A RADAR system that would play a major role in fighting Hitler's Luftwaffe and saving lives was rolled into place at Sopley on Christmas Day 70 years ago.

This Christmas RAF Sopley veterans will be raising a glass to the memory of the men who developed the radar system and to those who manned it during the war years and beyond.

The Battle of Britain proved Britain needed improvements to its radar defences to see aircraft after they had flown inland and the Blitz showed RAF night fighters needed the help of radar direction to find targets.

That led to the development of a new system in 1940 by the Air Ministry's Telecommunications Research Unit in Dorset while the Air Defence Experimental Establishment in Christchurch adapted an Army mobile gunnery radar to operate as a Ground Control Intercept (GCI) Unit.

Following trials in Sussex the first of six mobile GCIs was set up in a field at Sopley on Christmas Day and RAF Sopley, callsign Starlight, was operational and helping to protect the nation.

"In 1940 no-one could have predicted that this small mobile radar station, a collection of half-a-dozen trucks, trailers and radar aerials mounted on wheeled chassis would continue in use, growing and developing for over 30 years," said Friends of New Forest Airfields' spokesman John Levesley.

But stay it did. During the course of the war Starlight went from being a mobile station with about two dozen staff to a permanent facility with 150 housed in the "Happidrome".

Then, during the Cold War era Sopley became a Fighter Control Sector HQ and work began on an underground watching station.

In the mid 1950s the site expanded with the formation of the Fighter Control School, the construction of Sopley Camp in Derritt Lane and married quarters in nearby Bransgore.

But during the 1960s the Fighter School was relocated and replaced by a Joint Area Radar School for miltary and civilian air controllers while a few fighter controllers stayed on to provide support for research projects including the TSR2 and Concorde programmes.

Sopley finally closed on September 27. 1974.