RAF Balderton

RAF Balderton opened in June 1941 a couple of miles south of Newark-on-Trent in Nottinghamshire and served, at different times, the RAF, the Royal Canadian Air Force and the United States Army Air Forces. Its first operational tenant was No. 408 “Goose” Squadron RCAF, which flew in from Syerston with its Handley Page Hampdens on 9 December 1941 and mounted its first sortie the very next day, a daylight raid against the airfield at Leeuwarden; the squadron stayed until September 1942. A heavy conversion unit flying Lancasters followed in 1943.

Balderton has an unusual place in the story of jet flight. During 1943 and 1944 Frank Whittle’s turbojets were tested from the airfield, including trials with a Gloster Meteor and a Vickers Wellington fitted out as an engine testbed, and Whittle is said to have lodged nearby at Balderton Old Hall. In 1944 the station passed briefly to the USAAF Ninth Air Force as a troop-carrier base, its C-47s and Waco gliders taking part in Operation Market Garden that September. No. 227 Squadron’s Lancasters flew from Balderton through the last winter of the war, at heavy cost, before the station wound down to munitions storage and was finally sold off in 1959.