Roamer: Hang out the washing on the Ulster line for Normandy

Northern Ireland, like the rest of the world, has been commemorating D-Day, honouring the heroes who returned and the many who made the supreme sacrifice.

Amongst Ulster’s strategic roles in the Normandy landings, a little-told tale is reminiscent of Jimmy Kennedy’s wartime refrain about hanging out the washing!

Author and former editor of the Coleraine Chronicle Hugh McGrattan explains:

By June 1944 Northern Ireland had over 20 military airfields and each played its part in D-Day. Among the lesser-known though important bases was RAF Mullaghmore, eight miles south-east of Coleraine and six miles east of Ballymoney.

Jimmy Kennedy’s wartime refrain

Built in 1941/42 as a training station with facilities for around 50 aircraft, it was planned as a bomber training unit, a forward fighter station and a gunnery school.

When these plans were scrapped the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) christened it ‘Station 240’ and used it as a combat crew replacement centre. Around 30 Marauder light-bombers and 25 transport planes were based there, preparing for D-Day.

With preparations completed Mullaghmore was to be handed back to the RAF but there was a last minute change of plan.

The U.S. 82nd Airborne Division, with units on the north coast, encountered a problem, or to be more exact - 30,000 problems. They’d been involved in the landings in Italy where 30,000 of their parachutes got soaked and they were urgently needed for D-Day.

RAF Mullaghmore parachute store

Brigadier General ‘Jumpin Jim’ Gavin frantically searched Northern Ireland for a suitable place to dry them and Mullaghmore’s big empty hangar was perfect. Thus the North Derry aerodrome played a not very exciting but nonetheless vital role as the ‘D-Day washing line’!

Afterwards, returned to the RAF, Mullaghmore became a Coastal Command base, like the nearby Limavady and Ballykelly aerodromes. Then it was converted into a navigator training unit for Wellington bombers before becoming a Royal Navy base for two squadrons of Swordfish (anti-submarine biplanes) and Avenger (torpedo bombers).

The Wellingtons also contributed to air-sea rescue though this increasingly specialised task was eventually taken over by a squadron of Warwick reconnaissance aircraft.

Four refresher flying units used the airfield in the closing stages of WWII, when it also became the RAF’s training unit for the new top-secret Long Range Navigation (LORAN) system.

RAF Mullaghmore Airfield operations board

The Royal Navy’s new-fangled Barracudas (anti-submarine planes) flew from Mullaghmore in 1945, but by VE Day in May the airfield was merely a ‘care and maintenance’ facility. Thus ended the remarkably varied wartime career of an aerodrome which took hundreds of workmen over a year to build.

Because of constantly changing plans it never reached its potential, and one airmen who had been stationed at Mullaghmore, and had spent a winter there, later recalled that it was like living ON a bog, and sometimes like living IN a bog!

One thing’s for certain - few airfields in the annals of WWII could truthfully boast ‘we’re gonna hang out the washing for D-Day!’

Thanks to Hugh McGrattan for this intriguing tale and to Andy Glenfield for photographs from his Facebook page ‘The Second World War in Northern Ireland’.

“It’s very easy to find,” Chief Flying Instructor Mark Holmes told Roamer earlier this week “you literally fly along the River Bann and Mullaghmore is very visible - you’ll see it to the west of the river.”

A pilot from Mark’s Microflight Ireland Flying Club probably flew the final flight from Mullaghmore which had been “used for light aircraft since the 1950s,” Mark explained, adding “we started microlight training there in 1994 and were there till 2007.”

Now re-formed as the Causeway Flying Club, their new Causeway Airfield (causewayairfield.co.uk) “is only about a mile and a half away”, Mark told me.

He once flew with a veteran who was based in Mullaghmore during the war.

“He came back from Canada and just turned up at the airfield one day in 1999,” Mark recounted. “I took him up in a microlight and he pointed out where the perimeter fence was. He told me ‘there were so many rows of barbed wire which we had to crawl through on a regular basis because the pub was just over there!’”

They not only crawled through the barbed wire “but then they had to cross a little river,” Mark explained.

I suggested that this was all good training for D-Day.

“But getting back was obviously a little more difficult,” Mark smiled, “because their coordination wasn’t quite as good.”

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