During WW2, Beech Wood and some others in the vicinity, including neighbouring Hedenham, were closed and used as a large bomb store by the United States Army Air Force, known as the Earsham Forward Ammunition Depot. Bombs were also stored beside several of the roads in the area, such as Hall Road, Denton Road, Pheasants Walk and Five Acre Lane >
Link. Earsham Hall was used as the headquarters and the camp was situated in the grounds. Bombs were brought there by railway >
Link and then transported on lorries to airfields all over East Anglia.
This long hut was building #100, and it was used for belt linking. The following information was kindly supplied by Peter from the Airfield Research Group >
Link
"Small Arms ammunition for machine guns and cannon came in two configurations, belted and unbelted. Belted, as supplied, was usually one type such as Ball (solid bullet) each round joined to another by a metal link forming a flexible belt.
Aircraft operations in particular required 'mixed' belts, for example 3 Ball, 1 Tracer, I Incendiary, repeated through the length of the belt. To meet changing requirements, both supply depots and airfield armouries had ammunition belting machines and boxes of loose ammo and links and they assembled their own. The simplest machines were hand cranked, the fancier ones electrically driven. Some electric machines could be loaded with both links and rounds and performed the actions of joining the links, clipping in the rounds and positioning.
In the absence of any type of machine, belts were made up entirely by hand by a team and each round individually and accurately positioned within its link, using a simple lever-operated hand tool. Clean flat benches in a warm dry room facilitated this.
To enable a simple production line, lengths of flat top benches would be laid end to end and a group of men assembled to join empty links in a chain, fill them with the required sequence of rounds and then pass them through the machine, which ensured that each round was correctly positioned within its link, critical to avoid feed and stoppage problems. Belts would be made up in short lengths of (say) fifty rounds for ease of handling, and then belts joined by hand during the gun loading at the aircraft. At storage depots such as Earsham a dedicated building was configured for Belt Linking or Belt Filling."