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 Stratford is best approached as a wartime training and support site rather than as a single-purpose operational combat base. In the Second World War, many locations labelled ‘RAF Stratford’ in local memory were used as relief landing grounds, training detachments or administrative sites connected to larger parent stations in the Midlands and central England. That wider pattern matters: the RAF’s training machine required space, and it needed multiple fields to spread traffic, run instrument practice, and provide safe diversion runways when weather closed in.
Training and support stations were busy environments. They handled repeated circuits and landings – ‘circuits and bumps’ – and longer navigation exercises that trained crews to operate in blackout conditions, poor visibility and winter weather. Depending on the syllabus and the period, the aircraft mix would typically include elementary trainers (such as the de Havilland Tiger Moth), more powerful advanced trainers (Miles Master or North American Harvard), and twin-engined trainers like the Airspeed Oxford or Avro Anson used for navigation and multi-crew procedure. These aircraft were the stepping stones to operational types, and the training patterns learned on them were carried forward into Wellingtons, Halifaxes, Lancasters, Mosquitos and fighters.
Units associated with training areas around Stratford often included Service Flying Training Schools, Advanced Flying Units, and specialist flights teaching beam approach and controlled landing techniques – skills that reduced accident losses at night. RAF Regiment and anti-aircraft flights provided airfield defence even at training sites, reflecting the RAF’s concern about protecting aircraft and fuel stocks. The most meaningful ‘unit’ story at this kind of station is therefore the continuous flow of course intakes and the standardisation of instruction: instructors, check flights, examinations and postings onward.
For historians and visitors, the value of RAF Stratford lies in what it represents: the infrastructure of learning. Combat squadrons could only sustain their strength if trainees became operational quickly and safely. Training stations did that work. They also show how deeply wartime aviation penetrated ordinary landscapes: farms and villages lived with the sound of training circuits, the movement of lorries and fuel bowsers, and the presence of aircrew who were learning to fly under wartime conditions.
- Primary wartime role: training/relief landing and support capacity within the central England RAF training system.
- Typical units: Service Flying Training Schools, Advanced Flying Units, specialist approach-training flights, RAF Regiment/defence elements.
- Typical aircraft: Tiger Moth, Miles Master, North American Harvard, Airspeed Oxford, Avro Anson (depending on unit and period).
RAF Stratford’s WWII significance is therefore real even without a famous operational squadron. It is a heritage point for understanding how the RAF built competence at scale – how thousands of routine training sorties became the foundation for operational success.
If you are building a visitor page, one practical approach is to map the station’s story onto the training pipeline: elementary skills, advanced handling, instrument procedure and then posting onward. That pipeline framing gives readers a clear sense of why an airfield like this mattered even without headline raids – because it converted recruits into reliable aircrew at a pace the war demanded.