"We kept 'em flying" Donald Kramer in World War II

Wichita Falls resident Donald L. Kramer spent most of December 7, 1941 quietly in the Texas countryside near Sheppard Field visiting with his girlfriend Glendine. That all changed when he tried to get back on base that night. “I knew nothing about Pearl Harbor till I tried to get back in through the back entrance like I normally did and got stopped three times. ‘Halt! Who goes there? Advance and be recognized!’ they said. The guards wouldn’t let me pass, so I had to come back through the main gate. I still didn’t know what was going on, but I got into the barracks just in time for bed check at 10 o’clock and the guys told me what had happened. Immediately there were changes. We had to send our civilian clothes home; from then on, we had to wear our uniforms all the time. The pace of our training sped up. All of the sudden we were at war,” he said.



Donald L. Kramer in 1941

          The transition from war to peace was just the latest in a series of abrupt changes in Mr. Kramer’s life. A native of New Riegel, Ohio, Kramer had spent much of his life in that small farming community southeast of Toledo working on the family farm through the Depression years. “We had a 24 acre farm outside of town and grew nearly everything that we ate. We raised cows, chickens, and hogs. We had a big potato patch, fruit trees, berry bushes, and a vegetable garden. It was a good life but it wasn’t easy. Everyone had to pitch in,” he remembered.

          During the summer of 1941, Kramer worked at Swan Rubber Co. in nearby Carey, Ohio, operating a punch press making rubber clutch facings and brake linings along with his cousin and close friend Harold Landoll. “We worked together, and dated together, so when Harold was drafted in July; it just wasn’t the same after he left. So one day after work, I journeyed up to Toledo to see an Army recruiter and told him that I wanted to join the Air Corps and be an airplane mechanic,” he said. “I got my choice of service, my choice of job, and even my choice of where I wanted to be sent for training.”

After being sworn into service August 25, 1941 at Fort Hayes near Columbus, Ohio, he was sent on a train to Sheppard Field at Wichita Falls, Texas for basic training. “My first impression of Texas wasn’t all that great. It was hot and dry. Sheppard Field was just getting started, just a few barracks out in a wheat field. There were about 350 men assigned to the field. They only had a few barracks finished, so we would move in and clean one up, then move on to the next one. This happened four or five times. I was in the second graduating class at Sheppard as part of the aircraft mechanics course, which lasted 26 weeks,” he said.

Once the war began, one of the first things Kramer did was to marry Glendine in January 1942. It capped six months of remarkable changes in his young life. Since August, Kramer had transitioned from civilian to military life, from living at home to living in Texas, from peace to war, and from single life to married life.

Don Kramer's Certificate of Appreciation for War Service from 1945.

After his class graduated that spring, most of the men were sent to other bases but Kramer was left behind at Sheppard Field for a month, “not contributing anything to the war effort. So I went to the chaplain and complained. He said he would see what he could do about it. Two days later, they pulled me from K.P. and sent me off to Duncan Field where I was assigned to the motor pool. Next I was sent off to aircraft carburetor school at Kelly Field. Finally I received my orders to go overseas.”

Kramer sailed to England in the spring of 1943 aboard the liner Queen Mary along with 18,000 troops and a crew of 3,000, crossing the Atlantic in 4 ½ days. Upon arriving in England, he was assigned to the 16^th Depot Repair Group at Burtonwood No. 2 near the town of Warrington, about halfway between Manchester and Liverpool. The Army Air Force had just established this massive service depot operation to support the Allied air offensive against Germany, labeling the two depots Burtonwood No.1 and Burtonwood No. 2. “The airplanes would come in to the depot, and all of the parts that needed to be overhauled would be taken off the plane and sent to the various shops. I worked at both depots fixing carburetors, so I worked in the engine shops. One depot worked on inline engines for fighter planes like the P-51, while the other worked on radial engines for the B-17s and B-24s. We retrofitted 700 or 800 P-51s with a water injection system which gave them a short term burst of power. It was a lot like working in a factory, just like back home. Once the various shops finished their work, the plane would be re-assembled and flown back to the fighter or bomber group. We kept ‘em flying,” he remembered.

It took endless hours of maintenance to keep up
the Allied air offensive in Europe. Here two mechanics
are working on the radial engine of a B-17
belonging to the 384th Bomb Group at
Grafton Underwood in 1944. Planes requiring major
overhauls were sent to Burtonwood.

Life in England was a stark contrast to the life he had known back in the States. “When we got to England, the country was on the ropes. England had a strict blackout rule, anybody that got caught lighting a cigarette was punished. They were still getting bombed nearly every night. In some of the towns, it looked like a war zone with burned buildings and rubble. I stood guard duty at Burtonwood with three rounds of carbine ammunition because that was all they could afford to give us. What do we do if we see the enemy? Fire your three shots and run! It was really something,” he stated. “I liked the English people though, lots of nice families. For the most part we got along pretty well.”

Kramer spent his three years in England living in a barracks “very similar to the Nissen huts in the movie Twelve O’Clock High. We had a little wood burning stove right in the center of the barracks and since I was a staff sergeant and barracks chief, I got a cot right next to the stove. It didn’t put out too much heat but it kept the ice off the windows. We ate a lot of Spam, powdered eggs, powdered potatoes, and corn beef hash. We usually had a traditional meal at Christmas and Thanksgiving. I knew what we were doing at the depot was important, but I had some mixed emotions about fixing planes to go back and bomb Germany. My dad came from Germany and I’m sure we still had relation living in Germany then.”



A snapshot showing one of the endless poker games in the barracks at Burtonwood No. 2 Kramer remembered that as staff sergeant, he "got a cot right next to the stove. It didn't put out too much heat but it kept the ice off the windows." The poor G.I. on the cot in the foreground looks cold (he's wearing his jacket) and utterly exhausted: he is fast asleep despite the rowdy card game going on just a few feet away.

“One of the things I really remember is when I met General Eisenhower. He came to the shop one day with a Russian general, introduced himself, and went around the shop shaking hands and talking with the men. He had me explain to this Russian general what we were doing in the shop. This happened before D-Day, as he was probably too busy after D-Day to have time to visit,” Kramer commented.

Going on leave always promised an adventure. “The officers and enlisted men usually went to separate towns while on leave. I remember going to Liverpool on leave and you’d run into troops of every nationality. English, Canadians, Norwegians, Free French, Poles, you name it. It was a wild town. We normally went to Manchester which was a little closer and not as wild as Liverpool,” he said. “You could never get good food in an English restaurant since everything was short. I had a furlough in London and had to go down into a bomb shelter every night, but had a good time.” Kramer later acquired a two-seater bicycle and rode through the English countryside, even going into towns that were ‘off-limits’ to military personnel.

Sergeant Donald L. Kramer at left with best friend Claude Loe of Cygnet, Ohio on the right in a photo dating from 1944 while both men were stationed at Burtonwood No. 2. Kramer is wearing an enlisted men's service cap and heavy wool overcoat while Loe is wearing an overseas cap and dress uniform; he displays ribbons for Good Conduct and European Theater service. His left lapel shows an engineering collar disc.

V-E and V-J Days both occurred while Kramer was on leave. “After the war, I was sent down to the bomb dump at Groverly Woods. It was my job to get rid of the bombs, so we’d load them on flat bed trailers which were carted into port, then dumped out to sea. Same thing with airplanes. We had so many bombers left over that no one knew what to do with them, so we’d strip them down of anything useful, chop off the wings and haul the remnants out to sea and toss them over the side.”

Mr. Kramer was discharged in November 1945 at Tyler, Texas and returned home to Wichita Falls. “I was just so happy to be home after 2 ½ years overseas and was eager to resume the normal life. But it was a different life than before the war. We all had the same dream of building the country up after the war. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I bounced around jobs for a few years before I went to work at Sheppard Air Force Base, and stayed there until I retired,” he said. “By the time I came back to Sheppard in 1951, there were 15-20,000 men assigned to the base. Quite a change from 1941.”