Site #1
Wendling Airfield
Ben Jones - Wendling Researcher

The main airfield site was situated 1 mile South East of the village of Besston and 2 miles North West of Wendling village. It contained the bomb dump and the main technical site. Within in this site was to be found the control tower, the base fire department, crew rooms gas storage facilities and many of the maintenance facilities. The Link trainer was also on the site.

The airfield also was home to a small contingent of British Home Guard soliders. They were found on the South side of the field in a few scattered huts.

Wendling Control Tower - 1944

Airfields are always bleak places to work due to the cold winds and little shelter as this dramatic shot shows of Wendling's Control Tower. Taken during the winter months with snow on the ground and a overcast sky, one can clearly see how tough the ground crews work would have been in keeping the aircraft airworthy for the next mission.

Aerial photograph of Wendling taken in the spring of 1944. B-24 aircraft can be seen parked around the field on the dispersed hard stands. The Technical site is encompassed within the main airfield making up Site 1.

Just West of the Technical site sits Site 13, where the hospital and sick quarters were located. North of the Hospital is Site 2 or the Administrative buildings. Here were the group's briefing rooms and Norden bombsight storage facilities. Ben Burgess now utilizes these building.

Seen between runways 19 and 26 at the NNE side of the field, the firing butt was located where the aircraft guns were test fired. A B-24 can be seen with its tail gun pointing towards the butt.

In the bottom left of the picture, Honeypot Wood can be seen. It was here that munitions were stored using the natural camouflage of the woods. Just to the east of this was one of the two T-2 hangars on the field. The various buildings around this belonged to the base engineering depot.

Inside the taxi way and between runways 26 and 31 was a small skeet range.

An enlargement of the typical handstands located around Wendling's runways. In the top left corner of the photo one can see a lone B-24 parked on a handstand. This aircraft is 42-52548 S Jaw-Ja-Boy whose crew chief was Ernie Barber. His field built line shack can be seen to the left of the aircraft, with a concrete path leading up to it from the taxi way. This shack was one of the many that sprung up over the airfield. Most were built from the wooden bomb crates. In the lower right hand side of the photo is the outer edges of the Bomb Dump in Honeypot woods.

In the centre of the field was a small skeet range and to the north east corner of the field were two firing butts located at the end of a concrete turnaround.

A 'Little Friend' buzzes the field at Wendling. The P-47 appears to be flying over the top of the photographic building located towards the north end of the main technical site, having buzzed the 08 runway.

Squadron and Flight Office nissen hut.

Located to the north east of the control tower, this building served as the squadron's flight offices. To the right of the picture one can see the Floodlight trailer and tractor shed. Located behind these two buildings in the centre we can see one of Wendling's two T-2 hangars used for aircraft repair. A few pieces of equipment can be seen beside the T-2. Nothing of these buildings remain today. This photo appears to have been taken during the winter of 1944/1945.

A view looking north at Cannister farmhouse and barns. The owner at the time refused to move out of his house and told the officials during the building of the airfield that he was here long before them and refused to vacate his house. The outcome was that the main technical site was built around his property, much to the joy of the 'Yanks' stationed here as it was just a walk to fresh eggs and milk from their place of work! The main farm house is the only building surviving today. The farmhouse can be seen on the extreme left of the panoramic print taken from atop the control tower on the same site.

FOLLOWING PHOTOS TAKEN IN 1999


Firing Butts

The runways were in the A formation with the longest, 260, being 6000ft in length. Runways 010 and 130 were both 4200ft in length. The main contractor for the concrete runways was Taylor Woodrow Ltd with work beginning in 1942. It wasn't until September 1943 that it was first occupied by its tenants, the 392nd Bomb Group.

Main Runway

For the aircraft dispersal sites these consisted of 25 pans and later after the intial constuction another 26 loops were added. Each squadron of the 392nd were then assigned an area on the field. The 576th were on the hardstands on the NW corner of the field. The 577th were in the NE corner, the 578th to the SE next to the Bomb dump, and the 579th were in the SW corner.

Looking towards the 579th area on the field and the end of RW010

Wendling was built with two T-2 type hangars. One was located in the NW area of the airfield , the other in the SE corner.

Today, thanks to the efforts of a local turkey farmer, much of the runways still remain intact today. The perimeter taxiway also survives, and one can almost drive all the way around the field. The former technical site and its related buildings are unfortunately, long gone. Amazingly most of the outlines of where there were concrete pathways and foundations can still be seen in the freshly ploughed fields today. Even though concrete crushing machines have long since destroyed the foundations, from the air, the outlines can be clearly seen. Even as one walks the fields, where once stood a hundred or so buildings, you can still walk the pathways. The years of ploughing these fields still turn up the ghostly outlines.

The control tower remained on the site up until the early to mid 1980's when, by then, it was just an empty shell of a structure that had simply caved in on itsself. It was then simply bulldozed flat and the site cleared.

The only original part of the Technical site that remains today is an enterance road and a small concrete pad that sits aside a farmhouse. The farmhouse, known as Cannister farm, was surrounded by the technical site during the war. Now it sits as it did prior to the war, alone surrounded by empty fields. I worked for a hydraulic company that were based on this site so it was a daily visit for me. We operated out of a hangar not too disimilar to the wartime T-2 type. Now the site sits empty once again. Its hard to believe that this was the nerve centre of the field some 50 years ago, with all its briefing rooms and repair shops. Some things about airfields never change though, they are still cold and desolate places to work outside in, whether they are active of been closed for 50 years!