North Pickenham
NORTH PICKENHAM: Military aerodrome
Note: This picture (2018) was obtained from Google Earth ©
One of so many WW2 airfields, some seventy years later, that can clearly be defined.
Military users: WW2: 8th USAAF 95th Bombardment Wing
491st Bomb Group
852, 853, 854 & 855 Sqdns (Consolidated B.24 Liberators)
Location: N of B1077, W of North Pickenham village, 2nm SE of Swaffham
Period of operation: 1944 to 1965
Runways: 06/24 1737x46 hard 01/19 1280x46 hard
14/32 1280x46 hard
NOTES: Here again just a minor detail but why was runway 06/24 one hundred yards, (91.4 metres), short of the normal length? Did the contractors run out of materials?
The B1077 ran across the southern end and a lane across the northern end - but it was not unusual for even major roads to be closed for runway extensions during WW2.
This was a pretty major base with 2894 USAAF personnel on station in 1944
Perhaps a good example to pick on? Hardly a famous airfield of course but an excuse to explain that in 1944 there were 426,000 US airmen, (that includes everybody from bottle-washers to pilots), based in Norfolk and Suffolk. On average US airfields were just 8 miles apart. The effects of this migration has to be taken into account too, when roughly every 6th person in these eastern Counties of England during this period was American.
DENIS SEXTON
This comment was written on: 2020-09-27 18:17:02I have some parts of a Liberator B24 42-50668 491BG that crashed near Burnley Lancashire on the 19-2-1945 whilst lost on route Warton base air depot 2
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