Qualla: RAF Great Ashfield

RAF Great Ashfield: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On the morning of 6 March 1944, Brigadier General Russell Wilson lifted off from a Suffolk airfield in a radar-equipped B-17 Flying Fortress, leading a formation of the 385th Bombardment Group toward Berlin. It was the largest American daylight raid yet sent against the German capital, and it became the costliest mission the Eighth Air Force ever flew. Every other 385th aircraft came home that day. Wilson's did not. Flak hit one engine, set it ablaze, and the bomber exploded over enemy territory. Four men, including Medal of Honor recipient First Lieutenant John C. Morgan, parachuted out. Eight died. The field they had taken off from, just south of the Suffolk village of Great Ashfield, is now mostly back under wheat.

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RAF Great Ashfield: Before the Americans

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There had been an airfield here since the First World War, when the Royal Flying Corps used a patch of grass as a landing strip. The RAF kept it for training between the wars and called it RAF Elmswell. When the United States Army Air Forces came to Suffolk in 1942, looking for f...

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RAF Great Ashfield: The Square-G Group

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The 385th Bombardment Group arrived from Great Falls, Montana on 19 June 1943. Their B-17s carried the Square-G tail code that became their signature. Four squadrons made up the group: the 548th, 549th, 550th and 551st. Within two months they had earned a Distinguished Unit Citat...

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RAF Great Ashfield: The Crew

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

B-17 crews were small communities, ten young men crammed into a freezing aluminium tube at 25,000 feet, breathing oxygen through rubber masks. Pilot, co-pilot, navigator, bombardier, flight engineer, radio operator, ball turret gunner, two waist gunners, tail gunner. They flew at...

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RAF Great Ashfield: Peace and the Slow Return to Wheat

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

After V-E Day, the 385th flew prisoners of war out of Germany to Allied centres and dropped food into the still-starving Netherlands. They returned to Sioux Falls, South Dakota on 28 August 1945 and were inactivated. The airfield reverted to RAF control as a bomb storage site und...

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RAF Great Ashfield: What Remains

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Walk into the parish church of Great Ashfield village today and you find a memorial to the men of the 385th who never came home. Across the ford, a stone slab carries a bronze plaque to the crews of the Square-G Fortresses. The fields where they revved up Wright Cyclone engines a...

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