RAF Tangmere

Tangmere lies on the flat coastal plain three miles east of Chichester in West Sussex, a few miles inland from the Channel. The Royal Flying Corps opened a training field on the site on 25 September 1917, and the following summer the airfield was handed to the United States Aviation Section of the Signal Corps, whose crews were learning to fly Handley Page O/400 bombers when the Armistice came. The station was wound down after the war before the RAF brought it back into use, and through the inter-war years Tangmere settled into a long career as a fighter aerodrome on the south coast.

By 1940 Tangmere was a Sector Station of No. 11 Group, Fighter Command, controlling the airspace over the western approaches to London and the Solent and working with satellite fields at Westhampnett and Merston. Its Hurricanes and Spitfires were squarely in the path of the Luftwaffe’s summer assault. The worst day came on 16 August 1940, when Junkers Ju 87 Stukas with their fighter escort wrecked hangars and aircraft on the ground; fourteen RAF personnel and six civilians were killed, and the station was patched up and fighting again within hours. Pilot Officer Billy Fiske of No. 601 (County of London) Squadron died of his wounds a few days later, an American volunteer among the first of his countrymen killed in the war.

From early 1941 Tangmere was home base of the Tangmere Wing under Wing Commander Douglas Bader, sweeping over northern France in the offensive operations that replaced the previous summer’s defensive battles. No. 616 Squadron arrived with its Spitfires that February, bringing the young pilots Hugh Dundas and Johnnie Johnson, the latter eventually the highest-scoring Western Allied fighter pilot against the Luftwaffe. The airfield had a quieter, more secretive role too: from a farmhouse opposite the main gate, the Westland Lysanders of No. 161 (Special Duties) Squadron flew agents of the Special Operations Executive into and out of occupied France by moonlight. In the run-up to D-Day, Tangmere hosted Canadian, Norwegian and Czechoslovak squadrons among the dozens passing through, and its runways supported fighter cover over the Normandy beaches in June 1944.

After the war the Central Fighter Establishment moved in briefly before transferring to RAF West Raynham, and Tangmere became a setting for record-breaking flight: in September 1946 Group Captain Teddy Donaldson took a Gloster Meteor F.4 to 616 mph over the Channel, and in September 1953 Squadron Leader Neville Duke pushed a Hawker Hunter prototype to 727.63 mph along the same coast. Front-line flying ended in 1958 and the runways were used for radar calibration until December 1970, when the last unit left and the ensign was lowered. Most of the airfield has since been returned to farmland, with commercial glasshouses on the old dispersals and housing across the apron. The Tangmere Military Aviation Museum, founded by local volunteers in 1982, occupies a corner of the technical site and preserves Donaldson’s Meteor and Duke’s Hunter alongside the station’s wider story.