RAF Waddington

RAF Waddington lies on the limestone ridge south of Lincoln, on ground first ploughed up for military aviation in 1916 when the Royal Flying Corps opened a training aerodrome there. The station passed to the newly-formed Royal Air Force on 1 April 1918, was wound down after the Armistice and slid into care and maintenance by 1920. It stayed that way through the lean years of the inter-war RAF, and only came back to life on 12 March 1937 when the Expansion Scheme reopened it as a heavy bomber station. No. 50 Squadron arrived the same day with biplane Hawker Hinds; No. 44 Squadron followed in June. Both units re-equipped with Handley Page Hampdens before the decade was out, and that was the aircraft Waddington took to war.

Through the first half of the Second World War the Hampdens of 44 and 50 Squadrons flew the long, costly minelaying and small-target sorties that defined Bomber Command’s early years, joined for a time by the Avro Manchesters of No. 207 Squadron. The station’s place in the bomber war was settled on 2 March 1942, when 44 Squadron flew the first operational sortie ever made by an Avro Lancaster. Six weeks later, on 17 April 1942, twelve Lancasters from Waddington’s 44 Squadron and from 97 Squadron at Woodhall Spa set out on Operation Margin, an audacious low-level daylight strike against the MAN factory at Augsburg, which built roughly half of all U-boat diesel engines. Seven of the twelve did not return. Squadron Leader John Nettleton brought what was left of the leading section home and was awarded the Victoria Cross.

For the rest of the war Waddington was largely a Lancaster station, and from late 1943 a notably Australian one — Nos. 463 and 467 Squadrons RAAF flew from here through to the final raids on Germany. No. 617 Squadron arrived in June 1945 with the long-range Lancaster B.VII (FE), one of the units earmarked for Tiger Force and the planned bomber offensive against Japan that the atomic bombings cut short. By VE-Day the airfield had buried hundreds of crews killed flying out of it.

The post-war station became one of the key V-bomber bases. No. 83 Squadron received the RAF’s first operational Avro Vulcans here in May 1957, and Nos. 44, 50 and 101 Squadrons flew Vulcans from Waddington into the early 1980s. Three of those Vulcans flew the Black Buck missions of May and June 1982, the round-trips from Ascension Island to Port Stanley that were, briefly, the longest-range bombing raids in history. The last Vulcans went in 1984. From 1991 the station took on a new identity as the home of the RAF’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance force — first the E-3D Sentry AEW.1, then the Sentinel R1, Shadow R1 and, from November 2013, the RC-135W Rivet Joint. The Red Arrows moved in from Scampton in October 2022, and Waddington is today the busiest station in the Royal Air Force.