Vickers Wellington T2578

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The RAF Nº 9 Squadron ORB records that on 21 December 1940 Wellington T2578, flown by Pilot Officer Hemmings, force landed at Bexhill, due to fuel shortage, without injury to any of the crew. I am keen to know exactly where it force landed. The internet appears to be silent. Can anyone help me?

[chevvron]

Possibly Pebsham Airport (opened c1934) between Bexhill and Hastings and last used early '70s?
The UK Airfield Guide mentions it was used by fighters 'and a couple of bombers' as a diversion and another website mentions a B24 diverting, or at least attempting, to divert there but no mention of a Wellington.
It was marked on 'Esso Road Maps' of the mid '50s but I can't find any reference to its size; I suspect it was about 1,000yds.

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[QUOTE=chevvron;10919995]Possibly Pebsham Airport (opened c1934) between Bexhill and Hastings and last used early '70s?

Thank you, chevvron. That's what occurred to me - and the reason why I asked (I've been researching the history of Pebsham for more years than I care to admit!). However your dates for Pebsham are wildly optimistic. Although it was planned before the war, and work started on it in the latter thirties, it did not become operational (although even that is to stretch a point) until post-war and it had ceased to be well before the end of the fifties (although it was not formally abandoned by its local authority owner until the sixties). But to return to the point. The work that Hastings Corporation had undertaken pre-war may have meant that there was a strip of grass that offered a Godsend to a Wellington being nursed home on a wing and a prayer in late 1940. I wonder, does anyone have more tangible information as to where, that day, T2578 came à terre?

[chevvron]

On another forum a couple of years ago, a pilot said he was the last person to land and takeoff there in in a C172 about 1971.
www.airfieldresearchgroup.org.uk/forum/sussex-airfields/1528-hastings-pebsham has a short discussion about the airfield.
See also www.ukairfieldguide.net/airfields/Pebsham

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Pebsham had a curious history. It can be described as one of the children of Cobham's campaign to encourage the creation of municipal aerodromes. In the early 1930s Hastings Corporation proposed, due to the less than ideal topography of the site (but it was not spoilt for choices within the borough), to create a level surface for the airfield by dumping on and then levelling the site. There was a public inquiry in 1934 and the project got underway subsequently. However it was impossible for its development to progress faster than the supply of rubbish to the site! Even that slow progress was curtailed in 1938 when the corporation gave up its aspirations for an airfield. One presumes that, with the outbreak of WW2, any alternative development of the site was put on hold - which may be the reason why, if it be the case, the site was able to receive one or more ailing bombers during that period. After the war the project was revived, with the airfield officially opening in 1948. However it never was much of an airfield, being distinctly 'infrastructure lite'. It never did aspire to hangars (the closest it came was the nissen cut that housed the Klemm L.25 owned by George Lush!) and its only buildings were wooden huts. Very few aircraft operated from it. Those of which I'm aware are the aforementioned Klemm, an Avro Prefect and two Austers Autocrats, an Arrow and a V). Hastings & East Sussex Air Service took a lease of the airfield but soon surrendered that. Mike Macey then took a seasonal licence for pleasure flying. The airfield could not be described as a success by any measure and it was moribund by the late fifties. I cannot presently trace the date when formally it was closed but I think that it would have been the sixties, by when flying from the site had long since ceased. There may have been subsequent sporadic, perhaps unauthorised, landings at and take-offs from the site, but no formalised aerial activity. The site subsequently was given over to sports pitches. These saw flying activity in, I think, 1980/81, when the Hastings Air Shows were held there. I doubt that there has been any since.