Per Ardua: A History of the Royal Air Force

The Royal Air Force likes to point out, with some justification, that it was the world's first independent air force: not a wing bolted onto an army or a navy, but its own service, with its own ranks, its own uniform and its own opinions about how wars ought to be won.

It has held that independence for a little over a century, through a Battle fought in its own name over the fields of Kent and Sussex, through a bombing campaign that remains one of the most debated episodes in British military history, and through a shrinking, ever more expensive fleet that can now flatten a target from a continent away.

This is a factual account of how the RAF came to be, and of the aircraft, battles and turning points that shaped it.

From Balloons to Squadrons: The Royal Flying Corps (1912 to 1918)

Military aviation in Britain began, as these things often do, with a committee. The Royal Flying Corps was established by royal warrant on 13 April 1912 and became operational the following month, split into a Military Wing run by the War Office and a Naval Wing run by the Admiralty, with a Central Flying School at Upavon in Wiltshire training pilots for both.

It was a modest start: when the school opened that August, Britain had precisely 19 qualified military pilots between the two services, 11 army and 8 navy, flying aircraft that were still closer in spirit to garden sheds than to weapons of war.

One of the first course's students was a young officer named Hugh Trenchard, who would go on to command the RFC in 1915 and, in time, be remembered as the father of the whole service.

The Naval Wing, meanwhile, drifted away from War Office control and was formally reconstituted as the Royal Naval Air Service in 1914, so that by the outbreak of the First World War Britain was fielding two separate air arms, with two separate chains of command, two separate procurement systems, and, inevitably, a great deal of unhelpful rivalry between them.

Both services expanded enormously over the war, learning reconnaissance, artillery spotting, bombing and, eventually, dogfighting the hard way, at a cost in young pilots' lives that has never been forgotten.

The RFC's early missions were unarmed reconnaissance flights, and its first real strategic triumph came almost immediately: in 1914, its pilots spotted the gap opening in the German army's advance that helped the Allies win the Battle of the Marne. Air fighting escalated quickly and grimly from there.

Observers began strapping Lewis guns to their cockpits, firing awkwardly off to the side because nobody had yet worked out how to shoot through a spinning propeller without hitting it, until German Fokker aircraft introduced a synchronisation gear in 1915 that let pilots simply aim the whole aeroplane at their target, a temporary technological edge that cost the RFC dearly and became known, with grim understatement, as the Fokker Scourge.

The Air Board's refusal to issue parachutes to pilots, on the theory that they might abandon a damaged aircraft too readily, made a dangerous job needlessly crueller. By the war's end, 14,166 British pilots had died, more than half of them in training accidents rather than combat, a sobering reminder that flying itself, in machines of wood, wire and canvas, was often as lethal as the enemy.

The World's First Independent Air Force (1918)

By 1917 the case for combining the two air arms had become hard to ignore, not least because German Gotha bombers had started raiding London and the public wanted a single service answerable for stopping them.

South African statesman Jan Smuts produced a report on 17 August 1917 recommending a unified air service, Parliament passed the Air Force (Constitution) Bill that November, and King George V approved the name Royal Air Force by decree on 7 March 1918.

On 1 April 1918, the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service formally merged, creating a service that briefly ranked as the second independent air force in the world, just a few weeks behind Finland, and would by the war's end become the largest air force on the planet, run from a converted London hotel, the Hotel Cecil on the Strand, which is not the most glamorous origin story for a service that would go on to fly Spitfires and Vulcans, but there it is.

That "second" needs a word of explanation, because it sits awkwardly against the claim the RAF has made about itself for a century. Finland dates its air force to 6 March 1918, when a donated Swedish reconnaissance machine arrived at Vaasa, and it was constituted separately from the army from the start, which is a real claim to primacy and one the Finns quite reasonably make. What it was not, in March 1918, was large: a handful of aircraft in the middle of a civil war. The RAF three weeks later was the merger of two full wartime air services at the height of a world war. So both services are telling the truth, and the usual formulation is the fair one. Finland got there first; the RAF was the first air force of any consequence to be lifted out from under an army and a navy and made to stand on its own.

The RAF's Latin motto, Per Ardua ad Astra, "through adversity to the stars," was adopted around the same time and has proved, if anything, to be something of an understatement.

Trenchard's Peace: Doctrine and Austerity Between the Wars (1918 to 1939)

Peace brought the usual reward for a large wartime service: savage cuts. The RAF shrank drastically after 1918, and it fell to Trenchard, as Chief of the Air Staff from 1919 to 1930, to argue for its survival as an independent force rather than being carved back up between the Army and the Navy, who both rather fancied getting their aeroplanes back.

Trenchard's solution was twofold and, in its way, quite ruthless: he championed "air control," using aircraft as a cheaper substitute for garrisons of soldiers to police unruly parts of the empire, notably in Iraq and on the North-West Frontier, and he developed the strategic bombing theory, the idea that an enemy's war-making capacity and civilian morale could be broken from the air, that would go on to shape RAF thinking for the next two decades and beyond.

It was not all doctrine and budget battles. RAF pilots also spent the interwar years setting speed records, most famously in the Schneider Trophy seaplane races of the late 1920s and early 1930s, contested by the RAF's High Speed Flight. The Supermarine racers that Britain flew to victory were designed by R.J. Mitchell, whose experience with high-speed monoplane design fed directly into his next project: a fighter that would, within a decade, become rather more famous than any trophy.

The Few: The Battle of Britain (1940)

If the RAF has one battle honour that has entered the language, it is this one. Fought between 10 July and 31 October 1940, the Battle of Britain pitted RAF Fighter Command, under the careful, unglamorous leadership of Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, against the Luftwaffe's attempt to win air superiority ahead of a planned German invasion.

Around 3,000 RAF pilots took part, flying Spitfires and Hurricanes and directed to their targets by the Dowding System, an integrated network of radar stations, observer posts and ground control that gave Fighter Command a genuine technological edge over an enemy still fighting the last war's battles.

It is worth being clear about what that system was, because it mattered more than any individual aeroplane. Chain Home radar stations along the coast picked up formations assembling over France; the Observer Corps tracked them inland once they crossed the coast and radar could no longer see them; and everything either of them reported went by telephone to a filter room at Bentley Priory, where the reports were reconciled into a single picture and pushed out to the group and sector stations that actually scrambled the squadrons. Nobody else in the world had anything like it. Its real value was negative rather than positive: it meant Fighter Command did not have to fly standing patrols to find the enemy, and standing patrols would have worn out its pilots and its engines inside a fortnight.

The fighting ran through several distinct phases: attacks on Channel convoys in July, an assault on RAF airfields and radar stations through August that came uncomfortably close to breaking Fighter Command's infrastructure, and then, from early September, a fateful German shift toward bombing London and other cities instead, which took the pressure off the airfields and allowed the RAF to recover.

By the battle's end Germany had lost around 1,733 aircraft to Britain's 915, and the invasion, Operation Sea Lion, was quietly postponed and then abandoned.

Winston Churchill's tribute to the pilots, that "never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few," gave the battle its enduring nickname: the Few. What followed instead of invasion was the Blitz, months of night bombing of British cities that killed tens of thousands of civilians but never came close to achieving what daylight raids on RAF airfields had failed to do.

One consequence of that August, and of some grim lessons learned in Crete and the Western Desert soon afterwards, was that the RAF stopped assuming somebody else would defend its airfields. On 1 February 1942 it raised a corps of its own to do the job on the ground, which is a curious thing for an air force to need and has been quietly necessary ever since: The RAF Regiment.

Bombing Germany: Bomber Command and the Dambusters (1939 to 1945)

While Fighter Command's story is one of narrow, defensive triumph, RAF Bomber Command's is longer, larger and considerably more troubling. Under Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris, who led the command from February 1942 until the war's end, Bomber Command pursued a strategy of area bombing against German industrial cities, targeting war production and, explicitly, civilian morale.

It was enormously costly to its own aircrew: of around 125,000 men who served in Bomber Command, 55,573 were killed, a death rate above 44 per cent, worse odds than infantry officers had faced in the trenches of the First World War.

Its most celebrated single operation remains the Dambusters raid of the night of 16 to 17 May 1943, officially Operation Chastise. Barnes Wallis, an engineer who reportedly worked out the physics by bouncing marbles across a garden water tank, developed a drum-shaped bomb codenamed Upkeep that could skip across water to strike a dam wall below its torpedo nets.

Wing Commander Guy Gibson, just 24 years old, led 133 aircrew of the newly formed 617 Squadron in 19 Lancasters against the Mohne, Eder and Sorpe dams in Germany's Ruhr valley, flying at precisely 60 feet and 232 miles per hour to release the weapon correctly. The Mohne and Eder dams were breached, causing serious flooding, though the Sorpe held; 53 of the 133 aircrew were killed and three became prisoners of war.

Two figures round that out, and neither of them makes the raid look worse so much as it makes it look real. Eight of the nineteen Lancasters did not come back, a loss rate of 42 per cent in a single night, which is why the raid was never repeated in that form. And below the Mohne and the Eder, the flood killed roughly 1,600 people. Around six hundred were German civilians. The other thousand or so were foreign forced labourers, most of them Soviet and Eastern European women held in camps in the valley, drowned in their huts by a wave sent to break a dam above them. It was the highest civilian death toll of any RAF attack on Germany up to that point, and the people who paid it were, almost entirely, prisoners of the regime the raid was aimed at.

Gibson was awarded the Victoria Cross, and 617 Squadron's reputation as a specialist precision unit endures to this day. Whether the raid's industrial impact matched its propaganda value remains debated by historians, but as a feat of engineering and airmanship it has rarely been equalled.

Bomber Command's larger campaign included the 1942 Cologne raid, the first to send 1,000 bombers over a single target in one night, the devastating firestorm raids on Hamburg in 1943, and the controversial bombing of Dresden in February 1945, which remains, alongside the area bombing campaign as a whole, one of the most contested chapters in the Command's history.

By September 1943 Germany had diverted almost 9,000 anti-aircraft guns and around 1,000 night fighters to home defence, resources that could otherwise have gone to the Eastern or Western Fronts, whatever else is disputed about the bombing campaign's precise effect on German production.

D-Day and the Defeat of Germany (1944 to 1945)

By June 1944 the RAF had grown into a genuinely vast organisation, and it showed on D-Day itself: of the 11,590 Allied aircraft that took part in the invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944, 5,656, very nearly half, were flying under RAF markings.

RAF squadrons bombed coastal gun batteries and radar stations, towed gliders and dropped paratroopers, flew deception operations to confuse German defenders about the real landing site, and maintained fighter cover so complete that Field Marshal Erwin Rommel complained the Allies had "complete command of the air" and could cut off almost all daytime movement behind German lines.

That dominance had been paid for in advance: in the months of preparatory bombing before the landings, Bomber Command alone lost nearly 300 aircraft and around 1,500 aircrew killed. By the time Germany surrendered in May 1945, the RAF had grown from a corps of biplanes into one of the most powerful air forces the world had ever seen, a position it would not hold for very much longer.

Into the Jet Age (1944 to 1950s)

The RAF had already, quietly, entered a new era before the war even ended. The Gloster Meteor, Britain's first operational jet fighter and the only Allied jet to see service in the Second World War, entered squadron service in July 1944, its early career restricted to home defence for fear that a captured example would hand Germany the secret of jet propulsion.

Its most memorable wartime role was distinctly unglamorous but effective: intercepting V-1 flying bombs over southern England, including one celebrated occasion in August 1944 when a Meteor pilot, his guns jammed, slid a wing in under a V-1 and banked, spilling enough airflow to flip it out of the sky without ever touching it.

That pilot has a name worth putting on the record. Flying Officer T. D. “Dixie” Dean of 616 Squadron caught a V-1 over Kent on 4 August 1944, closed in, fired, and had all four of his cannon jam, which was a chronic fault on the early Meteors. Rather than break off he eased his wing in underneath the flying bomb's wing and banked. The airflow spilling off the jet lifted the V-1's wing, toppled its gyro, and put it into a field near Tonbridge. It was the Meteor's first kill, and 616 Squadron's, and it remains one of the more resourceful ways anybody has brought down an aircraft.

The jet age that the Meteor opened would, within a decade, produce the V-force bombers and swept-wing fighters that carried the RAF through the tensest years of the Cold War, and by 1951 Australian-flown Meteors were seeing combat again over Korea, this time outclassed by Soviet-built MiG-15s and shifted to ground attack work, an early lesson in how quickly jet technology could make even a cutting-edge aircraft look dated.

Cold War Guardians: Berlin, the V-Force and the Bomb (1945 to 1969)

Peace lasted barely three years before the RAF found a new, less kinetic but no less demanding job. When the Soviet Union blockaded land access to West Berlin in June 1948, Britain and the United States responded with the Berlin Airlift, flying food, coal and supplies into the city around the clock rather than abandon it.

Over the course of the blockade, which the Soviets lifted in May 1949, Allied aircraft flew 277,804 flights and delivered around 2.3 million tons of supplies, with aircraft landing at Tempelhof airport as often as every 30 seconds at the operation's peak.

RAF crews were a core part of that effort throughout, and the airlift is generally regarded as one of the largest humanitarian air operations in history, and a formative moment in the Cold War stand-off that would define the next four decades.

Those four decades gave the RAF an entirely new job: delivering Britain's nuclear deterrent. From the mid-1950s the RAF operated the V-force, three distinctive delta and crescent-winged bombers, the Vickers Valiant, Avro Vulcan and Handley Page Victor, kept on permanent quick-reaction alert to carry Britain's nuclear weapons in the event of war with the Soviet Union.

The V-force carried the deterrent role until 1969, when it passed to the Royal Navy's submarine-launched Polaris missiles, but the Vulcan in particular would get one more, wholly unexpected moment in the spotlight over a decade later, in a conflict nobody had planned for it.

The Falklands: Operation Black Buck (1982)

When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in April 1982, the RAF's ageing Vulcan bombers, by then mostly retired from the nuclear role and awaiting the scrapyard, were suddenly needed for conventional bombing at a range nobody had designed them for.

Operation Black Buck, flown between 30 April and 12 June 1982, sent Vulcans from RAF Waddington on round trips of roughly 6,600 nautical miles, some 16 hours in the air, to strike Port Stanley airfield in the Falklands.

Each Vulcan required support from eleven Handley Page Victor tankers converted for air-to-air refuelling, in a logistical chain so complex that the mission planning alone was a small miracle of improvisation.

Five of seven planned missions were completed. The first, Black Buck 1, cratered the runway at Port Stanley, though Argentine engineers had it patched within a day, and subsequent raids achieved only modest further damage; the runway remained usable by Argentine transport aircraft for much of the war.

Independent assessments of the raids' military effect have generally been unflattering, but as a demonstration of reach, Black Buck briefly held the record for the longest bombing raids in history, a record it kept until B-2 Spirit stealth bombers flew even further during operations over Afghanistan in 2001.

Black Buck gets the attention, but the RAF's real contribution to the air war over the Falklands was flown a great deal closer to the islands, and off somebody else's deck. The Harrier GR3s of No 1 Squadron were ferried 3,600 miles from Ascension, eight hours and twenty minutes in the air, landed on the container ship Atlantic Conveyor, and flew off her to HMS Hermes on 18 May 1982, where they spent the war doing ground attack while the Navy's Sea Harriers held the air. The aircraft that made all of that possible, and the argument about whether a jump jet was ever a sensible idea, is the subject of Straight Up: A History of the Harrier Jump Jet.

The Gulf War and the Jet Age Continues (1991)

Nearly a decade later the RAF's Tornado GR1 squadrons formed a central part of the coalition air campaign against Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War, tasked in the war's opening phase with knocking Iraqi airfields out of action so that Saddam Hussein's air force could not get airborne.

Tornados carried the JP233 runway denial weapon, a system that scattered cratering submunitions and anti-personnel mines across enemy runways in a single low-level pass, a genuinely hazardous tactic that came at a cost: several RAF Tornados were lost during the campaign, including aircrew killed or taken prisoner.

As the campaign progressed and Iraqi air defences were worn down, RAF operations shifted to medium-altitude precision strikes against infrastructure targets, a preview of the kind of stand-off, precision-guided warfare that would come to define RAF operations for the following three decades, through further campaigns over Iraq, the Balkans, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan.

After the Cold War: A Smaller Force, Kept Busy (1991 to Today)

The end of the Cold War did not bring the RAF much rest. Tornados patrolled the no-fly zones over Iraq through the 1990s, and in 1999 RAF aircraft took part in NATO's bombing campaign over Kosovo and Serbia, an operation that tested a coalition air force's ability to fight a war largely from the air with the alliance's political credibility on the line.

In March 2011, Typhoon fighters flew their first ever combat sorties, deploying to Italy within days to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya and flying their first operational mission barely 18 hours after arriving in theatre, a striking demonstration of how quickly the RAF's newest fast jet could go from air show display to live combat.

Typhoons and, later, remotely piloted Reaper aircraft went on to fly missions over Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria through the 2010s, part of a long, unglamorous campaign against Islamic State and other targets that generated far less newsreel footage than the Battle of Britain but occupied RAF crews for the better part of a decade.

Into the Modern Age: The RAF Today

Today's RAF is, like the other British armed services, a much smaller and more specialised force than at any point in its twentieth century heyday, built around two principal fast jets: the Eurofighter Typhoon, which has handled the bulk of the RAF's air policing and combat duties since the 2000s, and the F-35B Lightning, the stealth fighter now flying from the Royal Navy's new aircraft carriers as well as from RAF bases, giving Britain a genuinely fifth-generation combat capability for the first time.

That last point is a bigger change than it sounds, because it means RAF squadrons now routinely go to sea. The F-35B has its own account in Jump Jet 2.0: The Story of Britain's F-35B Lightning, and the two ships it flies from are HMS Queen Elizabeth (R08) and HMS Prince of Wales (R09). Whose aircraft they are, and whose deck they are on, is a question the two services have been amiably arguing about since 1918.

Ministry of Defence figures put the RAF's full-time trained strength at around 27,800 personnel, a fraction of the tens of thousands who once flew and maintained the Battle of Britain's Spitfires or Bomber Command's Lancasters, but a force that now measures its power in precision and reach rather than sheer numbers.

The service's public face, for many people, remains the Red Arrows, the RAF Aerobatic Team formed in 1964 and flying Hawk jets since 1979, whose Diamond Nine formation has been a fixture of British skies at air shows and national occasions for six decades, and whose real job, alongside the display flying, is recruitment and defence diplomacy dressed up as an afternoon of very loud fun.

Sixty years of that is a longer run than most front-line aircraft manage, and the team has had its own share of adversity to go with the stars. Their full history, including the parts that are not on the postcards, is in The Red Arrows.

The RAF's history does not run in a straight line either, from the wood and fabric biplanes of 1912 through the desperate improvisation of the Battle of Britain, the grinding controversy of the bomber offensive, and the long, quiet decades of nuclear stand-off, to a modern force that trades the huge fleets of 1944 for a much smaller number of vastly more capable aircraft.

What has not changed is the core claim it made at its founding in 1918: that air power deserves its own service, its own doctrine and its own seat at the table, a claim that a century of history, for better and for worse, has generally borne out.