Friday: I set off on Friday morning just at the end of the 'school run'. I was headed for East Anglia and Caister-on-Sea. The Blackwall tunnel was good and I was through and into north London within half-an-hour of setting out. I ignored the signs for the M11 and stuck to the A12. Through the suburbs of Ilford and Romford and then we were out into the Essex countryside.
Essex - Suffolk - Norfolk. Those o so flat counties with those large, expansive skies. The sky today was full of grey rolling, sometimes boiling dark, black clouds heavy with the promise of more rain. The A12 had light traffic especially after the Interchange with the M25 Dartford crossing. And as the larger towns of Essex fell behind us so the traffic became even lighter.The signs for Colchester and Ipswich came up. Familiar names on the secondary signage - Dedham, Flatford - reminded me that the border between Essex and Suffolk is more often called 'Constable Country after the painter John Constable, founder of the Royal Academy.
11:30. I stopped for coffee at a Little Chef at the Interchange of the A12/A140, on the outskirts of Ipswich. Then driving on up the A140 which the map tells me is an old Roman Road to Norwich and Kings Lynn. It is flat, straight; arrow straight and pointed right to the heart of Norwich.Listening to the Cistercian Monks of the Austrian Abbey of stift Heiligenkreuz on the car CD. On the flat plain, driving up that straight road I can see on my right hand strange shapes in the fields; square mounds not quite natural looking even when they have small copses on top of them; an old and disintergrating Nissan hut in the middle of a green field of wheat. A sign catches my eye as I flash past; 338 B(ombardment) G(roup) Memorial.
Sixtyfive years ago the skies above my head were full of huge bombers. The flatlands of Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk were the homes to thousands of American boys. Boys from Missouri, Mississippi, Illinois, California, Utah, New York, Texas, Virginia, Massachussettes. All over the United States young boys came to be 'flyboys' and to fight for the Freedom of Europe. Day after day these incredibly brave young men got into their planes - B17's B24's P51's, P47's and P38's. They flew out over the coastlands of East Anglia towards fortress Europe where they killed and were killed in their scores of hundreds for our freedom.
They flew high, so high that they were perpetually cold even wrapped up in their flying gear. The thin, aluminium skins of their craft offered no protection from the flying shards of Anti-Aircraft munitions, twenty millimetre cannons of the Luftwaffe Focke-Wulfs and Messerscmitts. The Bombers wewre blown out of the sky, the wreckage falling, sometimes almost gracefully down twenty or twentyfive thousand feet while friends in following planes prayed and shouted for someone, anyone to "get the hell out of there". Chutes would be counted - 1,2,3.Is that it?
Bombs were dropped - hundreds, thousands, on the roofs of the towns below. People were killed because they were Germans. Sometimes the dead were even Nazis. Explosions, fires, chaos.
Planes would come home, sometimes limping, even the pilot not knowing what kept the plane in the air after the pasting it had received from the German defences. Black smoke pouring out of the engines, holes in the fuselage large enough to drive a Jeep through, blood, gallons of blood, lying in pools along the companion ways as badly wounded crews tried to help each other to live. Just a little bit more. There is the coast, there is the beach, there is the hedgerow, And somewtimes they fell short. Fell into the North Sea - Here lies an unknown Airman recovered from the sea, March 21st 1944. Known only unto God. All this flashed through my mind as, coincidently, the track of the Album Chant began to play the Gregorian chant for the Requiem Mass.
I visited the site of the memorial to the 100 Heavy Bombardment Group, also just off the A140, near Abbess Althorpe. Unfortunately it was not open but it wasn't hard to get into the grounds. An Aircontrol Tower, a couple of sheds, a Nissan hut. Walking out into the green wheat field uncovered the concrete runway. So long ago now. The evening air rustles the wheat. A lark trills high above. Hard to imagine thirty B17's thundering down that runway on an early summers morning; the roar of the Pratt & Witney engines and the wash of the propellors, lumbering heavily into the air, heavy with a full tank of fuel and 10,000 lbs of bombs destined for the shunting yards of Mannheim.
Lest we forget. These young Americans died for our Freedom.
Caister-on-Sea. As a boy I spent my summer holidays in Caister with grand ma. I loved the place and i knew every inch of the beach and the Dunes. My reason for visiting today however was to visit the Caister Cemetery extension of the Great Yarmouth MunicipalCemetery.I am trying to locate the grave of my grandfather, William Fagan. He was a 'soldier of the Great War', indeed, he was a regular soldier who went to France in August 1914. He 'copped it' in October or November 1914. He was hit by a shell and buried in his trench and suffered apalling injuries to his chest and legs. Additionally, he went 'mad' (shell shock). He became a patient in various military asylums including Maghill, Merseyside, now the Special Secure Hospital. He ended his days as a pensioner at the Royal Naval Hospital, Great Yarmouth. an establishment which had been founded in 1881 to take the mentally ill sailor (due to drink and Syphillis usually). During the first war it took many of the 'shell shocked', those who were considered 'incurables'.Into the 1950's it still had a ward of WW1 veterans,
The cemetry at Caister has several blocks for the Naval Hospital, and the first internments there date to circa 1907. Although I thought I looked very carefully I did have to check several hundred headstones and I failed to locate William. I am very disappointed especially as I have a memory as a 7 year old, being shown his grave. There was a block of internments dating to between 1949 and 1959 and William ought to have been in that block (he died in October 1956) but I couldn't spot him. I think I will have to write to the Superintendant of Cemeteries and see if they have a registration for him.
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