Full WW2 control tower details and photos for this wartime airfield are coming soon. Please check back later as this is work progress. If you would like to contribute information or photos please get in touch.
RAF Boreham lay on the Essex plain north-east of Chelmsford, created in 1943-44 as one of several new airfields built to support the expanding American air forces in Britain. During the war it was best known not by its village name but as USAAF Station AAF-161, with the station code ‘JM’ painted on signs and paperwork as part of wartime security. A three-runway layout, perimeter track and wide dispersal areas were designed for rapid turnarounds and the high sortie rates expected from a front-line Ninth Air Force unit.
Boreham’s operational story is dominated by medium bomber operations in the crucial months before D-Day. The airfield became home to the Ninth Air Force’s 394th Bombardment Group (Medium), flying the Martin B-26 Marauder. The group’s four squadrons – 584th (K5), 585th (4T), 586th (H9) and 587th (5W) – brought a distinctive tail marking: a white diagonal band across the fin and rudder. The first aircraft arrived as the base completed its final preparations, and by March 1944 Boreham was fully alive with dispersal activity, armament loading, and the routine of briefing huts, hardstands, and mess halls that underpinned combat flying.
The 394th’s first mission from Boreham came in March 1944, striking targets in France including the Luftwaffe airfield at Beaumont-le-Roger. From that point the group settled into a relentless pattern of interdiction. Bridges and transport chokepoints were priority targets: road, rail and river crossings that could delay German reinforcements moving toward the invasion front. Alongside bridge attacks were missions against marshalling yards, airfield defences, gun positions, and construction sites supporting German fortifications. Over roughly four months of operations from Essex, Boreham’s Marauders flew dozens of daylight sorties at high tempo, building the reputation that earned the 394th its famous nickname: the ‘Bridge Busters’. For visitors today, this phase explains why Boreham matters – its work was not glamorous, but it was strategically decisive, designed to strangle movement and logistics at the exact moment Allied forces needed the enemy disrupted.
In late July 1944 the 394th moved forward to RAF Holmsley South as Ninth Air Force units repositioned closer to the Continent after the Normandy breakout. Boreham then shifted toward transport operations late in the war. In March 1945 the 315th Troop Carrier Group operated Douglas C-47 Skytrains from the airfield, and on 24 March 1945 aircraft departed as part of Operation Varsity, the great airborne assault across the Rhine, carrying British 6th Airborne Division paratroops toward drop zones near Wesel. That combination – medium bomber ‘bridge busting’ in 1944, then troop carrier lift in 1945 – gives Boreham a compact but powerful wartime legacy.
The station closed in late 1945, but the airfield’s footprint remained visible for decades in post-war use and preservation, even as later development and quarrying altered the landscape. Boreham’s WWII identity, however, remains clear: a purpose-built American station whose hard-worked runways launched missions that helped open the road to France, and then helped close the war in northwest Europe.