Full WW2 control tower details and photos for this wartime airfield are coming soon. Please check back later as this is work progress. If you would like to contribute information or photos please get in touch.
RAF Cosford, in Shropshire near Wolverhampton, played a different but essential Second World War role compared with the front-line fighter and bomber stations. Opened in 1938 as the home of No. 2 School of Technical Training, Cosford became one of the RAF’s great engineering ‘factories’, producing and refining the ground trades that kept aircraft serviceable: engine fitters, airframe specialists, armourers, riggers and flight mechanics.
By the outbreak of war the station was already training thousands of personnel. The RAF’s rapid wartime expansion meant that technical training had to be scaled quickly and reliably, and Cosford’s output fed directly into operational readiness across the country. In March 1940, with the pressure of war rising, apprentice elements were shifted elsewhere, but Cosford remained a major hub for technical instruction and support functions as training pipelines adjusted to wartime realities.
Cosford’s wartime story also includes maintenance and storage at scale. No. 9 Maintenance Unit arrived in March 1939 and took on roles that included storing, maintaining, modifying, repairing and issuing aircraft to operational squadrons. This kind of work mattered because aircraft did not arrive from factories ‘ready to fight’: they often required fitting-out, modifications based on combat feedback, and careful inspection before delivery. Cosford became closely associated with the Supermarine Spitfire, with large numbers prepared on site for front-line service, making the station part of the wider industrial and logistical chain behind Fighter Command’s effectiveness.
Throughout the war a variety of additional units passed through Cosford, reflecting its flexible utility. An officers’ school and ferry-pilot elements were among those associated with the station, as were national contingents and depots connected to Allied personnel serving in Britain. Such activity underlines that Cosford was not only about apprentices and classrooms; it was part of the broader wartime machine that moved aircraft and people efficiently between training, maintenance and operations.
The station also gained a significant medical role. A major RAF hospital was added in 1940 and, over the course of the war, treated large numbers of patients. Wartime air power produced injuries and illness in many forms – from operational flying and accidents to industrial work and the stresses of intensive training – and Cosford’s medical infrastructure forms an important part of its story.
Toward the end of the conflict, Cosford became associated with the processing of repatriated RAF prisoners of war, a role that speaks to the human aftermath of combat and captivity and the administrative work required to reintegrate airmen after liberation.
In short, RAF Cosford’s Second World War history is the story of technical competence scaled to national need: training and maintaining the people and aircraft that enabled operations elsewhere. It is a reminder that the RAF’s wartime success depended not only on pilots and squadrons, but on a huge skilled workforce trained and supported at stations like Cosford.
In practical terms, every aircraft issued from a maintenance unit and every trained tradesman posted to a squadron increased sortie rates, which is why Cosford’s contribution – though indirect – was strategically significant.