Named for the Sixth Earl of Mayo… No, I am not making that up… No, I’m not aware of whether the Sixth Earl of Mayo has any relationship to the Fourth Earl of Sandwich–famous inventor of meat between bread. If only Sir Francis Bacon had been made an Earl…
Category Archives: England
DAILY PHOTO: Big Ben
DAILY PHOTO: Munition Storage Area at RAF Woodbridge
This is the Non-Nuclear Munition Storage Area at RAF Woodbridge. Those berms are the backside of storage bunkers where munitions were stored. Apparently, long before I was stationed here, they had had a small tactical nuclear storage area whose boundaries (not shown) were easily discernible in my time by the decaying remnants of doubled fences, razor wire, a concrete guard bunker, and a tower.
Anyway, it was a source of great hilarity / headache that the local anti-nuclear groups refused to believe nuclear weapons were no longer present. They would occasionally try to break in to show that security was inadequate for (the non-existent) nuclear weapons. Occasionally, they would succeed–because there weren’t nuclear weapons and so one airman–often on foot–provided security for the whole area, and nothing was line of sight because of the ubiquitous berms. It would take either a long time or a lot of noise to bust into one of the bunkers and one would probably gain access to nothing more than small arms ammo or bomblets for A-10s. So the security risk was not particularly great (compared to tactical nuke storage.)
I preferred the “ghost hunters” that regularly came around over the anti-nuclear crowd, the former were a little more willing to accept evidence than the latter.
DAILY PHOTO: Hardened Aircraft Shelter
Hardened Aircraft Shelters (HAS) are heavy-duty aircraft hangers designed to prevent the wholesale destruction of planes as witnessed in the movie Independence Day at Marine Station El Toro. However, I think the Soviets were considered a more urgent concern than aliens at this particular time. (Oh, how times change.) This particular HAS contained A-10 “Warthogs”– a slow ugly plane that was built around a Gatling gun and that we were about to scrap until we started getting into wars that showed that if one wasn’t fighting dogfights with the Soviets–but rather fighting ground troops and armor of militaries devoid of operational air forces, e.g. in Iraq or Serbia– the A-10 was pretty much the most useful combative plane in the inventory.
I guess there were plenty of sunny days like this, but somehow my memories of England only come when it’s raining.





