Qualla: Volkel Air Base

Volkel Air Base: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 2021, a researcher at the open-source investigation outlet Bellingcat noticed something strange about a publicly available flashcard app. American soldiers stationed in Europe had been using the site to study for their security examinations, and they had typed the answers in. The flashcards turned out to include the locations of the underground vaults at six European airbases where the United States stores its B61 nuclear bombs - including which specific shelters at Volkel Air Base in the Dutch province of North Brabant held live weapons and which held dummies. For decades, the Dutch government had refused either to confirm or deny that nuclear weapons existed on Dutch soil. For decades, everyone had known they did. And now they were on a flashcard app.

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Volkel Air Base: Nachtlandeplatz Volkel

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 gr...

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Volkel Air Base: Tempests Over Germany

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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Volkel Air Base: Thirty-Two Concrete Shelters

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 nuclea...

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Volkel Air Base: The Bombs That Were Not There

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Volkel Air Base: Flashcards and Modernization

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 class...

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Volkel Air Base: What Volkel Is

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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