Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
April 1990 | Volume 41, Issue 3
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
April 1990 | Volume 41, Issue 3
From 1941 to 1945 the biggest aircraft carrier in the North Atlantic was England. Once the U.S. 8th Air Force arrived in 1942, a new field was started every three days. By war’s end there were more than 700 airfields spread across the country; the 8th had built 130 of them. Enough concrete had been slathered across cornfields and cow pastures to pave four thousand miles of highway—all in an area about the size of Vermont. “There were so many airfields,” one pilot, Ray Galceran, recalls, “you could cut your engines at ten thousand feet and take your choice. Land anywhere.” Most of the bases were concentrated in the rural countryside of East Anglia, that broad peninsula of Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex, and Cambridgeshire that presses into the North Sea like a thumb.
Today this bucolic land, still green with the memories of the men who served on it, is to the U.S. Air Force what Normandy, Midway, and Iwo Jima are to the lore of the Army, Navy, and Marines. This may be why an East Anglian from Lavenham or Bury St. Edmunds might first draw a deep breath before he talks about the men of the 8th, and speak with emotion when he does. Every one of these American fliers is honored as a hero, even if he never did another decent thing in his life. It was enough that these men once went to Germany in the frigid bellies of B-17s and that some came back and some didn’t.
“I was five or six years old in 1944,” says Ian Hawkins, who lives near Framlingham and has written a couple of books about those days. “We were used to the sound of American bombers. Paid no more mind to them than we did to the sound of a tractor engine. But I remember one day hearing an unearthly roar so loud I could feel floorboards jump under my feet. I ran outside and looked up. I’d never seen anything like it. More than a thousand B-17s were rendezvousing in a black cloud that just kept coming and coming. Imagine! Four thousand engines, five million horsepower. It’s something the world will never see again.”
No American or East Anglian can think seriously about B-17s today without feeling the tug of their great purpose and destiny. They were the two-fisted tin cans that tore the roof off a deranged empire. When they swarmed over occupied Europe, people blessed them. One day several hundred roared across Holland, according to Rex Alan Smith in his book One Last Look, and a little girl cried in fear. Her father put his arm around her, took her hand, and looked up. “Listen to it, Helene,” he told her. “It’s the music of angels.”
So you