The RAF Regiment: The Gunners Who Guard the Skies from the Ground
Ask most people what the Royal Air Force does and you will get the same answer every time: it flies aeroplanes. Fair enough. But an aeroplane, for all its speed and menace in the sky, is a remarkably vulnerable thing the moment its wheels touch tarmac. It cannot outrun a saboteur, outfight an infantry patrol, or dodge a mortar round while it is being refuelled.
Somebody has to stand guard while the aircraft are on the ground, and for over eighty years that somebody has been the RAF Regiment: the corps of gunners, infantrymen and air defenders whose entire purpose is to keep RAF airfields, and the people and aircraft on them, alive.
It is one of the RAF's least glamorous stories and, properly told, one of its best. This is a corps that has fought as infantry in the Burmese jungle, shot down a jet fighter with a gun designed years before jets existed, guarded the Queen at Buckingham Palace, been ambushed by the IRA, dug into the mud at San Carlos, and, in one unfortunate incident in Aden, given the entire Royal Air Force a nickname that has stuck for seventy years. Grab a cup of tea. This one has a bit of everything.
Born from a Disaster
The RAF Regiment exists because of a hard lesson learned the hard way, more than once. Before the Second World War, defending airfields on the ground was the British Army's job, not the RAF's. It sounded sensible enough on paper. In practice, when the fighting started, the Army had rather a lot of other things to worry about, and airfield defence kept sliding down everybody's list of priorities.
The consequences were painful. In France in 1940, RAF aircraft were caught and destroyed on the ground as the Wehrmacht advanced. In Greece and then Crete in 1941, it happened again, and worse: German airborne forces overran the airfield at Maleme in Crete in May 1941 while it was still largely intact, handing the Luftwaffe a ready-made base in one of the more sobering episodes of the entire Mediterranean campaign.
Then, in May 1942, Japanese aircraft caught much of Burma's fighter and bomber strength sitting exposed at Magwe airfield, destroying a large slice of it in two days of raids that a properly organised ground defence might have blunted.
Winston Churchill, never a man to let a lesson go unlearned twice, decided enough was enough. If the RAF wanted its airfields properly defended, the RAF would have to do it itself. On 1 February 1942, King George VI signed a Royal Warrant creating the Royal Air Force Regiment: a corps, raised within the RAF, whose job was to seize, secure and defend airfields so that flying operations could actually happen.
It was not built from nothing. The Regiment could trace a lineage back to the armoured car companies formed in Egypt in 1921 for operations in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, units that spent the 1920s trundling around in Rolls-Royce armoured cars keeping the peace in a fashion the RAF was, at the time, rather proud of.
That lineage gave the new corps a head start in ethos, if not in numbers. At its creation, the RAF Regiment drew together roughly 66,000 personnel, largely absorbed from the RAF's existing Defence Squadrons (numbered in the 700s), and equipped them with Morris, Humber and Otter light reconnaissance cars, Hispano 20mm cannon and Bofors 40mm anti-aircraft guns.
By the end of the war, the Regiment had swollen to more than 80,000 men. Not bad going for a corps that did not exist when the decade began.
A Corps in a Hurry
Standing up a new fighting corps in the middle of a world war is not a leisurely business, and the Regiment's early years show it. Training schools sprang up across the United Kingdom to turn airmen into infantrymen, armoured car crews and anti-aircraft gunners, more or less simultaneously. Out in India, matters were, if anything, even more chaotic: defence personnel were scattered thinly across the subcontinent until Wing Commander J.
H. Harris arrived in December 1942 and set about knocking some 4,500 of them into a coherent fighting force. No. 1 RAF Regiment Training School opened at Secunderabad that October, and its curriculum, weapons handling, fieldcraft, night operations, machine gun tactics, and jungle warfare, left nobody in any doubt about where these men were heading next.
The Regiment also picked up a rather more ceremonial duty early on. On 1 April 1943, it mounted the King's Guard at Buckingham Palace for the first time, a job traditionally associated with the Brigade of Guards, and one that told the rest of the armed forces this new corps intended to be taken seriously. It has kept a hand in royal ceremonial duty ever since, a nice thread of continuity for a unit that otherwise spends most of its time considerably less spick and span.
The War in Earnest
By the time the Regiment's squadrons deployed on operations, they had plenty to do. Sixty-eight light anti-aircraft squadrons stood guard over Britain against the V1 flying bomb campaign, a grim, unglamorous job of shooting at pilotless aircraft over your own countryside. Elsewhere, RAF Regiment field, armoured car and light anti-aircraft squadrons fought their way through North Africa, the Middle East, Italy, the Balkans and, eventually, north-western Europe as the Allies pushed toward Germany.
They were not shy about being near the front of the queue. Regiment units were among the first British forces to reach both Brussels and Paris as those cities were liberated, and in the war's final days a force under Squadron Leader Mark Hobden had the peculiar distinction of arresting Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, Hitler's chosen successor, at Flensburg.
Not many corps can say their gunners personally collared the last head of the Third Reich.
Then there is the story that airfield defence enthusiasts (a smaller club than you might think, but a passionate one) bring up whenever anyone mentions the Regiment's war record. In late November 1944, gunners of 2875 Squadron RAF Regiment, dug in with a Bofors 40mm gun at the forward airfield of Helmond in the Netherlands, engaged a Messerschmitt Me 262 of III./KG 51, one of the Luftwaffe's revolutionary jet fighters, and shot it down.
It is generally reckoned to be the first time in history that ground-based anti-aircraft fire had brought down a jet aircraft, achieved with a gun whose basic design predated the jet engine by the best part of a decade. The squadron commander received a personal note of congratulations from the Air Officer Commanding 83 Group for the effort.
It is the sort of detail that makes military historians go slightly misty-eyed, and rightly so.
The Regiment's war was not confined to Western Europe. In December 1944, twelve of its squadrons deployed into southern Greece and found themselves engaged not against the Axis but against Greek Communist forces (ELAS) in the tense, murky fighting that followed the country's liberation, a reminder that the end of one war does not always mean the beginning of peace.
Burma and the Jungle War
If Europe gave the Regiment its most famous exploits, Burma gave it its hardest fighting. The training pipeline built at Secunderabad fed six field squadrons and seventy anti-aircraft flights into a campaign fought in some of the most unforgiving terrain of the entire war. During the Battle of Imphal, from March to June 1944, Regiment gunners provided airfield defence that helped keep vital supply and air support flowing to besieged Allied forces.
The Regiment's defining Far Eastern moment came in early 1945. On 1 March, squadrons were flown into the newly captured, and tactically critical, airfield at Meiktila, right in the middle of territory the Japanese Army was fighting furiously to hold. For roughly three weeks, RAF Regiment gunners helped defend a perimeter barely the size of a few football pitches against determined attack, while transport aircraft used the strip to keep the wider battle supplied.
The fighting at Meiktila is generally credited with breaking the Japanese grip on northern Burma, and the Regiment's gunners were dug in at the sharp end of it, doing precisely the job Churchill had created them to do three years earlier.
It was not all glory, mind. In June 1944, with the fighting in Normandy consuming infantry replacements at an alarming rate, some 25,000 RAF Regiment officers and airmen were transferred wholesale to the British Army for retraining as infantry, many ending up in line regiments and the Foot Guards. It is a reminder that manpower planning in wartime is a brutal business, and that the Regiment, for all its distinct identity, was never entirely its own master when the Army needed bodies.
Winding Down, Then Winding Up Again
Peace in 1945 brought the inevitable shrinking of a force built for total war, but the Regiment's job was, if anything, about to get busier rather than quieter. King George VI became Air Commodore-in-Chief of the Regiment in 1947, cementing royal patronage, and in 1953 the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II presented the Regiment with its Queen's Colour to mark its tenth anniversary, a ceremony delayed a year by her father's death in 1952.
The following decades read like a gazetteer of the retreat from Empire and the anxieties of the Cold War. Regiment squadrons served in Palestine as the Mandate collapsed, in the Malayan Emergency's jungles, during the Suez crisis of 1956, and across Britain's remaining Middle Eastern commitments in Oman and the Yemen. Aden, in particular, earned itself a permanent place in Regiment folklore, and not entirely for military reasons.
How the RAF Got Its Rock Apes
Every corps needs a nickname, and the RAF Regiment's is one of the armed forces' better yarns. Contrary to the popular assumption that it has something to do with Gibraltar's famous Barbary macaques, the story actually traces to Aden in the early 1950s. Two RAF Regiment officers were out shooting at the local hamadryas baboons, known locally as "rock apes," in failing evening light, when one of them accidentally shot the other.
Asked afterwards why on earth he had done it, the shooter reportedly explained that his colleague, silhouetted in the gloom, had "looked just like a rock ape." The story did the rounds of the RAF at a speed no official newsletter could have matched, and "Rock Apes," or simply "Rocks," has stuck as the affectionate, slightly cheeky nickname for Regiment gunners ever since. It is not, by any measure, the most dignified origin story in British military heraldry, but it is very hard to forget, which is presumably half the point of a good nickname.
The Cold War Years
Through the 1960s and 1970s, the Regiment kept pace with the changing shape of British defence commitments and the changing technology of air defence. The Tigercat missile system, the UK's first genuinely portable low-level surface-to-air missile, entered service in 1968, giving the Regiment a real teeth-arm capability against fast jets rather than just heavy machine guns and Bofors cannon.
It was superseded in the 1970s by the Rapier system, which from 1974 equipped four Regiment squadrons stationed in West Germany, standing ready against a Warsaw Pact air threat that, thankfully, never actually materialised.
The Regiment also proved it could move fast when required. When Rhodesia unilaterally declared independence in 1965, 51 Squadron RAF Regiment deployed to Zambia to provide air defence cover within six hours of being told to go, an impressively short fuse for any military unit, let alone one hauling anti-aircraft equipment halfway across a continent.
Later in the decade and into the 1970s, Regiment flights based out of Singapore rotated through Hong Kong, protecting RAF Kai Tak and the Tai Mo Shan radar station as Britain's Far Eastern commitments gradually wound down.
Closer to home, 1969 brought a grimmer posting. As sectarian violence flared in Northern Ireland, RAF Regiment gunners were reportedly among the first reinforcement troops sent in, ahead of the wider deployment that became Operation Banner, the longest continuous operation in British military history, running from 1969 to 2007.
The Regiment paid a price for its later involvement too: four of its personnel were killed by the IRA, all in 1988 and 1989, one to hostile fire in Northern Ireland itself and the rest to snipers and car bombs targeting British service personnel on the European mainland, a stark reminder that the Regiment's fight was not confined to conventional battlefields.
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The Falklands, 1982
When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in April 1982, the Regiment's Rapier squadrons, several of them pulled straight from their Cold War posting in Germany, were rushed south to provide low-level air defence for the British task force. Detachments went ashore at the San Carlos beachhead alongside 63 Squadron, working to protect the ships, troops and the vital Harrier strip from Argentine air attack during some of the most sustained and dangerous air combat British forces have faced since the Second World War.
Gunners travelled south aboard the requisitioned liner SS Canberra alongside the Welsh and Scots Guards and the Gurkhas, a fairly eclectic bunch of company for a journey to the South Atlantic. It is a chapter of the campaign that rarely makes the popular retellings, dominated as they are by Harriers and Exocets, but the Regiment's low-level air defenders were doing dangerous, unglamorous work at San Carlos while history was busy being written somewhere more photogenic.
The Gulf and the 1990s
The Regiment's next major test came in the deserts of Iraq and Kuwait. During Operation Granby, Britain's contribution to the 1991 Gulf War, RAF Regiment personnel made up around nineteen per cent of the total RAF deployment, its largest single overseas commitment since the Second World War. Through the rest of the 1990s, Regiment squadrons rotated through the Balkans as Yugoslavia broke apart in a series of increasingly nasty wars, and later into Sierra Leone as Britain intervened to help stabilise that country's brutal civil conflict, adding yet more entries to a service record that by this point read like a survey of the decade's trouble spots.
Iraq and Afghanistan
The wars that followed the September 2001 attacks kept the Regiment busier still. Squadrons deployed repeatedly to Iraq during Operation Telic and to Afghanistan during Operation Herrick, providing force protection for airfields that were, by this stage, routinely under threat from mortars, rockets and improvised explosive devices rather than conventional air or ground assault.
It was not without cost: five RAF Regiment gunners were killed in Iraq, one in a firefight and three (including a member of the Royal Auxiliary Air Force) in a single devastating mortar strike, with a fifth lost in a road accident. Five more were killed in Afghanistan, one to hostile fire and four to IEDs, among them a 51-year-old RAuxAF reservist who became the oldest member of the British Armed Forces to die in that campaign.
A further gunner was lost in an accident in Cyprus during operations connected to the same era. These are sobering figures for a corps whose job description has always, at its core, been protection rather than conquest, and they are worth pausing on rather than rushing past.
Throughout these campaigns, the Regiment also took on a role that has quietly become central to modern air power: providing Joint Terminal Attack Controllers, the specialists on the ground who talk pilots onto targets, embedded with British Army units. It is a job that puts RAF Regiment gunners at the very front of the fighting, often far from any airfield at all, which says something about how far the corps's role has stretched since 1942.
Reorganisation and the Modern Regiment
The twenty-first century has brought its share of institutional reshuffling. In July 2004, responsibility for ground-based air defence, the Rapier role that had defined so much of the Regiment's Cold War identity, transferred to the British Army's Royal Artillery, and four Regiment air defence squadrons were disbanded as a result.
The Regiment's chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) responsibilities have swung back and forth between services too: the role moved to the RAF Regiment in 2011 as part of the wider Strategic Defence and Security Review, was partly reversed in 2016, and finally returned to the Army in 2020. Squadron numbers have shifted along the way as well; 16, 37 and 48 Squadrons were all disbanded in 2013, even as the Queen's Colour and the Standards of 1 and 27 Squadrons were renewed the same year.
In 2017, Prince Harry presented a new Colour to the Regiment at RAF Honington to mark its seventy-fifth anniversary, a fitting moment for a corps that had, by then, quietly amassed one of the more varied service records in the British armed forces. Also in 2017, the Regiment opened its doors to female applicants for the first time, a year ahead of the wider infantry, and in January 2020 the first woman completed the demanding twenty-week gunner training course at RAF Honington, the Regiment's home since 1994.
Today the RAF Regiment sits within 2 Group of RAF Air Command, describing itself as the Air Force's own organic defensive security force. It fields around 1,850 regulars, organised into seven regular field squadrons (Nos. 1, 2, 15, 27, 34 and 51, plus No. 63, which doubles as the Queen's Colour Squadron for ceremonial duties), supported by six Royal Auxiliary Air Force squadrons providing reserve depth.
Every Regiment gunner still trains first and foremost as a combat infantryman, learning fieldcraft, sniping, close protection, support to special forces operations and CBRN defence, a curriculum that would look entirely familiar, in spirit if not in equipment, to the men who first went through Secunderabad in 1942.
Honours, Motto and a Little Light Celebrity
The Regiment's motto, Per Ardua, "Through Adversity," is a deliberate nod to the wider RAF's own motto, Per Ardua ad Astra, "Through Adversity to the Stars." It suits a corps that has spent its entire existence doing the unglamorous, often dangerous groundwork that lets the flying happen. Individual squadrons carry their own additional mottoes and battle honours on their Standards, one of the very few units in the RAF permitted to carry Colours into the field at all, a tradition inherited from the Army and worn with evident pride.
The Regiment has also, over the decades, quietly collected a roster of National Service conscripts who went on to rather better-known careers. The comedian Tony Hancock joined in 1942. Footballer and legendary Nottingham Forest manager Brian Clough served with the Regiment during his National Service between 1953 and 1956.
The actor Brian Blessed, never a man short of a booming anecdote, served as a parachutist with 2 Squadron. The golfer and much-loved BBC commentator Peter Alliss did his National Service with the Regiment between 1949 and 1951. It is a peculiar footnote to a serious military history, but a rather charming one: for a few years of the mid-twentieth century, half of light entertainment and light industry seems to have passed through Regiment training at one point or another.
Why It Still Matters
It would be easy to think of airfield defence as yesterday's problem, something solved once and for all with a decent perimeter fence and a couple of sentries. The Regiment's own history argues otherwise. Every conflict from Crete to Kandahar has shown that an air force's aircraft are only ever as safe as the ground beneath them, and that the enemy, whether a paratrooper in 1941, a mortar team in 2007, or a drone operator today, will always look for the softest point in the perimeter.
The RAF Regiment exists to make sure that point is a great deal harder to find than it might otherwise be.
Eighty-plus years on from that Royal Warrant of February 1942, the corps Churchill created out of frustration and necessity has fought in the jungles of Burma, the deserts of the Gulf, the peat bogs of the Falklands and the mountains of Afghanistan, picked up a nickname it will probably never live down, and quietly become one of the most travelled, and most under-recognised, fighting formations in British military history.
Not bad for a corps that was only ever meant to mind the airfields.
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