Through The Flak, Fog and Flame

USAAF Emergency Landings at RAF Woodbridge

ISBN 9798549767973

THROUGH THE FLAK, FOG & FLAME

USAAF emergency landings at Woodbridge in WW2

Built specifically to accommodate seriously damaged aircraft returning from missions against Occupied Europe, RAF Woodbridge (previously RAF Sutton Heath) in Suffolk was expanded to include an enormous runway, three times longer and five times wider than the standard heavy bomber landing strip. RAF Woodbridge is estimated to have taken 4200 emergency landings from the time it was built on late 1943 until the end of the war in Europe. On some months, more Americans used the field than the RAF who built it. Thousands of lives are thought to have been saved - half of them American crews of bombers and fighters. Its two miles long runway carved out of forests enabled aircraft without hydraulics, brakes, flaps and even an undercarriage to land safely when other airfields would have meant an inevitable crash off the end of the landing strip.

• A day-by-day account, in some cases minute-by-minute, using extracts from official reports and USAAF unit histories
• Based on the hand-written entries in the Station Log related to American use of Woodbridge - these brief entries are greatly expanded and enhanced
• Statements, correspondence and diary extracts from the American veterans who experienced or witnessed the dramas
• Brief stories relating to the airmen and their planes, many of which sported the flamboyant nose art so frowned upon by RAF officialdom but admired by the majority
• 118 photographs, 277 pages in a soft cover

© Ray Bowden 11 August 2022