Wigsley
WIGSLEY: Military aerodrome later civil use
Note: This picture (2008) was obtained from Google Earth ©
At first glance it might look as if little visual evidence exists, but, armed with a WW2 map of the airfield such as I have, the general layout and some evidence of the runways can be discerned, especially the 08/26 runway.
Military user: WW2: RAF Bomber Command 5 & 7 Group
1654 HCU (Avro Lancasters, Manchesters)
7 Group (Short Stirlings)
Location: SW of Wigsley, ENE of Spelford (now spelt Spalford it seems), 7nm W of Lincoln
Period of operation: 1942 to 1958
Runways: WW2: 02/20 1280x46 hard 08/26 1829x46 hard
14/32 1280x46 hard
NOTES: Some of the aircrews sent here to convert to Avro Manchesters had already experienced operations such as flying Whitley bombers on daylight anti-submarine sweeps for Coastal Command over the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic. This would be roughly the period of late 1942, early 1943. It appears that some, (or many if not most on this series of courses?), then had to convert from the Manchester onto the Lancaster.
SOMETHING TO REMEMBER
I reckon there is much to be learned about this episode. For example, today it takes endless years of testing and trials to get nigh on any type of aircraft into service. The Lancaster prototype first flew on the 8th January 1941 but here we have aircrews converting onto the type, barely proven in service, roughly two years or less later! Indeed the ‘Dam Busters’ raid using heavily modified Lancasters took place in May 1943.
In his book Wings Patrick Bishop gives an insight: “It would be some time before the volunteers arrived on operational squadrons. The training could afford to be lengthy and rigorous. There was nothing for them to fly until the big four-engined bombers that had been ordered as part of the pre-war rearmament programme arrived in service. The first of the series – the Short Stirling – started to be fed into squadrons in August 1940, the Halifax in 1941 and the mighty Lancaster not until the beginning of 1942.”
Bomber aircrews, and ground crews of course, at WIGSLEY would have been at the forefront of these developments.
ANOTHER IMPORTANT POINT
Mr Bishop makes another important point: “In this interim period Bomber Command struggled on with its inadequate Blenheims, Hampdens, Wellingtons and Whitleys, trying to make the Air Staff’s assertions that bombing was capable of inflicting precise and painful damage on the German war machine a reality. In the course of 1941 it lost 1,338 aeroplanes on operations – more than the number of German aircraft the RAF had shot down during the Battle of Britain. Another 154 were destroyed in training and other accidents, a scandalous rate that persisted throughout the war.”
Of the raids by Bomber Command on Germany during 1940 and 1941 the result was next to nothing. They made no noticeable difference. So sad to think that the names of those that died fulfilling this thankless and pointless task will be on a memorial somewhere that the majority of us ignore today.
SOMETHING OF NOTE
Reckoned to have the shortest wingspan of any UK designed light aircraft at 15ft 9in the Ward Gnome, built in the nearby village of North Scarle in Lincolnshire, is claimed to have had its first flight here in 1967.
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