On a brief overseas holiday recently, I found myself sitting in a window seat on a KLM Boeing 737-800 flying from Glasgow to Amsterdam. Hardly a setting for having a realisation about Bomber Command, you would think.

And yet.

The plane’s route took us roughly south-east from Scotland, cutting across the top of England. Gazing idly out the window, thinking about haggis, bagpipes and whisky, I spotted something that pushed all those Scottish thoughts from my mind. Thirty-something thousand feet below I saw a familiar triangular sort of shape among the fields.

Hello, I thought. That’s an old airfield.

There wasn’t much left of this one: I could see the outline of one long runway and a peritrack, and maybe a couple of hangars. But a minute later, there was another. And then another, and another.

I later plotted our approximate track on Google Earth, and managed to identify several of the airfields I’d seen. First was Catterick, a 13 Group Fighter Command airfield that’s now an army base. Then Leeming, a 6 (Canadian) Group heavy bomber airfield that remains an active RAF station. Then came Skipton-on-Swale, another 6 Group field that’s now reverted to farmland, and Topcliffe, also a wartime airfield turned modern army base.

We flew on over Yorkshire and the airfields kept coming. I didn’t identify them at the time, but we would have passed places like Elvington, Linton-on-Ouse, Full Sutton and Pocklington, all heavy bomber airfields. Then we crossed into Lincolnshire, past Spilsby, Binbrook, Kelstern and Strubby. If I’d realised and looked in the right direction, I might even have been able to make out RAF Waddington through the haze.

Gazing down at these old airfields as we cruised along, what I realised was how many there were. The air was fairly hazy, as is common in these parts, and I couldn’t see more than a few miles before any ground detail disappeared in the murk. But once I got my eye in, they were everywhere. Even in the thin corridor of ground that I could see, before long I’d counted dozens of the things.

I once flew a light aeroplane on a tour of several wartime airfields. While I remember being struck that time by how many of them I saw, I didn’t realise until now just how tightly packed in they are in this part of England. Some were so close that their flying circuits would have overlapped.

I marvelled at the sheer amount of effort that these mostly-crumbling places represented. To build the runways alone, each airfield took 18,000 tonnes of dry cement and 90,000 tonnes of aggregate. By the end of the war there were some 720 military airfields in the UK. At the peak of construction, in 1942, a brand-new all-weather airfield was coming online on average every three days.[1] Not all were bomber bases, of course, but in the northern part of England, the same area over which I was flying on the KLM jet, most of them were. And a typical bomber airfield might house something like 2,400 personnel.

That was a whole lot of people, I thought, all dedicated night after night to sending (and flying) bombers across the sea to Europe. Seeing all those airfields really brought home the scale of the bomber offensive.

And then our KLM jet crossed the coast and headed out over the North Sea.

© 2023 Adam Purcell

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[1] https://historicengland.org.uk/research/results/reports/7018/NineThousandMilesofConcrete_AReviewofSecondWorldWarTemporaryAirfieldsinEngland