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
Watch the Film – The Last Miles Home
This story is also available as a short film, following the bomber crews, crash sites, memorials and wartime airfields across East Sussex.
The film brings together the human stories with the landscapes where they unfolded — from Beachy Head and the South Downs to Ashdown Forest and the High Weald.
Explore the Locations
All six locations featured in this story are included on my public East Sussex photography map, covering the memorials, former wartime airfields and crash-site locations across the South Downs, Ashdown Forest and High Weald.
View all six locations on the Sussex Photography public map.
Beachy Head – The Last Sight of England
Standing high above the English Channel, Beachy Head is one of the most recognisable landmarks on the south coast.
For RAF Bomber Command crews during the Second World War, it could mean something very different.
The Bomber Command memorial near the headland records that Beachy Head became a major operational route for crews leaving Britain. Its inscription remembers around 110,000 Bomber Command aircrew and the 55,573 who lost their lives, adding a particularly haunting line: for many of them, Beachy Head would have been their last sight of England.
That thought changes the landscape.
Today the view is one of white chalk cliffs, the lighthouse far below and an apparently endless Channel horizon. During the war, crews crossing that same coastline knew they might not see it again.
Those who did return would search for familiar landmarks through darkness, cloud and bad weather. Seeing England again must have brought enormous relief.
But the coast was not the end of the journey.
A damaged bomber might still have many miles to travel before reaching its home base. For some, simply finding somewhere — anywhere — to land became the priority.
Just a few miles inland from Beachy Head was one such place.
Friston Airfield – A Place to Come Home To
There is very little at Friston today to suggest that aircraft once operated from these open fields on the South Downs.
The landscape itself, however, provides a clue.
Unlike many parts of the surrounding Downs, here there is a broad expanse of relatively open ground beneath an enormous sky.
Friston began as a pre-war landing ground and in 1940 was designated an Emergency Landing Ground. It later developed into a busy fighter airfield, particularly from 1942 onwards. Hurricanes and Spitfires operated here, along with British, Belgian, Polish and Canadian units.
But the emergency role never entirely disappeared.
Large damaged aircraft also used Friston. Records include RAF Lancasters and American B-17 Flying Fortresses managing to land on its grass surfaces.
For crews struggling home across the Channel, a place such as Friston could represent safety.
Reach the coast. Find the airfield. Get the aircraft onto the ground.
On 2 February 1944, ten American airmen were attempting to do exactly that.
They had made it back to England.
Friston was close.
They never reached it.
Butts Brow – Ruth-Less and Ten Men Almost Home
From Butts Brow today there are extraordinary views across Eastbourne, towards the coast and inland across the Downs.
On a clear day it is a landscape of huge horizons.
That was not the landscape the crew of Ruth-Less could see on 2 February 1944.
B-24D Liberator 41-24282, of the 506th Bomb Squadron, 44th Bombardment Group, had been returning from an operation over northern France when it was badly damaged by enemy fire.
Its pilot, First Lieutenant James O. Bolin, knew the aircraft was unlikely to make it back to its home base at Shipdham in Norfolk.
Instead, the crew attempted to reach Friston.
The weather over southern England was poor. Ruth-Less was flying in very low cloud, descending as the crew searched for somewhere to land. The aircraft struck the high ground at Butts Brow above Eastbourne.
All ten men aboard were killed.
They were:
James O. Bolin, Harold W. Schwab, Orville L. Wulff, Edward J. Ackerman, James H. Bales, Chester W. Yurick, George M. Dewald, Aubrey J. Maloy, Ralph E. Strait and James L. Wilson.
Their memorial now lies quietly against the hillside.
The landscape makes their story particularly difficult to ignore.
Friston is only a short distance away. On a clear day the South Downs appear open and inviting. Eastbourne lies below and the coast stretches away beyond it.
Yet on that February day the same hill became an unseen barrier between ten men and safety.
The inscription on the memorial finishes with four simple words:
“Our Friends and Allies – Far From Home.”
And Ruth-Less was far from the only aircraft to survive the long journey across occupied Europe only to be lost during the final miles over England.
Three years earlier, another bomber had returned from a much deeper raid into Germany.
It too reached East Sussex.
Ashdown Forest – The Airman’s Grave
Ashdown Forest provides a completely different East Sussex landscape.
Open heath, woodland, isolated trees and long views across the High Weald make it difficult to associate this peaceful place with a burning bomber.
But on 31 July 1941, a Vickers Wellington of No. 142 Squadron was returning from a raid on Cologne.
The aircraft had left RAF Binbrook in Lincolnshire as part of a Bomber Command attack on Cologne’s railway marshalling yards. On the return journey it developed trouble with its port engine and encountered very poor visibility.
It never made it back to Binbrook.
The Wellington struck the southern slopes of Ashdown Forest and burst into flames.
All six men aboard were killed: Harry Vidler, Vic Sutton, Wilf Brooks, Ernest Cave, Stan Hathaway and Len Saunders.
Today the crash site is marked by one of the most distinctive aviation memorials in Sussex.
It is known as The Airman’s Grave, although none of the six men is actually buried there.
The memorial developed from a simple wooden cross placed at the crash site by the mother of one of the crew shortly after the accident. Over time it became the stone enclosure that stands on the forest today.
The location is perhaps what makes it so affecting.
Heather grows around it. Walkers pass across the surrounding heath. There is no obvious sign of wreckage and little to indicate the violence of what happened here.
Without the memorial, another generation could walk through this landscape without ever knowing that six men died on this hillside while trying to return home.
And elsewhere in the High Weald, another Wellington was making an equally desperate journey back towards England.
This time, the crew were Polish.
Darwell and Netherfield – The Polish Wellington
Beside the road climbing from Darwell towards Netherfield stands a memorial to six men of No. 304 Polish Bomber Squadron.
Their story began on the night of 27 May 1941 when Wellington R1392, code NZ-N, left RAF Syerston for an operation against Boulogne.
Over the target the aircraft was hit by German anti-aircraft fire and one engine was badly damaged.
The journey home became a struggle for survival.
Rear gunner Józef Drożdż left the aircraft by parachute while it was still over the Channel. He was never recovered.
The Wellington continued towards England.
As its condition deteriorated, Stanisław Józefiak and Józef Nilski eventually bailed out over Sussex. Both survived, although they were injured.
Three men remained with the aircraft: Jan Waroczewski, Bronisław Kuszczyński and Cezary Wieczorek.
The Wellington came down near Doctors Farm at Darwell Hole. All three were killed.
Four members of the six-man crew had therefore died: three in the aircraft and Drożdż somewhere in the English Channel.
Józefiak and Nilski survived.
The roadside memorial was later erected in remembrance of the four men who did not return.
It is not surrounded by the dramatic scenery of Beachy Head or the open heath of Ashdown Forest. It stands beside a busy rural road, easily passed without noticing.
Yet perhaps that makes it even more representative of these hidden wartime stories.
Thousands of people drive through the High Weald without realising that the lanes, fields and woods around them contain the final chapters of men who had travelled hundreds of miles through the wartime skies.
The Darwell memorial also reminds us that these were not exclusively British stories.
Polish airmen who had already seen their own country invaded continued the fight from Britain, serving throughout the RAF.
And following that Polish connection takes us from another crash site back to an airfield.
RAF Chailey – An Airfield That Disappeared
The RAF Chailey memorial now stands in the grounds of The Plough near Plumpton.
Like Friston, the airfield it remembers has largely disappeared from the landscape.
RAF Chailey was an Advanced Landing Ground created during the later years of the war. From 1943 it became associated particularly with Polish fighter units, including the 302 City of Poznan, 308 City of Krakow and 317 City of Wilno Squadrons of No. 131 Polish Fighter Wing.
The memorial specifically remembers two Polish pilots.
Flight Lieutenant Mieczysław Adamek of 317 Squadron was killed on 18 May 1944 after his Spitfire was hit by anti-aircraft fire over Fécamp in France. He struggled back towards England but was unable to reach Chailey and abandoned the aircraft near the Sussex coast. He did not survive.
Three days later, Flight Lieutenant Jan Kurowski of 308 Squadron was killed when his Spitfire was hit by anti-aircraft fire during operations over France.
The Chailey memorial records them as the only two aircrew lost from the airfield.
Even the pub beside the memorial forms part of the story. The original Plough was demolished during construction of the wartime airfield; the present pub was built after the war.
The wartime airfield at Chailey has almost completely disappeared, as have so many of the physical traces connected with these stories.
What remain are the memorials.
The Landscape That Remembers Them
More than eighty years later, these places have returned to the landscape.
Heather surrounds the Airman’s Grave on Ashdown Forest. Friston is once again open grassland beneath the South Downs sky. Butts Brow looks peacefully across Eastbourne, while Beachy Head still faces the same stretch of Channel crossed by thousands of wartime aircrew.
Without the memorials, there would often be little to suggest what happened here.
They preserve the names of British, American and Polish airmen whose final journeys ended among these hills, fields and forests.
Today these are places we walk through for their scenery and tranquillity.
But the landscape remembers a very different time — and the men who never made it home.
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