Fliegerhorst Lippstadt opened in 1936 as one of the first airfields of the reconstituted Luftwaffe. The very first unit based here, Jagdgeschwader 132 (JG 132), was activated in March 1936 with Heinkel He 51 biplanes - a stubby, slow, single-seat fighter that was the first fighter aircraft of the reborn German Air Force. Within weeks JG 134 stood up alongside it, also with He 51s and Arado Ar 68 biplanes. Then came KG 254 in April 1937 with Junkers Ju 52 transports, JG 142 in November 1938 with early Messerschmitt Bf 109Cs, ZG 142 in January 1939 with Bf 109Cs and Ds, and ZG 26 in May 1939 also with Bf 109Ds. The airfield was, in those late-thirties years, a kind of assembly line for the wartime Luftwaffe: stand up a unit, train it, send it elsewhere. Most of the units formed here flew on to take part in the invasion of Poland that September.

By 1944 Lippstadt had been repurposed for night fighters - one of the airfields from which the Luftwaffe tried to intercept RAF Bomber Command's nightly procession over the Ruhr toward Berlin and Hamburg. Anti-aircraft FlaK batteries ringed the perimeter. Then the Americans got the airfield's range. On 19 April 1944, 122 bombers dropped 840 500-lb general-purpose bombs and 1,547 100-lb incendiaries. The October raid was four times bigger. By early March 1945, the combination of fuel shortages, lost equipment, and constant bombing had made Lippstadt unsustainable. Flight operations ended. The airfield's job, in the last weeks, was to be a target.

On 1 April 1945, units of the British XXI Army Group sweeping down from the north met the American First and Ninth Armies pushing up from the south near Lippstadt. The Ruhr Pocket - encircling the bulk of German Army Group B - snapped shut at this exact place. Over the following three weeks, more than 300,000 German soldiers inside the pocket surrendered. Lippstadt was the geographic stitch in a noose. On 7 April the IX Engineer Command's 830th Engineer Aviation Battalion arrived at the airfield, cleared mines and wrecked Luftwaffe aircraft, and within a day had it usable for C-47 Skytrain transports. The Americans designated it Advanced Landing Ground Y-98.

By 20 April the field could host operational combat units. The Ninth Air Force's 373rd Fighter Group flew in with P-47 Thunderbolts and supported American ground forces racing east toward the Elbe. They flew for just over two weeks before the German surrender on 7 May ended the war in Europe. The airfield stayed open until 12 July 1945 as a transport field for C-47s and a garrison for the Army of Occupation. Then it fell into the British Zone, the Americans handed it to the British Army, and the British declined to keep flying from it. The destroyed runways and hangars were eventually all removed.

The British Army built a new garrison across the former airfield and named it Camp El Alamein - after the desert battle that had given Montgomery and the Eighth Army their reputation. From 1958 the Bundeswehr took it over and renamed it Lipperland-Kaserne; German soldiers lived in barracks built where Bf 109s had once dispersed for camouflage. The Bundeswehr closed it in 2007. Since 2013 investors have been carving the site into a business park in the north and family homes in the south. The old Luftwaffe ground station is still partly recognisable from the geometric layout of its surviving buildings, and a careful walker can find Bundeswehr-era infrastructure half-hidden in the new business park. Otherwise the airfield is gone - absorbed into the slow accretion of suburban Lippstadt. (Confusingly, the modern airport called Paderborn Lippstadt, opened in 1971, is a different place entirely, 13 miles to the east.)