I suppose my interest started a long while ago. I was born in 1954, a mere nine years after the end of the Second world War. The question that all lads of my age asked their fathers was “what did you do in the War dad?. Well my dear old Dad served under Montgomery in XXX Corp, but would never tell my slightly elder brother or I what he got up to, That question was answered by my Mother not long after he died, The Arnhem fiasco he was not proud of, the injuries sustained while escaping a burning Sherman tank…twice, No, Dad never metioned or spoke of these things.
And so to make up for what Dad didnt tell us, Mum told us her tales. Tales of being a teenager amongst the thousands of American airmen who were based at Nuthampstead, of watching the B-17s of the 398th BG take off, and watching them come home. Often damaged, sometimes on fire. So many stories, so many memories she held. Of her and her elder sisters being smuggled in to watch the Glenn Miller concert that he played there, the endless bicycles and jeeps that packed the town of Buntingford in the evenings, and of course, the general atmosphere of living close to what was then a huge wartime airfield.
The tales of the Americans seemed to lodge in my mind, I was intrigued when I saw for the first time on television the eternal classic “12 O clock High”. I think that film affected me the most and gave me my interest in old airfields.
Often when walking around many of the former airfields I had a sense of needing to do something for the memory of the air and ground crews that inhabited these places, just walking the places left me feeling as if I owed something more than a visit. This is a feeling that has never gone away even though I have reached my half century.
The culmination resulted in the building of a permanent memorial to air and ground crews on the airfield at Hunsdon earlier this year. With a few other chaps who felt the same, we have succeeded in unveiling a memorial attended by many former Hunsdon veterans, with a few very distinguished people indeed. Branse Burbridge, top scoring night fighter pilot and Hugo Townsend, son of Peter to name but two.
But the thrill for me is to find a fragment of history on these former airfields, be it a small piece of mangled aluminium, a button found in the remnants of a long derelict Nissen hut, a part of an instrument in a ditch behind a former dispersal.
The buildings that still stand provide sometimes tantalising evidence of the Men, a name painted on a door as we found at Rivenhall airfield only three weeks ago ‘Squadron Leader H.E Watson DFC’. Things like this make you wonder of the man himself, what happened to him, is he still alive but frail in his late eighties?.
Of the American Oak trees planted on the airfield when it was under USAAF use, when the saplings or acorns were planted, did the planter ever imagine they would stand proud 60 years on?.
When you do enter these buildings,or walk the diminished runways and taxyways they do have an ‘air’ about them, maybe as our interest is strong this manifests itself to us alone, a casual disinterested person would probably not be in receipt of that supposed aura.
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