Once we'd finished with Mendlesham, it was back in the car and off to the last but one destination for our first day of travels and that was to the 493rd Bomb Group Memorial and Tower Museum. The Memorial is under an Oak tree near the Headquarters about 3 miles West of Woodbridge at Debach.
493rd Bomb Group
Helton's Hellcats 493rd BG(H) Debach
Tony and I had a bit of a discussion on how to actualy pronounce Debach...was it said like 'Debatch', Deeback, De-back ?...we had no idea !. Well, we had the satnav set up so followed the directions and ended up on what looked like a farm....hmmmmmm. So we stopped and had a chat with a gentleman who was doing some work on an old US Army truck, figuring that he might know where we had to go. Best thing we did !
Turned out that not only was he the owner of the truck, he owned the land the museum was on and also farmed the locale !. Once we explained what we where doing he couldn't have been more helpfull. I must apologise for I cannot for the life of me remember his name or his colleague who said "Follow me and I'll take you there and also open up the Museum for you !". So we basically had the Muesum and its surrounding buildings opened up for us to have a good look around and we had some brilliant anecdotes and useful bits of info from the guys. They were both very knowledgable and genuinely interested in what they have on site. Top marks to both.
Wow....just about sums up what we found. The Tower had been renovated and some of the nearby buildings converted into extra displays for the museum and the surrounding area was well very well tended and you could tell it was looked after by people who have passion in what they were trying to achieve and took pride in thier efforts. To stand on the top of a genuine WW2 Watch Tower and look out over the surrounding land is a very humbling experience !
Parked on a hardstanding right next to the Tower was an airfield controllers caravan replete with original nose perspex from a '17 !!.
Heres some of the pics we took at this gem of a Museum. If you ever get the chance, spend at least a day here and you wont regret it at all. We were told that the airfield often gets 'bounced' both by 'Sally B' and also by Maurice Hammond in his '51's 'Marinell' and 'Janie'. Apparently, you hear Maurice and have no idea from which direction his coming....but he's always 'Low' !
I'll leave Tony to add pics from the runway, the internal shots from the Museum and a few more from the Tower, I might add some more later on as well. Tony will also introduce a 'third' crew member !
And incidentaly, we were both wrong, its pronounced 'Debbitch' !