Once a year, on an otherwise ordinary morning in November, the nation performs a small but solemn miracle. It falls silent. For two minutes, the usual clatter of British life – kettles boiling, car horns sounding, someone in a queue muttering about the weather – gives way to a hush so complete it feels almost borrowed from another age. Armistice Day arrives, and with it the annual reminder that the present is built upon the forfeited futures of others.
In East Anglia, towns and villages see veterans and civic leaders gather by their war memorials, reading aloud the surnames of men who once lived in the community. People will remember, perhaps those lost in the great conflicts of the 20th century, or perhaps in more recent wars where the dust has yet to settle. The roll call stretches beyond Britain’s own borders, encompassing the Commonwealth, European allies, and indelibly, America.
Memorials are timeless and universal
But remembrance, despite its calendrical anchoring, is not a creature that exists in November alone. Scattered across the region are memorials that do not wait for a sanctioned moment of national reflection. They stand in fields, on village greens, beside quiet roads, or in churchyards, marking the places where young men from small towns and villages and faraway US states could not fight anymore. They are not grand, most of them. They do not demand attention. They simply persist, as memory does, even when no one is looking.
East Anglia is dotted with these small monuments to the airmen of the United States Army Air Forces who arrived in their thousands during the Second World War. Some died in combat; others in the sorts of accidents that wartime urgency made tragically commonplace. Their stories rarely appear in history books, overshadowed by the sweep of campaigns and the names of generals. Yet they, too, shaped the outcome of the war. And they, too, deserve to be remembered.
The last flight of the Flying Fortress
One such story begins on Thursday, 26 April 1945, a date that now reads like the final page of a long and terrible chapter. Victory in Europe Day was less than a fortnight away, though no one could know it. The Russian advance on Berlin was tightening like a fist. Marshal Philippe Pétain, the disgraced figurehead of Vichy France, was being arrested as he attempted to slip into Switzerland. Hitler, in his bunker, was only 4 days away from ending his own life. History was accelerating, but for the crew of one B‑17G Flying Fortress, it was about to stop altogether.
The aircraft in question, B‑17G 44‑8687, had arrived in Britain the previous November. Built by Lockheed in the US, it was first flown from Burbank, California to Lincoln, Nebraska for preparation and assignment to the Eighth Air Force, before continuing to Grenier Field, Manchester, New Hampshire, where a crew was assigned ahead of its transatlantic flight to the UK. It then arrived at Sudbury in Suffolk. It belonged to the 486th Bomb Group, 834th Bomb Squadron, and had flown multiple missions without yet earning a nickname.
Its pilot was First Lieutenant Clyde E. Simmons, accompanied by co‑pilot, First Lieutenant Donald L. Williamson. The navigator, Second Lieutenant Vincent T. Colletti, and the bombardier, Second Lieutenant Robert F. Bradley, occupied the nose. Engineer Sergeant John J. Hill tended the aircraft’s mechanics and manned the top turret. Radio operator Sergeant Robert L. West, waist gunner Sergeant Edward G. Geron, and observer, First Lieutenant James G. Olson, completed the crew.
On that April morning, the Flying Fortress lifted into the air with the deep, confident roar of its four Wright Cyclone engines. The mission was not a bombing run but formation practice – an essential skill for the B-17, whose defensive strength lay, not in its individual firepower, but in the overlapping arcs of machine-gun fire created when dozens of aircraft flew in tight, disciplined patterns. Formation flying was both art and mathematics, requiring precision, trust, and a willingness to place one’s life in the hands of pilots in neighbouring aircraft.
It was also perilous. Maintaining altitude and position was difficult enough in straight flight; during a turn, the margin for error narrowed to a sliver. A moment’s drift, a fraction of lost height, and disaster could unfold with brutal speed.
At 11,700 feet, over the border between Norfolk and Lincolnshire, disaster did just that. As the formation banked, another B‑17, 43-38859, known as Miss‑B‑Havin, struck 44-8687 from behind, severing its tail. Lieutenant Simmons fought to keep the crippled aircraft steady long enough to sound the bail out bell, but the altitude was low, the damage catastrophic, and time pitilessly short.
Eight men had taken off that morning. Only two, Colletti and Bradley, survived to see the night.
The wreckage fell into farmland, where workers ran towards the smoke, hoping to help but finding little they could do. The following day, what remained of the aircraft was salvaged. Miss‑B‑Havin survived the war, only to be scrapped months later, its own story ending quietly.
Remembering all who “fought and died for our freedom”
Today, in a village so small it eludes most maps, a memorial at a nearby church is the only clue that 44-8687 came down. Each April, the locals gather to remember the crew.
Simmons, Williamson, Hill, West, Geron, and Olson never lived to see the war conclude, but their service helped bring that conclusion about.
If you find yourself travelling through East Anglia, it is worth pausing if you pass one of these modest memorials. They do not clamour for attention. They simply ask for a moment, an acknowledgement, that the freedoms we treat as ordinary were, for many, the last thing they ever fought for.
Remembrance need not be loud, or a display of flags on street furniture, but nor should it be confined to a single day. Sometimes it is enough to stop, to look, and to remember them, properly.
This article has been updated to correct the aircraft’s route following confusion between similarly named locations in the US and UK.
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