Echoes

Description

Once, the fields and farmlands of wartime England were alive with airfields, No less so than Lincolnshire, where it was said, you were never more than eight miles form an RAF airfield. This was the heart of the RAF’s wartime Bomber Command where as many as 28 RAF bomber stations were active throughout the Second World War. And in that time, the hangars and messes, the workshops and watchtowers of these Stations saw their fullest share of life and death.

More than 57,000 aircrew; pilots, flight engineers, navigators, wireless operators, bomb aimers and air gunners were shot down by enemy fire or lost to sheer bad luck during tours of operations, often in circumstances of extreme and unimaginable horror. Their average age was just 22.

Today most of those Stations have long disappeared; returned to farmland with little reminder of what took place there. But here and there will stand a reminder, like a long-abandoned airfield watchtower. The nearest building to the aircraft and the runways; the focal point of aircrews departing for raids over enemy territory. And a prayed-for return flight.

And sometimes, though the body may be gone, that youthful energy doesn’t die. And for some of those lost young airmen of decades past, their now-derelict watchtower still holds a place where the echoes of lost youth and unfulfilled promise return….

© Copyright Simon W Atack 2022