THE WAR IN THE AIR

THE FORMATION OF THE ROYAL AIR FORCE:  APRIL 1918

    It was on the 1st April, 1918 that Britain’s Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air Service were combined to form the Royal Air Force. As such, it was the world’s first air force to become independent. France followed suit two months later, and Italy in March 1923, but Communist Russia held back until May 1932, and the United States until September 1947. Germany, of course, was demilitarized by the peace terms. The Luftwaffe was not formally created by the Nazi regime until February 1935, though, in fact, it had been in existence by the mid 1920s.

     InxBritain’s case (and that of France), the German strategic bombing campaign, the so-called Operation Turk’s Cross, clearly prompted the move. The Gotha raids in the summer of 1917, threatening the very existence of Britain’s historic security as an island state, brought widespread concern and anger among the public. The Daily Mail spoke for the people when it declared that German bombers made “serene progress” across the London skies. The lack of sufficient defensive measures (Ground Based Air Defence), was both “disgraceful and humiliating”. Given the increasing ability of aircraft in both the distance they could fly and the amount of ordnance they could carry, there was a pressing need to meet this extension of airpower by creating a dedicated force that could better command and control an ever changing and challenging situation.

Acknowledgements

Birth of RAF: amazon.co.uk Paris: hnlynet.com Eastern England: enwickipedia.org London: youtube.com Trenchard: en. wikipedia.org Bleriot: modellingmadness.com Sopwith Salamander: arachinus.com Battle of Britain: tes.com Junkers: kickstarter.com

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     In July 1917 the British prime-miniser, Lloyd George, invited the South African military leader, General Jan Smuts, to join the war cabinet, and tasked him with producing a report on the feasibility of forming an independent air force. He produced his report the following month, coming out very firmly in favour of establishing – as soon as possible – a new, unified and independent air force. The day might not be far off, he accurately predicted, “when aerial operations with their devastation of enemy lands and destruction of industrial and populous centres on a vast scale, may become the principal operations of war.”

     No time was wasted. In April 1918, Major General Hugh Trenchard, then in command of the Royal Flying Corps, was appointed the first Chief of Staff (CAS) of the Royal Air Force. This in no way reduced the inevitable wrangling between the armed forces, each anxious to get the biggest share of the defence budget as possible, but the proponents of airpower now spoke on equal terms with both the Army and Navy. This enabled them to create their own training establishments – Trenchard, for example, established the RAF College Cranwell in November 1919 – and to give their full attention to the development and supply of new aircraft, two areas which had not always received the close study required. The ending of the war obviously brought about cuts in funding, but, in the long term, strategic bombing was not going to go away, and nor was the need for the development of an extremely well organised defence system across the entire British Isles. Strategic bombing was in its infancy, of course, particularly concerning night navigation and target accuracy, but the new RAF, as Smuts had foreseen, had an assured future.

    HughxMontague Trenchard, 1st Vicount, was born in Taunton, Somerset, in 1873. Not being academic by nature, he had difficulty in gaining entrance to the army, but eventually joined the Royal Scots Fusiliers as a second lieutenant in 1893. He served in India, South Africa and Nigeria, and learned to fly in 1912. That brought a change in career. Come the war, he was put in command of the Royal Flying Corps in France, and when the RAF was established in 1918 he was appointed its first Chief of Air Staff (CAS) and – the following year – the country’s first Air Marshal. In this office he did much to encourage the value of air control in the policing of British colonies and mandates, and he strongly emphasised the increasing role that air power was going to play given the expansion of strategic bombing. It was important, he realised, that an airforce was in a positon to assist both the Army and the Navy in their respective roles, but, in fact, the bomber was the key weapon of a future airforce. Later in his career he served as Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police from 1931 to 1935. He was made a peer in 1936, and died in London in 1956.

     Incidentally, while taking part in the Boer War, Trenchard was critically wounded. He lost a lung and was partially paralysed. On medical advice, he went to Switzerland to recuperate, and, after suffering a serious crash while bob sleighing, found to his astonishment that he was no longer paralysed! Able to walk unaided, he returned to active service in South Africa!

    By this date – the establishment of the RAF – the aeroplanes in current use were virtually unrecognisable compared with those flying before the war, such had been the advances made in aircraft production. On the left shows the French aviator Louis Blériot making the first crossing of the English Channel in July 1909; on the right is the Sopwith Salamander, a British ground attack fighter, coming into service late in 1918. But with this transformation – and the increased armaments that went with it – the dangers to the crews increased substantially. By the end of the war the loss rate was 1 in 4 killed, comparable to the infantry loses on the Western Front. And in the matter of over-all numbers, the RFC began with some 1,240 personnel in August 1914, and this had risen to more than 290,000 by the formation of the RAF.

    Incidentally, it was this new force that, in 1940, by the sheer valour and skill of its fighter pilots, defeated the German strategic bomber force. On attacking southern England, it suffered such heavy loses that it was forced to give up its offensive. The RAF thereby kept its supremacy over the skies of the British Isles, putting an end to the threat of a Nazi invasion. “Never,” declared Prime Minister Churchill, “has so much been owed by so many to so few”. ……

    ...... And equally worthy of note is the fact that it was as early as 1915 that the German aircraft designer Hugo Junkers produced the first all-metal aircraft. Known as the Hugo Junkers J1, it was completed in the December, but, in the flight trials that followed, some pilots complained that it was unstable and difficult to handle. In some quarters, indeed, it became known as the “Blechesel” (the “Tin Donkey”). It saw no active service and, after the war, was displayed in Munich Museum. Ironically, in December 1944 it was destroyed during an Allied bombing raid on that city. It was a harbinger of things to come. ......

     …… The development of airpower in the First World War gave rise to two notable writers on the subject, the Italian General Giulio Douhet (1869-1930), and the American pilot, Colonel William Mitchell (1879-1936). Douhet published The Command of the Air in 1921; and Mitchell Winged Defence in 1925.