Lieutenant Eugene Bradley arrived at the new Connecticut air base on a Tuesday in August 1941. Three days later his airplane was paved over.
A Pirep featured story · KBDL Bradley International, Windsor Locks, CT
In the spring of 1941, the Connecticut General Assembly bought 1,700 acres of tobacco farmland in Windsor Locks and leased it to the U.S. Army for an air base. The Atlantic seaboard was nervous. Britain was being bombed nightly, and military planners considered the East Coast a plausible target for a German attack. The Army painted the new runways and taxiways with a patchwork green-and-tan camouflage to mimic tobacco fields and dirt roads, so the place would be hard to spot from above. By late July, Windsor Locks Army Air Base was operational.
The 64th Pursuit Squadron of the 57th Fighter Group arrived on August 19, 1941. Among them was a 24-year-old second lieutenant from Dela, Oklahoma, named Eugene M. Bradley. He had come east with his new bride. She was pregnant.
Two days later, on the morning of August 21, Bradley took off in a Curtiss P-40C Warhawk, tail number 41-13348, for a mock dogfight with First Lieutenant Frank Mears. They climbed to ten thousand feet. After several turns Mears called over the radio that they had had enough. Bradley pulled into a hard diving turn, then a spin. According to Mears's statement to investigators, Bradley appeared not to recover; the airplane continued in a slow flat spin all the way to the ground. He crashed about a mile west of the field. He was the air base's first fatality.
An editorial in the Hartford Times asked that the field be renamed for him. The Army agreed. On January 20, 1942, the War Department officially designated the installation as Army Air Base, Bradley Field. Bradley's wife gave birth that year, in Oklahoma. The 57th Fighter Group shipped to North Africa in July 1942 and fought through Sicily and into Italy, finishing the war as one of the most decorated American fighter outfits.
In 1948 the field was opened to civilian commercial traffic. Today Bradley International Airport handles roughly seven million passengers a year. In 2010 — sixty-nine years after the accident — a team of historians and archaeologists trying to find the crash site cross-referenced state records, old newspapers, and aerial photographs, and determined that the wreck site was directly under Runway 33. When the runway was extended in the 1960s to accept jet airliners, the Army's records were not consulted. Bradley's airplane was paved over.
The pilot's name has been on the field for eighty-four years.