Royal Air Force

Per Ardua ad Astra (Through Adversity to the Stars)

The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind. ~ Arthur Travers Harris

The Royal Air Force (RAF) is the United Kingdom's air and space force. It was formed towards the end of the First World War on 1 April 1918, becoming the first independent air force in the world, by regrouping the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS). Following the Allied victory over the Central Powers in 1918, the RAF emerged as the largest air force in the world at the time. Since its formation, the RAF has taken a significant role in British military history. In particular, it played a large part in the Second World War where it fought its most famous campaign, the Battle of Britain.

Per Ardua ad Astra  (motto)

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F

• The second British advantage was in the air, though here the advantage was much smaller. Served up to the House of Commons on August 20,1940, Churchill's tribute to Fighter Command - 'Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few' - remains one his most memorable utterances. At the time, however, pilots joked that it was an allusion to the size of their unpaid mess bills. Churchill's own private secretaries felt the speech 'seemed to drag' because it contained 'less oratory than usual'. His phrase 'the few' implied that the Royal Air Force was outnumbered by the Luftwaffe; and indeed that was what British intelligence believed at the time. In reality, the RAF had a narrow edge. On August 9, just before the Germans launched their crucial offensive against Britain's air defences, the RAF had 1,032 fighters. The German fighters available for the attack numbered 1,011. Moreover, the RAF had 1,400 trained pilots, several hundred more than the Luftwaffe, and they proved more than a match for the Germans in skill and courage.
  • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 393
• Britain was at last out-producing Germany when it came to aircraft. During the crucial months from June until September, 1,900 new fighters were churned out by British factories, compared with 775 in Germany. Just as they had in the years of appeasement, the British overestimated the Germans - by a factor of around seven in the case of pilot strength. The Germans also overestimated themselves. Goring was sure that half of all British fighters had been destroyed by the end of August; in fact Fighter Command's operational strength at that point was only slightly less than it had been when the battle had commenced. By broadening the scope of their targets to include ports and industrial centres, the Germans threw away their chance of inflicting a decisive blow on RAF command and control capabilities. As late as December, Goebbels could still gloat that the war was 'militarily as good as won'. In reality the technical advantage conferred by radar, combined with the judicious leadership of Air Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, meant that total German losses (including bombers) were nearly twice the British (1,733 to 915). Every week until October 9 the RAF consistently shot down more German planes than they lost in combat (see Figure 11.1).
  • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 393-394

G

• The British air estimates for 1938 included considerable expenditure in the Singapore area. The strength of the Royal Air Force Car East Command, which has headquarters in Singapore, is to be doubled by the end of the year. New airdromes have been completed not only on Singapore island but in Sarawak and Borneo, and others are planned for Malaya above the strait.
  • John Gunther, Inside Asia (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939), 31st edition, p. 311

H

• The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.
  • Arthur Travers Harris, Statement of 1942, at the start of the bombing campaign against Germany, as quoted in "Sir Arthur Harris & The Lancaster Bomber" at The British Postal Museum and Archive

M

• At the start of the Second World War, there were still some questions, at least on the Allied side, about what constituted a legitimate target (a British Cabinet minister is said to have protested in 1939, ‘But that’s private property,’ when the possibility of bombing German industry in the Ruhr came up). The all-out nature of the war swept such issues aside, although, again on the Allied side, they never completely disappeared. All the belligerents used bombing of civilians to disrupt enemy war efforts and weaken the will to fight on. Ports, factories, railway marshalling yards, oil depots, dams and bridges were all targets, but so too were housing and city centres. Hermann Goering promised Hitler in the summer of 1940 that he could force Britain to sue for peace by bombing its airfields and key cities, especially London. Sir Arthur Harris, chief of Britain’s Bomber Command, was convinced, and managed to persuade his superiors, including Winston Churchill, that the war against Germany could be won by the bomber and that the critical target was German morale.
  • Margaret MacMillan, War: How Conflict Shaped Us (2020)

S

• In 1958, Bomber Command's emergency war plan called for the destruction of 44 Soviet cities. Such an attack would kill about 38 million people. One hydrogen bomb would be dropped on the centre of each city, but Moscow would be hit by four and Leningrad by two. Had Britain gone to war alongside the US in the early 1960s, Bomber Command would have been asked to destroy an additional 25 Soviet cities. As air defences improved in the Soviet Union, the number of urban areas that Britain planned to destroy unilaterally was reduced. By the late 1960s, the missiles carried by Polaris submarines served as the British strategic deterrent, and they were aimed at fewer than a dozen Soviet cities. Until the end of the cold war, the complete destruction of the Soviet Union's capital – known as the "Moscow criterion" – was the UK's main objective.
  • Eric Schlosser, "Nuclear weapons: an accident waiting to happen", The Guardian, (14 Sep 2013).