Paul and Leah, my grandchildren, are always asking me to tell them stories about the old days, or about the war. So back to the old days and the war. Not me, this time though.
In the first years of World War II, a young writer and myself were asked to write a series of pamphlets for the US Air Forces to help them understand the British civilians they were forced to live with. I did this, and the last paper we wrote was a sort of culmination of all that had gone before and a kind of thank you to the US Air Force – mainly the Eighth. I don’t have the pamphlet, but I am going to reconstruct and perhaps, revamp it. It’s about two countries trying to understand each other under great difficulties, learning to live together, be happy, grieve together, and celebrate sometimes. I will be addressing this epistle to the American Air Force.
This is the quiet ploughland of old England, one of the most peaceful areas on earth, which was used to win the greatest war in human history. From the midst of these wheatlands and meadows, from the centuries old cottages with straw thatch and oak beams, the huge bomber fleets were airborne which pulped the heart of Hitler’s Reich. In these Eastern counties, the Pilgrim Fathers gathered and sailed away to build a new world. To these Eastern counties, their 20thcentury Pilgrim Sons returned to free the old world from tyranny.
Few people in East Anglia have been to the United States, but the United States have been to us. We saw them come in our hour of desperate need – young men in the tens of thousands, nonchalant, gay, confident and courageous. As an Englishwoman, one of a race which is said to be cold and proud, I would like to tell you very humbly something of which all of us who have been privileged to meet the men of the Eighth Air Force feel and shall ever feel in our hearts about Americans.
The American story began for us long before the first Flying Fortress or Liberators, the Lightnings or the Thunderbolts swept through the English skies. It began one spring afternoon in 1940, when clearly and steadily throughout two days and two nights, we heard in East Anglia the sound of distant explosions. There were dumps being blown up by remnants of the British Army before it was driven into the sea at Dunkirk.
We expected the Nazis to attempt an invasion within a few weeks. Men, women and children, all of us, meant to fight. Yet we had nothing to fight with. In our area of eleven miles long and four miles deep, we had seven rifles and one hundred twenty rounds of ammunition.
Every evening after work, men and women met together and concocted homemade bombs out of tar, gas and cotton wool. The idea was to light it with a match and then throw the contrivance underneath an advancing tank in the hope it would catch fire. We sweated away digging trenches and hiding places in the undergrowth beside all the roads leading from the coast, so the Nazis would not see us before we hurled our homemade bombs at them. Rather simple thinking, wasn’t it?
We arranged secret meeting places. We hid food. We planned to set fire to haystacks and burn everything of use to the enemy in the line of his advance. All night long, we kept watch on church towers, at crossroads, etc. in case the Nazis began to drop on us from the skies by parachute.
One evening, all the able-bodied men were called to the village hall. On the floor were large wooden boxes. From these, each one of them was handed a rifle and twenty rounds of ammunition. For the first time since Dunkirk, we felt we had something to hit back with if they came. Our hearts sang a new song.
These rifles were the first weapons to reach the Eastern Counties from the USA. Lend Lease may have been a subject of political controversy in the USA, but in England it was as if a friend had suddenly put a weapon in our hands at a time when our backs were to the wall and we had nothing but faith left to us.
All night long the Nazi planes droned overhead on their way to London. For many months, they were almost unopposed. We slept on the ground floor and in the cupboard under the stairs.
The German aircraft gave forth an eerie two-noted sound. If a glimmer of light showed, they dropped their bombs. The huge fires they started in London threw a rosy light on the Eastern Horizon.
We, in Bochain, built and equipped the bases for the Eighth Air Force as part of our share of Lend Lease in reverse. Many of them were placed on the finest farming land in Bochain. Parts of the East of England grow heavier crops per acre than any other land in the world. The Air Ministry had to pick the most level land for the air field, but the level land is the best farming land, the easiest to cultivate. Farmers who families had owned and farmed the same land for many generations found themselves dispossessed. Bulldozers came, smashing down the hedges and ditches. Trees were hauled out by the roots. Mountains of sand were carried and dumped in the middle of growing crops. Train loads of rubble from the blitzed areas of London were used to lay the foundation.
Tens of thousands of British workers toiled through the wet and cold winter weather, working long hours of overtime, seven days a week, mixing the concrete, laying the runways and building huts and hangers. Soon acres of concrete lay where the acres of corn had stretched before.
At dusk, the Englishmen drove around the deserted perimeter tracks in a car with sporting guns pointing out of the windows and shot at the partridges as they came home to rest. The first American arrivals stared in amazement as looking like a load of gangsters, the sportsmen rolled by in the gloaming. Come what may, the Englishman has to have his sport!
Soon the first big bombers from the States, the Liberators and Fortresses, began to arrive. Then came the fighters. Village communities, numbering only a few hundred people, found themselves with several thousand Americans on their doorsteps, in their shops and parks, and very soon in their homes. In many parts of the Eastern Counties, the American population outnumbered the British.
It was not easy at first. The Americans found us cold, glum and angular, with our severe ways and quiet superior glances. And the children – what pests they were with their eternal requests for “gum, chum”. But you, the Americans, were so good to them, they loved you and called you their American uncles. You were their heroes too. There were many problems of adjustment, but most were met with a grain of humor and an ounce of tact.
Soon after the Americans arrived, a Piper Cub, which always seemed to be having engine trouble and landing every day for temporary repairs, became a well-known feature in the lives of the villagers. The mystery was solved when it was discovered that the pilot always took the occasion of his breakdown to buy as many shell-eggs as the farmer on whose land he descended would sell him. It was an enterprising scheme to replenish the commissars of one the Eighth Air Force.
How to do the laundry for these thousands of men from across the seas suddenly planted in the middle of us? From the American angle, I guess it must have seemed that all the villagers charged high prices and did not do the job too well at all. But, from the British point of view, the problem was two-fold – soapy and socially. Our soap ration was barely adequate to keep our own hands clean. And, socially, it was not considered “quite the thing” by the ladies to do wash. However, in village after village, the word was passed, “I’ll do it if Mrs. King will. What’s good enough for Mrs. Crane is good enough for me”. Soon, every home had a share in keeping shirts, socks and hankies of the Eighth Air Force clean, mended and ironed.
Every community plotted and planned to make the American guests feel at home. In one village, there is an old building dating back from the 15th century. The ground floor has bars on its windows. It was used by the old feudal lords as a prison. The village ladies fixed this place, painted it themselves, furnished it, decorated it and turned it into a Welcome Club for the Eighth Air Force. Every night volunteers served refreshments and held dances, debates and card parties. Few Americans airmen who spent their evenings at this Welcome Club making friends with the village people could guess they were being entertained in an old jail which, no doubt, had been used to imprison many of those who were unlucky not to book a passage on the Mayflower and got left behind.
What did the Eighth Air Force think of the Eastern Counties? Not too badly, we hope. At any rate, thousands of them married English girls in these years of endurance and victory.
Bochain’s Home Guard, over two million strong, was at first armed with pikes and cudgels, but finally with some of the best weapons of warfare. They drilled in the evenings and weekends, and stood ready for four years to fight the enemy if he landed on these shores. The British Home Guard was originally enlisted to defend their own towns and villages, each man to stand, fight, and die if need be, amid the streets and houses that he knew and loved. When the American bases began to spring up like monster mushrooms all over the Eastern Counties, the question arose of who should defend them against possible enemy airborne attack. In most places, the Military High Command delegated this duty to the Home Guard, by then a highly skilled and heavily armed body of trained men.
The Eastern Counties have a sense of eternal values about them. They are the great invasion belt of British history. Across the counties have swept the Danes, Dutch, Normans, Romans, and many more, and have left their traces of habit and language behind them. As the plough broke the soil between the vast air bases, alive and throbbing with the amazing machinery of the modern age, it turned up ancient pottery, Roman coins, weapons of flint and iron, fossils, skulls and bones.
When the Germans dropped their bombs around East Anglia, it was often found that the old buildings stood the shock better than modern constructions of brick and stone. Maybe the old buildings of the Eastern Counties have a bit of give to them. They swayed in the bomb blast and stuck together, while more modern buildings stayed rigid and disintegrated. These old buildings have endured for centuries.
Their bones are of oak, mostly old ships-tankers which sailed the seas in the days of John Cabot and Henry VII. The seamen used to exchange them with the farmers near the coast in return for supplies. The flesh of the buildings between the oak bones is wattle and daub. Wattle is just bunches of hedge sticks bound together with withies. Daub was fashioned from clay, water and cow’s dung to make it stick firm. It was mixed in holes in the ground and those forefathers of ours used their bare feet for the mixing. It was from homes like these, which still stand around the air bases, that the men and women set forth to board the Mayflower all those years ago, over two hundred.
In those far off days, almost all the farmers in the Eastern Counties used to hold a HORKEY. This was a celebration in the barn each year when the farmers and villagers sat down together to break bread, sing hymns and songs, dance, and thank God for the harvest. So, after the Pilgrim Fathers made their landfall in the West, and in 1621 had gathered their first harvest in safely, with memories of the barns and villages in England, they held a HORKEY.
That was the start of Thanksgiving, and while in America the festival of family and earth has been maintained and enriched, in England it has died out. This good old custom was revived in honor of the Eighth Air Force. At harvest time, in a four-hundred-year-old barn, over one hundred and fifty guests sat down together. American airmen and the people from the village sat beneath the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes and celebrated. Outside, the bombers rolled on like thunder in formation. Inside, beneath the oak beams and rafters, decorated with sheaves of wheat, golden-globed marigolds and hedge blossoms; sat free men, united in a common crusade against evil, able to enjoy the simple faith which turns to God when the harvest is home.
At Christmas time many of the Americans put on shows for the children – parties and shows which the children will never forget. The young guests were transported to the bases in the hundreds. There was a huge tree, decorations, games, a present for each child, any amount of candy, and above all, huge quantities of ice cream.
When the jeeps and trucks came back to the villages in the darkness, the children stumbled out of them with their eyes shining like stars and their cheeks red as holly berries with excitement. “Look what our American Uncles gave us,” they said. Remember that many of these children, growing up in the war years, had never known a Christmas like that before. They will think of American Uncles for the rest of their lives whenever the candlelight falls softly on the dark green branches of the Christmas tree and parties and presents in the air.
The American airmen joined in the Christmas caroling with the with the villagers. It was heartwarming.
Well, the time came to say goodbye. The men of the Eighth Air Force shared so many things with us in those last tremendous years which ended on V. E. Day.
When a man has passed through the valley of the shadow of death with a friend at his side, he never feels quite the same towards that friend as he did before and he cleaves to him forever. Our nation passed through the valley of death, and you came in your youth, strength and daring. In the majesty of your industrial might and power, your crossed 2,000 miles of ocean of you own free will to take that journey with us. How can we, the English, ever forget you?
Every man in the US Eighth Air Force has been an ambassador for his nation, and the job they have done in the building of new affection and understanding between our two democracies will live forever.
