One of the most common questions we’re asked is where, on Tollerton airfield, were the many post-war heavy bombers destroyed in the well-documented Bash, Burn, and Bury process?
Many people think the destruction of over 1,000 aircraft took place in specific areas such as either inside, or very near to, the aircraft hangars. You might think so, but that wasn’t the case.
While they waited to be destroyed, the aircraft were parked nose-to-tail along the perimeter track which surrounded the airfield. When there was space, they were towed, one by one, onto the airfield dispersals where they were lightly sprayed with an accelerant (usually paraffin, which was in plentiful supply), then set alight.
About 48 hours later, when the remains had cooled down, groundcrew were sent in with heavy hammers to break up the aircraft remains.
When they’d finished their work, heavy pieces which had survived being set alight and being hammered were loaded onto trailers and taken to nearby pits (there were many dug in the airfield’s grassland and around the perimeter) where the remains were buried.
Sometimes the ashes were swept up and used to bulk out fencing, or used to fill in holes across the perimeter tracks, the runways, and in the airfield grassland. Sometimes the ashes were just swept off the dispersals onto the grass (or allowed to be blown off by the wind), prior to the next airplane being towed in.
We know all of this debris contained radioactive and many carcinogenic substances. The groundcrews must have suffered terrible ill-health in later years, but at that time Health & Safety didn’t exist, and nobody knew the damage to health these things would cause.
Here’s a photograph of an aircraft waiting to be destroyed, sitting amongst obvious burn-sites on nearby dispersals. On the lower dispersal a partially unburnt fuselage of an airplane is clearly visible. Presumably waiting to be broken up and buried.
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