The airfield was built in 1940 by the Luftwaffe after Nazi Germany occupied the Netherlands. It started life modestly, as Nachtlandeplatz Volkel - a diversion field for night fighters - and was upgraded in 1943 into a full operational base, renamed Fliegerhorst Volkel. The 3rd group of Nachtjagdgeschwader 2 flew Junkers Ju 88 night fighters from here against the British bomber streams pushing into the Ruhr. The second and third groups of Jagdgeschwader 3 operated Messerschmitt Bf 109Gs. By 1945, the last German aircraft to use the field were the jet-engined Me 262 fighters and the Ar 234 reconnaissance bombers - the most advanced aircraft of the war, flying in its closing weeks from a base that was being bombed into uselessness. Allied attacks during Operation Market Garden in September 1944 reduced the runways and dispersals to rubble that the Luftwaffe could no longer operate from.

When the south of the Netherlands was liberated later that autumn, the Royal Air Force moved in. The remaining facilities were wrecked, but the RAF rebuilt enough to base Hawker Typhoon and Hawker Tempest squadrons here for the final allied push into Germany. Among the pilots was the French ace Pierre Clostermann, a flight commander in No. 122 Wing RAF, who described operations from Volkel at length in his post-war memoir The Big Show. The Dutch Naval Aviation Service returned to the airfield for training in 1949. In 1950 the Royal Netherlands Air Force took it over, and the long process of turning a hammered wartime field into a permanent fighter base began. Gloster Meteors arrived as the first jets. Then came Lockheed T-33s, Republic F-84 Thunderjets and Thunderstreaks, and in 1962 the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter - the RNLAF's first supersonic aircraft, and an aircraft that killed Dutch pilots regularly enough that the program acquired a grim reputation across European service.

In the 1970s, Volkel was hardened. Thirty-two protective Hardened Aircraft Shelters - the squat reinforced-concrete bunkers familiar from every Cold War NATO fighter base - went up across the dispersal areas, designed to protect aircraft from a first-strike conventional or nuclear attack. The Starfighters were replaced between 1982 and 1984 by F-16 Fighting Falcons built under licence in the Netherlands by Fokker. Three squadrons - No. 311, No. 312, and No. 313 - flew from Volkel for the rest of the Cold War and beyond. No. 311 was disbanded in September 2012. The remaining two squadrons have now transitioned to the F-35 Lightning II as the RNLAF rebuilds itself around fifth-generation aircraft. Volkel today is one of the three major operational bases of the air force, alongside Leeuwarden and Gilze-Rijen, and rotates the annual public airshow days with them.

Nuclear weapons came to Volkel in the early 1960s, under the NATO nuclear-sharing arrangement that placed American B61 bombs at allied airbases for delivery, in wartime, by host-nation aircraft. The arrangement was an open secret almost from the beginning. Around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, some fifty B28 bombs were stored at Volkel, ready to be dropped by RNLAF aircraft if the order came. The newer B61 weapons replaced them, initially in conventional weapon-storage areas and later, after 1991, in eleven WS3 Weapon Storage and Security System vaults built into the floors of the aircraft shelters themselves - meaning the bomb sits beneath the pilot until the moment it is hoisted up and clipped under the wing. As of 2008, twenty-two B61 bombs were believed to be at Volkel. The Dutch Ministry of Defence, asked directly in parliament in 2005, would not confirm or deny. The 2010 WikiLeaks diplomatic cables confirmed Dutch nuclear hosting in general terms. On 10 June 2013, former Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers - by then in his eighties - simply said it on the BBC: yes, there are twenty-two American nuclear bombs at Volkel. He had been prime minister when they were modernized. He had decided it was time to stop pretending.

The Bellingcat investigation of May 2021 changed the conversation again. The leaked flashcard data revealed which specific WS3 vaults were 'hot' and which held training shapes, the duress codes and procedures, the personnel rotation patterns - details that would normally be classified at the highest levels. The U.S. Air Force tightened its training and the flashcards went down, but the disclosure had already happened. Later that same year, training began at Volkel with the new B61-12 - the modernized, precision-guided variant that replaces the older B61 series with a tail-kit that gives it dial-a-yield accuracy from a strategic bomb to something closer to a tactical one. A Sandia National Laboratories video showed F-16s flying the new shape. In December 2023, fourteen Volkel F-16s were photographed performing an elephant walk down the runway before take-off, a tight formation taxi that fighter pilots use both for drill and for public display - a quiet message, in this particular landscape, about what this base is and what it can do.

On a normal Tuesday afternoon, Volkel looks like any other modern NATO fighter base: F-35s climbing into the North Sea practice areas, an ANWB trauma helicopter waiting on its pad for the Radboud University Medical Centre, the national Aviation Police using the field for training. Underneath, the WS3 vaults wait. The B61-12s are roughly one of six such caches in Europe, alongside Büchel and Ramstein in Germany, Kleine Brogel in Belgium, Aviano and Ghedi in Italy, and Incirlik in Turkey, with about 150 American bombs distributed across them. The Netherlands' policy, contested for decades by anti-nuclear movements and increasingly by elected Dutch politicians, remains that these bombs are useful and that they stay. From the village of Volkel a few kilometres away, you cannot see any of this. The base is just fences and quiet runways. But the geography of European nuclear deterrence runs through this corner of North Brabant, and has for sixty years.