and I let him have a smack in the stomach and it turns out it was a lieutenant commander and I’m a brand new ensign and I thought, “Boy, that’s the end of my career.” I went to bed that night and got up the next morning. I checked into the commanding officers office. The commanding officer was a man by the name of Don Gay. The executive officer was a man by the name of Harmon. They called him “Jigger” Harmon. I don’t know what his real name was. The flight officer, the other of the three in command was the man that I’d struck the night before, but there was nothing said about that. Commander Harmon did the talking and he said to me, “I see you’re from Utah. I’m married to a woman from Utah, she comes from Brigham City. Her name is Robinette, that’s my wife and she’s LDS and I see by your papers you are too. Commander Gay is going to quit flying and go to the desk to do his job and the flight officer, commander Stearns, is going to take over that aircraft and you are to be his co-pilot. You already discovered that 13 he was pretty free with drinking and it would be a good thing to have someone in the cockpit that’s sober all the time.” SC: Now, was he the one that you slugged? RC: He was the one that I slugged, but I want to tell you he was the nicest guy that anybody had ever seen. It’s just that, like everybody else when that happens we know from scrimmages with alcohol and that things like that happen and that’s the way it was. He found out the night before that I was going to be his co-pilot and that was just how he took after it. I never held it against him and it was never spoken of after that at all. I flew the first mission with him as co-pilot and Commander Gay was the command pilot I flew just as observation to get acquainted with the crew and from then on I flew 40 missions. After that, Commander Stearns was sent home a couple of weeks before I was and I flew a couple more missions with another individual and that was the individual I was flying with when that German two engine fighter bomber came after us and was going to straif us from underneath. That’s about the only thing that happened there. I went to Wales one time, my cousin was supposed to have been there, but he had already been sent away when I got there. Other than that, it was just a routine thing. My recreation was a small pub nearby and we would go down there and talk with the locals a lot and became acquainted with them. SC: Did you remain friends with any of these military associates that you would communicate with later on? RC: No. I’d seen certain people but because they come from different parts of the U.S.A., it was too much of a thing to maintain any kind of thing with them at all. 14 SC: How do you feel like the military experience changed your life? RC: The only thing that changed me was I was designated as a commercial pilot afterwards which was a type of training that would be difficult to come by in any other circumstances, but I never stayed flying. It was interesting because of the type of plane that I flew and the many hours that I had that I could become an airline pilot, but it wasn’t something that I had any intention to do especially. It just seemed that I went back to the type of thing that I would have done if I hadn’t gone in the military at all and, just have a family and do what most of the population of the people from Utah do. SC: What has been your profession? RC: What was my profession? Afterwards, I was a business owner. We could go back though before I get into that because that will be after I got out of the Navy, but after the year of 1944, when I came back to the states for reassignment, I spent the year of 1945 in a Naval Air Station and it was a training of new crews to do that same type of a thing that we did in England. This Stearns, who was the command pilot of the plane, when he got back home, he was assigned to be the commanding officer of a Virginia naval air station. He requested that I become his right hand man so to speak. It was not a regular assignment, and I was made gunnery officer there. It’s kind of like being a principal over a school. I didn’t do any teaching because it was the chiefs in the Navy that did the teaching and taught the crewmen how to handle the machine guns and that type of thing. It was mostly that type of training, but I spent that year, most of the year as a gunnery officer over the schools that did that training for that. There was a short 15 period of time after that that I was sent up to Patuxent River in Maryland in a service test like engine testing in the same aircraft that Liberator B-24 for a couple of months and then it came to the end of the year and I was sent to San Diego. My assignment at San Diego was I was given a crew and made the command pilot and signed for the airplane with only four hours on it when I got it and given a whole crew to start out with. This was in December of 1945 and they assigned me for a day flight with this new crew for a couple of hours and then a night flight with this entire crew, but I was hoping that I could get out about that time because the war had ended, Japan had signed. Since I wasn’t planning on staying in the Navy, but my assignment after those two flights was to go to Kaneohe, Hawaii out in the Pacific and then do my remainder of my service in the Pacific. Fortunately for me, when I was about to gather the crew together and make it so that we’d do our flight from California to Hawaii and do all the things you have to do and figure out what you have to take and all that type of thing, the amount of hours and, “Your navigator ok, your co-pilot ok, your crew chief ok, and everybody’s ready to go and when I got up that morning and headed for the ready room. The bulletin board showed I had enough hours or enough time in and points to get out, so I took that choice. The reason for that was that I had been married in the year previous and Betty, my wife, was due for our first child in January of 1946. I was with her, which was nice and I had completed my service in the military. SC: You said you had a business after your military service, what was that? 16 RC: When I got back to the United States, thereafter, I found out that I’m not going to go to Hawaii, I separated. They didn’t call it discharged put you in reserves. I bought a car while I was in the military back in Norfolk, Virginia. It was a 1941 Ford car. I had driven it from back east clear to California. At the end of service I’m looking for work and found the California employment service and went in there. An interesting thing happened about that. I was working on the car and was getting it fixed up for some of the things that it needed and I went into this employment service and they didn’t give me any hope of any kind that I could get work and as I went out I thought, “Now that wasn’t very smart, I wasn’t prepared to go in there and I didn’t look decent.” The next day I put my uniform on and walked in and they rolled out the red carpet for me that day. I got a job interviewing the Seamen at San Pedro, California Seaport when they got discharged off the ships to give them their choices of what they could do and what things that were available in now they are civilians like work and school. We had a whole list of things that we’d tell them about and giving them information. It was kind of a personnel thing. Anyway, at the same time, when there wasn’t a ship that was disembarking and releasing, we didn’t have interviews to do so we went around and looked at different firms in California looking for people that were hiring and tried to set up something for them. As far as getting employees, and men getting employment and all. I ran across a business that was renting out utility trailers. I knew there wasn’t anything in Utah like that, so in addition to me interviewing them for the purposes of what the employment business wanted, why, I put it in the back of my mind and it wasn’t 17 long after that I bought 30 of those trailer frames and had them shipped here to Ogden. I moved here and I spent the next 40 years business. I advanced into more of an RV business and I sold pick up campers, trailers, motor homes, and various trailers at one time or another. I spent my years at 3776 Wall. That was where my business was. I had property between Riverdale Road and Wall Avenue and after 40 years I hung it up and that was in 1986. SC: How many children have you had? RC: I have three children. My oldest son lives up in Idaho, Manan, close to Idaho Falls. He’s retired now. He spent most of his life as a broker one way or another. My next son lives in Clearfield and he works for ATK. Then, my daughter, her husband is an attorney and when they got out of school they spent 20 years back in Washington D.C. on Senator Garn’s staff. SC: I know your wife was sick for a lot of years. You were a wonderful nurse to her. RC: My wife came into dementia about ten years ago. About seven or eight years ago, she began to get to the point where she would forget things like turning the stove off and she couldn’t handle different things. She’d get part way into things and then that dementia would take over and cause some struggles, so my purposes after that was to take care of her. It’s one of those situations where I never knew what she wanted, but I definitely knew what she needed, so I just had to take over pretty much and it was my pleasure. She took care of me for a lot of years, it was my turn, that’s all. In December last, just three or four weeks before our 70th wedding anniversary, she broke her hip. From that time until she 18 died in April, so we were in care facilities and assisted living and that type of thing. Other than that right now, I’m in really good shape. I do fine. SC: When did she pass away? RC: She passed away on the 24th of April. She broke her hip and I got her fixed up with hospice and I came home and I stumbled over my own foot and landed over there and broke this arm. So, I spent the last two months with her in assisted living until she passed away and then my therapy lasted just the next day, it’s kind of interesting, but that ended our togetherness as far as this life in concerned. SC: Well, I want to thank you for your service in the military. All of us younger folks have a debt of gratitude to you and your generation for you and what you did. The world would be a lot different place if it hadn’t been for men like you. I personally want to thank you for allowing me to get to know you and having this interview, it’s been a special time for me. RC: Well, I’d heard about the interviews before and the interesting thing about this, I have been nominated for this trip back to Washington D.C. for WWII veterans— what do they call that? SC: Is it Hero Flight or something like that? RC: Hero Flight, yeah, and I’m going back there on October the 30th for three days. SC: Are you? RC: Yes. My son from Idaho is going to accompany me, so I’ll get to see the monuments and everything that they’re doing for the World War II service people. 19 SC: Well, well-deserved. I’m glad you are getting to do that. You told me that earlier. Well, thank you for your time today. It’s been really a pleasure. RC: Thanks to you, and thanks to you, young lady, as well.