Americans in Burtonwood, Cheshire

Read Time: 8 minutes

For a kid growing up in semi-rural Cheshire, England, the American USAAF service men and the airbase they occupied was a window on another world. Local church bells rang out, predictably, school was always a drudge in winters of dark mornings and condensated windows and rough rugby games and trudging through the mud, and then the harvest times where you could earn a bit of money, long days under the blistering sun, and bumpy rides to the fields on a tractor trailer. And then the USAAF airbase at Burtonwood. Arrived at down a winding country lane, exploding into view with its sentry points and hangars and men in uniforms.

My dad would drive us past the base sometimes, or we would go there on our bikes and find a spot where we would gaze through the perimeter fence at the USAAF staff, smart tall men in uniforms who seemed to carry a sense of purpose and a simultaneous relaxed confidence as they walked around, got into jeeps, came out of the bowling hall, or waved an arm at the guards on the observation post at the entrance. Whenever my dad drove by down the old Burtonwood road with its hedgerows and farms and poplar and oak trees, I feasted on the hangar and the uniformed men and jeeps and trucks as we went by. For weeks and weeks, until we went by again, I would think about them and wonder what secret operations they did, and longed to drive in one of the trucks and sit on the lap of a driver.

At one time, Burtonwood had the largest single-span hangar in the world. Americans always did things on grand scales, right? American might and ingenuity. Long Jeep convoys rumbled down narrow country lanes, filling the air with a constant hum. People of my grandparents generation said the air was constantly pulsing with engines in the war years, originally the Spitfires, and when the Americans came the B52s, massive and dominating like eagles.

Even in my 70s childhood, the airbase was a bustling hub of activity. Though it was handed back the British Air Force in 1946, between 1966 and 1993 the USAAF still used the base for logistics and storage. It was a place bigger than Heathrow, today. Twenty thousand service men occupied the grounds. 

I remember the convoys of Jeeps in the first Gulf War in the early 90s, going back and forth from Liverpool. I learned years later that Patton and Eisenhower met in a quiet village of Cheshire, Lower Peover, and there discussed strategies for D-Day. The American flag hangs in the local church, St Lawrence where General Patton once worshipped. The inter-continental links are still here. The stars and stripes still visible for visitors. Still testament to the days of American presence in England, a lifetime ago.

Growing up near Burtonwood you couldn’t miss the American culture and influence. The Airforce men were outgoing, always ready with a smile and a stick of gum for the local kids. Their confidence was infectious, and they brought a sense of excitement to our otherwise quiet corner of England. For me, America was this land of freedom and opportunity, a place where anything seemed possible. A far off mystical land, mystical like Narnia, only always benevolent. A place that we tried to imagine through the music and scratches of literature, music, and films we had read, heard about or seen.

My dad was an Elvis fan, an on his wedding photo he has his hair combed back in the Rockabilly style. Like his brother, they’d heard Elvis on the radio and sang his songs and said the Liverpool upstarts The Beatles were nothing compared to the original, Elvis. He was the one who created popular music and made an American style standard.

When Elvis died in 1977 we were on holiday in Anglesey, Wales. As a child I was up early and went to the convenience store to buy provisions for breakfast. There on a billboard I read the sign The King Is Dead. Thinking it was news of major importance I ran back to the tent on the campsite bearing the onerous news The King is Dead. I said it over and over to my mum and dad, and when I was done my mum said we didn’t have a king.

My dad tuned in the transistor and immediately realised my mistake. Elvis was dead. Aged 44.  His wild and energetic music, ever since that time, has always been referenced to the campsite with its rain and clouds and sandy beaches, the pools where crabs and fish got caught, with its rushing tides and seagull craw and ferries in the distant travelling between Liverpool and Ireland, and somewhere beyond the horizon the home country of Elvis, far off America.

The American influence of Burtonwood, and all that it pointed to, America, far off, land of opportunity and adventure.  Of Elvis and the books and the comics, of Glen Miller who played his last concert at the base, of Bob Hope who visited, and of Paul Simon who wrote Homeward Bound in a local railway station, the railway station of the opening lines of the song, of Spiderman and Batman, went beyond the physical presence of the airbase.

It was about the values and ideals that the Americans brought with them. About what they represented to a child growing up with factories and grey clouds and parents who worked endlessly. The Americans represented an abundance, a freedom, an ingenuity, and a relaxation about material things. They built big houses for their servicemen. Their pockets always held some surprise for a child. They held Christmas parties on the base for up to six-hundred local children, and always paid attention to the orphans. Their cars hummed down the lanes and took up the parking space of two English cars in the town. And the base itself, reduced in size, became at its abandoned periphery a place of adventure where a kid could find bullet shells, gas masks we wore and smelled the strange rubber smell and look at the word through round tinted green glasses. They brought the war close in imagination and reality, and their far-off land was a place that held constant fascination.

 As I got older I realised the Americans were peacekeepers and stabilizers, standing firm against the threats of demagogues and dictators. There were raids on the USAAF airbase, there were raids on Liverpool twenty miles away, and occasional jettisoned bombs the Luftwaffe could not carry back to German ripped the earth and left craters where ponds formed in farm fields and became reminders of why the Americans Airforce ever came to England.

 

The U.S. in the decade of my childhood, and the decade of my youth, became a beacon of opportunity and innovation, a country that welcomed people from all walks of life and provided them with the opportunity to thrive. It was a stark contrast to places like Iran, where the regime has long drummed up hatred for the U.S. for decades with slogans like Death to America. And America the Great Satan. Resentment for the USA is palpable, and yet a deflection from their own failings. Who in their right mind would want to live in Iran? I would ask myself at University in the early 90s, where creativity and entrepreneurship were stifled, where the very books I was reading so freely were prohibited, Bunyan and Milton and Shakespeare, where the focus over years is now developing nuclear power for evil purposes? To obliterate Israel, the imposter nation, the infidel, the enemy to Islam.

 

For these early halcyon years, life near the airbase was different. It was vibrant and abundant. The GIs were larger than life, and some married local women, there were 6500 marriages in total between the local women and the USAAF servicemen, a few stayed, but most brides emigrated to the U.S. I remember the American husband of my friend’s aunt driving down our street in a massive Buick with black and white tyres, a car unlike anything we had ever seen. He was tall, always chewing gum, and generous with the sweets he handed out to the local kids. He brought a piece of America to our small town, our suburban road with its ordered gardens and small cars.

When I got older, I noticed the changes. The Americans began to leave, and the airbase slowly wound down. The once-bustling roads became quiet country lanes again. The giant hangar stood empty, silent witness to the era when the USA fulfilled what I see as a divine role of defeating the evil of Nazism, an evil that inflicted on the world and the Jewish community the worst concentrated atrocities ever seen.

Yes, though the ten-pin bowling lanes had gone, and the housing estates of the American-occupied land returned to British hands and the so-called `tobacco houses’, built with American tobacco money, were demolished, the memory of those days remains, will always remain, always be a part of my memories and naïve and nascent views of what America was about.

Sometimes, after I got my licence, I would drive past the old base entrance and remember this gateway to another culture and world, America. Bit by bit, the airbase disappeared as one housing company after another built. They are functional housing estates. Quiet and predictable and very English.

When the control tower at the base was detonated, when the last strips of land got sold to logistics companies, more housing companies, to supermarkets and drug stores, the final physical vestiges of the USAAF were gone.

And yet, the Americans and their influence never left. As a child to have grown so close to one of the biggest American airbases in the world, is to have an anchor point in history, memories of voices and abundance and cars and some overriding purpose that made the presence of the USAAF so special.