The Royal Air Force in the First World War

The Royal Air Force (RAF) was formed on 1 April 1918 by merging the army’s air arm, the Royal Flying Corps, and the navy’s, the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS). It answered neither to the War Office nor to the Admiralty but to a new Air Ministry, and it is usually regarded as the world’s first air force independent of both army and navy. In the last months of the war it fought over the Western Front, in Italy, in Macedonia and in the Middle East, defended Britain against air raids and bombed western Germany. In November 1918 it was the largest military air force in the world.

From the Smuts report to 1 April

The new service was born of the German air raids. After the Gotha daylight attacks on London on 13 June and 7 July 1917, the government set up a committee whose work was in practice done by General Jan Smuts, a member of the War Cabinet. In his report of 17 August 1917 Smuts recommended creating a separate air service, equal to the army and the navy: in his view two competing services were wasting engines, machines and men, and aircraft might one day destroy the enemy’s industry and cities on a great scale.

Things then moved quickly. On 29 November the Air Force Act received the royal assent, on 21 December the King laid down the composition of the Air Council, and on 3 January 1918 the Air Ministry began work, with Lord Rothermere as minister and Major-General Hugh Trenchard as Chief of the Air Staff. Over the following weeks the ministry prepared the merger: tens of thousands of men had to be transferred to the new service, and ranks, uniforms and regulations had to be settled.

On 1 April 1918 both services ceased to exist. According to the naval historian Stephen Roskill, the naval air arm brought into the RAF 55,066 officers and men, 2,949 aircraft and 126 coastal stations; the rest of the men and machines came from the RFC. The army squadrons kept their numbers, while the naval ones were renumbered by adding 200. A women’s auxiliary service, the Women’s Royal Air Force, was also formed; by the summer of 1918 more than 15 thousand women served in it, among them mechanics, drivers, storekeepers and clerks.

Unity in the ranks did not extend to the leadership. Trenchard believed the Chief of the Air Staff was entitled to far wider powers than Rothermere was willing to give him, and he resigned as early as March. The minister delayed announcing it so as not to harm the merger, so on 1 April Trenchard was still formally at the head of the Air Staff. In mid-April the resignation was accepted and his place was taken by General Frederick Sykes. Soon the minister left too and was replaced by the industrialist William Weir.

On the Western Front

The RAF was born in the fire of Operation Michael, while its airmen attacked the advancing German columns without respite. The change of name did not interrupt the work: the squadrons flew from the same airfields with the same machines, and General John Salmond kept the command in France. When a few days later the Germans struck in Flanders, in the Battle of Hazebrouck on 12 April the airmen flew more hours and dropped more bombs than ever before in the war. On 21 April over the Somme valley, in a fight with Camels of No. 209 Squadron RAF, Manfred von Richthofen was killed, although the fatal shot was most probably fired by an Australian gunner on the ground.

August brought a hard trial. On 8 August, the first day of the Battle of Amiens, Salmond threw his bombers, and even fighters carrying small bombs, against the bridges over the Somme. The bridges were not cut; the RAF lost 44 aircraft that day, and another 52 were struck off strength. The British official history called it “a bad day for the RAF”. In the Hundred Days Offensive aircraft circled low over the advancing infantry, keeping in touch with it, attacked targets ahead of it and machine-gunned the retreating Germans, up to the last great battle on the Sambre on 4 November.

The Independent Force and other fronts

The Smuts report had also foreseen the destruction of the enemy’s industry from the air. On 18 May six DH.4s attacked Cologne in daylight. On 6 June the bombers based near Nancy became the nucleus of the Independent Force, which was to bomb industry, railways and airfields in western Germany. Trenchard, who commanded it, answered neither to Douglas Haig nor to Foch but directly to the Air Ministry. According to Jones’s British official history, by the armistice the Independent Force had dropped 543 tons of bombs, and the planned raid on Berlin was never flown.

Far from France, RAF airmen had a large share in the victories of the autumn of 1918. In Palestine in July and August they all but drove the Germans from the sky. In September, in the Battle of Megiddo, they bombed the junction at Afula and the headquarters of the Turkish armies, and wrecked wagons blocked the line of retreat from Tulkarm to Nablus. In Macedonia, after the Battle of Doiran, they bombed the retreating Bulgarian columns without pause, and in October aircraft of No. 63 Squadron supported the advance on Mosul. Over England the RAF took over the defence against air raids: on 5 August one of its DH.4s shot down the airship L 70 over the sea, killing Peter Strasser, the head of the German airship service.

November 1918 and after

At the armistice the RAF numbered 291,170 men and women and 22,647 aircraft. Demobilisation soon shrank it, however: by October 1919 it was down to 58,000, and the army and the navy wanted their air arms back. In 1919 Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for War and Air, brought Trenchard back as Chief of the Air Staff, and Trenchard defended the new service’s independence. The Royal Air Force exists to this day and marks its anniversary on 1 April.