Almost every US Air Force flying wing is known by its number and nothing else. The 48th is the exception. On 4 July 1954, at Chaumont Air Base in eastern France, USAFE commander Lt Gen William H. Tunner presided over a ceremony at which the wing received the title “Statue of Liberty Wing”. The wing’s own history records a neat piece of serendipity behind it: the comptroller had discovered that the foundry which cast Bartholdi’s statue stood about 25 miles from Chaumont. A replica was later cast and installed on the base. The Air Force today describes the 48th as the only wing in the service both numbered and named, and everyone at Lakenheath uses the short form — the Liberty Wing.

The wing arrived at Lakenheath on 15 January 1960 and has never left. Its aircraft have changed roughly once a generation: F-100 Super Sabres, then F-4 Phantom IIs from 1972, F-111Fs from 1977, F-15E Strike Eagles from 1992, F-15C/D Eagles from 1994, and F-35A Lightning IIs from 2021. What has not changed is scale. The 48th is the only USAFE wing operating both F-35 and F-15 types, and the Air Force calls it the largest US fighter operation in Europe. Lakenheath and its housing annexe at RAF Feltwell support around 7,000 active-duty members and British and American civilians, together with roughly 11,000 family members. Four fighter squadrons — the 492nd and 494th on Strike Eagles, the 493rd and 495th on Lightning IIs — sit under the 48th Operations Group.

The sign at the gate reads Royal Air Force Lakenheath, and that is not sentiment. The station belongs to the Ministry of Defence; the UK Defence Infrastructure Organisation contracted and managed the construction campus that received the F-35s. The Americans are, in legal terms, a visiting force. Their status rests on the 1951 NATO Status of Forces Agreement, brought into British law by the Visiting Forces Act 1952, which sets out jurisdiction over service personnel and their civilian component, and their exemptions from immigration and customs rules. The arrangement grew out of the emergency of 1948, when American bombers came to Britain during the Berlin crisis and simply stayed.

Command is therefore split rather than shared. A US Air Force officer, normally a colonel, commands the operational base — at Lakenheath the commander of the 48th Fighter Wing. Alongside him the House of Commons Library records that an RAF commander is present at the main US visiting-forces sites, normally of squadron leader rank, acting both as the host-nation link to the American base commander and as head of establishment for Ministry of Defence employees. Above all of it sits a political understanding rather than a treaty text. The Churchill–Truman communique of 1952 stated that the use of these bases in an emergency would be a matter for joint decision by the two governments; the protocols giving effect to that joint decision are held in confidential bilateral agreements which successive British governments have declined to publish.

Lakenheath began as a lie. In 1940 the Eriswell Low Warren was laid out as a decoy aerodrome, with dummy buildings, a painted runway and wooden aircraft, first as a daylight “K” site and later upgraded for night work. A real station followed on more than 1,800 acres acquired by the government, and RAF Lakenheath opened as a satellite of RAF Mildenhall on 24 November 1941, with three concrete runways. Wellingtons came first. In 1942 No. 149 Squadron moved in with four-engined Stirlings and flew on the thousand-bomber raid against Cologne on 30 May; No. 199 Squadron joined in 1943, and both squadrons took part in the attack on the German rocket establishment at Peenemunde on 17 August 1943 before turning to minelaying. Flying stopped on 15 May 1944 while the station was rebuilt to very heavy bomber standard.

It reopened under RAF Bomber Command on 15 April 1947, and the first American aircraft and personnel arrived in 1948. The US Air Force formally took the station on 1 June 1950. Within weeks of the outbreak of the Korean War Lakenheath was crowded: by August 1950 it held 29 permanently assigned B-29 Superfortresses and a further 24 deployed. Strategic Air Command assumed control on 1 May 1951 and the perimeter was fenced in 1952; B-47 Stratojets were permanently assigned from 1953, with KC-97 tankers and U-2 reconnaissance aircraft passing through. The bomber era ended when jet fighters landed on 15 January 1960 with the arrival of the 48th Tactical Fighter Wing under Third Air Force.

On 5 April 1986 a bomb at the La Belle discotheque in West Berlin killed two American soldiers and wounded more than 200 people. Nine days later the answer came out of Suffolk. At about 1900 local time on 14 April, twenty-four F-111Fs of the 48th Tactical Fighter Wing lifted off from Lakenheath, six of them airborne spares, supported by EF-111A electronic warfare aircraft from RAF Upper Heyford and a large tanker force of KC-10s and KC-135s. France and Spain refused overflight rights. The strike package had to fly out over the Atlantic, around the Iberian peninsula, through the narrow international corridor of the Strait of Gibraltar and east down the Mediterranean, then repeat the whole thing in reverse.

Air & Space Forces Magazine puts the round trip at about 6,400 miles — roughly 10,300 km — and around thirteen hours in the cockpit, with each aircraft taking eight to twelve air refuellings. Eighteen F-111Fs pressed on to Libya, striking the Aziziyah barracks in Tripoli, the Sidi Bilal training camp and Tripoli military airfield, while US Navy aircraft from USS America and USS Coral Sea hit Benina airfield and barracks at Benghazi. It was the longest combat mission then flown by tactical aircraft. One F-111F, call sign Karma 52, was lost over the Gulf of Sidra, almost certainly to a surface-to-air missile; its two crew, Fernando L. Ribas-Dominicci and Paul F. Lorence, were killed. The wing received the Navy Meritorious Unit Commendation, the only Air Force unit to hold it.

Lakenheath stored American nuclear weapons for half a century, and it came close to catastrophe early. On 27 July 1956 a B-47 crashed on the airfield and struck a storage igloo containing three Mark 6 atomic bombs. The Department of Defense narrative records that the weapons were in storage configuration, that no capsules of nuclear material were in the weapons or in the building, that the bombs did not burn or detonate, and that there were no contamination or clean-up problems; damaged weapons and components were returned to the Atomic Energy Commission. What made it serious was the high explosive. Each Mark 6 carried thousands of pounds of conventional explosive as part of its implosion system, and burning jet fuel from the wrecked bomber washed over the igloo before firefighters put it out. All four B-47 crewmen were killed.

The weapons eventually went. Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists disclosed in 2008 that they had been withdrawn — by then some 110 B61 gravity bombs held in 33 underground vaults — the first time since 1954 that the United States stored no nuclear weapons in the United Kingdom. Since 2022 the picture has shifted again. FAS found the United Kingdom added to a NATO list of nuclear weapons storage site upgrades, alongside Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey, and Air Force budget papers referring to a “surety dormitory” built for the arrival of a potential surety mission. Contracting records, construction and satellite imagery have followed. The United States neither confirms nor denies the location of nuclear weapons in Europe, and FAS itself is careful: the upgrades may create a capability held in reserve rather than evidence that bombs have returned.

The United States announced on 8 January 2015 that its first F-35s in Europe would be based in the UK, and the Defence Infrastructure Organisation set about building the campus — parking aprons, two hangars, a dual-squadron operations and maintenance building and a simulator facility — that the aircraft would need. The 495th Fighter Squadron was activated in October 2021 and picked the nickname Valkyries; the first F-35A touched down on 15 December 2021. The 493rd Fighter Squadron, the Grim Reapers, converted next, and by April 2025 US European Command expected 52 F-35s across the two squadrons, with the second reaching full operational capability that autumn.

In May 2025, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Air Force signalled that once the F-35s were fully established the two F-15E Strike Eagle squadrons would return to the United States, potentially making Lakenheath an all-F-35 base. No date was attached and no final decision on where the Strike Eagles would go had been taken. The plan depends on the F-35 force actually delivering, and Congress has shown scepticism. In the meantime the Strike Eagles have gone on working: in July 2026 both F-15Es and F-35s from Lakenheath deployed to the Middle East after the collapse of a US–Iran ceasefire, part of a week in which all three permanently based American fighter wings in Europe were committed at once.