Station 115 Shipdham: The Story of a USAAF Airfield

Author(s): Peter W. Bodle 

ISBN: 9781781554951
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The birth, growth and evolution of a Second World War airfield seen through the eyes of the people who were there.




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  • Contains many unpublished ey ewitness accounts

  • A sixty-year history of a unique 600-acre patch of East Anglia

  • Superbly illustrated with previously unseen black and white photographs

  • Stunning images of battle-damaged B-24 Liberators that were bloodied by the Luftwaffe over Nazi Germany


Station 115 Shipdham: The Story of a USAF Airfield tells of a 600 acre Second World War airfield built on Norfolk farmland in the early 1940s. It is a mere 10 minutes’ flying time from Norwich between the market towns of Dereham and Watton. It covers the gestation of the airfield from open arable farmland through the construction phase to its commissioning as a USAAF heavy bomber base in the frontline of the greatest conflict that the world has ever seen.

It covers the activities at the airfield during the war in detail and then moves on to describing its reversion to farmland in the Fifties. It then follows the re-emergence of the airfield, initially as a base for an air-taxi service and then incorporating a crop-spraying operation for the local intensive cereal industry. In the mid-Eighties, it became home to a flight training school and light aircraft maintenance base.

Finally, it evolved into a general aviation airfield providing a home for light aircraft used for recreation by keen amateur pilots in the Norfolk area.



BOOK ISBN 9781781554951
FORMAT 234 x 156 mm
BINDING Paperback
PAGES 176 pages
PUBLICATION DATE 15 January 2016
TERRITORY World
ILLUSTRATIONS 56 black-and-white photographs

 

 






 

Peter W. Bodle FRAeS started out in life as an engineer, became a designer and then an inventor by inventing the Passive Floor Path Marking System for passenger carrying aircraft. The company he started then is now the world’s leader in this technology. Fortunately, its success has allowed him the time to pursue his writing interests and has so far had almost twenty biographies and aviation history published. Bodle was a light aircraft pilot for almost twenty-five years and is married with four children and an ever growing number of grandchildren and great grandchildren.

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