Memorial: RAF Horne and WW2

In May and June 1944, the parish of Horne was home to a wartime airfield - a grass landing ground with two steel-mesh runways, hidden among the fields. It was an Advanced Landing Ground, one of a number hastily built across the southeast as the RAF prepared for the invasion of Europe, and the only one of its kind in Surrey.

Three fighter squadrons were stationed here under canvas, representing airmen from across the world. 130 Squadron brought together pilots and groundcrew from England, Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. 303 Squadron was entirely Polish. 402 Squadron was entirely Canadian.

All three arrived at Horne on Sunday 30 April 1944, having flown in from different airfields around the country. Just two days later, on Tuesday 2 May, they took off together on their first operation over enemy-occupied territory - a Wing that had never before flown as one, doing so for the first time from a Surrey field most of them had only just learned to call home.The airfield is gone now, the land long since returned to farmland and absorbed into Horne Park Golf Course, but it is remembered with a small memorial on Bones Lane.

An older line of defence

The airfield lay just south of an even earlier wartime feature: a defence line built during or after the Battle of Britain, in anticipation of German invasion. It took the form of a wide, zig-zagging ditch with raised banks, running east to west across the landscape. Little of the ditch itself survives at ground level today, though it can still be traced in LiDAR survey data and in wartime aerial photographs. Several of the pillboxes built to defend the line still stand to the north of its former course, quiet survivors of an invasion that never came.