European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - May 30, 1991, Darmstadt, Hesse F ? Quot >"1 1 r i Quot s j j pm j i it above a maintenance shop framed by a deteriorating Quot doorway lies silent and unused. Right Lavenham s Only remaining runway refuses to die continued from Page i. Another half Milt or so the b-17 will make up its own mind whether it s going to Fly. You won t know for sum. Until you con count every Leaf on those Trees charging1 no you from the other end of the runway at 90 Miles an hour at. this it s a real love Hale relationship a you be got with this Metal the Meadow finally turns into a verdant blur and All you can think about is those Trees you keep the a bomber glued to the runway wringing every last mile per. Hour out of the remaining inches of Cement. When there s no More Cement left and the co Pilot sucks in his breath you know it s time to pull Back on the control wheel. The massive Condor bounces a couple of times and with a Little coaxing. Pleading. ,. Swearing. It Breaks free of the ground inching its Way Over the treo lops and toward the sky spectacular takeoffs became almost commonplace for flight Crews of the . 8lh air Force flying out of the farm Fields of the English Countryside in the second ,. Quot great both men and machines were asked to do far More than they were Ever designed to do. Sometimes they were not up to the task. The numbers were always against them by 1944, the average lifespan of a b-17 and its Crew was 15 missions. They were assigned 25. An overloaded by 7 was terribly. Unforgiving of any momentary lapse of attention on the part of its Pilot. The War May have made men out of boys but it also made junkyards out of air planes. If the air a fully armed and tightly flown formation o b-17s could throw 30 tons of Lead per minute into the swarm of enemy fighters surrounding it but St Luhe lighters would find a Hole and punch their Way through. Fighting the numbers was a Way of life but it was no Way to live 1the War is gone now,1 and so Are most of the Crews a their air planes. But what happens to old airfields when they die with a bit of Luck maybe they Don t die at All. Maybe they just live on rolling Meadows of East Anglia Airfield clings tenaciously to its past in the Suffolk Farmland a Little Over a mile North of the town o Lavenham and 10 Miles Southeast of Bury St. Edmunds there smack in. The Middle of the John Pawsey farm it lib a sprawling tribute to the members of the 487th bomb 4 stripes Magazine May 30, 1991
