In forming the Royal Air Force on 1 April 1918, Britain created the
world’s first independent air service. Britain entered the First
World War with less than 200 ill-assorted flying machines divided
between the army and the navy, but by the end of the war the RAF
mustered almost 300,000 personnel and 22, 000 aircraft. Originally
published in 1986, more than 65 years after the event, the decision
to form the RAF remained poorly understood and Malcolm Cooper
presented the first detailed modern analysis of its creation,
shedding new light on the process by which Britain entered the air
age. Set against the background of the build-up of air power during
the First World War, the book explains how deepening political
concern at failures in home air defence, public demands for
retaliatory air action against Germany, problems of mobilization
and expansion in the aircraft industry, and disagreements between
the existing army and navy air services combined to create the
conditions for an independent air force. The author argues that the
pressures of war were insufficient to give real substance to the
RAF’s independence and that its failure to escape from its
wartime role as an ancillary service was also of crucial
significance in the evolution of British air strategy in later
years. Based on an extensive study of official documents and
private papers and amply illustrated with contemporary photographs,
this title will prove invaluable in understanding both strategic
thinking in the Great War and the early development of a form of
warfare which dominated military and naval operations in the
twentieth century.
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