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| The Airmen's Bar |
The Swan Hotel in Lavenham was an appropriate venue for today’s launch of The Eighth in the East Heritage Guide. This publication offers valuable
assistance to visitors wishing to access
the many local sites that are connected to the activities of the 8th
United States Army Air Force whose forces arrived in East Anglia between 1942 and 1945.
The Guide has been produced, thanks to a grant from the
Heritage Lottery Fund. It has been put together by a group of museums, individual volunteers and
enthusiasts with interest in what has become known as the ‘friendly invasion’ of our
area by our wartime allies. The publication offers visitors to East Anglia some 20 sights to visit. These include well known places such as the Cambridge
American Cemetery and Memorial at Madingley and the American Air Museum at
Duxford, part of the Imperial War Museum.
Also in the mix however are smaller museums such as the Rougham Control
Tower Museum outside Bury St Edmunds and the Wattisham Station Heritage Museum
(open by appointment only).
Also included in the Guide is the Swan Hotel itself. Famous as the home of the USAAF’s 487th
Bomb Group, the Hotel’s Airmen’s Bar still retains on its wall the evocative
signatures of young servicemen from the nearby airfields at Lavenham and
Sudbury for whom it was a favourite watering hole.
The Guide is intended to be just a start. Further funding is being sought to upgrade
the project website and to further encourage visitors to explore this
fascinating story. A link to the website is available HERE.
Not many veterans of the 8th are still alive. Only 15, all in their nineties, attended a
recent reunion in New Orleans. In
addition to promoting tourism, this initiative should serve to keep the memory
alive of the soldiers and airmen who came to our assistance during the darkest
period of the Second World War. Many of
them never saw their homeland again.
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| The WW2 airfield at Deopham in Norfolk today |
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