RAF Waddington: Your local specialists in bomb- and eavesdropping

         ‘I was a sea boy, like the Hitler youth, 15 years old in 1944’ said now 82-year old James Ross when I chatted with him about his experiences during the Second World War in his home village of Waddington. 

I met the vigorous pensioner in the Horse & Jockey pub in the High Street of the sleepy little village, which lends its name to the nearby airbase. He is more than willing to go back in time and talk about the turbulent days of his youth, when the airbase played a vital role in the fight against the Axis powers. 

German JU-88 multirole aircraft

    ‘There were German intruder fighters coming from Holland nearly every night. They were going round the airfield and tried to catch the bombers when they started. They shot quite a few down’ he says, and describes how he ‘saw some of the aircraft, the Junkers 88, going round the air base, just over the rooftop level in the moonlight.’

        His memories shed light on the constant feeling of fear that was prevalent during the years of the Second World War and the imminent danger that German bombs posed for the population of Lincolnshire. Unfortunately, the presence of a military facility was one the reasons which made life in and around Waddington more dangerous.

RAF Waddington in 1939

The Royal Air Force Base Waddington, which was built in 1916 as a flying training station, came into full use in 1937, shortly before the war began in 1939. The fact that the surrounding area was very flat made it destined to become a bomber base, as these heavy planes needed much time to gain altitude. As most of the county shared this landscape feature, a total of 45 air bases were finally built here during the war, and the rural and once peaceful Lincolnshire soon became known as Bomber County.  

       Another reason for the massive increase of military installations was the proximity to the enemy. While most of the fighter bases were located in Kent to fend off the German planes stationed in France, the bomber bases were erected in this part of Britain, which is one of the nearest to Germany. 

Waddington air crew in front of their bomber

     After the Luftwaffe had started to shift her focus from military installations towards bombing civilian targets, large bomber fleets took off from the airfields of Lincolnshire to carry out retaliatory attacks on German cities. ‘You had about 700 bombers going over there at night’ recalls Mr. Ross. ‘I used to stay up at night, watching them from the window sill. There was always something happening.’

      But soon he came to see more action than he wished for. The Germans desperately tried to stop the constant attacks on their cities and harbours and sent their own planes to destroy the attackers on the ground. And they also attacked civilian targets.

Destroyed church in Waddington village

        ‘Once there was an intruder raid, and this Junkers 88 was going to attack Scampton, He came down, and he saw this two lights on the road. He hit the car, took it off the road, killed the man in it, and he just crashed in the next field because he was that low’ says Mr. Ross.

The village of Waddington and the air base were not spared from devastating attacks. In 1941, two parachute mines of one ton weight each flattened 70 houses of the village including the 12^th century church, and killed one person. On the same day bombs dropped by a single Luftwaffe plane took the lives of eleven female members of the Air Force Auxiliary Services, who had sought refuge in an air-raid shelter in the airbase.

Damaged airmen's mess, RAF Waddington

     But these attacks happened infrequently and did never seriously hamper the activity of the airfield. Thus, aircraft from Waddington could take part in many operations against Nazi Germany and its allies. Dangerous and costly missions such as the daylight raid on Augsburg, the preparation of D-Day and the sinking of the battleship Tirpitz were hailed by the press. However, planes from Waddington were also involved in the bombing of the French town of Royan, in which as many as 800 French civilians were killed.

Avro Vulvan on display

Throughout the war the air base was not only home to British pilots, but also to members of the Australian, American, and Polish Air Force. The price they paid for their participation in the war was high. Altogether, RAF Waddington lost more bombers during operations than any other Bomber Command station in the UK, a total of 345.

       After the war, RAF Waddington was one of the few wartime bases in Lincolnshire that were not closed. It became the home of the Avro Vulcan, a strategic jet bomber which carried nuclear bombs and was a part of Britain’s airborne deterrent forces during the Cold War. 

Russian map of RAF Waddington

       How serious the Soviets took this threat became evident not long ago, when old Soviet maps of the airbase were discovered in Russian archives. The maps of the airbase and its surroundings show bunkers and hangars, details that are still not available on official maps of the UK. A spokesmen of RAF Waddington was quoted in the Lincolnshire Echo, saying that ‘to see the level of detail they have managed to achieve so long ago is remarkable.’

      The air base also shot to fame in 1982, when Vulcan bombers provided by RAF Waddington bombed the runway of the Argentinian air base of Port Stanley on the Falkland Islands, and thereby marked the entry of the United Kingdom into the Falklands War.

Pinochet leaves the UK

It also was the place where Augusto Pinochet’s flight to Chile took off after he had been released of his house arrest by then-Home Secretary Jack Straw in 2000. His plane was stopped on the taxiway in order to allow the crew to take an expensive silver-plate on board, a gift from Margaret Thatcher to her ally from the Falklands War.

         Today, the air base remains a vital part of the RAF and is home to several intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition aircraft and the accompanying ground crew. Several of the station's surveillance planes are currently based in the RAF Akrotiri on Cyprus, where they take part in the UK’s war against Libya.