RAF Lavenham was not in Lavenham. The airfield, also called Cockfield in some records, sat a few miles north of the medieval wool town near the village of Alpheton. It was built through 1943, an enormous undertaking for a country at war: 190,000 cubic yards of concrete for the runways and 3.5 miles of perimeter track, 52,000 cubic yards more for roads and buildings, 4.5 million bricks, and 679,000 cubic yards of excavation. The technical site and admin buildings sat on the south side, along with most of the dispersed temporary accommodation for the 2,900 personnel who would live and work there. The airfield opened in April 1944 with the USAAF designation Station 137 (LV), and the United States Army Air Forces Eighth Air Force moved in. From this date until the end of the war, the village of Lavenham was an American place.

The 487th Bombardment Group (Heavy) arrived from Alamogordo Army Air Field in New Mexico on 5 April 1944, assigned to the 4th Combat Bombardment Wing of the 3rd Air Division. The group's tail code was a Square-P. They had four squadrons: the 836th, 837th, 838th and 839th Bombardment Squadrons. They flew Consolidated B-24 Liberators first and then converted to Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses by March 1945. Their first commander was Lieutenant Colonel Beirne Lay, Jr., a prominent Hollywood screenwriter, who was shot down over enemy territory on 11 May 1944 in one of the group's earliest combat actions; he evaded capture, returned to duty, and after the war wrote the screenplay for the 1949 film Twelve O'Clock High, the closest cinema ever came to the truth of strategic bombing. The group nickname was 'Gentlemen From Hell.' They flew 185 combat missions, sortied 6,021 aircraft, dropped 14,641 tons of bombs, and lost 57 aircraft - 33 missing in action and 24 in other operations - in roughly fourteen months of fighting.

The 487th bombed airfields in France in May 1944 in preparation for the invasion of Normandy, then attacked coastal defences, road junctions, bridges and locomotives during the invasion itself. On D-Day, 6 June 1944, they aided ground forces. In July they hit German positions near Caen to help the British. In August they struck gun emplacements at Brest. In September they covered the airborne attack on the Netherlands at Arnhem and Nijmegen. From August 1944 onward they shifted almost entirely to strategic targets: the oil refineries at Merseburg, Mannheim, and Dulmen; factories at Nuremberg, Hanover, and Berlin; marshalling yards at Cologne, Munster, Hamm, and Neumunster. They flew through the Battle of the Bulge in December and January, then supported the Rhine crossing in March 1945, then the final advance into Germany. Their bombers and their crews lived in the Suffolk countryside, drank in Lavenham and Long Melford, and made the daily eight-hour round trip into the air war over Europe.

On 24 December 1944, the Eighth Air Force launched its largest operation of the war. The objective was to bomb eleven German airfields east of the Rhine while another 634 heavy bombers attacked communication centres west of the river. Brigadier General Frederick Castle, the highest-ranking Eighth Air Force officer eventually to receive the Medal of Honor, took off from Lavenham as air commander leading more than 2,000 heavy bombers. On the way to the target, one engine on his B-17 failed and he was forced to give up his place at the head of the formation. He refused to jettison his bombs over friendly troops on the ground. The lagging unescorted aircraft became a target for enemy fighters which ripped the left wing with cannon shells, set the oxygen system afire, and wounded two crewmen. With fires spreading and the bomber close to exploding, Castle gave the bail-out order and stayed at the controls to give the rest of his crew the time they needed to escape. The Flying Fortress exploded and carried him to his death. Fifty-six American aircraft were lost that day. Castle's portrait still hangs at the Swan Hotel in Lavenham, where he had been a regular.

The 487th returned to Drew Army Air Field in Florida during August and September 1945 and was inactivated on 7 November. The airfield was closed in 1948 and the land returned to farming. The concrete cracked. Nature crept in across the dispersals. Most of the runways have been removed and used as hardcore, though a few sections remain and are still used for open storage of haystacks. The Nissen huts and wartime buildings exist in various states of decay. The exception is the Control Tower, which is maintained. A small aircraft engineering company still uses the site to work on light aircraft. From above, the ghost of the perimeter track is still visible against the surrounding arable, the outline of an American base in the English countryside that for fourteen months delivered an enormous part of the air war.