November 2018.
A connection across the generations; from another world war; a tenuous geographical link from across an ocean. An imprint from the past.
A stroll in the late autumn Norfolk sunshine in my home village sent me off on a tangent, and a departure from my usual subject matter. Three names calling out from a redbrick wall.
My forbears in the Crook family had roots since the early 1900’s at Overa Cottages, Eccles. But as the memory faded of their lost sons who perished in the clay of Flanders or the desert sands of Mesopotamia, or put down roots in Canada, literally just across the railway line from that old house, in 1942, a new world war came to them.
If you’re familiar with modern house builders, the name Taylor Woodrow is well known, but back in 1942 they were busy in the Breckland fields opposite the Crook farmhouse, constructing RAF Snetterton Heath. With that would come the boys of the 386th and 96th Bombardment Groups of the United States Eighth Army Airforce. Farm boys from across the ocean? A familiar tale.
Just as the Crook boys had dispersed around the world, another generation of sons found themselves on foreign soil fighting a war.
D.O. Steele, Texas, USA, ’43, Chauncy N Danner, Adelphi, Ohio, David H Schroeder, Ohio.
Three names, carved with a penknife tip, into the soft red brick wall of the White Horse pub at Kenninghall.
A couple of miles from the airfield. A lifetime away from home. A sanctuary from war and homesickness. Sons, fathers, brothers, husbands, comrades. Strangers.
By the time the B-17s stood across the cornfields at harvest time in 1943, the Crook family was long gone from Eccles. Soon the American boys would be gone too.
Like the Crook brothers in another war; memorials in stone. An unknown story, a hidden history.
Image © American Air Museum FRE5869
Further reading here:
https://www.americanairmuseum.com/archive/place/snetterton-heath
Researching their names, I found this link to an obituary for Chauncy N Danner:
https://www.hillfhkingston.com/obituary/Chauncey-Danner
Chauncy was born April 4th 1920 and passed away April 13th 2014. I can only imagine the thoughts of a 23yr old as he carved his name so far from home.
There didn’t seem to be any immediately obvious sources for D.O. Steele, but a search for David H Schroeder uncovered the below enlistment details for him:
But maybe this is him; David O Steele jr – a 388th BG man attached as a corporal engine mechanic to the 452nd Engineering Depot at Knettishall, but apparently detached to RAF Fersfield for the Aphrodite/Anvil/Batty missions that famously claimed the life of Joe Kennedy Jr in August 1944? Who knows.
Whoever these men were, and whatever they thought as they gathered for a beer in a tiny Norfolk pub, they left their mark for all to see. The skies are no longer full of the sights and sounds of the Mighty Eighth. The quiet lanes no longer echo to the excited voices of farm boys from a distant land. But they are here – the ghosts and memories of a flying army that came and went in the blink of an eye.
26,000 or more paid with their lives, and the rest are either very old men or long since passed. But in small corners of East Anglia like Kenninghall, you can still reach out and touch the past and remember them as the boys they were.
Farm Boys and Pioneers 