During September AVE Services had the privilege of being apart of the team that helped unveil the USAAF memorials that had been moved from Greenham Business Park.
The Royal British Legion Branch Secretary, Keith Williams explained during the service that a passing remark to an American visitor sparked the idea to re-site the memorials from their old site of Greenham Business Park as they couldn’t easily be found.
Janine Westropp was tasked with raising the necessary funds for the removal and re-installation.
“Nobody was safe from Janine!”, Keith explained. However very quickly, the funds were raised and work was started to move the memorials, and what you see today is the culmination of a lot of hard work by many people to move them.
Thirty-one paratroopers and two pilots from the 17th Airborne Division were killed when their Horsa glider crashed shortly after take-off from the Greenham airbase on December 12, 1944.
Three days later, 16 men were killed when two B-17 Flying Fortresses from the 306th bombardment group collided above the common.
Two memorial stones remembering the events, plus a third dedicated to all US servicemen who died in the war now stand as a memorial to them.
