North Killingholme
NORTH KILLINGHOLME: Military aerodrome
Military user: RAF Bomber Command 1 Group
550 Sqdn (Avro Lancasters)
Location: W of North Killingholme & NW of South Killingholme villages, 10nm NW of Grimsby
Period of operation: 1943 to 1945
Runways: 03/21 1829x46 hard 09/27 1280x46 hard
14/32 1280x46 hard
A MICHAEL T HOLDER GALLERY
Note: These three great pictures were published in Lincolnshire Airfields in WW2 by Patrick Otter.
NOTES: If you read ‘Men of Air’ by Kevin Wilson it seems to me very hard indeed not to conclude that there were many people in the Air Ministry and at senior level in Bomber Command who were basically working in sympathy with the Nazi regime? Either by family history, political leanings or other reasons? Let’s face it, our Royal family was and is of German heritage!
SOMETHING TO CONSIDER?
‘Bomber’ Harris has come under intense criticism from nearly all quarters since WW2 but I have never seen or heard anybody pointing out that, right beneath his nose, many senior staff were, (or so it might well seem), working very hard to aid the Germans - and he remained oblivious to this.
Raid after major raid was, (there can now be no doubt about this), specifically engineered to give every advantage to German defences. Indeed, the flying tactics employed were, as often as not, so obviously designed to inflict maximum damage and casualties on the RAF crews. This aspect of WW2 has yet to be exposed, even in the 21st century!
A LITTLE KNOWN ASPECT?
It is now no secret that many of the crews who managed to survive their tours, went against orders in many respects, making their own decisions about how to attack the enemy. For example, many seasoned crews flew a route some distance away from the main bomber stream, rejoining it only when near to the target.
Time and time again for raids were ordered when the ‘Top Brass’ knew damned well the weather conditions were far from suitable. A clear sky with bright moonlight being one of the worst conditions to mount a big raid.
We had very fast aircraft almost immune from enemy attack, (such as the DH Mosquito), employed to over-fly the target area and give a report on probable weather conditions. Time and time again these reports were ignored, nearly always with large losses to the RAF.
SOMETHING TO REMEMBER
It now seems so sad that many of those young men in Bomber Command knew very well they were being sent off on missions which, if not exactly suicidal, had very poor odds of returning alive to land back after some raids and a very bleak prospect of surviving a tour. And yet, even knowing this, they climbed up into their bombers, again and again, simply because they knew that they were the only way that the German regime, in their homeland, could be attacked. We today living in the UK have a great debt to be acknowledged here.
As is even now still being pointed out, as it was at the time by the USAAF, the area bombing of cities was just prolonging the war. 'Bomber' Harris could not understand, that if the refineries alone were taken out, without fuel, vehicles of all kinds cannot move! This, coupled with hitting military manufacturing centres and strategic rail junctions etc would it now seems, without much if any doubt, have ended the war many months before.
Note: This picture is from my Google Earth © derived database. This WW2 bomber base is most unusual in only having one Squadron, 550, based here. Indeed, I cannot think, off-hand, of another example.
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