Coningsby
CONINGSBY: Military aerodrome
Note: First picture by the author. Second picture obtained from Google Earth ©
Military users: WW2: RAF Bomber Command 5 Group
97 (Straits Settlements) Sqdn (Avro Manchesters, later Avro Lancasters)
106 Sqdn (Handley Page Hampdens & Avro Manchesters)
61, 83, & 619 Sqdns (Avro Lancasters)
Note: This picture from a postcard was kindly sent by Mike Charlton who has an amazing collection. See, www.aviationpostcard.co.uk
After a bit of research I still cannot identify this Spitfire. Unfortunately the full serial number is not visible - just 'PS85' - which doesn't appear to be part of the BBMF collection. If anybody can kindly offer advice, this will be most welcome.
Post 1945: 109 Sqdn (Mosquitos)
15 Sqdn (English Electric Canberras)
57 Sqdn (Boeing B-29 Washingtons)
149 Sqdn (Boeing B-29 Washingtons later Canberras)
IX, 12 & 35 Sqdns (Avro Vulcans)
41, 56 & 111Sqdns (Phantoms)
228 OCU (McDonnell Phantoms)
RAF Strike Command
F.3 OEU
5, 12, 29, 35 & 65 Sqdns (Panavia Tornado F3s),
229 OCU (Panavia Tornado F3s) and 56(R) Sqdn
3, 11, 17 & 29 Sqdns (Eurofighter Typhoon FGR.4s)
1998 snapshot: RAF Air Defence
5 Sqdn 13 x Panavia Tornado F.3
RAF Operational Conversion Unit
56 (R) Sqdn (F3 OCU) 21 x Panavia Tornado F 3
Flying club/school: 1959. Coningsby Group
Location: S of A153, 4.5nm SE of Woodhall Spa, 7nm SSW of Horncastle
Period of operation: 1940 to present day
Runways: WW2: 03/21 1280x46 hard 08/26 1783x46 hard
12/30 1417x46 hard
2001: 08/26 2743x61 hard
NOTES: THE COLD WAR
It really wasn’t that long ago, in historical terms, in fact shortly after the end of WW2 that a combination of scientists, politicians and military people in ‘The West’ and also in ‘The East’ came up with a fabulous idea. They decided to squander untold resources on the basis that the entire world could be destroyed in all-out nuclear war. An option, can we now believe, that was actually viewed as being desirable if war was declared by the Soviet Union. Just why anybody thought the Soviet Union, of all peoples, would be disposed to this course of action beggars the imagination – especially as nearly all the aggression was from the ‘West’. It was of course utter lunacy, which probably explains why, in a series of protocols mostly led by the Soviets, a truce was eventually agreed.
In his book Wings Patrick Bishop gives an excellent over-view of the situation that prevailed. “The gung-ho spirit of the American fliers was mirrored in the institutional attitude of their bosses. The USAF and in particular the Strategic Air Command (SAC) exuded aggression and displayed a willingness to embrace the concept of mutual annihilation that underlay the possession of nuclear weapons. The SAC was the air force’s bomber wing and it soaked up much of the mighty resources of the US military budget. It was led by ‘bomber generals’, exemplified by the baby-faced, cigar-sucking Curtis LeMay, the architect of the firebombing of Tokyo. LeMay believed that America’s entire nuclear arsenal should be employed in a single, obliterating strike if it seemed likely that a Soviet attack was planned – an atomic version of the ‘knock-out blow’ theory of the interwar years.”
LeMay by this time was quite clearly deranged, a mental case needing urgent treatment, but he wasn’t removed. Is this not perhaps the most astonishing aspect of this episode?
PERPETUAL READINESS
“Throughout the 1950s the SAC stood in a state of perpetual readiness to send its nuclear bombers against a host of Soviet cities as soon as the order was given.” What appears obvious is that LeMay had no idea regarding how the Soviet Union had suffered during WW2. Even the latest figures beggar the imagination, estimates being between fifty and eighty-five million dying. Of these it is estimated that between thirty-eight and fifty-five million dying were civilians. So why on earth would anybody regard the Soviet Union as being willing to enter into yet another global war?
“It was a Sisyphean task, requiring constant reconnaissance, monitoring and analysis of the Soviet Union’s actions. It was the fate of the RAF during this period to work as a junior partner with the USAF, sharing the exhausting labour of eternal vigilance.” Not widely known, even today, is that RAF crews bore most of the brunt of reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union, sometimes flying USAF aircraft.
“In October 1953 warheads were exploded in the South Australian desert, the start of a process that would produce Blue Danube, Britain’s plutonium bomb. The new weapons would be carried by a succession of ‘V Bombers’ – the Vickers Valiant, Avro Vulcan and Handley Page Victor, which acted as Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent force until the responsibility passed to the Royal Navy’s Polaris missile-equipped submarines in 1969.”
A VERY SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP
We Brits must of course bear in mind that, initially by and large, our ‘special’ relationship with the USA is that we traditionally freely gave them all the advances we made, especially in aviation matters, and in return got sod all by and large. An arrangement which, rather oddly it seems to me, has much pleased our successive governments. Incidentally, perhaps not too widely known, regarding the development of nuclear weapons in the USA, it must be borne in mind that British scientists were also involved.
“America’s initial reluctance to share her nuclear secrets waned and in 1958 the US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement was signed, which locked the two countries into a shared nuclear strategy. The RAF was at the forefront of NATO’s plans for nuclear war with the Soviet Union. From bases in central and eastern England V-Bombers would be the trigger force for a nuclear Armageddon, and had the capacity to destroy Moscow and Kiev, killing millions before the Americans had entered Soviet airspace.” This is still something some people think we should be proud of. I cannot share their enthusiasm. But, I am still fascinated by the concept of having a ‘deterrent’, with the proviso that I cannot quite believe it was ever needed on the scale engineered in those times.
“For much of the time the RAF’s Cold War duties seemed to those who carried them out like an elaborate game, albeit one that bore the risk of violent death if things went wrong. Both sides broke the rules frequently. RAF aircraft flew deep into Soviet air space on intelligence-gathering missions, collecting radar and photographic evidence of military sites, and despite some narrow escapes they got away with it.” It’s odd how the grapevine works because even as a ‘plane spotter’ aged about fourteen and living near to LAP (London Airport) in around 1961, I was quite aware that the RAF were conducting spy missions using Avro Vulcans over the Soviet Union. At that age this knowledge didn’t bother me in the slightest, just an item of interest.
But, why should I be concerned? We ‘reggie spotters’ were quite accustomed to seeing Aeroflot Tu.104s arriving regularly, so obviously the Soviet Union was, (not that we thought much about such things), appearing as basically a rather friendly entity. BEA were flying Comet 4Bs to Moscow too on a daily basis. What military minds were up to didn’t much intrude on our little world.
THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS
Getting back to Wings Patrick Bishop tells us: “ In autumn 1962, however, the feeling of unreality that pervaded the Cold War evaporated and the unimaginable prospect of a nuclear war became horribly plausible. At the end of October, President John F. Kennedy received hard evidence that Soviet missiles were about to be deployed in Cuba, a hundred miles from the Florida coast. He warned that the delivery of the weapons would be opposed by force. Any clash had the potential to escalate into an all-out nuclear conflict in which Britain – as America’s nearest ally and partner in her nuclear strategy – would be in the front line. During the week-end of 26 October 1962 the V-Bomber force was brought to the highest levels of readiness. At four air bases forty Vulcans stood with their bombs on board, their crews waiting alongside at fifteen minutes’ readiness.”
I can just about remember this going on and, I don’t think I or any of my mates, felt particularly concerned, and went about life as per normal. It would I suppose not have made much sense because we’d already been told, (am I correct?), that the Russians were sending over to London their Bolshoi Ballet troupe the very next year. Hardly an act of aggression. Looking it up it appears the Bolshoi ballet did arrive in 1963.
‘The aircraft were all ready to go,’ remembered former Wing Commander Peter West, an electronics officer on a Vulcan based at Coningsby in Lincolnshire. ‘We were fully kitted out with our flying gear. All we had to do was get in, put a our straps on, press the button and the engines would start up.’ The crisis passed, however, and for decades the British public remained in ignorance of how serious the drama had become.” Well then, that seems to explain the general lack of concern we felt at the time. Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.
BBMF DHC-1 CHIPMUNKS
If anybody should be under the illusion that RAF Chipmunks were only employed in the basic training role, Jarrod Cotter in his book Battle of Britain Memorial Flight gives an example of Chipmunks being employed way beyond the basic training role, especially regarding one of the Chipmunks operated by the BBMF. “WG486 served on operations with 114 Squadron in Nicosia, Cyprus, during operation Thwart in 1958. The Chipmunks were used to carry out anti-terrorist operations from December 1958 to March 1959. No. 114 Squadron was especially re-formed for these operations….Their tasks included observation and liaison, flying with Army officers in the rear seat.”
But it doesn’t end here. “In 1987 WG486 moved to Germany to operate as part of the Gatow Station Flight in Berlin, which was surrounded by Soviet Bloc territory. From the 1950s Chipmunks were used to carry out air coverage of the 20-mile radius of territory around Berlin, where there were large concentrations of Soviet and East German Forces. After WWII there had been a number of incidents so in 1946, under the Potsdam Agreement, the UK, France, Russia and the USA created the 20-mile Berlin Control Zone in which all aircraft from both sides had access.
Operating at low level (often as low as 500ft) with hand-held cameras, the Chipmunk crews would often return to base with valuable photographs of the Warsaw Pact’s equipment and personnel in operational and training roles. Sometimes hostile actions would occur – on at least one occasion a Chipmunk returned to Gatow with a bullet hole in its airframe.” It appears the Russians knew very well the ‘Chippies’ were being used for spying but they in turn carried out similar flights over ‘West’ Berlin. All in all a bit of a fiasco then.
As Jarrod Cotter points out, “The Flight’s (BBMF) Chipmunks, (WG486 and WK518 – my note), are therefore not only the sole examples of the type remaining in service with the RAF, but WG486 has the rare distinction for its type of having served operationally twice in its service life.”
It would appear that WG466, which also served with the Berlin Air Safety Centre at Gatow is now on display in the Allied Museum at Tempelhof, Berlin. In 2012 another ex-Gatow Chipmunk took to the skies, WP971 (G-ATHD), operated by the Spartan Flying Group which I believe is still based at Denham, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE. This aircraft operated from Gatow from 1966 to 1974. It appears that these spy flights started in 1956 as Operation Schooner, later Operation Nylon, and continued until 1989 when the Berlin Wall “came down”.
JUST HOW ‘COLD’ WAS THE COLD WAR?
Regarding the ‘Cold War’ much of this was just posturing to satisfy the simple-minded military on both sides. Trucks from western Europe were, in the 1970s, given permits to travel to Greece, Turkey and the Middle East through Eastern-Bloc countries. I can testify to this on my first trip in a truck to Greece, with permits to transit East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia. It was obvious that a large amount of trade was already going on, with, at that time, Bulgaria using German (Mercedes-Benz) and Romania Swedish (Scania) trucks. Glasnost might have been a concept yet to be accepted in the Kremlin, but in reality it was pretty much established. The ‘West’ were trading with the ‘East’ in pretty much the same way nation States traded with each other on both sides of ‘the divide’in those days. DeuTrans, the East German international trucking operation were using Volvo (Swedish) trucks and Hungarocamion, MAN trucks from West Germany. Also, probably 90%+ of that east-west trade was being handled by Eastern Bloc trucks.
There was a shop in High Holborn (London) that sold well made items such as binoculars, cameras etc from the Eastern Bloc countries, at very competitive prices. On top of this thousands of mainly younger people from the west were visting the Eastern Bloc countries on holiday with surprisingly few restrictions.
The ‘Cold War’ concept created by the USA was pretty much ‘dead in the water’ by the early 1960s. Today I suppose, perhaps we need to question the sanity of the nuclear scientists, the manufacturing teams and military and government ‘advisors’ who had persuaded politicians on both sides, that being able to destroy the entire planet was definitely not enough - and the capability to do this ten times over, or more, with nuclear weapons was still the most viable option. And so the scramble went on, costing far more than either side could afford and very obviously all for nothing, a bluff at best. Indeed, despite heavily armed check-points on the roads, travellers could catch a local 'S-bahn' train from West to East Berlin with only minimal formalities. The phrase; "The lunatics have taken over the asylum", seems apposite? Plus of course, while this was going on, East Berliners attempting to escape to the West were often being shot in 'No-Mans' land. On the other hand there is (or was) a memorial placque in the 'Check-Point Charlie' museum to all those soldiers who fired at escapees but somehow managed to miss.
IN CONCLUSION?
What now seems pretty obvious is that, unlike the Americans, the Russians had seen the consequences of modern war; the utterly futile destruction and massive loss of life, plus the most appalling actions of their last genocidal leader Stalin. But, the Soviet leaders had no option but to oppose the threat now posed by the USA. A strategy which left millions of Russians in abject poverty for decades. The Soviet plan to occupy all of western Europe, which had been stalled by 1944/45, when the Allied, mostly American troops, had arrived in huge numbers, was enough to halt each others forces roughly in the region that became West and East Germany.
THE BBMF
CONINGSBY has been the base of the BBMF (Battle of Britain Memorial Flight) from 1976 to –
On the 19th October 2012 the then latest BBMF Spitfire, TE311, a Mark LF XVIe, made its first flight after 58 years. The restoration took about ten years and the BBMF were doubly pleased to have such a Mark to display as it was a Mk.XVI Spitfire that performed the first Battle of Britain flypast in 1957. See BIGGIN HILL KENT for some early BBMF history.
CONINGSBY: Private airstrip
Location: Close to and on the E side of the military airfield
NOTES: Once used for crop dusting operations
Info source AAIB report EW/G2008/07/05.
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