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History
On 8 April, No. 185 Squadron and the Cottesmore Station Headquarters establishment were merged to form No. 14 Operational Training Unit.
No. 14 OTU trained night bomber crews for No. 5 Group squadrons for which it was equipped with Hampdens and Herefords. With few exceptions, all air crew trainees took a three months course of training with one of these OTUs before joining an operational squadron.From the night of July 25, 1940, it periodically undertook leaflet-dropping sorties over the Continent. None of its Hampdens were lost during these operations.
When No. 14 OTU was called upon to provided a sizeable force to bomb Cologne on the first of the `Thousand Plan' raids on the night of May 30/31, 1942, one of the 29 aircraft despatched was shot down by a night fighter and two others crashed in England, one after colliding with a Halifax. Cottesmore also participated in the second and third `Thousand Plan' raids, losing another Hampden but the station's most costly night was participation in the attack on Dusseldorf on the night of July 31 when three Hampdens were shot down by night fighters and a fourth was so badly crippled that it crashed on its return. On the night of September 13/14, 1942, a No. 14 OTU Hampden was shot down during a raid on Bremen and another crashed on its return. These were the last Hampden losses during Bomber Command operations. All told, Cottesmore had seven aircraft failing to return from operations and four lost in operational crashes.
In the autumn of 1942, No. 14 OTU converted to Wellingtons and remained at Cottesmore until August 1943 when it was moved to Market Harborough, where it disbanded on 24 June 1945.
No.14 Operational Training Unit (OTU), Bomber Command. It was one of seventeen such units located about the Midlands, with two more in Morayshire, Scotland.
(Source and (C) www.rafweb.org and www.raf.mod.uk)
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Casualties of the squadron, buried in the Netherlands.
