RAF Lindholme

RAF Lindholme was built on Hatfield Moors in the flat lands east of Doncaster in South Yorkshire and opened in June 1940 — known at first as Hatfield Woodhouse before taking the name Lindholme. As a Bomber Command station in No. 1 Group it sent Handley Page Hampdens and Vickers Wellingtons against Germany; among its squadrons were two of the Polish bomber units, Nos. 304 and 305, and a Canadian squadron. Some seventy-six of its bombers were lost on operations. In the war’s later years Lindholme became a training base, home to a Heavy Conversion Unit and a Lancaster Finishing School preparing crews for the four-engined heavies. Its most enduring legacy is the “Lindholme Gear” — a set of air-droppable dinghies and survival equipment developed here for rescuing ditched aircrew, which RAF aircraft carried for decades afterwards. After the war it housed the Bomber Command Bombing School and a radar unit before closing in 1985, when the site was converted into HM Prison Lindholme.