Kennedy G. Imperial Defence. The Old World Order, 1856-1956

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8 The RAF in imperial defence,

1919–1956

James S. Corum

In the last decades of the British Empire, from the end of the First World

War to the Suez crisis of 1956, airpower played an important role in impe-

rial defence policy and in every military operation in the empire. While air

operations in defence of the British imperial interests were always sec-

ondary to the mission of defending Britain and Western Europe, they

were still a major part of the RAF mission. Indeed, imperial defence

played a major role in the evolution of the RAF force structure and devel-

opment as the RAF forces overseas evolved over the 36 years from the end

of the First World War to the ﬁnal gasp of the empire at Suez.

At the start of the period under study, the RAF was little more than a

force to support the senior services in the traditional mission of keeping

control in the Asian, African and Middle Eastern colonies. However, after

the Second World War, military roles were reversed and the RAF became

the priority service in grand strategic terms of protecting British interests,

and the army and navy were now cast into the supporting roles. By the

1950s, maintaining RAF bases in strategic locations around the periphery

of the Soviet Union became one of the primary justiﬁcations for maintain-

ing an imperial presence.

Of the many great changes brought about by the First World War, the

appearance of airpower as a major instrument of warfare was among the

most important. From fairly humble beginnings as reconnaissance forces,

air forces had quickly evolved into powerful military arms capable of pro-

viding accurate intelligence, close support to ground troops, interdiction

of enemy logistics and, ﬁnally, weapons with the capability of bombing

cities and industries far behind the ﬁghting front. There was no doubt in

the minds of the British political and military leaders that airpower would

play an important role in any future military operations.

However, it did not follow that airpower’s important role in military

operations would assure the survival of the RAF as an independent service.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, both the army and the navy staffs,

with strong agreement in the cabinet, wanted to see the RAF disestab-

lished as an independent service, and its squadrons revert to the army and

navy, who would, to be sure, maintain strong air arms – but ﬁrmly under

the control of the army and navy staffs. Air Marshal Hugh Trenchard, who

had brieﬂy served as the ﬁrst chief of the air staff before taking command

of Britain’s heavy bomber force in 1918, again assumed command of the

RAF after the war and had to immediately ﬁght to preserve the RAF as an

independent service. Trenchard believed that air power, especially in the

form of strategic bombers, would be the decisive weapon in future con-

ﬂicts and that only a truly independent air force, commanded by airmen,

could mould modern airpower and exploit its potential as a decisive

weapon of warfare.

Trenchard believed that the disestablishment of the RAF would be a

strategic mistake of the ﬁrst order and set out to ﬁnd a means to justify an

independent air force. Trenchard was not an especially articulate man,

and even if he were, it would have been difﬁcult to change the positions of

the army and navy staffs on the issue. Trenchard was, however, a gifted

bureaucratic inﬁghter and knew that, given time, the RAF could justify its

independence to the government. Trenchard asked the army and navy

staffs for a year’s grace period to develop a peacetime organization plan

for the RAF with the ﬁnal decision on that service’s independence to

come after the air staff could propose a detailed post-war plan.

In 1919,

the air staff argued that the RAF would be Britain’s ﬁrst line of defence in

the next war. As true as this statement was to be proven two decades later,

the post-First World War government was sceptical of such claims.

Tren-

chard and the air staff had to come up with a mission for the RAF that

would appeal to the government. Keeping in mind the stringent ﬁnancial

conditions in post-war Britain and the urgent requirement to demobilize

and still provide security for the empire at the lowest possible price, Tren-

chard set out to create an air force that would, at ﬁrst, be more of a cadre

force than the decisive force he envisioned. Growth and development of

the RAF could come only after service independence could be assured.

The air control policy

One of the Britain’s most urgent post-war defence requirements was to

bring order to several expensive new colonial obligations in the form of

League of Nations mandates to govern Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq. At

the same time that the armed forces were ordered to assume a costly

burden of military occupation in regions rife with violent internal con-

ﬂicts, the government had to demobilize the wartime forces and to econo-

mize by any means possible. This seemed an almost impossible task at the

time as the army and RAF were engaged in some large colonial conﬂicts

that ﬂared up in the immediate post-war period. Afghanistan and the

Northwest Frontier of India had remained fairly quiet during the First

World War, thanks to a pro-British Emir of Afghanistan. But in 1919, the

Emir was assassinated, and the new Emir was pushed into conﬂict with

Britain by Afghani factions. As border clashes escalated into a conﬂict

The RAF in imperial defence 153

known as the Third Afghan War, RAF ﬁghters supported Indian army

ground troops ﬁghting on the Northwest Frontier and Handley Page

bombers bombed Kabul to demonstrate Britain’s new ability to reach

deep into hostile territory and exact a quick punishment for border incur-

sions. This began a period of major operations by the Indian Army against

several border tribes, and the RAF squadrons in India saw constant

combat.

The British Government also faced major conﬂicts on other fronts as

the new British mandate in Iraq exploded in 1920 in what was to be the

largest campaign faced by the interwar British army. The 60,200 British

troops and 2 RAF squadrons in Iraq were hard pressed to simply hold on,

so Britain was forced to dispatch an additional 19 battalions and 2 addi-

tional RAF squadrons to ﬁnally suppress the rebellion.

During the ﬁght-

ing in Iraq, the RAF performed well in conducting constant

reconnaissance and bombing missions in support of the army and was

able to supply surrounded garrisons by air and quickly evacuate

casualties.

After a year of heavy ﬁghting, the rebellion was suppressed at

the British cost of 1,040 soldiers killed and missing and 1,228 wounded,

with an estimated 8,450 dead Iraqi rebels.

The ﬁnancial cost of the enter-

prise shocked the British Government. In order to maintain control of a

minor colonial mandate with only moderate strategic value, British mili-

tary operations had cost the treasury £40 million, considerably more than

Britain had spent in supporting the Arab revolt against the Turks in the

First World War.

The RAF’s performance in India and Iraq provided considerable evid-

ence of the usefulness of air power in colonial operations. The effective-

ness of a few aircraft in putting down a minor rebellion in British

Somaliland in 1919–1920 provided Trenchard and the air staff with addi-

tional evidence to support an independent mission for the RAF.

The

British Government had estimated that destroying the rebel ‘Mad

Mullah’s’ forces might require a large campaign costing over one million

pounds, but, in the ﬁnal reckoning, the short campaign in which the RAF

had played the central role ended up costing only £77,000. This was an

argument for air power that played exceptionally well in the colonial and

war ministry and with the exchequer.

Trenchard argued that the RAF could police several of Britain’s trou-

blesome new colonies through ‘air control’, namely using aircraft as the

primary means of employing force against bandits and rebellious tribes.

Strikes by aircraft would take the place of punitive expeditions by ground

forces that had traditionally been used to punish tribes for banditry and

small-scale rebellion.

Simply put, punitive expeditions were a form of

corporate punishment usually meant to punish and deter troublesome

tribes by destroying their villages, crops and livestock and inﬂicting casual-

ties upon tribal warriors. The punitive expeditions and corporate punish-

ment of hostile tribes was standard practice not only in the British Empire

154 J.S. Corum

but in all the colonial empires. In Britain’s colonial wars, a punitive expe-

dition might vary from a platoon of the Camel Corps riding against one

village to months-long operations on the Northwest Frontier carried out

by thousands of soldiers.

Air control meant substituting aerial bombardment for the traditional

ground punitive expedition. Airplanes had the advantage of reaching the

object of the punitive expedition, i.e. the tribal headquarters or main

village, very quickly. Airplanes also possessed the capability to inﬂict

serious harm upon rebellious natives. Since disruption and destruction

was the goal of a punitive expedition, a small force of airplanes was pre-

ferred as it could inﬂict as much damage as a large, cumbersome and

expensive ground force expedition and do it far more cheaply. Indeed, in

the view of the colonial administrators, airpower was superior to ground

forces because it could inﬂict punishment quickly. An immediate and

sharp response to a hostile action gave the British a psychological advant-

age under typical conditions in which small numbers of colonial adminis-

trators and police were required to control large numbers of tribal

peoples that were often kept quiet by the threat of force.

With Iraq and the Northwest Frontier quieting down and the campaign

in Somaliland successfully completed, Air Marshal Trenchard met with

Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill at the Cairo Conference on Middle

East Affairs in 1921 and formally proposed that the RAF take over the task

of directing military operations in Iraq and that the primary British garri-

son for Iraq should be RAF squadrons.

Trenchard asserted that a few

RAF squadrons, supported by armoured car units and locally recruited

troops, could keep order at a fraction of the cost of a large army garrison.

The ﬁnancial argument for air control was irresistible to Whitehall, so in

October 1922, RAF Air Marshal John Salmond took over military

command in Iraq. It was the ﬁrst time that an airman had been placed in

control of all military operations in a country.

The RAF’s garrison for Iraq

was initially eight squadrons of ﬁghters and light bombers, such as multi-

purpose DH-9, supported by four RAF armoured car companies.

These

forces were, in turn, supported by 15,000 Iraqi troops and police, 5,000 of

them under British command and being organized as an Iraqi Army. Iraqi

forces were paid for by the Iraqi state.

Through the 1920s and 1930s in Iraq and small colonies such as Aden,

the RAF was able to quell minor tribal banditry by swiftly punishing the

culprits from the air.

The colonial air control policy later gave rise to

some myths about the relative effectiveness of airpower that still persist.

The ﬁrst popular myth was the descriptions of colonial operations as

purely air operations, which was rarely the case. Aside from very small

police actions, such as bombing tribes in Aden to suppress cattle rustling,

RAF colonial operations are best described as modern joint operations in

which aircraft played a traditional supporting role to ground forces. In

suppressing the sizeable Kurdish rebellions in Northern Iraq in the 1920s

The RAF in imperial defence 155

and 1930s or in ﬁghting hostile tribes along India’s Northwest Frontier,

most RAF sorties consisted of reconnaissance, transport and medical evac-

uation missions for the army as well as close air support.

Another popular myth is that the RAF bombing campaigns were far

more humane than the traditional punitive expeditions by ground forces,

a view popularized by airpower advocates of the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed,

at times the RAF carefully applied minimum force and provided rebel

tribesmen with warnings and then carefully bombed the home of the

tribal chief as a warning that the force levels would escalate unless the

tribe and chief complied with British decrees.

The later ofﬁcial reports

of the RAF and the writings of its supporters maintained that the RAF’s air

control methods were very humane, resulted in little loss of life and were

always carried out with full warning.

However, in many cases, no warn-

ings were given and hostile tribes bombarded ruthlessly.

Yet, at a time

when there was little media presence and little communication on the

frontiers of empire, British forces faced by hostile tribesmen could get

away with ignoring the rules. However, it is only fair to say that the RAF

employed airpower more humanely than other colonial powers, notably

Spain and Italy, who used aircraft to drop poison gas on tribal rebels. Even

in desperate situations, the RAF refrained from employing poison gas in

colonial warfare.

The tactical effectiveness of air control tended to decline over time,

and this demonstrated some of the limits of airpower. The ﬁrst time air

strikes were employed, they tended to have an impressive psychological

effect upon the population, as occurred in Somaliland in 1920. However,

as air control methods became common practice in many colonies, the

initial psychological effect soon wore off. Hostile tribes in Aden, on

India’s Northwest Frontier, and in Kurdistan learned to camouﬂage their

camps and dig air raid shelters for their villages when trouble broke out

with the British. Tribes in Kurdistan set up a primitive warning system with

observers and smoke signals to warn the most likely targets when British

aircraft approached.

In the later campaigns against the Kurdish leader

Sheik Mahmud, the rebel capitol was heavily bombed for months as the

rebels gamely fought on. Nor were the Arabs ﬁghting the British in Pales-

tine in the 1930s overawed by the RAF’s airpower capability. The two-year

revolt in Palestine was ﬁnally ended not by military force but through a

political deal and British compromise that limited Jewish immigration.

In the ﬁnal analysis, the RAF’s programme of colonial air control can be

considered fairly effective. If aircraft could not do the job alone, they cer-

tainly acted as a tremendous force enhancement for military operations on

the frontiers of the empire. RAF squadrons were very effective in reducing

the numbers of ground troops required, and police and military opera-

tions supported by airpower were much more effective than in the pre-First

World War era. In campaigns in India or Iraq, one or two aircraft could

provide army and police forces the same level of reconnaissance support as

156 J.S. Corum

a cavalry battalion. A few aircraft could provide ﬁre support equal to an

artillery battery, a major consideration for an army that tired to move

artillery through the rugged terrain of the Iraqi desert or the Northwest

Frontier. Moreover, aircraft could react to emergencies quickly. The heavy

ﬁrepower that the aircraft could bring to the battle was a psychological

shock to the enemy and a great morale boost for the British troops. The

RAF also proved its utility in numerous small-scale transport operations.

Modiﬁed DH-9 light bombers successfully evacuated the wounded during

the Somaliland campaign of 1920, and during a crisis in Afghanistan

during the winter of 1928–1929, RAF bombers based in India evacuated

586 people from Kabul.

Airpower fully lived up to Trenchard’s promise to reduce the costs of

policing the empire. The post-World War conditions favoured the RAF.

When Trenchard proposed the air control policy, the RAF had a large

stockpile of rugged two-seater ﬁghters and light bombers left over from

the World War. Aircraft such as the Bristol ﬁghters and Dehaviland DH-9

light bombers were ideal for the observation and bombing missions that

were the mainstay of RAF operations. Obsolescent biplanes were cheap,

and required little support infrastructure and requirements for colonial

operations were basic. There was no enemy air threat, and ground ﬁre was

rarely lethal in an era when the enemy had no anti-aircraft guns – and

rarely even machine guns. Aircraft considered too obsolete for home

defence or European operations were considered acceptable for colonial

air control, so aircraft such as the Bristol ﬁghter that ﬁrst ﬂew in 1917 were

employed in the colonies into the late 1920s. Although the initial commit-

ment to imperial defence in 1920 represented a large share of the RAF’s

operational squadrons, the number of RAF units in the colonies remained

relatively static during the 1920s and 1930s as the government dramatically

expanded the RAF force at home after 1923. From then on, most aircraft

ordered for the RAF went to home commands and units at home had ﬁrst

call on the latest models of aircraft while colonial forces soldiered on with

old aircraft considered too obsolete for European operations. When war

broke out in 1939, RAF units on India’s Northwest Frontier were equipped

with Wapiti biplanes – long considered unsuitable for home use. Through

the 1920s and 1930s, the RAF’s colonial operations represented a small

share of the RAF budget and required only a few thousand personnel.

The RAF in the context of imperial strategy

The interwar British governments and the RAF leadership can be faulted

for failing to provide an air force even minimally adequate to meet the

requirements to defend what were proclaimed to be some of the most stra-

tegic points in the empire. Indeed, as long as order was maintained within

the colonies, there was little thought given to the requirements for external

defence against conventional threats until much too late – a policy that had

The RAF in imperial defence 157

disastrous consequences for the empire during the ﬁrst half of the Second

World War.

Britain considered the Mediterranean and Middle East to be vital stra-

tegic areas in which Britain required colonies and military bases in order

to protect the vital sea route to India and the Far East. Loss of the great

naval base at Malta or the Suez Canal to an enemy power would be seen as

a catastrophic blow to British trade and imperial communications as

sailing time to India and the Far East would be increased by several weeks.

At the other end of the world, the naval base at Singapore, the largest

single defence project of the interwar period, was viewed as the strategic

keystone to defending Australia, New Zealand and Britain’s Asian colonies

from any Japanese advances.

Considering how important Malta, Egypt

and Singapore were in British strategic thought and planning, it is

surprising that relatively little was done to provide adequate air cover for

these bases even after the threat from the Italian-German alliance and the

Japanese had become acute.

Hugh Trenchard, who served as Chief of the Air Staff until 1928, viewed

the defence of vital strategic points as an important mission for the RAF.

One of the RAF’s ﬁrst major post-war deployments was to Egypt, where the

RAF sent seven squadrons in 1920. Egypt was seen as crucial to defending

the Mediterranean and Suez Canal as well as being a sensible base for an

RAF reserve force that could quickly deploy to any trouble spots in the

Middle East or Asia. Trenchard also argued for a major RAF role in the

defence of Singapore as the building programme got underway in the

1920s. After the First World War, Britain dropped its alliance with Japan

and increasingly viewed that nation as a major potential threat to British

colonies and British dominions. With Japan a likely future enemy, the 1921

Imperial Conference agreed that Singapore was the key point in the Paciﬁc

and proposed spending £11 million to build a major naval base and to

fortify it against any ﬂeet attack. In 1926, the navy and air staffs engaged in

a major dispute about the most effective means of protecting the ﬂeet base,

with the Admiralty favouring 15″ guns and the air staff arguing that a force

of torpedo bombers would be cheaper and more effective.

Eventually, a

compromise was reached and the naval base would be defended by a com-

bination of heavy guns and airplanes, and the RAF developed the Vilde-

beest torpedo bomber, which came on line in the early 1930s. Still, the air

component for the defence of Singapore and Malaya consisted of a mere

handful of obsolescent aircraft until the very eve of war in the Paciﬁc.

In the early 1930s, as Hitler came to power in Germany and Japan’s mil-

itaristic and aggressive intentions became evident, Britain began to rearm.

Under every rearmament plan, the RAF played an increasing large role in

defence planning and won an ever-increasing share of the budget.

Spurred on by Germany’s creation of a new air force in 1935, aerial rear-

mament went into full swing with Britain’s 1935 RAF expansion scheme

that set a goal of a home air force of 1,736 front-line aircraft and an

158 J.S. Corum

increase of the RAF’s overseas forces to 37 squadrons.

However, the

British aircraft industry could not increase production fast enough to

come even close to meeting the RAF’s rearmament plans. The new air-

craft produced after 1935 went almost exclusively to the Bomber

Command and Fighter Command at home, with Singapore, the Middle

East and the Mediterranean getting only a few obsolete aircraft – but none

of the newer models. Air defence of the strategic points in the empire was

not forgotten, but it was shifted to a relatively low priority. At the outbreak

of the war with Italy in 1940 and with Japan in 1941, the RAF was unable

to provide an adequate defence of Egypt or Singapore. The vital base at

Malta did not even receive a token defence. Although the Committee of

Imperial Defence had studied the defence of Malta in the 1930s and

decided that Malta required 172 anti-aircraft guns, 24 searchlights and

four ﬁghter squadrons for an adequate defence against the Italian air

force based on nearby Sicily, in June 1940, the island had a mere 42 anti-

aircraft guns and no ﬁghter squadrons for its defence.

The development of a serious air defence system for Singapore and

Malaya only got underway in 1940–1941 and came too little and too late to

effectively confront the Japanese onslaught. When the Paciﬁc War began

on 7 December 1941, RAF and Commonwealth air forces had only 181

operational aircraft available to meet a much larger Japanese force – and

almost all the RAF aircraft were older machines. Some aircraft in Malaya,

such as the hapless American Brewster Buffalo ﬁghter, were deemed too

inferior to serve in Europe but were thought sufﬁcient to take on the

Japanese. Indeed, a major part of the RAF’s Singapore’s defence force con-

sisted of 36 venerable biplane Vildebeest torpedo bombers, now a decade

old. The superb Japanese Zero ﬁghters quickly swept the RAF’s motley col-

lection of aircraft out of the sky as Japanese ground forces overran Malaya

and Singapore in a few weeks in Britain’s single greatest imperial defeat.

One of the great strategic opportunities that Britain failed to exploit

was the chance to develop a modern air transport system to link the

empire together. Geographically, the British colonies and dominions were

well situated to make long-distance air routes an attractive means to trans-

port people rapidly from Britain to far-ﬂung outposts. The RAF pioneered

some air routes right after the First World War, and air service from Cairo

to Baghdad was opened in 1921. However, the British Government was

reluctant to subsidize civilian air transport to the degree necessary to

develop large and efﬁcient cargo and passenger aircraft. Germany and the

US provided generous subsidies to develop civilian air transport and

quickly moved ahead of Britain in every aspect of civil aviation. By the

early 1930s, the Americans were building the DC-2 and DC-3 transports,

and Germany was manufacturing the Junkers Ju 52. All of these transport

craft were capable of carrying three tons of passengers or freight safely

over long distances. Britain was unable to produce any aircraft to compare

with the American and German transports.

The RAF in imperial defence 159

German and American aviation subsidies also paid for the development

of long-distance and night-ﬂying technology – another capability that

British civil aviation lacked. From the late 1920s on, the German and

American passenger planes routinely ﬂew at night with the aid of radio

navigation systems. At the same time, British civil aircraft were limited to

daytime ﬂights. These were capabilities that translated directly into mili-

tary capabilities. By the late 1930s, the German and American air forces

had adapted the civil aviation navigation technology for military use, and

the German and American bombers were able to ﬂy fairly effectively over

long distances, in bad weather or at night. In contrast, the RAF Bomber

Command remained mostly a daytime and fair weather force. In 1937,

RAF aircraft and stations lacked direction-ﬁnding equipment and only

half of the RAF Bomber Command stations had meteorological sections,

and none had a ‘blind landing’ (Lorenz-type) system – all technologies

that had been used in Germany and the US since the late 1920s.

Because of sustained and generous government support for civil air

transport through the 1920s and 1930s, the US Army Air Corps and the

German Luftwaffe were able to develop specialized and highly trained mil-

itary transport forces by the late 1930s – forces that proved invaluable for

supporting military operations in the Second World War. In contrast, the

RAF went to war in 1939 without a specialized transport force and was

forced to improvise a military air transport system using obsolete bombers.

Luckily, the RAF was able to acquire large numbers of modern specialized

transport aircraft from the US during the Second World War. However,

during the ﬁrst half of the war, the RAF possessed little in the way of air

transport means or capability.

The Commonwealth and airpower 1919–1939

Yet another missed opportunity in the interwar period was the failure to

develop an effective system of military and civil aviation cooperation

among the Commonwealth nations. While the Commonwealth was an

important political entity, in terms of making strategy or enhancing mili-

tary cooperation, it was little more than a very loose consultation body.

This was difﬁcult enough for British strategists to deal with during the

1920s when there were no urgent threats to Britain or the dominions.

However, as major threats arose in the 1930s, the failure of the Common-

wealth nations to cooperate and coordinate airpower strategy, aircraft pro-

duction and aircrew training put the survival of the British Empire at

grave risk once war began.

The First World War enhanced the status and role of the imperial

dominions and fundamentally changed the nature of the British Empire.

The independent dominions of Canada, Australia, South Africa and New

Zealand created large and effective armies and played an important role

160 J.S. Corum

in every ﬁghting front. The World War also advanced the industrialization

of the independent dominions and created the basis for a modern mili-

tary-industrial infrastructure that included establishing local military and

civil aviation industries. Conscious of the crucial role they had played in

winning the ﬁnal victory, the governments of the dominion states insisted

on renegotiating their position within the framework of imperial defence

and strategy. No longer would imperial defence strategy be crafted in

London with dominion states informed after the fact. After 1918, the

Commonwealth states demanded the right to sit at the table as full part-

ners rather than the loyal and cooperative subordinates they had been

before 1914.

A series of imperial defence and policy conferences in the 1920s set the

tone for the Commonwealth cooperation with the British military for the

defence of the empire. Most of the imperial discussions concerned

ground and naval forces, but the role of airpower was an important

consideration as well and would become increasingly important through

the 1920s and 1930s. British Government proposals for a single imperial

navy and air force set forth in the 1921 and 1923 imperial conferences

were non-starters as far as the Commonwealth nations were concerned.

Every Commonwealth state insisted that it would maintain independent

services whose equipment would be compatible with the British as much

as possible. Key issues, however, were left open. The role of the Common-

wealth nations in the Paciﬁc was left unclear, as were the military

command arrangements. Most importantly, the degree of support that

Australia and New Zealand might provide to the Singapore naval base was

left open. During the 1920s, Britain and the Commonwealth often worked

at cross-purposes in terms of imperial defence strategy. Britain saw Com-

monwealth defence planning in terms of getting Commonwealth nations

to pay more for their defence, and Commonwealth nations saw the Singa-

pore strategy and traditional reliance upon the RN as a means to pay less.

In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, the independent

dominions also had their demobilization and economic issues to deal with

and were reluctant to be associated with any military schemes that might

involve them in any new imperial adventures or commitments. Britain’s

attempt to bring the Commonwealth nations into supporting Britain’s

scheme to intervene in Turkey in 1922 during the Charnak crisis sowed a

degree of mistrust between the Commonwealth governments and the British

Government that remained into the 1930s.

During the First World War, all the dominions established air forces and

basic infrastructures for ﬂight training, aircraft maintenance and even air-

craft construction. Indeed, a large proportion of the Royal Flying Corps

came from the dominions. Australia, for example, ﬁelded its own squadrons

for service with the Royal Flying Corps in the Mideast and France. After the

war, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa established small air

forces. With the RN serving as the ﬁrst line of imperial defence, building air

The RAF in imperial defence 161