RAF Lakenheath

Lakenheath Warren was first used as a Royal Flying Corps airfield during the First World War, when the area was turned into a bombing and ground-attack range for aircraft flying from Feltwell and Thetford. In 1940 the Air Ministry picked the site as an alternative to nearby RAF Mildenhall and used it as a decoy airfield. Surfaced runways were laid in 1941, the main one 3,000 feet long and two subsidiaries 2,000 feet each, and by late 1941 RAF flying units were using the station on detachment. It soon functioned as a Mildenhall satellite, with the Short Stirling bombers of No. 149 Squadron dispersed from the parent airfield as conditions allowed; the squadron had exchanged its Vickers Wellingtons for Stirlings late in November 1941, and once fully operational on the new aircraft it moved into Lakenheath on 6 April 1942.

One of the squadron's Stirling pilots, Flight Sergeant Rawdon Middleton, was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross for the night of 28-29 November 1942. Hit by shell-fire during a raid on the Fiat works at Turin, and despite serious face wounds and loss of blood, he brought the damaged aircraft back towards southern England; with the fuel nearly exhausted, his crew were ordered to bail out.

A second Stirling unit, the newly re-formed No. 199 Squadron, arrived on 21 June 1943 and flew mine-laying operations at sea before moving to RAF North Creake in Norfolk on 1 May 1944. No. 149 Squadron ended its association with Lakenheath in the same month, taking its Stirlings the short distance to RAF Methwold, just inside Norfolk. Both bomber squadrons left because the airfield had been selected for upgrading to a Very Heavy Bomber station, work that kept it closed to aircraft until April 1947.

Cold War tension with the Soviet Union in Europe began as early as 1946, and that November President Harry S. Truman ordered Strategic Air Command B-29 Superfortress bombers to Europe and decided to realign United States Air Force Europe into a permanent combat-capable force. In July 1948 the B-29s of SAC's 2nd Bombardment Group were deployed to Lakenheath, and the first USAFE host unit at the station, the 7504th Base Completion Squadron, was activated in 1949. Among the units that followed were the 3913th Air Base Squadron under Lieutenant Colonel Archie Thomas from 1953 to 1955, and the 3910th Installation Squadron under Major John F. Thomas and the 3910th Air Base Group under Colonel L. M. Thomas, both from 1955 to 1959. The Royal Air Force had operated the station from 1941 to 1948; the United States Air Force took it over in 1948, Strategic Air Command held it from 1951 to 1959, and the USAF has operated it since.

On 30 April 1956 two Lockheed U-2s were airlifted in to form CIA Detachment A. The first flight was made on 21 May, but the Central Intelligence Agency unit did not stay long, moving to Wiesbaden Air Base in West Germany that June. On 10 October 1956 a United States Navy Douglas R6D-1 Liftmaster disappeared over the Atlantic after leaving Lakenheath for Lajes Field in the Azores. It was flying a Military Air Transport Service run carrying 50 members of the 307th Bombardment Wing home to the United States after a temporary duty assignment, with a US Navy crew of nine; all 59 people on board were lost. Two accidents involving nuclear weapons occurred at the station, in 1956 and 1961.

After the United States desegregated its military in 1948, a small community of mixed-race children whose mothers were British and whose fathers were black American servicemen based at Lakenheath formed in Norwich. Vanessa Baird, born in April 1958 to a Liverpudlian mother and a black GI stationed at the airfield, grew up without her father knowing of the birth; her mother's family was strongly disapproving once they found out, and mother and daughter moved to Norwich, where by Baird's account some of the women married black GIs and went to the United States with them. Elaine Brown's mother met a black GI, Harold Grigsby, when he was based at Lakenheath in the early 1950s; he was sent back to the United States before Elaine was born in 1953, and her mother told her his name and that he came from Washington DC. In 1996 Brown and her husband found her father and met her American family.

When President Charles de Gaulle insisted in 1959 that all non-French nuclear-capable forces be withdrawn from France, the USAF began pulling its North American F-100 units out. The 48th Fighter Wing left Chaumont-Semoutiers Air Base on 15 January 1960, its aircraft landing at Lakenheath that afternoon; its tactical components were the 492d, 493d and 494th Tactical Fighter Squadrons, distinguished by blue, yellow and red colours and later by the tailcodes LR, LS and LT. From late 1971 the wing converted to the McDonnell Douglas F-4D Phantom II, taking on aircraft that had already served in Vietnam and marking every squadron with the new LN tailcode. Deliveries came intermittently and reaching the full strength of 73 aircraft took two and a half years, so the wing did not resume its full NATO and USAFE commitments until 1 July 1975. The Phantom's service with the 48th was short, ending with the three-way aircraft exchange known as Operation Ready Switch in 1977.

The first General Dynamics F-111F Aardvarks arrived in March 1977 under Ready Switch, and the transition from the Phantom was completed rapidly and without major difficulty, earning the wing an Air Force Outstanding Unit Award. The 495th Tactical Fighter Squadron was activated on 1 April 1977 as a replacement training unit for the wing's other squadrons, making the 48th the only combat wing in United States Air Forces in Europe to operate four fighter squadrons and its own training unit. Through the Cold War the wing was held at high readiness as part of NATO's deterrent forces, exercising and deploying across Europe and the Middle East, and by 1979 it had flown the highest number of hours recorded by an F-111 unit in a single fiscal year.

Lakenheath was one of the proposed sites for NATO's Pershing II missile system, a deployment that provoked protests across Western Europe, and the station was one of the most prominent military sites. The radical historian E. P. Thompson argued in a pamphlet that basing the system there endangered Cambridge directly: "Lakenheath is, by crow or cruise, just over twenty miles from Cambridge... Within the CEP we must suppose some fifteen or twenty detonations at least on the scale of Hiroshima". A semi-permanent peace camp was set up outside the base, and in 1985 the future Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was arrested for singing psalms at a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament protest there.

In April 1986 F-111Fs from Lakenheath flew long-range strike missions against targets in Libya in Operation El Dorado Canyon, in response to state-sponsored terrorism, going out from the United Kingdom and back; more than 1,000 people demonstrated outside the base against the bombing. After Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 the wing sent F-111Fs and personnel to Saudi Arabia for Operation Desert Shield and then Desert Storm, flying thousands of combat sorties and delivering precision-guided munitions against armoured vehicles, bunkers and airfields. With the Cold War over the USAF began phasing the F-111 out, and the wing's replacement training squadron was deactivated in December 1991. The last of the wing's F-111s were withdrawn during 1992.

The first McDonnell Douglas F-15E Strike Eagles arrived in 1992 and the last F-111 left on 16 December that year. The 493d Fighter Squadron was inactivated on its departure and then reactivated as an F-15C/D unit, receiving its first aircraft in November 1993, standing up again on 1 January 1994 and reaching full operational capability that July. Losses followed over the decades that came after. Members of the 48th Security Forces Squadron were among those attacked by a lone gunman at Frankfurt Airport on 2 March 2011 while travelling by bus to Ramstein Air Base; on 22 March 2011 an F-15E crash-landed in eastern Libya after a reported mechanical failure, both crewmen ejecting safely. A Sikorsky HH-60 Pave Hawk from the base struck a bird on a low-level training exercise on 7 January 2014 and crashed into Cley Marshes on the North Norfolk coast, killing all four on board; an F-15D of the 493d came down outside Spalding in Lincolnshire on 8 October 2014, the pilot ejecting and being recovered by Pave Hawk; a US Marine Corps F/A-18 Hornet of VMFA-232 crashed after taking off from Lakenheath on 21 October 2015, killing Major Taj Sareen; and on 15 June 2020 an F-15C of the 493d crashed into the North Sea about 74 nautical miles east of Scarborough, killing 1st Lieutenant Kenneth Allen, whose body was later recovered. The 56th Rescue Squadron's combat search and rescue helicopters were based at Lakenheath until they moved to Aviano Air Base in 2018.

In January 2015 the US Department of Defense announced that Lakenheath would take 54 Lockheed Martin F-35A Lightning IIs from 2020, split between two squadrons, bringing 1,200 more military personnel and 60 to 100 civilian workers alongside the two existing F-15E squadrons. Construction of a dedicated F-35 campus on the south side of the airfield began in 2017; a $148.4 million investment was authorised in August 2018, the Defence Infrastructure Organisation awarded a 160 million pound construction contract to a Kier Group and VolkerFitzpatrick joint venture that November, and demolition of the first of eighteen buildings began in March 2019. The 495th Fighter Squadron was reactivated on 1 October 2021 as the first Lightning II squadron at the station, its first aircraft arriving on 15 December. Withdrawal of the F-15C/D fleet had begun that September but was held up by the Russian military build-up near Ukraine; the final four F-15Cs of the 493d left for the United States on 27 April 2022, ending 45 years of continuous USAF F-15 air superiority operations in Europe, and the squadron re-equipped with the F-35A, moving from an air superiority to a multirole task. Contract documents for new nuclear-core storage facilities emerging in February 2024 prompted public discussion in East Anglia about weapons returning to the base, and in July 2025 flight activity and other evidence suggested that a specialist USAF squadron had flown an unknown number of B61-12 tactical nuclear gravity bombs in from a storage site in New Mexico. Between 20 and 22 November 2024 small unmanned aircraft were seen over and around Lakenheath, Mildenhall and Feltwell, fluctuating in number and varying in size; F-15Es were reportedly scrambled in response, and RAF Regiment personnel were deployed to the bases with the ORCUS counter-drone system after a second sighting on the night of 25 November.

In March 2026 at least one Lakenheath F-15E was reportedly involved in a friendly fire incident over Kuwait during Operation Epic Fury, the United States-led air campaign against Iran; BBC Verify's analysis of footage and aircraft markings identified one of the aircraft shot down by Kuwaiti air defences as F-15E serial 91-0327 of the 492d Fighter Squadron, with all aircrew ejecting safely. On 3 April 2026 an F-15E of the 494th Fighter Squadron was lost during combat operations over Iran; the wreckage markings identified it as serial 00-3000, and both crew members ejected and survived, their recovery taking a multi-day combat search-and-rescue operation. A protest was held outside the station on 4 April after reports that a US fighter shot down over Iran the previous day had flown from Lakenheath, and around seven demonstrators were arrested on 5 April for allegedly supporting the banned group Palestine Action. On 8 April demonstrators blockaded several base entrances, locking themselves to vehicles, a large peace symbol and each other; Suffolk Police arrested 13 people, and seven were charged with offences including locking on, attempted locking on and obstruction of the highway before being released on bail. The blockade was organised by the Lakenheath Alliance for Peace, one of the groups, with the Stop the War Coalition and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, that have made the station a focus of peace protest since its founding.

The station is owned by the Ministry of Defence and remains a Royal Air Force station, but it hosts only United States Air Force units and personnel. The host formation is the 48th Fighter Wing, the Liberty Wing, assigned to United States Air Forces in Europe - Air Forces Africa and operating the F-15E Strike Eagle and the F-35A Lightning II; some 1,500 British and American civilian staff work at the site. The gate guardian is a North American F-100D Super Sabre, serial 54-2269, originally delivered to the French Air Force and now in the Wings of Liberty Memorial Park.