Introduction

Today, the South Downs, Ashdown Forest and the wooded hills of the High Weald are among the most peaceful landscapes in East Sussex. Walk these places now and it can be difficult to imagine the skies above them filled with aircraft heading to and from war.

Yet during the Second World War, East Sussex lay beneath one of the great aerial highways between Britain and occupied Europe.

Bomber crews crossed the Sussex coast on their way out. Hours later, often in darkness and poor weather, they searched for England again. Some returned with damaged aircraft, wounded crew or failing engines, knowing that reaching the English coast did not necessarily mean they were safe.

Across East Sussex, memorials still mark some of those final journeys.

This story begins on the cliffs at Beachy Head, follows the returning aircraft inland towards the airfields they hoped to reach, and ends among the fields that once formed another temporary wartime airfield.

It is a story about British, American and Polish airmen. But it is also about the landscape that remembers them.

More than eighty years later the runways have disappeared, the wreckage has gone and nature has reclaimed most of the crash sites. In many places, a stone, plaque or small memorial is now the only indication that anything happened there at all.

Battle of Britain Over East Sussex – Four Pilots, Two Days, Four Memorials