RAF Witchford began receiving aircraft in 1943. No. 196 Squadron RAF arrived in July of that year with Vickers Wellington bombers, transitioning to Short Stirlings during their stay before moving on in November. No. 513 Squadron formed at Witchford on 15 September 1943 with Stirling IIIs, then disbanded barely two months later. No. 115 Squadron RAF arrived on 26 November 1943 with Avro Lancaster IIs, then standardized on the Mk I and III Lancasters in March 1944. This was the workhorse unit at Witchford, remaining until September 1945. No. 195 Squadron reformed here in October 1944 with Lancaster I and IIIs before departing to RAF Wratting Common in November. The Lancaster was the dominant aircraft of RAF Bomber Command's strategic campaign: four Merlin engines, a 33-foot bomb bay, capable of carrying the 22,000-pound Grand Slam bomb, and utterly dependent on the skill and nerve of seven-man crews who flew in the dark.

A total of 99 bombers dispatched from Witchford were lost in operations — 8 Short Stirlings and 91 Avro Lancasters. Each loss represented a crew: pilot, flight engineer, navigator, bomb aimer, wireless operator, mid-upper gunner, rear gunner. Seven men in each aircraft. The losses speak to the statistical reality of RAF Bomber Command: aircrew who flew a full operational tour of 30 missions faced survival odds that improved with experience but never became comfortable. Witchford's losses were not exceptional for a station of its type, which is itself a measure of the scale of the campaign. The aircraft were manufacturing replaceable; the men were not. One account of a single lost Lancaster — HK559 — has been preserved in detail: its crew, their final mission, the subsequent commemoration ceremonies, the families who eventually met. Each of the 99 lost aircraft contained a story of that kind.

In 1958, the United States and Britain began deploying PGM-17 Thor intermediate-range ballistic missiles to RAF stations across England under Project Emily. These nuclear-armed missiles were aimed at targets in the Soviet Union and represented one of the Cold War's most significant forward deployments of nuclear weapons on British soil. RAF Witchford was on the initial list of proposed sites. Then a problem emerged: the land at Witchford was owned by the Church Commissioners. The Church Commissioners declined. The site was substituted with nearby RAF Mepal, which had more favorable road access — the main selection criterion was the gradient of the connecting roads, since a slope greater than one in seventeen was considered an unacceptable risk for transporting the missile. The fens' extreme flatness was, in this case, the deciding factor. Witchford's brief atomic future was redirected before it ever began.

RAF Witchford was closed to flying operations after the war, formally standing down by 1946. The runways were eventually removed. Most of the site is now the Lancaster Way Business Park — light industrial units, warehouses, small businesses — occupying the concrete footprint of the wartime station. The surrounding farmland returned to agriculture. The fens are not dramatic country. They are vast, flat, and unrelenting in their horizontality; the sky accounts for more of the visual field than the land. In this landscape, the business park sits without ceremony, just as the wartime airfield once did. What the fens kept is the quietness. The noise that filled this air for two years — the low, deep throb of four Merlin engines on climb-out, repeated dozens of times on each operational night — is entirely gone. Lancaster Way is a name on a signpost, which is the kind of memorial that ordinary places make for the extraordinary things that happened on them.