93rd Bombardment Group at Hardwick

It achieved fame on various counts:          

• It was the oldest B-24 group in the Eighth.
• It flew more missions than any other bomb group in the Eighth. 
• It was the Eighth's most travelled group and was dubbed 'The Travelling Circus'. 
• Boomerang was the first Eighth Air Force B-24 to fly 50 missions.
• The group flew on the Ploesti raid on the Romanian oil fields of August 1943. Two of the five Medals of Honor awarded after that epic operation went posthumously to 93rd BG pilots (one of them the group's CO). 
• The first of its two Distinguished Unit Citations was the first awarded to an Eighth Air Force group. This was for operations in North Africa from December 1942 to February 1943.

The group was involved in raids on a wide spread of targets in Europe, including those in the build-up to and in support of the invasion of France. It flew petrol to France for the army when a shortage developed.

The 93rd flew a total of 391 combat missions, including 41 from North Africa, and lost 140 Liberators in action.

If you want to see photographs and other records relating to the 93rd Bomb Group, visit our digital archive.

It was constructed between 1941-42 and was originally planned for use by the RAF.

The 310th Bombardment Group, which flew B-25 Mitchells, were the first to use the airfield from September to November 1942.

The B-24 crews of the 93rd Bombardment Group which followed made it their base for the rest of the war.

All sites are now private property and you will need permission before you visit. 

The library has information on some base contacts and with their permission can pass this onto you. The Library itself is unable to organise site visits.

The airfield lies just to the south of the village of Topcroft, which is about five miles east of the A140 and 12 miles south of Norwich.

Most of the handstands have gone. One main runway remains almost complete.

The rest of them and the taxiways have now been broken up for hardcore.

On some of the dispersed sites to the east of the airfield quite a number of the buildings remain and are used by a farmer for a variety of purposes.

It's in a small plot on one of the old barrack sites.

This is just off the lane from Hempnall, which runs to the east of the airfield.

The present landowner, David Woodrow, flies the Stars and Stripes from the nearby flagpole on suitable occasions.

It's located on one of the dispersed sites on Airfield Farm.

It contains general Eight Air Force memorabilia, material on the 93rd Bomb Group and items recovered by the East Anglian Aircraft Research Group.

For more details and opening times, visit the 93rd BG Museum website.

Among those histories are:

• Peter Bodle and Paul Thrower: The 93rd Bomb Group in Norfolk: A Pictorial History 
• Story of the 93rd BG 
• C Stewart: Ted's Travelling Circus

Information about the individual bases comes from from George H Fox's 8th Air Force Remembered: An illustrated guide to the memorials, memorabilia and main airfields of the US 8th Air Force in England in WW2 (London: ISO Publications, 1991).

For more on the history of the airfield, see:

• Martin Bowman: Bomber Bases of WW2: 2nd Air Division 8th Air Force USAAF 1942-45
• Michael Bowyer: Action Stations Revisited: No 1 Eastern England
• Ken Delve: The Military Airfields of Britain: East Anglia (Norfolk and Suffolk)
• Roger Freeman: Airfields of the Eighth Then and Now
• In 2019 a new feature length documentary film was released. Return to Hardwick - Home of the 93rd Bomb Group was showed at the American Library in 2019 and is now available to stream worldwide.

If you're interested in any of these books you can find and reserve them at the Norfolk Online Catalogue.

Related website

You can also visit the 93rd Bomb Group's website for more about its history, reunions, research, etc.