RAF High Halden

High Halden, some eight miles west-south-west of Ashford in Kent, was another of the temporary Advanced Landing Grounds built to prove the methods that would be used for airstrips in liberated France. Laid out with a portable surface rather than concrete runways, it was known to the Americans as USAAF Station 411.

An advance party of the 358th Fighter Group, part of the Ninth Air Force’s XIX Tactical Air Command, moved in from RAF Raydon on 13 April 1944. Flying Republic P-47 Thunderbolts, the group’s three squadrons threw themselves into ground-attack work as the invasion approached, their effort intensifying sharply once the Normandy landings began. The unit met few enemy fighters and suffered relatively light losses in air combat, but the strip lay within the V-1 flying-bomb corridor that opened in June 1944, and flying bombs fell on the base on the 18th and again on the 23rd.

As the Allied armies pushed inland the group began moving to its own forward strip at Cretteville in Normandy at the end of June, though aircraft continued to operate from High Halden until mid-July. The airfield closed in September 1944 and was returned to agriculture. Little now remains to be seen on the ground, but a memorial near the line of the old runway on Bethersden Road records its wartime service.