England

In the middle of March we went to England. The purpose of our voyage was to track down the places where these five men trained and departed from. We began by visiting the Imperial War Museum in London, and found fascinating photos in their archive we have never seen in any publication.

We then drove up to the small town of Wansford, which borders the Kings Cliffe airfield where Walter Perra trained. There we met with Toni Palenski, who served as our guide. Toni’s father, who fought in the war, worked for a man named Jack Pike, who used to farm Kings Cliffe. He has lived in the area his whole life. Walking through the fields where runways used to be, Max and Toni talked about what the area looked like back then, and how the men were absorbed into the community during that brief stretch of time.

Like many places we had seen in Normandy that had become unexpected hosts to war machines, at Kings Cliffe field in England there is the occasional debris to be found that are vestiges of what once happened there. For instance, we found unused gun camera tape, from when a pilot crashed his plane there while training.

The next day we went with Toni to another important airfield – the one in North Witham. Concealed by trees, we walked along the now interminably quiet stretches of pavement where at one time Gene, Bob Sechrist, Jim White, and the other 101st AB paratroopers took off from.

We then drove on to Slapton Sands, where Norval and the other members of the 29th Infantry Division trained, and where there now stands a memorial to their efforts. We also took a trip to the vertical cliffs of Burton Bradstock, where the rangers trained for climbing Pointe du Hoc.

We also visited Southwick House, where the historic decision to begin the Normandy campaign was made. In fact, the original map that SHAEF used in their planned stands preserved behind glass just as it was on the morning of the 5th.

We arrived there not just to film the building as it stands now, but rather we had hoped to capture the atmosphere of that tense morning, when as Ike later described, it was storming so hard that the house was shaking. What had not been preserved, of course, were the precise weather conditions during which the decision was made: it was overcast, but it was not raining. But thanks to Rhona Mitchell and the generous grounds crew, we were able to hook up a firehouse to the water pump about 100 ft from the side of the building and voila! We made it rain at Southwick House. They say that weather in England can change in the blink of an eye – that was definitely the case at Southwick House that day.

 

Our final destination was the seaside town of Weymouth, where GIs departed from on their way to the Normandy coast. The main street that runs along the beach still closely resembles the images of it that were captured by Signal Corps men back in 1944. From a boat we obtained through our new friends George Afedakis and Richard English, we were able to film the landscape as we pulled away from it, experiencing for ourselves the last vision of England the soldiers would have had as they headed toward the Normandy coast.

 

 

 

 

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