WW1 and WW2 Defences - Suffolk and beyond

Oulton Street airfield opened in July 1940 as a satellite of Horsham St Faith and was a base for Blenheims. Later, it was expanded and was home to both RAF and USAAF Fortresses.  Little now remains of the airfield, except part of the runways and a few huts. It is now all private farmland. Above: Memorial to RAF Oulton Street and some of the remaining buildings. At least two pillboxes remain of Oulton airfield’s defences. Both are octagonal and were built to house a Vickers machine gun, but are slightly different in design to each other. Both are unique designs, a feature that seems to be quite common to pillboxes defending RAF installations. The larger pillbox has a large but narrow embrasure for a Vickers and six rifle/light machine gun embrasures. There is a large semi-circular table for the Vickers tripod.  There are two parallel anti-ricochet walls either side of the Vickers embrasure. There is a low entrance protected by an ‘L’ shaped blast wall. ...

A long weekend in Norfolk allowed for a bit of pillbox hunting. On the way up, we took in some of the defences of stop line FII, which uses the River Brue and the Broads as anti-tank obstacles (the Broads has little in the way of concrete defences, defence instead relying largely on the river patrols). However, crossings over the Brue between Wroxham and Aylsham are defended by pillboxes and anti-tank cubes. We visited some of the defences at Brampton, Burgh next Aylsham and Aylsham. This was a divisional stop line – i.e. it was intended to delay or act as a deterrent to enemy armour rather than halt it completely (corps stop lines and the GHQ stop line on the other hand were intended to bring enemy armour to a halt). The bridge over the Brue at Brampton has the classic stop-line defences of anti-tank cubes and a mined bridge covered by a type 22 pillbox. The anti-tank cubes are 5ft square and block the immediate approach to the bridge from the sides; the two on opposite sides of ...