Downham Market opened in the summer of 1942 as a satellite station for RAF Marham, a few miles to the north. Three concrete runways crossed the fen: one of 1,900 yards and two of 1,400. There were thirty-six hardstandings, six T2 hangars, and the usual Nissen-hut sprawl of accommodation for 1,719 men and 326 women. Bexwell Hall, the brick-and-flint country house at the corner of the site, was requisitioned as the officers' mess. In October 1943 the airfield was fitted with FIDO, the Fog Investigation and Dispersal Operation, an extravagant system of burning petrol that boiled fog off the runway so heavy bombers could land in conditions that should have grounded them. FIDO was loud, terrifying to watch, and saved lives.

The first squadron in was 218 Squadron with their Short Stirlings, arriving from Marham in July 1942. 623 Squadron formed at Downham in August 1943, flew Stirlings for four months, and was disbanded when the station re-equipped with Lancasters. 214 Squadron passed through briefly. Then in March 1944, the station joined No. 8 Group, the Pathfinder Force, and the character of the airfield changed. 218 Squadron left for Woolfox Lodge. 635 Squadron arrived with Lancasters. 571 Squadron formed at Downham with Mosquitoes, then moved on to Oakington within a month. In August, 608 Squadron re-formed with Canadian-built Mosquitoes. The Pathfinders had a particular doctrine: one Lancaster squadron and one Mosquito squadron at each base, the slow heavies to deliver the load, the fast wooden bombers to mark the targets.

Across the war years, 170 aircraft either failed to return to Downham Market or crashed on operations from it: 109 Stirlings, 40 Lancasters, 21 Mosquitoes. Mosquito KB364 came down on Bawdeswell church. Each number was a crew, usually seven men in a Lancaster, four or five in a Stirling, two in a Mosquito. The mathematics of Bomber Command was brutal in a way the planners did not advertise. The two squadrons that finished the war at Downham, 608 and 635, were both disbanded in late summer 1945. The bombers were broken up, the men went home, and the airfield was left with nothing to do.

Closure came in 1946. The site sat derelict until it was finally sold in 1957. Around 1950 a large portion of the domestic site was redeveloped as a short-term housing estate called Stone Cross, which closed in 1963. The airfield remained almost intact until the late 1970s, when the Downham Market bypass was built and much of the concrete from the runways and taxiways was broken up for hardcore. Today most of the site is back under the plough. The technical area has become an industrial estate. A small radio relay station sits in one corner. By 2016 even the last segment of runway visible from the A10 had been removed. Next to St Mary's Church at Bexwell, opposite where the guardroom once stood, a small plaque is the only deliberate marker that the airfield ever existed.

From the air over west Norfolk, the outline of Downham Market is still legible if you know where to look. The geometric pattern of the dispersals, the slight discoloration of the soil where concrete used to be, the regularity of certain hedgerows and field boundaries, all hint at the bomber base beneath. Bexwell Hall still stands. So does the radio mast, and the church, and the plaque. A few miles north the F-35Bs at Marham sometimes rumble overhead, the direct lineal descendants of the work that was done here from 1942 to 1945, but at Downham Market itself there is only farmland and silence.