In 2019, archaeologists and military veteran volunteers from Operation Nightingale excavated part of the hut camp of ‘Easy Company’ – the famous D-Day paratroopers better known as the ‘Band of Brothers’ – in Aldbourne, Wiltshire (see CA 354). The remains we uncovered were illuminating, but the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic halted investigations – until last year, when the team returned to search for further traces of this legendary American unit.
In our wildest dreams, we didn’t think there was much chance of equalling the finds made in the previous excavation – after all, if you are looking for paratroopers, it is difficult to beat the discovery of an emergency parachute handle and part of a parachute itself – but our field strategy was broadly the same as the one developed in 2019: to use geophysical survey to pinpoint possible hut locations, and to examine what survived of structures used by members of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne – both from ‘Easy’ and, we think, ‘Fox’ Companies. These investigations were augmented by a splendid set of contemporary aerial photographs that vividly illustrated the bustling and cramped nature of the site in the 1940s – a situation far removed from the open football pitch that stands over it today. Our main aim was to discover more about the camp’s American inhabitants, but we also hoped to see if structures differed across the site, whether we could locate traces of the British soldiers who had been based here before the US troops arrived, and to search for signs of the villagers who had returned post-war.
All the work was to be done by hand (apart from back-filling, which was taken on – thank goodness! – by a local farmer with his tractor), so we marked out a carefully targeted excavation area to de-turf. We thought this would be directly over the location of a hut used by the ‘other ranks’ (ORs; personnel who are not commissioned officers) of ‘Easy’ Company, towards one of the modern goalposts. Along the football pitch’s halfway line, we set up a grid for both ground-penetrating radar and metal-detecting survey, which we intended to explore further with test-pits, should the results be promising.
