We quickly moved on to the next site at Mendlesham.
Medndlesham was the home of the 34th Bomb Group and the airfield is about 3 miles SE of the village.
34th Bomb Group
Now its all one huge industrial estate. We couldn't find the memorial so stopped at the gate house to the industrial estate and asked for directions. The guard was quite positive that we , a. couldn't enter the site and b. there was nothing left of the airfield. He did however tell us where the memorial was and that its was a difficult place to access. We thanked him, drove back to the main road, turned left and almost imediately left down a small grass cut-in and there was the memorial.
Or rather there it wasn't !.
The brickwork was in place but some theiving pikey bastids had stolen the actual plaque !. We couldn't believe it but stopped to take some pics anyway. The memorial gravel was looking decidely unloved and untended and there were a few miserable looking offerings next to the wall. Tony and I spent about 10 minutes removing some of the weeds from in front of the memorial wall, but I'm afraid that without gloves, we left the thistles in place (not very heroic compared to what the youngsters went through admitidly !) but we felt a bit better.
Parking space is limited to probably two cars and you are pulling off / back onto, a very very busy, very fast road so be carefull and wait for a gap in the traffic !. Feeling rather despondant we left with heavy heart as this had put a definite 'downer' on our trip. The missing plaque was made of bronze and put in place way back in 1949 !. So no airfield and plaque, it felt as though the World had forgotten all about the sacrifice of the 34th Bomb Group.
However... fast forward to next day and when driving past the memorial, we spotted what looked like a Nissen hut with a tallish brick chimney down a side road. Tony has an amazing ability to make his car act like the CGI fighters in the latest warfilms....in other words we executed a perfect 90 degree right turn(pulling 9 G !!!) and with no apparent loss of forward momentum, found ourselves travelling down yet another small road on our right this time to pull outside the building. This is now a small engineering workshop but was an original building and we found a bit of original peri track to the piccie of the '17 wheel on.
This cheered us up no end. When we'd finished, out trusty sat nav said to carry on the way we were pointing. so we did and not two corners later, came face to face with the main runway !.
Moral of the story is...dont trust gate guards as they have absolutely no bl**dy idea what they are talking about !!
I'll leave Tony to add the pics we took on the runway plus any others.
And on a happier note, back at work on Tuesday, I was looking for details about the missing plaque. It was stolen around a year ago and not recovered. There are actually a lot of people heavlily involved in the memorial and the really good news is that according to a local meeting held in the first week of this Month (Oct) a new memorial will be built to a similar size, placed this time in the churchyard (St Mary's) and a replacement of the missing plaque has been modelled by a supporter (not in bronze this time) and will take pride of place when the memorial is built.