Stuart J. Wright | ཐུབ་བསྟན།

“Should our guys ever get together to write ‘Attleborough tales’—the winter’s walk from Old Buck’ to the Griffin; shooting with the village vicar, or the infamous raid on the Gaymer’s Cyder Mill; missing Liberty Runs from the Cattle Market; the night the crew of Stinky released a skunk in the Samson & Hercules; nights at the Bell to exchange missions with Stateside classmates assigned to other Groups, often times a search for a never to be seen again friend—that’s the way I remember an emotional gauntlet.”

One Saturday morning in March 1986, I was scanning the bookshelves in the Second Air Division Memorial Room (now known as the American Library) in Norwich library, Norfolk, England, when I heard American accents, confirming my initial observations. I turned round and said hello to the American couple in their sixties, as far as I could tell, sitting and browsing through a kind of coffee table book. They were Bill and Dorothea Eagleson. Bill was a veteran of the 733rd Bomb Squadron, 453rd Bomb Group, based at Old Buckenham, near Attleborough, Norfolk, in 1944. He flew thirty combat missions over Nazi-occupied Europe as the bombardier on a B-24 aircrew – Crew 25 of the 453rd Bomb Group; pilot, Lt. Jack Nortridge. Their aircraft was nicknamed “Corky” – Burgundy Bombers.

“Have you seen this book?” Bill asked, in a way that sounded like a positive endorsement. He was holding a copy of One Last Look: A Sentimental Journey to the Eighth Air Force Bases of World War II in England (Kaplan and Smith 1983). I had not seen that book before. According to an excerpt from a review in the magazine American History Illustrated, which continues to be the book’s standard promotional blurb: “This beautifully illustrated and sensitively designed volume returns to now-long-abandoned U.S. Army Air Force bases in England, melding photographs from World War II with recent views of overgrown runways, rusting Nissen huts, and crumbling, ghostly control towers.”

Following the war, veterans of the Eighth Air Force typically seemed to put their wartime experiences to the backs of their minds and many hardly spoke about it for decades. But during the 1970s and 1980s, the veterans began to retrace past experiences, searching telephone directories for their old crewmates, forming veterans’ associations, organising reunions, and planning trips back to England for ‘one last look’ at the bases from which they had flown during World War Two, and the surrounding environs. In some cases, that ‘one last look’ was repeated two or three times, or more. Bill retired from his job as a sports coach at Brockton High School in 1984 and became active in the 453rd Bomb Group Association, and the Second Air Division Association. Following his 1986 visit to England, he returned twice during the 1990s. 

In Spring 1986, Bill’s memories of World War Two in England were probably as distant and yet as vivid as my current memories of meeting Bill – considering that forty-one years had passed between the end of the war and Bill’s return to Norfolk, and over thirty-nine years have passed since I met Bill.

Although not yet fourteen, I was already doing ‘research’ on the United States Eighth Air Force whose World War Two bases had dotted the East Anglian countryside about every five miles. I lived in what was believed to be a three-hundred-year-old cottage in a small village which, during World War Two, had been virtually an ‘island’ encompassed by a USAAF base, and home to several thousand Americans. Since I was about eight years of age, I had been studying my father’s copies of Airfields of the Eighth: Then and Now (Roger Freeman) and Fields of Little America (Martin Bowman) – mostly looking at the photographs, initially. In June 1984, I had attended a D-Day anniversary event in my village, when American veterans returned. In spring 1985, I found the name and address of a veteran once based in my village in a copy of a book donated to the library in the nearest town. I wrote a letter and soon received a reply along with some original wartime photographs (we would remain in contact until his death, twenty-three years later). 

I was planning to go to Jarrolds department store in Norwich that day, with either a book token received at Christmas, or money earned from my before-school Monday–Friday newspaper delivery job. (This job also funded postage stamps for correspondence via air mail, camera film and film processing, and the copying of wartime photographs borrowed from veterans and historians.) I intended to buy a copy of Martin Bowman’s Castles in the Air. I had not seen One Last Look in any bookshop, but it was undoubtedly a much more expensive book. So, I made a mental note, and that was one of the first books I would look for on subsequent visits, until eventually buying a copy a couple of years later.

It was probably the first ‘photo book’ I was interested in, in which photographs were intended to trigger the subconscious in some way – to evoke memories, emotions, and so on. More like art than the utilitarian ‘survey’ photographs included in Airfields of the Eighth: Then and Now. Bill pointed to a photograph of a derelict building at his former base at Old Buckenham and said, “This building is going to be demolished on Monday”. He had visited Old Buck’, as he always called it, a few days before.

Located only about nine miles from my home, ‘the way the crow flies’, I knew Old Buckenham from Freeman’s Airfields of the Eighth: Then and Now. And I had heard about how, in April 1944, my father, at the age of seven, was enrolled at Old Buckenham Hall School, and used to hear the 453rd Bomb Group’s B-24 bombers forming overhead in the early mornings. Or maybe they were the B-17s from Snetterton Heath.

One of our neighbours, Keith ‘Jack’ Jackson, owned a light aircraft which he kept at Old Buckenham. In May or June 1984, he took my brother, Grant, and me for a flight. Well, it was a two-seater, so there were two flights. I flew first on a short trip over our village and back, while my brother waited at the side of what remained of Old Buckenham’s main runway. Then it was my turn to wait. That Saturday afternoon, the place was deserted. There was no flying club back then. The runway was used primarily for a few crop-spraying aircraft that were kept in two small post-war blister hangars. Standing at the side of the runway reminded me of that scene just a few minutes into the 1949 movie, Twelve O'Clock High.

I had cycled to Old Buckenham with my brother in Summer 1985, and I would be there again for another flight in Jack’s aircraft later in Spring 1986. Bill and I were already corresponding via air mail by then. When we first met, he asked me to see if I could find out what happened to a B-24 named Corky. But for a long time, I had more questions than answers. Bill would respond with very descriptive letters, sometimes densely-packed with abbreviated memories which, in 1994, became the inspiration for my book – An Emotional Gauntlet: From Life in Peacetime America to the War in European Skies – which was first published in 2004.

One of Bill’s earliest letters, from Spring 1986, included the paragraph quoted at the top of this page, from which came the book title. In the context of the book, it should all make sense. For the uninitiated, here is some elaboration: