RAF Woodhall Spa

RAF Woodhall Spa opened in February 1942 as a satellite of nearby RAF Coningsby, two miles to the south, in the flat farmland east of Lincoln. Its first resident unit was No. 97 Squadron, which arrived on 1 March 1942 with Avro Lancasters and worked from the new airfield until being posted to Bourn the following year. No. 619 Squadron formed at Woodhall Spa in April 1943 and flew from the station until the start of 1944, when a reshuffle within No. 5 Group brought a more famous tenant onto the books.

That tenant was No. 617 Squadron, which moved across from Coningsby in January 1944 and would stay at Woodhall Spa for the remainder of the war. The squadron arrived with thirty-four Lancasters and a pair of Mosquitoes and had by then shed its dam-busting identity for a new role as Bomber Command’s precision unit, dropping the deep-penetration weapons designed by Barnes Wallis. The first operational use of the 12,000-lb Tallboy was made from Woodhall Spa on the night of 8/9 June 1944, when 617 collapsed the roof of the Saumur railway tunnel and severed a German reinforcement route to the Normandy beachhead. Tallboys from the same airfield were then turned on V-weapon launch sites in northern France, U-boat pens at La Pallice and Lorient, the E-boat shelters at Le Havre, and German warships in harbour at Brest and Swinemunde. The squadron flew three attacks on the battleship Tirpitz lying in Norwegian fjords; the third, Operation Catechism on 12 November 1944, capsized her at her moorings off Tromso. Five months later, on 14 March 1945, a Lancaster from Woodhall Spa carrying the new 22,000-lb Grand Slam dropped the largest conventional bomb of the war on the Bielefeld viaduct, bringing down spans that fifty previous raids had failed to break.

For its marker aircraft the station relied on No. 627 Squadron, a Mosquito unit loaned from the Pathfinder Force in April 1944 to fly low-level visual marking ahead of 617’s bomb runs. The officers of both squadrons messed at the Petwood, a country house a mile south of the airfield that had been requisitioned at the outbreak of war; the hotel still keeps a squadron bar in one of its rooms. Across the war Woodhall Spa’s Lancasters and Mosquitoes flew against targets from the Ruhr to the Arctic Circle, ending with an attack on Hitler’s mountain residence at Berchtesgaden in the final week of operations.

Front-line flying ended in 1945 and the runways were used briefly as a Tiger Force assembly point and then for bomb storage. From the late 1950s part of the site was rebuilt as a Bristol Bloodhound surface-to-air missile station, manned in succession by Nos. 222 and 112 Squadrons until the unit left for Cyprus in 1967. RAF engine workshops continued to operate at Woodhall Spa, servicing Phantom and later Tornado powerplants for Coningsby, until the station finally closed in 1992. The Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust acquired the ground in 2015 and now manages it as a nature reserve, with the former airmen’s accommodation block at Thorpe Camp preserved as a small visitor centre commemorating the bomber crews who flew from here.