RAF Fersfield/winfarthing

RAF Fersfield, also recorded as Winfarthing, lay in south Norfolk near Diss, roughly sixteen miles south-west of Norwich. Built during 1943-44 with paved runways, it opened on 3 April 1944, originally serving as a satellite to a nearby Eighth Air Force base before being put to a more unusual purpose.

The station’s most distinctive chapter was its use for Operation Aphrodite, the joint American programme that flew war-weary B-17 Flying Fortresses as radio-controlled flying bombs against hardened German targets such as V-weapon sites and submarine pens. The 562nd Bomb Squadron of the USAAF’s 388th Bomb Group and US Navy crews worked from here from the summer of 1944. It was on a Navy mission connected with this effort that Lieutenant Joseph P. Kennedy Jr was killed when his aircraft exploded over Suffolk in August 1944.

Fersfield also hosted RAF Mosquito operations under No. 2 Group, and Mosquitoes flying from the airfield took part in the precision raid on the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen in March 1945 (Operation Carthage). A number of other No. 2 Group squadrons passed through, and the site later housed a Group disbandment centre.

The airfield closed in 1946 and reverted largely to agriculture. Its runways briefly hosted motor racing around 1950-51, and a surviving T2 hangar and operations block long marked the site.