RAF East Kirkby: The Airfield Behind Just Jane

Lancasters, loss and the Lincolnshire airfield where history still feels very close.

There are some historic places where you have to work quite hard to imagine what once happened there. RAF East Kirkby is not one of them.

Stand on the old airfield today and so much of its wartime story is still around you. The original control tower remains. Parts of the airfield survive. And, most unmistakably of all, there is the sound of four Merlin engines when Lancaster NX611 Just Jane comes to life.

For me, East Kirkby will always be particularly special.

It is the place that inspired my novel. The place where Jane and Bill's fictional story unfolds. The place where a post-cancer bucket-list taxi ride unexpectedly set me on the road to becoming an author.

But long before any of that, RAF East Kirkby had a very real story of its own. And it is one worth remembering.

From Lincolnshire farmland to bomber station

Before Lancaster bombers filled the skies above it, the site at East Kirkby had initially been used as a wartime decoy - the decoy actually working and was targeted once. Construction of a full Class A bomber airfield began in 1942, and RAF East Kirkby became operational in August 1943 as part of No. 5 Group, Bomber Command.

Like so many wartime airfields across Lincolnshire, its arrival transformed the surrounding countryside.

Runways, hangars, dispersals, accommodation and technical buildings appeared amongst the fields. Thousands of service personnel would pass through the station, and what had once been quiet countryside became a place of engines, vehicles, briefings, maintenance, departures and anxious waiting.

The control tower that still stands today was built in 1942. Its original layout included the watch office, meteorological office and switch room downstairs, with the control room, signals office and controller's rest room above. It is now Grade II listed and is one of the most tangible surviving links with the people who worked on the airfield during the war.

And then came the Lancasters.

57 Squadron arrives

At the end of August 1943, the Lancasters of No. 57 Squadron moved to East Kirkby from RAF Scampton.

The move did not leave much time for settling in. By 30th August, 57 Squadron was already flying an operation from its new home, with aircraft dispatched against Mönchengladbach.

Imagine what that must have meant for the station.

New crews arriving with kit bags. Ground staff learning their new surroundings. Aircraft being dispersed around an unfamiliar airfield. Intelligence staff, armourers, fitters, wireless personnel, meteorological staff, WAAFs and countless others trying to make a brand-new bomber station function almost immediately.

That is one of the things I find most fascinating about places like East Kirkby.

When we talk about Bomber Command, the Lancaster understandably dominates the story. It is an extraordinary aircraft. But an operational bomber station was never simply a collection of aeroplanes and aircrew.

Behind every Lancaster preparing to take off were dozens of other people.

Someone had fuelled it.

Someone had loaded its bombs.

Someone had serviced its engines.

Someone had checked its equipment.

Someone had plotted weather.

Someone had prepared maps and intelligence.

Someone would stand in an operations room and follow the progress of the raid.

And, hours later, people across the station would listen for engines returning out of the darkness.

The arrival of 630 Squadron

East Kirkby soon became home to a second Lancaster squadron.

On 15th November 1943, B Flight of 57 Squadron formed the nucleus of the newly created No. 630 Squadron, which would remain at East Kirkby for the rest of the European war. It flew its first operations only days later.

From then on, the airfield became closely associated with both 57 and 630 Squadrons.

Their Lancasters took part in the wider Bomber Command offensive over occupied Europe and Germany, including some of the most heavily defended targets of the war. 630 Squadron alone participated in all sixteen of the major Bomber Command attacks on Berlin during the campaign that became known as the Battle of Berlin.

But numbers and operation names can make the history feel deceptively tidy. The reality was anything but.

Each aircraft contained a crew of young men whose empty beds would be noticed if they did not come back.

Those who did not return

The statistics attached to East Kirkby's wartime history are sobering.

Aircraft operating from the station took part in 212 operational raids, and 121 Lancasters failed to return. A further 29 aircraft were lost through operational crashes or accidents.

Historic England records that 831 airmen from 57 and 630 Squadrons lost their lives, including almost 200 men from Commonwealth countries.

Those figures are difficult to comprehend until you begin thinking about them as individual crews.

Seven men in an aircraft. Friends sharing meals in the mess. Someone's son. Someone's brother. Someone's husband or fiancé. Perhaps someone who had spent the afternoon joking with the other members of his crew before pulling on his flying kit that evening.

And then an empty place at breakfast.

It is that human part of Bomber Command history that interests me most.

Not simply what aircraft flew where, but what it meant to live with that uncertainty every day.

Danger did not begin at take-off

Life on a bomber station could also be dangerous before an aircraft ever left the ground.

On 17th April 1945, only weeks before the end of the war in Europe, a serious accident occurred while Lancasters at East Kirkby were being prepared for an operation.

A bomb exploded during loading, triggering further explosions amongst aircraft parked nearby. Several Lancasters were destroyed or damaged and service personnel were killed and injured.

It is another reminder that the dangers of Bomber Command were not confined to the night skies over Europe.

Armourers worked around explosives. Ground crews worked around running engines, fuel and heavy machinery. Drivers moved vehicles around blacked-out airfields. And everyone carried on because another operation had to be prepared.

These are the people whose stories can so easily disappear into the background and the people I increasingly want to remember when I write about Bomber County.

Waiting for them to come home

Perhaps inevitably, when I think about East Kirkby, I imagine it at night.

A line of Lancasters taking off one after another. Then quiet. Hours passing. People going about their jobs while somewhere hundreds of miles away the aircraft from their station crossed hostile territory. And then, much later, the first distant sound of engines.

Aircraft beginning to return. One landing. Then another. And another. Until eventually there came the dreadful point when everyone knew that no more were coming.

That imagined moment became central to Just Jane.

My fictional Jane works within the station's operational world, following the aircraft that leave East Kirkby and waiting for them to return. Bill, meanwhile, experiences the same nights from inside a Lancaster.

Neither of them existed, of course. But the world around them did. That was always important to me.

I wanted their fictional story to take place among the routines, uncertainty and very real human cost of an operational bomber station.

When the war ended

By the spring of 1945, the war in Europe was nearing its end.

630 Squadron's final wartime operation took place in late April, after which its Lancasters were among aircraft used to help bring liberated prisoners of war back to Britain. The squadron was disbanded in July 1945.

No. 460 Squadron RAAF subsequently arrived at East Kirkby, while plans were made for aircraft and crews to become part of Tiger Force, intended for operations against Japan. Japan's surrender meant those plans were never carried through.

The frantic rhythm of the wartime station began to disappear.

By November 1945, East Kirkby had been placed on care and maintenance.

Later, the airfield would have another chapter. It was used again during the 1950s, including by United States Air Force units, before finally closing as an active military airfield in 1958.

It might easily have become just another former wartime airfield slowly disappearing back into the Lincolnshire landscape. But East Kirkby's story wasn't finished.

From airfield to living memorial

Today, the former station is home to the Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre.

The Centre was created by brothers Fred and Harold Panton as a memorial to Bomber Command and, particularly, to their elder brother Christopher, a flight engineer who was killed during a raid on Nuremberg in March 1944. The museum opened in 1988 and still retains the wartime control tower as one of its centrepieces.

And then, of course, there is NX611 — Just Jane.

Seeing a Lancaster in a museum is special. Seeing one on an original Bomber Command airfield is something else entirely.

Hearing the engines start somehow collapses the distance between the present and the past.

For a few minutes the airfield has noise again. You can smell the exhaust. Feel the vibration. Watch ground crew moving around the aircraft.

And imagine hundreds of Lancasters doing the same thing more than eighty years ago.

RAF East Kirkby isn't simply somewhere history happened. It is one of those rare places where, if you stand quietly enough or perhaps if four Merlin engines are running loudly enough that history doesn't feel very far away at all.