_What was The Friendly Invasion in Suffolk?

Suffolk played a central role in the Second World War, when the county became host to the B24 Liberators and B17 Flying Fortresses of the United States Eighth Air Force.

The Friendly Invasion had the biggest landscape and cultural impact on the East of England since the Norman Conquest, 900 years earlier.

• So many huge airbases punctuated the flat, rural landscape of Norfolk that they became known as ‘The Fields of Little America’.
• The US servicemen and women brought with them peanut butter, donuts, Jazz and Swing and much more.
  Their first mission was on July 4, 1942, a symbolic day for the North Americans. But their planes hadn’t arrived, so they had to use RAF bombers instead.
• They also brought segregation – market towns like Woodbridge, Framlingham and Lavenham hosted black and white servicemen on alternate nights.
• For every flier, there were three ancillaries, meaning airbases could support more than 3000 people, dwarfing the villages they lay beside.
• Hundreds of miles of concrete runway were laid in months. Much of the 250,000 tonnes of rubble needed was transported from bomb sites in London and Birmingham.
• If East Anglia was monochrome when they arrived, it was soon turned technicolour – just like The Wizard of Oz, released in 1939, the first year of the war.
• The Americans also brought their own pets, including a grizzly bear and a monkey.
• More than 40,000 wives and girlfriends went to the USA at the end of hostilities. Today their relatives come to visit ‘where Grandpa Joe served and where Grandma Molly came from’.

Friendly Invasion highlights in Suffolk

95th Bomb Group Museum, Horham – home of the Red Feather Club.

Parham Airfield Museum, Framlingham- control tower and museum to the British Resistance Organisation.