There had been an airfield here since the First World War, when the Royal Flying Corps used a patch of grass as a landing strip. The RAF kept it for training between the wars and called it RAF Elmswell. When the United States Army Air Forces came to Suffolk in 1942, looking for fields they could pave for heavy bombers, Great Ashfield was one of the chosen sites. They rebuilt it to Class A specification: concrete runways, hardstands, hangars, the works. The Americans designated it Station 155. The first aircraft to land on the new runway, on 17 May 1943, was a battle-damaged Martin B-26 Marauder limping home from a raid over the Netherlands.

The 385th Bombardment Group arrived from Great Falls, Montana on 19 June 1943. Their B-17s carried the Square-G tail code that became their signature. Four squadrons made up the group: the 548th, 549th, 550th and 551st. Within two months they had earned a Distinguished Unit Citation, awarded for bombing the Messerschmitt aircraft factory at Regensburg on 17 August 1943 after a long, hazardous flight across Germany. They would earn a second DUC for the bombardment of an aircraft repair plant at Zwickau on 12 May 1944, leading the entire 4th Bomb Wing through heavy opposition. Aircraft factories at Oschersleben and Marienburg, oil refineries at Ludwigshafen and Merseburg, marshalling yards at Munich and Oranienburg, airfields at Beauvais and Chartres: the group hit them all.

B-17 crews were small communities, ten young men crammed into a freezing aluminium tube at 25,000 feet, breathing oxygen through rubber masks. Pilot, co-pilot, navigator, bombardier, flight engineer, radio operator, ball turret gunner, two waist gunners, tail gunner. They flew at minus 40 degrees for hours, watching flak smear the sky, watching German fighters dive on them, watching planes alongside them suddenly disappear in fire. The 385th lost 129 aircraft on missions from Great Ashfield. Behind every number was a crew, often barely old enough to drink. In June 1944 they attacked coastline defences in preparation for D-Day. In December they hit German communications during the Battle of the Bulge. In March 1945 they bombed troop concentrations as the Allies crossed the Rhine.

After V-E Day, the 385th flew prisoners of war out of Germany to Allied centres and dropped food into the still-starving Netherlands. They returned to Sioux Falls, South Dakota on 28 August 1945 and were inactivated. The airfield reverted to RAF control as a bomb storage site under Maintenance Command. In 1955 the RAF finally sold it. Most of the concrete went to crushers and ended up as roadbase aggregate. A short stretch of runway lingered for civil light aircraft. Much of the perimeter track is now a single-lane farm road. A few wartime buildings stand in deteriorating brick and corrugated iron, slowly being absorbed back into the Suffolk landscape that produced them.

Walk into the parish church of Great Ashfield village today and you find a memorial to the men of the 385th who never came home. Across the ford, a stone slab carries a bronze plaque to the crews of the Square-G Fortresses. The fields where they revved up Wright Cyclone engines and climbed away toward Germany now grow barley and sugar beet, like every other field around them. There is nothing to mark where a Liberator carrying a general lifted off on its way to Berlin in March 1944, or where ground crews waited through long winter afternoons to count the aircraft coming back. But the men are not forgotten. The 385th Bomb Group Association still holds reunions. Every year, fewer of them. The memorial in the village church is the last thing left on the ground that knows they were here.