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RAF Framlingham, in Suffolk near Parham and Framlingham, was built as a heavy bomber airfield and became a significant part of the USAAF Eighth Air Force’s wartime presence in East Anglia. Opened in 1943 as a ‘Class A’ station with three concrete runways and extensive dispersals, it was designed specifically to support the high sortie rates and heavy maintenance burden of four-engined bombers.
The airfield is most strongly associated with the 390th Bombardment Group (Heavy), which flew the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress. From 1943 into 1945, the group launched daylight raids against targets across occupied Europe and Germany. These missions were part of a strategic effort to reduce German industrial capacity, disrupt transportation systems, and weaken the Luftwaffe through sustained pressure. For a B-17 station, operational rhythm was intense: early-morning briefings, mass engine starts, long assemblies over East Anglia, and then hours of flight under fighter escort into hostile airspace.
Framlingham’s B-17 crews attacked a wide range of targets: submarine pens and ports, aircraft and ball-bearing factories, rail marshalling yards, oil-related infrastructure, and airfields. As the invasion of Normandy approached, priorities shifted toward rail networks, bridges and coastal defences intended to isolate the battlefield and hinder German response. Later, as Allied armies advanced, bomber targets increasingly focused on transport and supply systems that could slow or stop movement. The Eighth Air Force’s precision claims have to be understood in context: crews operated at high altitude under stress, with weather, flak and fighter attack all shaping outcomes.
The airfield’s ground organisation was enormous. Maintenance personnel kept engines and airframes serviceable through constant use, dealing with battle damage and wear. Armourers loaded bombs safely and quickly; fuel and oxygen supplies had to be available at scale; signals and operations staff tracked aircraft movements; and medical and rescue crews prepared for crashes and casualties. The base community also included many support roles – cooks, clerks, drivers, police – without whom the operational ‘machine’ could not function.
Framlingham’s story also includes the human relationship between Americans and Suffolk villages: billeted personnel, local labour, shared social life, and the visible presence of a foreign air force operating from English farmland. That cultural history sits alongside the operational record and remains central to how communities remember the war years.
After V-E Day the station demobilised quickly and much of the airfield returned to agriculture, but the wartime footprint remains readable in the landscape. RAF Framlingham is therefore a representative Eighth Air Force station: a B-17 base where the strategic bombing campaign was lived day by day, and where the combined effort of aircrew and ground staff translated planning into sustained operational pressure on Nazi Germany.
Because the 1943-45 daylight campaign evolved rapidly, the base’s work also reflects tactical change: improved escort coverage, better formation discipline, and increasing focus on oil and transportation targets as the quickest way to weaken German war-making capacity. Framlingham’s record therefore sits inside a wider strategic arc from early-risk operations to the mature, escorted daylight force of 1944-45.