Ever Wonder Where the 'Bradley' in 'Bradley International Airport' Comes From?

If you were to tear up the runways at Bradley International Airport and dig around the uncovered soil long enough, you’d find fish fossils – lots of them.

That’s because much of the Central Valley – a region extending from the shoreline of Connecticut up to southern Vermont – was once underwater for millions of years. Lake Hitchcock, as it is known, extended from Rocky Hill up to the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts. The lake was not unlike Lake Champlain – long, narrow, and deep. The death and decay of living organisms over millions of years created a rich deposit of silt that became ideal for farming after the lake had drained.

One of the crops that thrived in the Central Valley was ; in fact, Bradley International Airport was built on former tobacco land. Even today there are many acres of tobacco very close to the airport in parts of Windsor Locks and in the Poquonock section of Windsor. Back in August of 1941, there were many more acres of tobacco under cultivation that were contiguous to the airport. Young George Clee of Windsor Locks was working on tobacco on the morning of August 21, 1941, when he heard an explosion.

I, like most kids of my generation, worked on both shade and     broadleaf. My first job was the summer of 1941 for the American Sumatra Tobacco Co. who kept mules on the corner of North Street, Luther Potter lived there afterwards. They had their farm all the way down route 75 to where the Pizza Hut is. I must say we had to work hard, drink water from a bucket and were not coddled by the Polish  and Lithuanian straw bosses. It was good training for later life, no regrets. The land across from the entrance to Bradley was called the Flat Iron as it was bordered by Old County Rd. and looked like one of the old flat irons. In August we were working there, and the Windsor Locks Airbase had P-40 fighters stationed there, and we heard a noise and Lt. Bradley was dogfighting and crashed. This was just the beginning of a number of planes that hit the ground.

Lt. Eugene Morris Bradley hailed from Dela, Oklahoma. He was born on July 15, 1917, the oldest of the eight children of John and Lean Bradley. Bradley learned to fly in San Antonio, Texas, first at Randolph Field and then at the Air Force’s oldest training facility, Kelly Field.

After marrying his sweetheart, Ann Blackerwick, the couple first shipped out to Long Island briefly and then moved to the new Windsor Locks Army Air Base, taking residence in Poquonock on August 19, 1941. Just two days later, Lt. Bradley volunteered for dogfight training in the skies above the airfield. No one knows for sure, but it seems probable that he blacked out in the cockpit, went into a spin, and rode his Curtis P-40 Warhawk into the ground on the East Granby side of the airport. The crash was violent, with the plane burrowing into the ground about twelve feet. Bradley was found still strapped in. Bradley’s pregnant widow accompanied his remains back to San Antonio for burial.

The now defunct Hartford Times pushed for naming the airfield in honor of Lt. Bradley in an editorial on September 3, 1941. The suggestion took hold and on January 21, 1942, the airfield was renamed “Army Air Base, Bradley Field, Connecticut.” After the federal government returned the airfield to the state of Connecticut for civil operation in 1946, it later became known as “Bradley International Airport.” Several attempts have been made to change the airport’s name since then, but each stirred strong opposition and lost.

Bradley field served as a training facility for the Army Air Corps during World War II. Its geographical proximity to Europe also made it ideal as a staging area for units to ship to the European Theater of Operations (ETO). At least 25 units were at least temporarily stationed at Bradley enroute to the ETO. Additionally, when the war ended, many combat planes cycled through Bradley on their return trip to other parts of the country. Bradley Field was a very active wartime facility indeed.

Besides Lt. Bradley’s fatal crash, there were 11 other fatal military crashes at Bradley Field during the war years that killed 21 service personnel – a fact that few people realize!

These 12 fatal crashes at Bradley during the war were part of the more than 7,100 USAAF aircraft involved in fatal accidents that killed more than 15,500 service personnel in the United States between 1941 and 1945 – a very under-publicized and sad reality of the cost of the war!

Those of you interested in pursuing more information on these domestic crashes should look up the pioneering work of Anthony J. Mireles. His impressive three volume set is entitled Fatal Army Air Force Aviation Accidents in the United States 1941-1945.

(Note: Next week’s column will explore other aviation accidents at Bradley in more detail.)

Notes, Sources, and Links:

1. According to answer.com, during World War II, a total of 406,000 American service personnel died; of these, an estimated 78,000 were killed by “friendly fire.” Add to that total the 15,500 who were killed in aviation accidents in the United States, and you have over 93,500 casualties due to accidents – an amazing total constituting over 20% of the fatalities during World War II!

2.       http://www.cttrust.org/index.cgi/12120

3.       Bradley Field: The First 25 Years by Thomas Palshaw (2002).

4.       To learn more about Anthony Mireles pioneering work on domestic aviation crashes, click on this link: http://www.warbirdcrash.com/

5.       Source of Bradley photo: http://www.dot.state.mn.us/aero/aved/museum/aviation_firsts/connecticut....

6. Over 13,000 Curtis P-40 Warhawks were made for the war in Buffalo, NY. The P-40 was famous as the plane used  by Claire Chennault's "Flying Tigers."