Stuart J. Wright | ཐུབ་བསྟན།

One Saturday morning in March 1986, visiting the Second Air Division Memorial Room (now known as the American Library) in Norwich Central Library, Norfolk, my eyes were scanning the bookshelves while my ears were listening for voices in the room. The sound of American accents confirmed my initial impressions, and I turned round and said hello to the American couple of around retirement age. They were Bill and Dorothea Eagleson. Bill was a veteran of the 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.

Bill and Dorothea were sitting, browsing through a kind of coffee-table book. “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 it before. According to an excerpt from a review in the magazine American History Illustrated, which continues to be the book’s standard promotional blurb:

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 1986 return to Norfolk, and almost forty years have passed since I first 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 at four- or five-mile intervals. 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. The aerial photographs were particularly fascinating. 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). 

On that Saturday in March 1986, the day I met Bill Eagleson, I was planning to go to Jarrolds department store in Norwich, 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 to the library and to Jarrolds, until eventually buying a copy a couple of years later.

It was probably the first photobook/coffee-table book I was interested in, in which photographs were intended to trigger the subconscious in some way – to evoke memories, emotions, and so on. It was more like art than the relatively utilitarian ‘survey’ photographs included in Airfields of the Eighth: Then and Now. Although writing on a very different topic, cultural historian Mark Seely describes the power of photographs most eloquently:

One Last Look is bursting with “hot molecule agitators” denoting and connoting the whole gamut of Eighth Air Force material culture: Wartime photographs, contemporary photographs; photographs of the aircraft, of the missions, and the deadly barrage of flak; and of the bases, the nearby villages, as well as London and other destinations when on leave or R&R. Then there were the photographs of various memorabilia: Wartime letters, Western Union telegrams, a Norden bombsight warning tag, an English–German phrase list for downed airmen, and a personnel record mission card.

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. 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 neighbouring 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. Very soon after take-off, once Jack had ‘checked in’ with air traffic control, I pointed at what looked like the remains of Deopham Green airfield, a former B-17 base. Jack confirmed it was Deopham Green. 

We approached Watton airfield from the east, banked left over Griston church, and seconds later I was looking down the right wing at our cottage, which we circled while my mum waived from the garden. Soon we were heading back to Old Buckenham. Then it was my turn to wait. That Saturday afternoon, the place was deserted. There was no flying club at Old Buckenham 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, which I had recorded onto a VHS tape from the television. A lone American veteran returns to his former base, mostly returned to agriculture, and sees a derelict control tower. Weeds are breaking through the joints in the concrete runway, and one of the concrete aircraft dispersal points, where the returnee scratches his right shoe in “the stains left by puddles of grease and black oil” (Lay and Bartlett 1948). In his mind’s eye, he sees it as it was: The base comes back to life with the sights and sounds of B-17s returning from a mission.

On second thoughts, I don’t think I saw Twelve O’Clock High until the following year, soon after recording The Way to the Stars (1945), which similarly captured the ghostly abandoned wartime airfield in its prologue, before jumping back in time to the war. But in 1984, I could already picture the scene clearly as a result of the books I had been reading and their photographs I had been studying. And from time spent in my own village, inspecting remnants of World War Two – the abandoned runway, control tower, and the signatures written in concrete by the troops of an African American engineer battalion – and exercising my own mind’s eye.

I cycled to Old Buckenham with my brother in summer 1985, and I would return for another flight in Jack’s aircraft in spring 1986 – a flight to the former B-24 base at Seething, a cup of tea in the flying club, and back to Old Buckenham. Bill and I were already corresponding via air mail by then. He had to cancel plans to return for a reunion in Norwich in May 1987, but he introduced me to a friend of his, former pilot Milton Stokes, and so I spent a day at Old Buckenham with veterans of the 453rd and their families. Meanwhile, at some point in 1986, I also received a letter from James Stewart, the Hollywood movie star who had been based in Norfolk – at Tibetan, Old Buckenham, and Hethel – in 1944–1945. Unfortunately, he also had to cancel his plans to attend the 1987 reunion, but he had made it back several times before.