History of Sussex airfields around Sussex. During the lead-up to the D-Day landings, the people of Sussex were witness to the build-up of military personnel and materials, including the assembly of landing crafts and construction of Mulberry harbours off the county's coast. Five new airfields were built to provide additional support for the D-Day landings, four near Chichester and one near Billingshurst. A legacy of the D-Day landings are the sections of Mulberry harbour that lay broken and abandoned on the sea floor off the coast, of Selsey Bill, having missed the invasion. Sussex was an industrial county, from the stone age, with
Britannia Fields Engineers of the U.S.A. 82 Airborne Division who were housed and trained here from Feb to June 1944 prior to the D Day landings. They often trained and played baseball on the field. Some of the survivors’ visited the site in June 2004 for the 60th D Day Anniversary. A number of temporary wood huts were erected as barracks for the troops which after the war were used as temporary housing up to early 1950s when they were finally demolished. In 1951 these buildings were converted to a territorial barracks for D squadron Prince Albert’s own Leicestershire Yeomanry which used