RAF Mildenhall

RAF Mildenhall lies on the heathy Breckland of west Suffolk, between the market town of Mildenhall and the village of Beck Row, on land flat and dry enough that the Air Ministry chose it as one of the flagship sites of the 1930s Expansion Scheme. The station opened on 16 October 1934, and four days later staged the start of the MacRobertson Air Race to Melbourne, drawing more than seventy thousand spectators to watch Tom Campbell Black and C. W. A. Scott lift their de Havilland Comet away from the new grass for a flight that reached Australia in under three days. Within weeks the spectators were gone and Handley Page Heyford biplane bombers of 99 Squadron had moved in, the first of many tenants.

Through the Second World War Mildenhall was a front-line bomber station in No. 3 Group of Bomber Command, and its squadrons cycled through every heavy type the Group flew. Vickers Wellingtons predominated in the early years, replaced from 1942 by the four-engined Short Stirling and from 1944 by the Avro Lancaster. Among the units posted in were 15, 75 (New Zealand), 115, 149, 218 (Gold Coast) and 622 Squadrons, operating both from Mildenhall itself and from its satellite fields. Crews flew against targets across occupied Europe, from the early leaflet sorties to the area-bombing offensive over Germany, the mining campaigns in the Baltic, and the tactical work supporting the Normandy invasion. By VE Day the airfield had despatched many thousands of sorties at the cost of more than two hundred aircraft missing and a corresponding toll in aircrew.

After 1945 the station entered a quieter decade under No. 3 Group, the bombers giving way to transport and training detachments while Headquarters 3 Group continued to occupy the site until 1967. The Cold War, however, brought a permanent change of accent. On 11 July 1950 Mildenhall became a joint RAF and United States Air Force base, hosting rotational Strategic Air Command bomber and tanker deployments before settling into a long-term American tenancy. From 1976 onward the airfield was a forward operating location for Lockheed U-2 and SR-71 high-altitude reconnaissance flights, and in July 1978 the 306th Strategic Wing arrived with a permanent RC-135 reconnaissance commitment.

Mildenhall today is still an RAF station in name only; in practice it has been run as a USAF installation since 1 February 1992, when the 100th Air Refueling Wing took over as host unit. The Wing’s Boeing KC-135 Stratotankers provide aerial refuelling across Europe, Africa and the Middle East, while the 95th Reconnaissance Squadron continues the RC-135 mission and the 352nd Special Operations Wing, resident since 1995, operates the airfield’s CV-22 Osprey and MC-130 fleet. The grass strip that hosted the Comets has long since gone, but eighty years on the place remains, as the Expansion Scheme intended, a working bomber-era airfield in Suffolk.