RAF Duxford

Duxford Aerodrome lies in Cambridgeshire about eight miles south of Cambridge, on land that was requisitioned by the Royal Flying Corps in October 1917 and received its first aircraft and training units in March 1918. The site outlasted the immediate post-war contraction and was reclassified as a fighter station on 1 April 1923, an identity it would keep almost without interruption for the next four decades. Successive Expansion Scheme rebuilds in 1928, 1931, 1935 and 1939 replaced the wartime Belfast-truss hangars and tented lines with the brick-and-tile messes, married quarters and C-type hangars that still define the present-day site. In 1938 No. 19 Squadron, based at Duxford, became the first RAF squadron to receive the Supermarine Spitfire.

During the Battle of Britain Duxford sat within 12 Group, behind the front-line airfields of 11 Group, and its dispersals filled with a polyglot mix of Hurricane and Spitfire squadrons including No. 310 (Czechoslovak), No. 302 (Polish) and the Auxiliary No. 611. It is best remembered for the “Duxford Wing” assembled by Douglas Bader at the prompting of 12 Group’s Air Vice-Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory — three to five squadrons launched together to meet incoming raids in mass. The tactic put Leigh-Mallory in open dispute with 11 Group’s Keith Park, who argued that the time required to form the Big Wing left his own airfields uncovered, and the controversy ran on long after the Wing’s squadrons twice scrambled from Duxford on Battle of Britain Day, 15 September 1940.

Duxford was handed to the United States Army Air Forces on 1 April 1943 and became Station 357. The 78th Fighter Group flew from its runways for the rest of the war, escorting Eighth Air Force heavy bombers across occupied Europe in P-47 Thunderbolts and, from December 1944, in P-51 Mustangs. After VE-Day the station reverted to the RAF and ran on into the jet age, hosting Meteor, Hunter and Javelin all-weather fighter squadrons through the 1950s. With no concrete runway long enough for the next generation of supersonic aircraft, Duxford was declared surplus in July 1961; a Gloster Meteor made the final operational take-off on 1 August 1961.

The site was transferred to the Imperial War Museum in February 1976 as its first outstation, and IWM Duxford has since grown into Britain’s largest aviation museum, housing close to two hundred aircraft across seven exhibition halls. The Norman Foster-designed American Air Museum opened on the airfield on 1 August 1997 and won the Stirling Prize the following year. Duxford remains a working airfield, with regular flying since 1973 and an annual programme of Duxford Air Shows that continue to put Spitfires, Hurricanes, Mustangs and Thunderbolts back over the Cambridgeshire fields they flew from in wartime.