bvs-
I was there in 81-82. Did you see me waving from the ground?
If Abigdon were attacked, we would have been bringing in C-130s and C-5s(!) to deliver and pick-up patients. The C-5 issue was really a big one because otherwise we were going to have to take them over land all the way to Heathrow. We had thought that Brize Norton would be possible but your folks said it would be one of their major hubs and not available to us for planning purposes.
Now I'm more interested in the others you may have visited
I honestly can't remember the others. There were several old Bomber Command bases in the north. I recall one training facility fairly vividly but not the name. The reason I recall it was that so many of the buildings were real duplicates of the buildings at Rissington and then...there were a whole bunch buildings that we hadn't seen before. Turns out they were the barracks for the students. Unfortunately, there was no useable runway reasonably close by. Anyway, it seems as though it was NE of Nocton Hall as we visited the place during a follow-up visit to NH. Another was a base that you had in current use in 81-84 but that was being planned for closure and was offered to us if we could use it. It just was too small to hold our asset when set up. The O Club was nice for lunch though.
Our instructions were to review every base offered and if we didn't want it, have a darn good reason. The reality was that the PSA seemed to have a counter instruction to offer the Yanks anything as they thought we'd pay for the upkeep of facilities you didn't need but that you didn't want to fall into disrepair. It was a good strategy for both sides until the Wall came down. We were lucky that we had Bicester set up for Gulf I though we didn't use it as intended. That's a long story and goes into the medical care and airevac strategy.
I had a series of mini strokes in 2006 and somethings are just plain hazy.
While I appreciate the long list of sites, I must warn you of something. When I clicked on the link and then back, the machine ground to a halt. Nothing worked. Finally I shut down the machine and re-started it. When it came up. it was really, really trashed. A mini-screen popped and offered to sell me an anti virus package. Any attempt to launch my anti-virus software was met with a failure. I finally turned it off and will take to my computer guy tomorrow.
I know Upwood and Nocton Hall in some detail over recent years...
My work at Upwood was largely consulting on the new clinic that was to be built there. In wartime, the clinic was to be the triage/entry point to the contingency hospital which would be in the hangers. The photos don't show the clinic so I don't know if it actually got built. The hangers at Upwood were the first to get the "curtain wall" replacing the main doors as I recall.
Nocton Hall was an interesting place. First in my mind was the hallway...... It made the design of the 500 bed hospital very different from the others. Whereas we used the large open-bay hangers for nursing units with no particular real demarcation between the wards. That meant that staff could assist from unit to unit. Nocton Hall required separation of the units and staff and some units would only hold a few beds, say 10-15. That meant that we had to use them for low density nursing care but there were several of those units and they weren't necessarily adjacent to each other. It was actually in pretty good shape when we were working with it but as I recall, the RAF had only stopped using it for a year or so. We were very thankful to have it but it would have had operational problems.
Isn't there some history about NH that sets it apart, something about the original being built by we Yanks. I may be wrong.
Eric ~ sorry to hear that you have a PC challenge as I tried the link directly from this website and it worked correctly.
I clicked on the first airfield in the stack named as " Abbeyshrule " and noticed that it has a message that states : New Discuss this airfield in The AiX ARG forum.
I've never seen that message before so I will close every thing else down and see what happens when I click it ~ I guess that it should feed me back into this web site ?
I served in the RAF from 1961 to the end of 1971. I came across this site through nostalgia really looking up places I had served. I started at Hereford as a Boy Entrant and from there in July 62 was posted to Little Rissington on the hill above Bourton on the Water. In September 1963 I was posted to the RAF police HQ in Acton W3, no I was not a snowdrop but a Clerk Progress. Actually recorded crime stats there and spent five years at that site not leaving till the end of 68. Theoretically I was then posted to Swanton Morley having been promoted to the dizzy heights of Corporal. However I spent a year detached to Cranwell carrying out an exercise on the life of aircraft parts on Jet Provosts. In January 1970 I was posted to RAF North Coates which soon closed down and I moved on to my last posting at RAF West Raynham, both these postings were with Bloodhound missiles first as 25Sqn then 41Sqn. In October of 1971 I left the RAF.
I find looking at photos of old RAF camps fascinating, particularly those with which I was involved. I was sad to see that the rest of Little Rissington is being pulled down, I worked in ENG Wing HQ and called in about 15 years or so again and the building was still there, if looking rather tatty.
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