Bedford is fortunate in having
two excellent private airfield museums dedicated to curating and displaying material from the Second World War. Sections of the American 8th Air
Force were based in north Bedfordshire (& elsewhere in East Anglia), engaged in aerial bombardment of
occupied Europe as part of the Allied
offensive. Both Museums are just off the
A6 road from Bedford to Rushden.
Twinwood Airfield is well known for its Glen
Miller Museum,
original airfield control tour and a range of WWII airfield buildings and
wartime displays. Slightly
less well known, but well worth a visit, is the 306th Bombardment
Group Museum at Thurleigh Airfield (now a Business Park), sited in an original
wartime building donated by Dr Jonathan Palmer, of Bedford Autodrome, and
opened on 27 July 2002.
Thurleigh is the
creation of its curators, retired locals Ralph and Daphne Franklin, who have
built it up over the last 10 years to what is now a superb collection of
material (much of it donated by veteran US servicemen and their families), both
military and social. Not only does it
evoke the experiences of the American servicemen who served there from 1942 to
1945, but also has excellent displays on Home Front life: a 1940s kitchen, a
local pub, wartime GI-bride weddings, and the ‘land girls’ of the Women’s Land
Army.
On Sunday
8th July I joined scores of others who gathered, despite the
occasional rain, to celebrate the museum’s 10th anniversary and to
witness the re-dedication of the memorial to the 306th Bombardment
Group who served here during the Second World War, and many of whom lost their
lives in the daylight raids on Germany. Wartime vehicles, re-enactors and the superb
Mainline Big Band turned up to help recreate the wartime atmosphere with Glen
Miller music and dancing in the adjacent marquee.
Dr Vernon
Williams, a history professor at Abilene
Christian University
in Texas, attended the event to represent the
306 Bomb Group Association which is still active in the USA. He is webmaster of their online site and editor of the newsletter Echoes. Vernon is quite well-known in
north Bedfordshire as well as in Cambridgeshire and elsewhere in England as the
director of a major oral-history project entitled the East Anglia Air War
Project. Beginning in 2003, he has
conducted countless interviews with US veterans, both flight and ground crew,
who served here during the war, and also those English people who came in
contact with them during those years.
His aim has been to explore not only the operation of the air war – he
is a military historian – but also the nature of the relationships developed
between the host population and their American ‘cousins’. He visits the East of England twice a year to
conduct his research. He is currently
working on writing a number of books based on his extensive research. I, for
one, am looking forward to his book on the Anglo-American relationships forged
locally during wartime. (He interviewed some of ‘my land girls’ and extracts
from their video interviews have appeared in some of his historical documentary
films, for example, the DVD Thurleigh at War).
Barbara
and Charles Neal also attended, representing the UK's 306th Bombardment Group Association. Barbara is the secretary of
the organisation and Charles heads the Second Generation efforts within the
306th BGA. The two of them laid wreaths
during the Memorial ceremony.
Small
specialist museums such as these carry out a useful role in complementing the
work of the major museums by introducing members of the public, some of whom
are possibly intimidated by the larger ones, to topics and periods in our
history which deserve our attention.
Both
Twinwood Airfield (open Sundays only) and Thurleigh Airfield museums (Saturday
& Sundays) are open each weekend during the main ‘tourist’ season. For further information about hours and events see Twinwood's and BGA's websites.
Stuart Antrobus
