Benjamin "Moe" Ramos

95TH BOMB GROUP (H)

ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

2005 REUNION         DAYTON, OHIO 

JM:  This is Janie McKnight with the Legacy Committee.  This morning I’m here with Benjamin Ramos, otherwise known as “Moe.”  For the record, Moe, will you give us your name, today’s date, and where we are?  

BR:  My name is Benjamin Ramos, better known as “Moe” throughout the 8th.  Today is Friday, September 30th 2005, and we’re in Dayton, Ohio.

JM:  What were your dates of service with the Army Air Corps?

BR:  I’m pretty sure it was January of ’43 through October of ’45.

JM:  And with the 95th?

BR:  With the 95th, that’s where I was at, yes.

JM:  And when did you go into the Army Air Corps?

BR:  Into the Army Air Corps?  I went in 1943.

JM:  Oh, okay, so you were in….

BR:  I started out in Air Force, yes, as a Private.  I was drafted and went into the Air Force.  They put me right into it.

JM:  And what was your principal job?

BR:  Radio operator/aerial gunner.  And at times I would have to, depending on situations, go into the waist and use a waist gun.  The other job I had was throwing chaff out.  As you know, it was aluminum foil – went out the plane in order to make a cloud, perhaps jam the German radar.  

JM:  So you said you were drafted.

BR:  Yes

JM:  Can you tell us about – where you were and how that happened.

BR:  I was drafted in California at the age of 18.  And had basic training in Fresno, California.  From there I went to Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  They said I was prime for radio.  They said I had a good ear for music and was able to pick up sounds and so forth.  So I went to radio school in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  Graduated from there, and sent to gunnery school in Las Vegas, Nevada.  From Las Vegas, Nevada, I ended up at Tinker Field with a A-20 outfit.  But I guess at that time they needed B-17 crews.  They took us out of the A-20 outfit, sent us to Tampa, Florida – McDill Field – and joined a crew.  And that’s where we made up our crew, in Tampa.

JM:  And how did your crew get from Tampa to England?

BR:  (Chuckling) That’s a good story.  Maybe I should eliminate part of it.  But anyhow, we flew from Tampa.  At the time, when we first got to Tampa and we became a crew, we ended up in Langley Field, Virginia with a B-17 as a crew – 10 man crew.  We would fly sub patrol, getting our training, flying touch and goes on the runways and so forth.  From there they decided that we would have to go to England.  And the reason we went there at that time – you may want to edit this, I don’t know.  But anyhow, we had a few days off at Langley Field, and half of the crew went AWOL, including the pilot, the co-pilot, and a couple of the enlisted men.  One was a ball gunner and another was a waist gunner.  They went AWOL, because they thought that we were not going to fly because we had been putting in our time.  Don’t you know the next morning we were called out to fly.  We had no pilot, no co-pilot, navigator.  And we said, “What are we going to do?”  Well, they took roll call and between the engineer and I and the other waist gunner, every time they called out a name, somebody over here would holler “Here!”  Somebody over there “Here!” until we got a whole crew.  And now we had to get a crew.  So we got – I won’t mention the pilot’s name – but we got a crew together.  They agreed to fly for us, or with us.  And we did fly that day.  We had a brand new B-17 – had 12 hours on it.  And off we went.  We completed our mission out, coming in for a landing – no hydraulics.  None.  What happened, I don’t know.  But anyhow, at the end of the runway they had been building a new perimeter, and there was a hole about 30 feet deep at the end of the runway.  And all this dirt was pile up on the other side of the hole.  We came in, and naturally we crashed, because there was no brakes, no nothing.  No time to do anything.  So we cracked up.  One of the props went wild.  We had no way of getting out because there was this 30 foot hole.  The only way we could get out was through the side of the plane, the regular door.  Well, they finally got us out.  And they took us in for interrogation.  That’s when they found out that everybody was missing.  And we were flying with a ghost crew.  And they caught everybody the next morning at the gate, coming back to camp.  And they took us in and they gave us a pretty good sized lecture.  But they didn’t give us ultimatum.  This plane was 12 hours old.  They gave us a choice of paying $125,000 as a crew, or going overseas.  Naturally, the first thing we said, “Let’s go!”  We got, within three days, we had our complete set of shots – seven shots.  Everything, we were ready to go in three days.  And they said, here’s your plane.  Get out!  So off we went.  We ended up in Rome, New York, where we stayed three days.  Engine failure on the plane.  We finally took off, landed in Bangor, Maine, and on take off blew out a tire.  So we had to stay there three days.  And then we ended up in Horham.  And that’s the way that went.  

JM:  That’s quite a story.

BR:  Well, everybody, if there’s ten guys, there’s ten different stories, possibly on the same subject.  But that’s my story on that thing, yes.

JM:  And once you got to Horham, how was your first mission?

BR:  I kept a pretty good record.  It was pretty good because of the fact that we were a brand new crew.  We flew tail end Charlie, because we were brand new, I guess.  But we flew tail end Charlie.  Our first mission was pretty good.  It wasn’t too, too bad.  We continued flying.  The best experience I can give you at that time – I don’t know how much you want me to talk about all this but, on December the 24th the Battle of the Bulge was on.  And we were scheduled to fly.  At that time it was about the first time we had been able to get up because of the weather.  And off we went, over the target.  We were over Warmbiblous Air Base, and that’s when my ball turret gunner was hit.  And he hollered over the interphone, “Moe, come and get me.  I got shot in the butt!”  So I had to crank him out of the turret; get him out, naturally with a walk around bottle for oxygen.  I got him into a heated blanket because his suit was all tore.  Got him into a heated blanket, still giving him his bottle oxygen.  And then I hooked him up to the regular line.  And while there, I administered First Aid as best I could, under those circumstances - cold as heck up there.  But I did keep him warm.  I did give him sulfur drugs.  I gave him a couple of shots of morphine until we got back.  And he ended up in the hospital.  He got behind eight missions, naturally in the hospital.  But that put him back eight missions.  That was one of my experiences on missions. The other one happens to be on the ground in our Nissan hut.  My brother-in-law was the engineer on the plane.  I called him brother-in-law at the time because when I met his sister, I told him “I’m going to marry your sister.”  So from then on, we were called brother-in-laws.  So my brother-in-law said “We never have enough coal here to get warm.”  We had to go around and swipe coal from the main line; swipe coal from 334 and 336 – wherever we could get coal we got coal, put it in this pot belly stove.  And he decided he was going to, being the engineer, he was going to revamp this little pot belly stove.  Well, I said, “Alright, go ahead.  Do what you have to do.”  And I went to the movies, which wasn’t too far away from our Nissan hut.  All of a sudden, I hear somebody holler out “Moe! Moe!  Your brother-in-law’s on fire!  You better come on!”  What had happened was he had gone out on the line, got a can of 100 octane gas, and was going to convert it into a gas burning pot belly stove.  But what he thought was a good container to drip ended up being cardboard.  And that 100 octane went right through and blew the hell out of the pot belly stove.  As he ran out of the Nissan hut, his whole arm was on fire, because he was holding the box.  His expansion bracelet on his wrist came off, and with it pulled all the skin from his hand to his fingers, and all that – he was running out like that.  My ball turret gunner was sleeping on two bunks down, on the top.  He grabbed a blanket off his bed and threw it on the top of him and put out the fire...  When they told me about what happened, I came over and saw him and I says, “My God, what the heck’s wrong with you?  I got to get you to a hospital.”  Well, I had to get something to quell his pain.  The quack sack was outside of our barracks not too far from the Nissan hut.  It was locked up, no doctor, no nothing.  I broke the window, climbed inside, got a syringe of morphine, and gave him a shot.  I says, “Come on, let’s go.”  Well, there was nobody in the office or anything, no place.  I saw a jeep out there and it had the key in it, so I swiped the jeep.  My tail gunner and I put him in the jeep and drove down to the hospital.  Of course we were getting chased by the MP’s by then.  And once we got to the hospital, gave them the information.  The MP’s got us and they said, “Well, you guys did the right thing.”  And everything else.  However, you can’t take jeeps.  They made us walk back.  They wouldn’t give us a ride back to the barracks.  So that was our other experience.  Other than that, I volunteered after 35 missions.  Zach Stanborough was operation officer at the 412 at the time.  He called Lieutenant Beck, which was our pilot.  Gave him a plan, he said, “Look, you get a crew together, you can go into France.  You’ll be stationed in France.  You’ll pick up broken down aircraft, bring them back to Bovington to get repaired, patched up, and back out on the line, and back out to flight.  So he agreed.  He came up to me, and he said, “You want to go?”  And I said, “Sure, why not?”  So we got a crew together.  Our one waist gunner became our engineer.  We had a navigator from the 100th Bomb Group that volunteered for it.  And we had a co-pilot; I think he was from the 336th.  And so we had a radio operator, an engineer.  We ended up with, like I say, a navigator, a co-pilot, and off we went, over to France.  We were put up in a makeshift hotel, because it had been partly bombed and so forth.  We weren’t too far from Charleroi in France.  The navigator called me one day and he says, “Why don’t you come up here.”  We had gone out to pick up a B-17.  We were on the runway, and he said, “Come on up here, Moe, and watch the ground go by us.”  “Alright, I’ll be right over.”  Now, nobody takes off in the nose of a B-17.  Nobody.  He called me up.  He says, “Oh I’ve been doing it all the time.”  I said okay, so I sat down in the nose.  Well, going down the runway, I don’t know – maybe we were going about 85 miles an hour, starting to get ready to take off.  85-95. Something happened.  Right into the runway.  Nose – I’m sitting in the Plexiglas nose.  I ended up laying in the runway. I went one direction; the plane went the other direction.  And holy smokes!  There I’m laying down.  I said I don’t know what’s the matter.  I couldn’t move.  They thought I was paralyzed, a broken back or something.  But I was bruised and brush burned – whatever.  They took me to the hospital.  My pilot and I always had the habit, when he walked through the plane, walked by the radio room, he used to pick up my hat, and he’d put his hat down where mine was.  Well, believe it or not, when we took off, I had the hat on.  Believe it or not, I was still on the runway, and I still had his hat on.  I don’t know how, or anything.  Well they took me to a real nice hospital for officers.  When they found out I was a GI, they threw me out.  I ended up someplace else, and I finally got back to the hotel where we were stationed.  And continued flying from there.  Once we were through with our flying combat cargo, went back to the base, to the 95th.  Well, the 95th is gone.  Holy smokes!  What do we do now?  In the meantime, though, they had taken all my clothes that I had there.  All my personal belongings, except that which was personal.  That was saved and it was waiting for me at the 412th headquarters.  And I got that and I had to go and get a new issue of clothes.  I was rather particular about how they fit.  I didn’t want a sloppy look or anything.  I’d had my shirts all tailored, the jacket tailored, pants tailored, everything else.  And I had to sign a statement of charges for them.  Once I was out of the service, oh about five years after I was out of the service, I received a statement from the government.  They wanted to get paid for that statement of charges for that extra clothes. I just wrote on the back, I says, “I still have them here.  If you want them, come and get them.  I’m not paying you for anything.”  But I never heard anything else.  Then I was discharged, and that’s the end of my story.

JM:  Those missions, those cargo trips that you flew, those were after your 35 missions?

BR:  After the 35

JM:  And about how many of those trips did you fly?

BR:  Oh, about 10, 15.  Pick up the aircraft.  I can document that nose thing because the navigator, who lives in Carolina, he wrote it up on their newsletter, and he sent me a copy.  So I have that.  In that 35, we flew the shuttle to Poltava.  And from there to Italy, and from Italy back to England.  I wouldn’t take a million dollars for it. Wouldn’t give you a nickel for anymore.  But that’s about it.

JM:  Any interesting characters that you met along the way?

BR:  Well, John Masiati was our tail gunner.  He was a hairdresser by trade.  So acted a little fruity half the time.  But he had a nickname of “Mr. Lucky and Mr. Phillips.”  But since we got out of the service, I have not been able to locate him anyplace.  Our ball gunner had a name of shortly because he was a little over four foot tall.  Those are about the only two that I would say, characters.  We did have, as you know, when I mention the fact that all these guys went AWOL, and they all come back.  We had a damn good crew.  We were tight though.  Very tight.  One guy went, they all went.  One more incident.  When we were in Florida, we used to go out as a crew, always.  We went to this club – it was called the High Hat.  We went in there.  We had dinner and everything else.  One of the, I think it was the co-pilot, wanted a pack of cigarettes.  So the waitress bought him a pack of cigarettes.  He paid her, and I think there was two cents change.  And he just left it there on the table.  Nobody thought of the tip.  Nobody.  And when we were about, maybe 20 feet past the door on our way out, here comes the waitress.  She says, “You cheap son-of-a-gun.  You leave me a two cent tip?  Naturally we had to take care of her, because everybody – we thought the pilot had taken care of it.  But apparently he hadn’t.  No one had.  But with the two cents, she thought that was her tip.  

JM:  So when you got back to Horham, the 95th was gone.  How did you get home?
BR:  Well, on the way home, we ended up going to Stone.  Ziggy Zigcraft, who was the engineer on our combat cargo thing, he and I took a Kaiser Liberty ship back home. And as a rule, I think they used to come across in about five, six days – something like that.  It took us 32 days to come home.  They said we had hit part of an iceberg through the North Sea.  I don’t know which way they were going.  But an iceberg can kind of rip the hull of the boat, or ship, whatever sailors call them.  We came home at three knots – all the way home at three knots.  It took us 32 days.  Which wasn’t too, too bad, because we were able to, being a Liberty Ship, very few people, very few of us coming home at that time?  We got the chief cook and bottle washer to get us some cherries and some apple juice and stuff.  We were trying to make some wine with cherry juice – let it ferment since we were going to be gone that long.  And it worked out pretty good.  Won a few dollars coming home, playing poker.  I think it ended up close to $10,000 in earnings, winnings, because we all had a lot of money coming home.  And I won quite a bit.

And when you got back to California, how was your homecoming there?
BR:  Oh, terrific because we landed at BPOE  - Boston Port of Embarkation – landed there.  I called my engineer’s sister in Buffalo, New York.  I says, “I’m going home.  I’ll catch you on the way back.”  I flew home, naturally, to my mother and father.  It was great.  I said, “Mom, Dad, I’m going to Buffalo.  I’ve got a girl over there, and I’m going to marry her.”  So I flew back to Buffalo.  We were supposed to get engaged.  But it didn’t work out that way.  I said, “Let’s get married. Why fool around?”  We went out four times, and only four times, during our knowing each other.  And we’ve been married 60 years.  I, at home, there’s five boys in the family.  All five in the service.  All five in combat.  One was a sailor.  One ended up in the Aleutians.  One ended up in the ETO.  In fact he was in the Battle of the Bulge.  And one was in the Pacific.  We all came home.  I was the first.  At that time, they used to have a flag with a little star for somebody in the service.  So as the boys went in, as we went in, they put up one star, two star, three, four, five.  And as we came home, she took whatever it was.  I got home first, so I took the one with five stars, and we went right down the line until we got them all.  And I came to Buffalo.  We got married.  I tried getting a job here.  But when you came home, all those that were coming home were going back to their job, because their job was secure.  But I went in at 18.  I didn’t even get to work.  And so I couldn’t get a job any place in New York.  So I went back home to California.  At least I knew my way around there.  We were married on July 4th, 1945.  A year later, my first daughter, in fact the one  that’s here with me now, was born.  And my wife was in a Catholic hospital, Queen of Angels hospital in Hollywood, California.  And when she had the baby, one of the nurses had to be a nun.  And she told my wife, “You have a beautiful little baby girl.”  And my wife still groggy says, “I know, she was born on my wedding day.”  Which wasn’t too good, because it was a year later.  Sister thought it was our wedding day that she had been born on.  But it was our first anniversary that she was born.  She was born in 1946.  I worked there for maybe a year.  But there again, there was no home to be purchased; no home to be rented.  Lived with my mother and father, which was no good.  You don’t have the privacy.  I said, let’s go back.  My wife got sick.  She was always going to the Doctor.  Finally one of the doctors told her, where are you from?  She said, New York.   She said, “You better take her home.  This girl is homesick.”  So we moved back to Buffalo, New York.  Got an apartment, got a job.  And everything was great.  And it’s been terrific since.  We had four children, two boys, two girls.  My boys have absolutely nothing to do with the Air Force, to do with B-17’s, to do with anything that I had done.  My two girls – tremendous.  My grandchildren – tremendous.  I have a grandson that’s 23 years old that can tell you more about a B-17 than a lot of people know.  Because I’ve taken him through B-17’s, I’ve taken him to the air shows.  My granddaughter the same thing.  In fact, my granddaughter, about three years ago, I called Johnson at Horham and talked to him.  I said, “My granddaughter’s going to be going over there.”  And he said, “Well you give her my phone number and you tell her to call me when she’s in London.  I’ll take care of things from there on out.”  I said fine.  So, when she got to London, she called him.  Alan told her what train to take and when to take it and how to take it.  Off she went to Horham.  The two boys met her at the train station.  They showed her everything in Horham.  They showed her the Red Feather Club – at that time it wasn’t like it is today. But at least she got to see it, and what progress had been made in renovating or restoring, I should say.  And they took her out to dinner and everything else.  And at the end of the day, they said, okay, now I got to put you back on the train.  They took her to the train station; they put her on the train; they told her where to go, how to get there.  And off she went back to London.  And she made me a collage of pictures that she took while she was there.  Pictures of the three of them – the two boys and her sitting down having dinner.  So I’ve got that in a frame.  At home I have a, you might say, little museum in my one spare bedroom.  I’ve got pictures.  I’ve got a six foot photo where we’re going today, of the unit when we had our reunion there.  It was panoramic.  The man just shot all the way across – took a picture.  I say it’s got to be six foot long.  About that wide.  Maybe 12 inches wide.  And I have that on the wall.  And I’ve got pictures of ‘17’s.  I’ve got a picture of the Berlin raid, with Al B. Brown leading the raid.  And my grandson at the time when he was about ten, he was very interested in B-17’s, so he and I sat down and we made a B-17 - got a 36 inch wingspan – of balsa wood that would put the skin on it.  And sprayed it, and it tightens the skin.  It’s painted silver; it’s got “Knock Out Baby”, which is a plane we flew mostly.  And the number 297257 on the tail with a big square B, hanging from the ceiling, hanging down about like this.  What else?

JM:  When did you start coming to the reunions?
BR:  I’ve got 18 of them.  I started in Valley Forge.  I think I missed one in Tucson, because we had already been there once.  And I missed Reno once, because we had already been there also.  I think I missed one more, because my wife had a total knee replacement and she couldn’t get around.  So we didn’t make that one either.  But I’ve been to a lot of them.

JM:  And after the war, did you stay in touch with any of your crew members?

BR:  I stayed in touch with the pilot.  He graduated a chemical engineer from Michigan.  And he did stop by once to see me because he was in California.  I was in New York.  But in New York we were right near Niagara Falls, which was a very big industrial area for chemicals.  He and another fella developed a kidney machine that was portable.  And he had to get chemicals for it, and he stopped in Niagara Falls and that’s when he came over to see me.  But shortly after that, I don’t know what happened, I never heard from anymore or anything.  He died, so I found out later.  I don’t recall how I found out.  But he did die.  And Ziggy Zigcraft, who was the engineer, lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  He got married when he got home.  He went back to, I think he was going to Notre Dame at the time.  He had gotten married.  He was standing on the corner waiting to cross the street.  A car went by and pasted him to the wall of a building and killed him.  He was only, well let’s see, he was my age.  So he would have been about 23 years old.  He never got to see his baby boy.  And his mother stayed in touch with me for quite a while, but then she died and I never heard anything else.  Our co-pilot that quit after five raids – he died.  I don’t know what happened to him after the court martial because he wouldn’t fly.  I don’t know whatever happened to him.

JM:  And how about your brother-in-law?
BR:  Oh, he lives in Florida now.  His hand is fine.  Well, he kind of clutches his hand because he can’t close it all the way.  But he’s fine.  He’s made maybe four missions (reunions), because he’s one that says, “I don’t want to have anything to do with it.  I want to forget it.”  I said, “Well I don’t.”  When used to come to visit us once a year, I said you make sure you come when we have a reunion because you’re going.  I’ve taken him to about four out of state.  And we had a couple in Florida.  So he had to go there too.  He said, “You stay at my house.”  I said, “I ain’t staying at your house.”  I says, “I go where the reunion is.  So if you want to see me, you get there.”  And it was at Fort Lauderdale, and he lived just maybe seven, eight miles away.  He was there everyday.  He’s doing well for himself.  And our ball turret gunner lives here in Dayton.  I had dinner with him just the other night, and I’ll see him tomorrow at the museum.  He’s getting along fine. 

JM:  Anything else you would like to add before we close?

BR:  Off hand, no.  

JM:  Thank you so much, Moe, for taking the time today to do this.

BR:  I just hope you’re able to use some of it, or all of it, or parts edited.

JM:  And thank you for your service during World War II.

BR:  That’s it.