RAF Wyton

RAF Wyton lies on the gravel terraces north of the Ouse in Huntingdonshire, four miles east of Huntingdon, on a patch of Cambridgeshire farmland that has been a flying field since the Royal Flying Corps moved in during 1916. Between the wars a long parade of training and bomber squadrons cycled through — Nos. 46, 65, 83, 104 and 156 among them — before the field was rebuilt in brick and concrete under the Expansion Scheme of the late 1930s. By the outbreak of war Wyton was a permanent station of the new RAF, home to Blenheim units of 2 Group, and on 3 September 1939 a Blenheim IV of No. 139 Squadron flown by Flying Officer Andrew McPherson became the first RAF aircraft to cross the German frontier in the Second World War — a reconnaissance over Wilhelmshaven that earned McPherson the DFC.

In August 1942 the station took on the role it is best remembered for. Air Commodore Don Bennett — at thirty-two the youngest officer ever to reach air rank in the RAF — set up the headquarters of the Pathfinder Force at Wyton, drawing in one squadron from each of Bomber Command’s heavy groups: No. 7 with Stirlings, No. 35 with Halifaxes, No. 83 with Lancasters, No. 109 with Wellingtons (and soon Mosquitoes) and No. 156 with Wellingtons. The PFF was elevated to No. 8 (Pathfinder) Group in January 1943, growing eventually to nineteen squadrons whose target-marking made area-bombing accuracy possible. Wyton itself flew Lancasters with 83 and 156 Squadrons and Mosquitoes with 109 and, later, 128 and 163 Squadrons of the Light Night Striking Force; Nos. 15, 40 and 57 had earlier rotated through with Wellingtons and Halifaxes. By 1945 the airmen of 8 Group had paid heavily — Pathfinder casualty rates were among the worst in Bomber Command — but their flares had guided the heavies onto everything from the Ruhr dams to Berlin.

The bombers left after the war but Wyton’s runways stayed busy. From the early 1950s the station became the centre of RAF strategic reconnaissance, flying English Electric Canberras of Nos. 58, 82 and 540 Squadrons over Europe and the Mediterranean, then Vickers Valiants from 1955 and Handley Page Victor B(SR).2s of No. 543 Squadron from 1959, the latter carrying out high-altitude photographic and radar surveys deep into the Cold War. The V-bombers had gone by the mid-1970s but the intelligence thread held.

Wyton remains an active RAF station. Since 2013 it has hosted the Defence Intelligence Joint Service Signals Organisation, the National Centre for Geospatial Intelligence and other elements of UK military intelligence under what is now Pathfinder Building — a deliberate nod to the airfield’s wartime identity. No. 1 ISR Wing and the Joint Forces Intelligence Group are based on the site; the runway itself is used only for light aircraft, but the work done at Wyton remains in the same line of business it pioneered in 1942: finding things, very precisely, a long way away.