No. 109 Squadron
- Group
- 8 Group
- Home station
- RAF Wyton
About
No. 109 Squadron was one of the technical pioneers of the bomber war. Reformed at the end of 1940 from a wireless-research unit, its task was to investigate German radio beams, jam them, and develop navigation and bombing aids for Bomber Command. Working with the de Havilland Mosquito, the squadron perfected Oboe, the precise blind-bombing system in which a pair of ground stations guided an aircraft to release its markers at exactly the right point.
Oboe was first used in action on the night of 1 January 1943 to mark the aiming point at Düsseldorf, and the squadron went on to lead target-marking for the main force as part of No. 8 (Pathfinder) Group, flying from RAF Wyton and later RAF Little Staughton, where alongside No. 582 Squadron it pioneered daylight formation bombing on Oboe. Its earlier types had included the Vickers Wellington, but it was as a Mosquito marker squadron that it made its mark.
Sources: This page was compiled from publicly available historical sources, including History of War — No. 109 Squadron (RAF) in the Second World War and Wikipedia: No. 109 Squadron RAF. The text is original and has been written from factual source material; no source text has been copied unless specifically quoted and attributed.
Photographs
ⓘ licence & credit
Basher Eyre / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:VJ_Day_at_the_National_Memorial_Arboretum_(336)_-_geograph.org.uk_-_6582156.jpgView source & full licence →No service records linked to this squadron yet. Aircraft, crews and sorties will appear here soon.
Further reading & sources
External sites — facts only are reused here; their text and images remain their authors'.