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 Westcott in Buckinghamshire was built as a purpose-designed Bomber Command training station, and its wartime story is a reminder that air power depended on a continuous pipeline of well-trained crews. The airfield opened fully in September 1942, and almost immediately became home to No. 11 Operational Training Unit (OTU), which moved in from RAF Bassingbourn. OTUs were crucial: they took pilots, navigators, bomb aimers and gunners who had completed elementary or advanced flying training, and forged them into operational crews capable of flying as a coordinated team under realistic conditions.
The main training workhorse at Westcott was the Vickers Wellington, in both older and newer marks. The Wellington was ideal for OTU use: it was a true twin-engined bomber with a real operational layout, yet could be maintained and flown in large numbers for repetitive training sorties. At Westcott, Wellingtons could be seen operating both from the main airfield and from nearby satellites such as Oakley, giving the OTU additional runway capacity and dispersal options. Training flights would include navigation exercises, bombing practice, night circuits, formation procedures, cross-country routes and simulated operational profiles – activities that generated a very high volume of movements compared to many front-line stations.
Because the purpose was instruction, Westcott also hosted a broader mix of aircraft types to make training more realistic. Communications aircraft, target-towing or gunnery-support types and visiting machines could all appear, giving aircrew experience of the varied traffic they would encounter in operational life. For local communities, the constant stream of Wellingtons – often flown by inexperienced crews under supervision – made training airfields memorable places, sometimes sadly associated with accidents that were an unavoidable risk of the wartime training surge.
Westcott’s strategic relevance increased again towards the end of the war and into the immediate post-war period. Like a number of Bomber Command training stations, it contributed to the huge logistical effort of bringing people home and restoring order after victory. The site is associated with the broader repatriation and transport tasks of late 1945, when the RAF moved personnel and former prisoners of war across Europe as demobilisation gathered pace. Shortly afterwards, the RAF closed the station (officially in April 1946) and Westcott entered a new chapter: it was transferred to the Ministry of Supply and became home to rocket and propulsion research, a role that would shape its post-war identity.
For visitors seeking Westcott’s wartime ‘hook,’ it is the OTU role that matters most. Every Lancaster, Halifax or Mosquito crew that went to war had to pass through an intense training system, and OTU stations like Westcott were where that system met the aircraft of Bomber Command. The combination of No. 11 OTU, the Wellington bomber, the satellite airfields and the airfield’s later evolution into a rocket establishment makes Westcott a particularly rich site for understanding the hidden, essential machinery behind Britain’s air offensive.