Charles Greer

Name : Charles Greer

Rank : S.P.3.

Ser. No. : RA14557903

Dates at Cranage : Nov 1956 - Jul 1957

620th Engineers, U.S. Army

While searching on google for all things ‘Cranage’ I came across a Yahoo Group of which Mr Greer was/is the only member to have been at R.A.F. Cranage. I sent Mr Greer an e-mail explaining who I was and what I was trying to create - this site etc. - and we now correspond on a regular basis. Mr Greer was at Cranage with the 620th Engineers, U.S. Army.

Mr Greer has kindly offered to put ‘pen-to-paper’ to add to our information in the future. For now I can add that SP3 Charles Greer can be seen on the left of this photograph which was taken in 1956 at Fort Polk, Louisiana and has been carried in Charles’s bill fold for over 30 years and is the only photograph he has left after his house was gutted by fire in 1977.

Charles ‘Tennessee’ Greer was stationed at Cranage between November 1956 and July 1957. He remembers visiting the Three Greyhounds pub just up the road from the airfield, and the Watermans Arms [now the Whitton Chimes] in the centre of Northwich. It was in the Watermans Arms that Charles met a girl, who had a twin sister though 40+ years mean he is struggling to remember her name. If you know any twins who visited the pub and who knew ‘Tennessee’, as he was known’ please get in touch with myself and I’ll pass on information.

In November and December 1956 Charles remembers that as a result of the Suez Crisis they were put on alert and were required to do infantry training and invasion tactics. A temporary camp of tents was set up on the football pitches [see 1941 aerial photograph, annotation C] for the period until some of the issues were settled.

For the last six weeks at Cranage they had no duties to perform, just roll call each morning as 10am. The reason behind this is was the evacuation of many Hungarian refugees to the U.S. as a result of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. All transportation, air and sea, was ‘tied-up’ in the operation and therefore the all the U.S. personnel at Cranage effectively had a vacation, including a ‘party to end all paties’ to which the public were invited.

Unfortunately, Charles spent his last weekend in the stockade at RAF Burtonwood as a result of returning to Cranage, from the Three Greyhounds, rather drunk and disorderly. This meant he missed out on the chance to say goodbye to friends and acquaintances.

This is a photograph of Charles with the latest member of the family, grand daughter Lilly.