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RAF Warboys, in Huntingdonshire (now Cambridgeshire), began as a wartime solution to a practical problem: congestion at nearby RAF Upwood. Construction started in 1940 and the airfield was designed to take over training and operational pressure, initially for No. 17 Operational Training Unit (OTU) with Bristol Blenheims. By the end of July 1941 the station was ready for use, and its early months show the constant wartime balancing act between building sites, finishing defences, and trying to keep aircraft moving.
The first unit to arrive was a detachment of Short Stirlings from No. 15 Squadron, coming from RAF Wyton. Shortly afterward ‘D’ Flight of No. 17 OTU moved in from Upwood on 15 December 1941, reflecting Warboys’ intended training function. The airfield’s domestic and technical sites expanded around this time, and like many Bomber Command stations it developed the familiar mix of messes, huts, maintenance areas, and the hard infrastructure needed to support heavy aircraft.
Warboys’ real wartime identity was forged in 1942 when it became associated with the Pathfinder Force. The station was allocated to No. 3 Group in August 1942 and became one of the original Pathfinder Force stations, linked to the specialist role of marking targets for the main bomber stream using flares and advanced navigation techniques. A major physical symbol of that ambition was its exceptionally long main runway – about 6,290 feet – built to accommodate heavy aircraft loads and improve safety margins. Building this runway even required the closure and diversion of a nearby road, showing how wartime priorities could reshape local geography.
The first fully operational squadron to arrive was No. 156 Squadron on 5 August 1942. Coming from RAF Alconbury with Vickers Wellingtons, the squadron later re-equipped with Avro Lancasters and continued in the high-skill, high-risk Pathfinder environment. Pathfinder units were typically among the first to receive new blind-bombing and navigational aids, and their crews often flew ahead of the main force into intense defences to place target indicators accurately. That meant a distinctive pressure: not simply to survive, but to succeed with precision, because an entire raid’s effectiveness could depend on the first few aircraft over the target.
Warboys also hosted specialist training and support activity. No. 1507 (Beam Approach Training) Flight equipped with Airspeed Oxfords operated here for a short period in 1943, highlighting the continuing need to improve landing and approach techniques for bomber crews returning in bad weather or after damage. The station’s routines would have included constant practice circuits, navigation exercises, ground training, and operational briefings – work that rarely appears in headline histories but formed the daily life of a bomber airfield.
In WW2 terms, RAF Warboys is best understood as a ‘purpose-built’ bomber station that grew into a Pathfinder hub: a place where training roots met operational specialism, where infrastructure was pushed to extremes to handle heavy aircraft, and where the units based there – especially No. 156 Squadron with Wellingtons and Lancasters – connect the airfield directly to the RAF’s sophisticated, technology-driven effort to improve bombing accuracy under the hardest conditions imaginable.