Frank Ramsey was born and raised in Charleston, West Virginia. He was born in March 1925. His father worked in real estate. He was a heavy equipment operator. He bought and built houses. When the Depression [Annotator's Note: Great Depression; a global economic depression that lasted through the 1930s] first happened, his father had to choose between losing the house or the car. His father decided to move them into a smaller house. His father always had a job during the Depression. They had a cow they staked out back. The cow was to give babies milk. When Pearl Harbor was attacked [Annotator's Note: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941], he was in a movie theater with his girlfriend. He was 16 or 17 years old. He went down to the recruiter’s office for the Air Force. He had to get permission from his parents to join. They did not sign the papers for him. He had to wait to be drafted when he was 18 years old. He was inducted into the Air Force. When he got there, they had too many pilots, bombardiers, and navigators. Ramsey took another test for radio radar and went to South Dakota for radio school, and Arizona for gunnery school. Then he went to Drew Field in Tampa, Florida. There he was assigned to his crew. They landed in Cuba one time. They went to Georgia to get the plane they would take overseas. Ramsey ended up going over on a troop ship in a convoy. The German submarines were all over. They went to Greenland and then England. He was assigned to the 306 Bomb Group [Annotator’s Note: 306th Bombardment Group].

Frank Ramsey [Annotator’s Note: stationed in England with the 368th Bombardment Squadron, 306th Bombardment Group, Eighth Air Force] remembers that the men were trained as 10-person crews, but then they cut them one man down. He had to train as a gunner as well. He saw two planes get hit and that was 18 men killed immediately. That scared him. Two days later, they went to see what the briefing was like. He was assigned to a crew that needed a waist gunner and radio operator. They flew 36 planes on a mission. Ramsey asked what flak [Annotator's Note: antiaircraft artillery fire] was like and they told him he would find out. Flak looked like fireworks going off. As they got closer, it sounded like someone was hitting the side of the plane. After that, they saw the fighters. When Ramsey went over, they had to fly 35 missions. The Germans were losing planes and could not replace them. The radio operator before him had been taken out by flak. He did not like the flak. On his 12th mission, they hit heavy flak. On one mission Ramsey bent over to pick up his pencil and his flak helmet fell off. He felt his face and he was bleeding. The flak came in the same place it had gotten the other radio operator. The Germans put out the P-262 jets [Annotator’s Note: Messerschmitt Me 262,] and the American planes could not touch them. The jets used a lot of fuel. One jet got shot down because it flamed out. Sometimes they did not have fighter support. They had great pilots. The Tuskegee pilots [Annotator's Note: The Tuskegee Airmen were a group of primarily African American military pilots and airmen who fought in World War II. They formed the 332d Expeditionary Operations Group and the 477th Bombardment Group of the United States Army Air Forces] were the best fighters up there.

Frank Ramsey flew in every position. [Annotator’s Note: he was stationed in England with the 368th Bombardment Squadron, 306th Bombardment Group, Eighth Air Force]. The ball turret gunner had ear trouble and Ramsey had to take over for him. They never left their gun stations until they landed because the Germans would follow them in. The Germans would attack them as they landed. The bomb bays held the bombs. The bombardier or the toggler kept watch over the bombs. They had one guy slip out of the bomb bay and he went down 20 thousand feet. It was cold up there and ice would form. If they took off their gloves and grabbed their guns it would peel the skin off. They wore long underwear, heated suits, flight suits, and heavy flight jackets.

Frank Ramsey [Annotator’s Note: serving with the 368th Bombardment Squadron, 306th Bombardment Group, Eighth Air Force based out of England] remembers that they would eat breakfast before they flew. They rode their bicycles down to the mess hall, then they went to the briefing and found out what their targets were. They had to watch out for the flak [Annotator's Note: antiaircraft artillery fire]. The Germans had the ack-ack [Annotator's Note: antiaircraft artillery fire] guns on flat cars through Germany and France [Annotator’s Note: Krupp K5 heavy railway gun, or Schwerer Gustav]. They never knew where they would get the flak. As they got close to the target they would spread out. Their job was to get the bombs there regardless of what happened. The bombardier would take control of the plane. The lead plane dropped the bombs. They would say “bombs away” and then they would drop them. On the first mission, Ramsey flew as the radio operator. The tail gunner was shot down during the first mission and he was a prisoner of war for the rest of the war. The best fighters were young men because they did not have any baggage. When things got rough, there was a lot of praying up there. They went to ground school the whole time they were there. During a mission, their hydraulic system was hit and they had to get out. They had to use oxygen when they reached over 10,000 feet. He rolled out the back of the plane and had to pull the rip cord. He landed in Brussels, Belgium. Thankfully, it was an area the American Infantry controlled. They had C-47s [Annotator’s Note: The Douglas C-47 Skytrain or Dakota is a military transport aircraft developed from the civilian Douglas DC-3 airliner. It was used extensively by the Allies during World War II] to take them back to England. The plane went down. On another mission, they got hit pretty hard. They were told they might not have enough fuel to get back. Their gas line was hit and they were losing gas. Ramsey sent hits down using his transmitter. They had to put on the radio compass. This helped them find their way to a field. The Germans flew over them and dropped bombs.

Frank Ramsey [Annotator’s Note: serving with the 368th Bombardment Squadron, 306th Bombardment Group, Eighth Air Force] remembers that the Germans were directing traffic during the Battle of the Bulge [Annotator's Note: Battle of the Bulge or German Ardennes Counter Offensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945]. His tail gunner thought he saw the sun reflecting off the wings of a fighter, but he was shooting at them. Ramsey told the other soldiers he would not trade places with them. If he could make it back, he had a bed and hot meals. On one mission, he forgot to plug in the hose on his suit for oxygen and kept dozing off. During training, they would have to take their oxygen masks off and put them back on. As they started running out of oxygen, their handwriting would become illegible. The airmen over there before Ramsey was there had it rough. They lost several planes in southern Germany. The biggest target he remembers taking out was a ball-bearing plant.

Frank Ramsey wanted to be in the Army Air Corps. His uncle had served in the First World War [Annotator's Note: World War 1, global war originating in Europe; 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918]. When he was young, his uncle bought a bush plane and took him for a ride in it. From then on, Ramsey wanted to fly. He liked the Air Corps because they had their own barracks and mess hall to come back to. His parents did not sign the papers for him to fly because they did not want him to go to war. After he was drafted, he went to Cincinnati, Ohio and took tests to be a pilot, but there were too many pilots at the time. He had his high school education. The mickey ship [Annotator’s Note: H2X radar units were commonly referred to as Mickey units] could see through clouds for the bombing. On an overcast day, the Germans could not detect them on the radars. He wanted to go over and fly in the Air Corps. He tested high in radio. They would fly over farmland in Sioux Falls [Annotator’s Note: Sioux Falls, South Dakota]. He would send signals using Morse code [Annotator’s Note: Morse code is a method used in telecommunication to encode text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations].

Frank Ramsey had gunnery training in Arizona. They shot a lot of skeet. They had .30 caliber machine guns [Annotator's Note: Browning ANM2 .30 caliber machine gun] that they had to track a target around with. One guy said he would rather go to war. When he was 14 years old, Ramsey killed his first deer. After he got out of the service, he never went hunting again. He wanted to volunteer for service because he thought he should. Then his mother and father would not let him. He was drafted in May 1943. He met his crew in Tampa [Annotator’s Note: Tampa, Florida]. They sailed on a ship. He saw B-24s [Annotator's Note: Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber] at the first field and he said he was not flying those. Then he was taken to the B-17s [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber].

Frank Ramsey remembers the whole crew went on the troop ship together. [Annotator’s Note: He was being shipped to England to serve with the 368th Bombardment Squadron, 306th Bombardment Group, Eighth Air Force]. They ate a lot of mutton. The bunks were five high. Ramsey took the bunk second from the bottom. The guy on the top bunk got sick and he quickly learned not to stick his head out of the bed. He went to the ship’s store anytime he could. He would get cookies. The merchant ships were hit by torpedoes in the convoy. The men would sleep on the deck. Ramsey came back by ship as well. The barracks were nice. They had a potbelly stove in the middle. There were showers. They would buy eggs from the farmers because they got tired of powdered eggs. If they came to get a crewman’s personal items, you knew they were not coming back. They had to have a certain rank to fly. The gunners would be staff sergeants. The engineer and Ramsey were technical sergeants. Ramsey saw a plane explode from flak [Annotator's Note: antiaircraft artillery fire] and one guy was reaching for air as he fell. He did not have a parachute.

Frank Ramsey remembers they had spam sandwiches and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches [Annotator’s Note: to eat while they were on missions in the planes]. It was freezing up there. There was a funnel for them to relieve themselves. They hit Berlin [Annotator’s Note: Berlin, Germany] three times. They were strategic bombing during the days. The English scattered bombs and flew at night. The English would wipe out the whole town, but the Americans left the churches standing. They would go to briefings to learn which targets to hit. Ramsey would go to radio briefing. He was not concerned with the Pacific. He knew if he finished his missions, he would go back to the States. Ramsey was seven days out at sea when Germany stopped fighting. The English food was hard to get used to. The best thing he had over there was fish and chips. They would go into the town of Bedfordshire [Annotator’s Note: Bedfordshire, England] and visit the pubs.

Frank Ramsey [Annotator’s Note: serving with the 368th Bombardment Squadron, 306th Bombardment Group, Eighth Air Force stationed in England] remembers that London [Annotator’s Note: London, England] was damaged from bombings. They could hear the whistles of the v-bombs [Annotator's Note: V-1 pulse jet flying bomb, German name: Vengeance Weapon 1; Allied names: buzz bomb, doodlebug] and people would run into the subways that served as bomb shelters. The fliers were good, but the Americans were better. The P-38s [Annotator's Note: Lockheed P-38 Lightening fighter aircraft] were great fighting planes. The P-61 [Annotator's Note: The Northrop P-61 Black Widow] was great too, but there were not very many of them. The mission he was wounded on started out as a normal mission. There was flak [Annotator's Note: antiaircraft artillery fire] coming up. When the fighters attacked, they would be shooting back. When the flak came up they would just sit there. Flak sounded like someone hitting the side of the plane with a metal bar. If they were sick and had to fly, they would put a tube up their nose and suck everything out. [Annotator’s Note: The video goes black while the tape is changed.] After they landed, they had to go in for debriefing and they would get a shot of whiskey. The hydraulics had been hit and they were on fire. They all had to bail out of the plane. Ramsey rolled out of the back of the plane by the waist gunner. He had the wrong harness on his parachute. He landed where Americans had taken over.

Frank Ramsey [Annotator’s Note: stationed in England with the 368th Bombardment Squadron, 306th Bombardment Group, Eighth Air Force] was excited to fly his last mission. He was ready to get out of there. After his last mission, he was going to go work in the control tower. He did not want to go fly in the Pacific against Japan. The men would play cards. He had all kinds of cigarettes to give to his parents when he got home. He returned home in May 1945. On the ship back, the guys who were POWs [Annotator's Note: prisoners of war] were doing KP duty [Annotator's Note: kitchen patrol or kitchen police]. Ramsey did not think they should be serving him. He went to the head cook and relieved one of them from their duty and served KP. Ramsey was in Greensboro, North Carolina when he heard about the atomic bombs [Annotator's Note: nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, 6 and 9 August 1945]. He was married and they lived in a small house off base. He was grounded at Greensboro as a classification specialist. He would send people to the South Pacific and discharge people. Some people had less points [Annotator's Note: a point system was devised based on a number of factors that determined when American servicemen serving overseas could return home] than he did. He was discharged on 6 October 1945. Then he went into the inactive reserve. He was a tech sergeant. He worked in heavy construction after he got out of the service. The GI Bill [Annotator's Note: the G.I. Bill, or Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, was enacted by the United States Congress to aid United States veterans of World War 2 in transitioning back to civilian life and included financial aid for education, mortgages, business starts and unemployment] was not paying in a timely fashion. They lived near a railroad track. If a train came through in the middle of the night, he would be out of bed and heading down the stairs. Then he would smoke a cigarette. He would smoke while they were flying too, taking his mask off and puffing on a cigarette.

Frank Ramsey [Annotator’s Note: serving with the 368th Bombardment Squadron, 306th Bombardment Group, Eighth Air Force] and his crew got along well. There was a hurricane coming in at Savannah, Georgia. They had to go to a different airfield. They wanted to see the B-29 [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-29 Superfortress very heavy bomber], but they were a secret weapon at the time. They got passes to go into town. Their pilot was cold and looked down on enlisted men. He got a DFC [Annotator's Note: the Distinguished Flying Cross, or DFC, is awarded to members of the United States Armed Forces for heroism or extraordinary achievement while participating in an aerial flight]. If they flew a full tour they would get a DFC. He received an Air Medal [Annotator's Note: US Armed Forces medal for single acts of heroism or meritorious achievement while in aerial flight] with the cluster and 35 [Annotator's Note: for number of missions flown] on it. He was in the inactive reserves and they told him he could maintain his rank. He was assured he would not be going into the service for Korea [Annotator’s Note: The Korean War was a war fought between North Korea and South Korea from 25 June 1950 to 27 July 1953. The war began on 25 June 1950 when North Korea invaded South Korea following clashes along the border and rebellions in South Korea]. When he went in, he was in the Army Air Force. He did not go overseas for Korea. He had two children. They lived on the base at Fort Knox [Annotator’s Note: Fort Knox, Kentucky].

Frank Ramsey fought in the war because it was something to do. He thinks the United States is a great country. The war made him grow up. He had never been out of the States and then he got to see the world. He liked having a bed to come home to. He thinks the wars we are having today should not be happening. In World War 2 when they destroyed a whole culture, it did not solve anything. [Annotator’s Note: He is referring to the Nazis and the Holocaust]. He thinks more people need to know about wars to prevent future ones. He was young and it was a thrill. You played hard and worked hard. He learned a lot about people.