Finally, mission accomplished: Revisiting my WWII bomber air base

The mission had to be aborted, you might say, nearly 61 years ago when I first tried to visit the site of my old World War II air base in northeast England.

After a harrowing London-to-Norwich 110-mile drive on the left side of mostly single-lane roads with my wife and two children, 8 and 12, which at times seemed as heart-thumping as any of the thirteen B-24 bomber missions I had flown as a 20-year-old radio gunner, we were denied access to the property,

What had been the Attlebridge village home of our 466th Bombardment Group, one of fourteen 8th Air Force B-24 bomber bases, was now the largest turkey farm in Europe. And Bernard Matthews, the owner, responded to my telephone request for permission to visit the property in a polite but firm tone.

“Impossible,” he said. “The farm is quarantined because some of the turkeys are diseased. We cannot allow any visitors."

Better planning 11 years ago and a gracious British couple’s commitment to helping former American airmen with their sentimental journeys produced a different outcome.

Ted Clarke, a retired computer programmer, and his wife joined us at our motel on the outskirts of Norwich. We gladly accepted his offer to do the driving. After paying to fill up his small car with gas, we were off. The Norwich library, part of a newly built downtown $100 million structure called Millennium Forum, was our first stop. A section serves as a memorial to the 44,472 airmen of the 8th Air Force, 2nd Air Division, who fought and died during the war. Hundreds of books about the U.S. line its shelves, sharing space with wartime memorabilia.

Downtown Norwich bustled with hundreds of pedestrian shoppers, doubledecker red buses, and stop-and-go traffic, a sharp contrast from those days when the blacked-out area vibrated with exploding bombs and ever-increasing formations of American and Royal Air Force bombers en route to German targets.

A number of flashy new stores lined Wensum Road, the main shopping hub. The creaky, 300-year-old Maid’s Head Hotel where we stayed in 1963 had undergone another renovation but was as different as night and day from the modern, motel-like Post House motel that held our reservations on this trip.

Nearby, Samson Hercules, the old dance hall we called “Muscles Hall,” was still luring young couples but now as a disco called Ritzy’s. Aside from the towering 12th-century Norwich Cathedral, Maid’s Head and Muscles Hall, nothing seemed familiar. Almost the entire city seemed to have been rebuilt.

German air raids had killed or injured more than 1,400 residents of the city and destroyed or damaged hundreds of homes between 1940 and 1945. How well I remember the words of our pilot, Richard Lester, as we passed through devastated sections of the city on the way to our airbase:

“Boy, they must have big termites here,” he quipped.

Norwich and Attlebridge, site of the airfield, are separated by eight miles of farms and woodlands. One of the farms, Clarke pointed out, was operated by a former American airman married to an English woman. “They made a small fortune by introducing a computerized method of raising and feeding pigs,” he said.

And, suddenly, there it was — the airfield property. Not a sound, no planes, just a field of weeds, concrete rubble and turkey sheds. You'd never have believed this flat, weed-infested terrain was once the launching pad for more than 200 B-24 bomber sorties against Nazi Germany’s war machine.

Shuttered turkey houses sat amid broken runways. The airfield control tower had been refurbished and was now headquarters for Matthews’ vast farm operations. There wasn’t a turkey in sight. No use asking permission to enter one of the turkey coops, Clarke cautioned.

“They’re very touchy about that,” he explained. “Afraid you might be one of those animal rights people who’s been raising hell, giving them trouble by complaining that the turkeys are too confined and unable to roam freely.”

What was the base theater was now a gutted shell and pile of bricks. Only the projection room portion of the building remained.

“Your barracks was probably up there,” Clarke said, pointing from a narrow dirt road to a thick cluster of trees. “That’s where the enlisted men’s quonset buildings were.”

There wasn’t a building in sight — just more forest.

The most interesting part of the journey was meeting Cathy Thomson, an outgoing young mother who with her late husband had bought three acres of the property that includes the onetime base headquarters and briefing room buildings. The historic nature of the property is what grabbed them, she said.

The frame, one-story, former base headquarters building was their five-bedroom home for more than 10 years, and an adjacent quonset building, formerly used for briefing flight crews, served as a giant storage shed.

“We used to keep our pigs in the briefing room building,” Thomson said.

“Former 466th men will always be welcome,” she added. “It’s a historic site, and you’re a part of it."

Well, it was a long time ago. Finally, though, as sole survivor of a nine-member B-24 bomber crew and with gracious hosts like the Clarkes and Mrs. Thomson, the mission was accomplished.

Si Liberman, 99, a retired editor of the Asbury Park (N.J.) Sunday Press, lives in Palm Beach.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Back in England: Revisiting my WWII bomber base