August 31st, 2019 : Grafton UK

Plunk in the middle of England is Grafton Underwood, village and civil parish in the Kettering borough of Northamptonshire, England.
Quiet, rural, the 2011 census counted 146.



In The War To End All Wars, WW I, I’ve heard the US sat out the war and came in at the last minute to hog all the glory.
Since pressure from the US caused the Germans to reign in their unrestricted warfare with submarines, and they still sank 5,000
ships, many of them US flagged, when they said it was unrestricted again, we had to go kick ass. It had been a trench stalemate
too long and needed fresh troops with fresh moves to break it up. Besides, it was getting expensive since Britain ran out of money
in 1916 we were paying the bill.

I hear the same thing about The Big One, WW II. There were an awful lot of USians who didn’t want to get into another European
bar brawl, although we were supplying materiel and food to the good guys. These people remember the lives lost, 40,000 to just
the flu from being jammed in barracks. Mothers remembered their sweet innocent young boys coming home after meeting the
Mademoiselle from Armentières... the shame . But when the Japs attacked us the argument was over, unrestricted warfare,
unconditional surrender, says the awakened sleeping giant filled with terrible resolve.

The people of Grafton have a memory like Pepperidge Farm. They were appreciative, even fond, of the 384th Bomb Group of the
USAAF 8th Air Force, who were flying out of the airbase a couple miles away. The fly boys probably enjoyed meeting the locals,
and the ladies sent from the cities to work on the farms.



The church was built in the late 12th century and had been renovated in 1890, they even took down the bells for a retune at
least 7 huge bells(on their facebook page), so in the 1980s it was due again, which is when the B17 window was added.
Seems a little strange for a B-17 to be in the window of 700 year old church but any church with an active congregation will
change the facility to keep up with them, even luxuries like electric lights and indoor plumbing.



Damn, this was a deeeep rabbit hole.


link

link

Neeto Burrito

There were an astonishing number of airfields in the UK during WW2 with a particular concentration in Norfolk, Suffolk and Lincolnshire.

A few survive to this day as operational airfields and fragments of others exist as private strips but most eventually returned to agriculture, hangars being especially useful as grain stores.

Grafton Underwood as it is today...

Attachment 68581

...and as it was in WW2:

Attachment 68582

Unusually, belts of trees now stand on the alignment of the wartime concrete runways and the star pattern rides still exist in the woodland to the east.

Note the memorial site on what would have been the first hundred yards or so of the runway.

Memorial Site Street View

Link

It's nice that they remember.

Evidently many of them kept in touch over the years, letters, vacation visits, child support checks, whatever. Then the internet made it easy for anyone to do it casually on the Church site and the Bomber Boys site.

This is cool, very cool.