Hattie Hearn, University of East Anglia:

‘We Have Come Home’: Pilgrimage, repatriation, and collective memory at the 100th Bomb Group Memorial Museum, Thorpe Abbotts

In a speech made at the former 8th USAAF base at Thorpe Abbotts in 1986, 100th Bomb Group veteran Robert Rosenthal told the assembled crowd that ‘we have come home...this was our base during the war. We lived here. We fought from here. We flew from here. We spilled our blood here and died here’. For Rosenthal, this return to the English base where he had spent two years of the war amounted to a ‘pilgrimage’; a sentiment echoed by many other 8th Air Force veterans who made the journey back to East Anglia in the post-war years.

This talk will explore how wartime processes of meaning-making, the development of an active community of 100th Bomb Group veterans, and the establishment of post-war commemorative practices have combined to establish Thorpe Abbotts as a symbolic ‘final home’. By viewing the return of wartime material culture to the museum as an act of repatriation and visits by veterans as a form of pilgrimage, this talk will argue that Thorpe Abbotts has taken on the status of ‘hallowed ground’ in the collective imagination of 100th BG veterans and their descendants.

100th Bomb Group Memorial Museum

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