RAF Aldermaston

RAF Aldermaston lay in Berkshire (now West Berkshire), some eight miles east of Newbury. It opened in the summer of 1942, having originally been laid out for RAF Bomber Command and intended for Wellington bomber operations. In practice it saw little use in that role; for a period it served instead as a Supermarine Spitfire assembly and testing site under the Ministry of Aircraft Production.

The airfield’s main wartime career belonged to the United States Army Air Forces. It passed first to the Eighth Air Force and then, from 1943, to the Ninth Air Force, becoming an important base for transport and troop-carrying aircraft as well as fighters and tactical reconnaissance units. Successive groups flew from Aldermaston, among them the 60th, 315th and 434th Troop Carrier Groups with their C-47 Skytrains, and the 370th Fighter Group with P-38 Lightnings. Its C-47 units took part in the great airborne efforts of the war, including the D-Day landings of June 1944 and the Arnhem operation, Market Garden, that September.

The station was handed back to the Air Ministry in 1945 and gradually fell out of military aviation use. After the war the site found an entirely different and lasting purpose, becoming the home of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment from around 1950, a role its successor, the Atomic Weapons Establishment, continues to fill.