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8th Air Force & Warbirds

"I was always struck by the sheer beauty of the skies in which we flew, a massive, endless field of  bluish silver to background in seconds an arena of terror and death. In mere minutes, scenes of major battles are thoroughly cleansed: all looks well again. However, it never paid to let one's guard down." - Maurice Rockett, 95th BG Bombardier

Living in East Anglia is great for me and other people who are planespotters and WWII nuts, because most of the 8th Air Force bases were in this area! Plus the fabulous 2nd Air Division Memorial Library at the Norwich Millennium Library, which is packed full of 8th Air Force books, videos and information. I'm never far away from a control tower, an airfield or an open day/exhibition where I can get lost in the wartime photos, stories and memorabilia.

Old air bases and Control Towers fascinate me - such a concentration of emotion, sadness, loss and euphoria concentrated into a very short timespan of about 3 years - you can't help but feel the atmosphere of some of these places. Unfortunately a lot of old airbases have now been returned to agriculture, their runways and hardstandings torn up and used as base material for our motorways. There are still some bases left with haunting empty windowless buildings, and remains of perimeter track or runways still there to walk on, overgrown with weeds and full of memories. I defy anyone to visit one of these bases on a warm summers' day and to stand near the runway and NOT feel respect for what happened there and what people went through. A great place to visit is the THORPE ABBOTS control tower museum, fully restored and packed with artefacts. Click HERE for more.

My interest in Swing Dancing also takes me to a lot of 1940s weekends and dances, which is great fun and you always meet like-minded people who have the same amount of enthusiasm - always a bonus dancing with men in uniform too ;-)

Click HERE for some great aerial shots of Snetterton racetrack/airfield as it was in 2003. Click HERE for a super website that has photos of all the old airfields in the UK, lots of atmospheric shots of derelict buildings and runways..

I've always loved old WWII aircraft, particularly Spitfires. As well as being damn sexy flying machines with a unique engine sound that is music to my ears, to me they represent a kind of distinguished elegance amidst a horrendous war.

The men who flew them were barely out of their teens, yet willingly went up there with very little training, to fight and to give their lives for their country. With no thought for themselves or the pain of their loss to their family and sweethearts......their attitudes 60 years ago are now a world away from the attitudes of kids of the same age today, brought up into an MTV-dominated compensation culture where joining the Forces can be a quick route to early retirement via a lawsuit for a tiny injury received in the line of duty, or a small harmless sexist comment by a careless colleague.

Sometimes when I see pensioners in the street or on a bus, I wonder if they were ever involved in flying these planes, whether they have hours of stories to tell about what happened up there in the clouds, whether they saw their boyhood friend blown to pieces by an enemy fighter, whether they dropped tonnes of bombs in Europe......what do they think, sitting there on a grimy bus in the New Millennium, watching the frantic pace of life around them, people pushing past them, ignoring them.....do they ever want to stop you and tell you their stories, make you relise what they sacrificed, what they witnessed, how they felt?

This extract of a letter that I read in a book kind of sums it up really, it was written by an American airman to his father near the end of the war:

"....What the future has in store for us is so out of any person's realization that no plans can possibly be laid. Furthermore, those wild dreams of World satisfaction are hopeless in view of the world's dry well of Leadership. Foresight is something I know I lack - but I sincerely doubt that there is a man alive today big and strong enough to cope with the problems of the day, let alone the future".

The same could be said of today's world and the men who lead our countries and the wars we are preparing to fight.

Seeing and hearing these fantastic machines flying overhead at airshows always gives me a lump in my throat, which some may consider strange because I was born nearly 30 years after WWII.

I get sad seeing them because they came from an era that will never return, where families were proper families, kids were safe to play on the streets, computers and TV were unheard of, and people weren't rushing their lives along on a rollercoaster of deadlines and corporate stress. Sundays were peaceful and lazy, devoid of the mass-shopping frenzy so common today, and families spent evenings together in one room talking or reading, not seperated into their own domains and brainwashed by Nintendo and the Teletubbies. An era where girls were girls, not aggressive mini-adults trying to grow up too fast and obsessed with body-image and sex, spoon-fed to them by the so called "teen" mags that preach they are doing the right thing by educating the girls when they are young.

If any of you think I'm ranting a little, well tough! You need to read some real-life memoirs of fighter pilots and bomber pilots, to see the massive change in attitudes over these years. I thoroughly recommend "The Man who flew the Memphis Belle" by Capt Robert Morgan (read an extract HERE and HERE),and "Fighter Pilot"by Paul Richey. Other books I've read so far are:

  • I could never be so lucky again - Jimmy Doolittle
  • The Cold Blue Sky - Jack Novey (Snetterton-based waist gunner B17)
  • Day of Infamy - Walter Lord
  • The Mighty Eighth in WWII by J.Kemp McLaughlin
  • B17G - Combat Profile by Roger Freeman
  • American Airmen in Norfolk 1942-1945 by Allan G Murray
  • Snetterton Falcons by Robert E Doherty
  • Airfields of the Eighth - Then and Now by Roger Freeman
  • On a Wing and a Prayer by Harry Crosby (Thorpe Abbotts based Navigator B17)
Some good WW2 aircraft links: Bomb Group homepages: