Place-making, material culture and 'home' at Second World War 8th United States Army Air Force bases.

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Soldiers have been posted to foreign lands throughout the course of history. Temporary by nature, their encampments are usually dismantled, destroyed or abandoned as soon as their purpose has been served. Despite the impermanency of most wartime bases, the production of material culture can be viewed as part of a unique process of place-making (Wilson, 2013). During the thousand days that the Eighth United States Army Air Force operated in England (1942-1945), American servicemen oversaw the construction and adaption of over seventy airfields in the Eastern counties. Often larger than the small towns and villages which surrounded them, these bases were home to as many as 3,000 American personnel at any one time (Miller, 2008). Built to standardised plans, the airfields were created for the purpose of facilitating bombing raids into occupied Europe as the Allies fought to turn the tide of the war. Despite the utilitarian design of the airfields, the sites were spaces of creative expression and identity, resulting in a material culture unique to any other that the war produced. Wall art, aeroplane nose cone art and handicrafts, such as sweetheart brooches and embroidered cushions made from parachute silk, were created to make bases 'a bit more liveable, and to some degree like home'; a process of place-making that saw the Americans' longing for home shape each base's material culture (Bowman, 2006). The effect of this process of place-making was the transformation of the Eighth Air Force's seventy airfields into individual localities, clearly identifiable to the groups who inhabited them. Seventy years later, an attachment to these sites has continued to endure, vocalised by veterans who talk of 'returning home' to their former bases, and now increasingly by visitors, who claim to feel the 'ghosts' of the past when faced with the material remains of the airfield sites (Edwards, 2015). This historical case study raises numerous questions. How were airfields transformed by their occupants into sites of meaning? To what extent did a longing for home fuel place-making? Is this process replicated at other militarised sites? As a set of unique and relatively un-studied case studies, the air bases of the Eighth Air Force provide the opportunity for a multifaceted study of place and material culture that has contemporary relevance in an increasingly militarised world. Contributing to the fields of conflict archaeology and heritage studies, my thesis also provides an opportunity to advance our understanding of the American personnel who served in England through the structures, objects and images that they created.