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Author: Tom Killebrew
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
ISBN: 1574411691
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
With the outbreak of World War II, British RAF officials sought to train aircrews outside of England, safe from enemy attack and poor weather. In the USA, six civilian flight schools dedicated themselves to instructing RAF pilots. Tom Killebrew explores the history of the Terrell Aviation School.
Author: Tom Killebrew
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
ISBN: 1574411691
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
With the outbreak of World War II, British RAF officials sought to train aircrews outside of England, safe from enemy attack and poor weather. In the USA, six civilian flight schools dedicated themselves to instructing RAF pilots. Tom Killebrew explores the history of the Terrell Aviation School.
Author: Tom Killebrew
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
ISBN: 1574416154
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 460
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Book Description
By early 1941, the war raged in Europe and Great Britain stood alone against the aerial might of Nazi Germany. Although much of the Royal Air Force's pilot training program had been relocated to Canada and other Dominion countries, the need for pilots remained acute. The British looked to the United States for possible assistance. Passage of the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941 allowed for the training of British pilots in the United States and the formation of British Flying Training Schools. These unique schools were owned by American operators, staffed with American civilian instructors, supervised by British Royal Air Force officers, utilized aircraft supplied by the U.S. Army Air Corps, and used the RAF training syllabus. Within these pages, Tom Killebrew provides the first comprehensive history of all seven British Flying Training Schools located in Terrell, Texas; Lancaster, California; Miami, Oklahoma; Mesa, Arizona; Clewiston, Florida; Ponca City, Oklahoma; and Sweetwater, Texas. The first British students arrived in a still-neutral United States in June 1941. Many had never been in an airplane (or even driven an automobile), but they mastered the elements of flight, attended ground school classes, were introduced to the mysteries of the Link trainer and instrument flight, and then ventured out on cross country exercises. Students began night flying with the natural apprehension associated with taking off into a black sky, aided by only a few instruments, a flickering flare path, and limited ground references. Some students failed the periodic check flights and had to be eliminated from training, while others were killed during mishaps and are buried in local cemeteries. Those who finished the course became Royal Air Force pilots. But the story of the British Flying Training Schools is more than the story of young men learning to fly. These young British students would also forge a strong and long-lasting bond of friendship with the Americans they came to know. This bond would last not only during training, but would continue throughout the war, and still exist long after the end of the war.
Author: Alex M Spencer
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 1557539421
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343
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Book Description
British Imperial Air Power examines the air defense of Australia and New Zealand during the interwar period. It also demonstrates the difficulty of applying new military aviation technology to the defense of the global Empire and provides insight into the nature of the political relationship between the Pacific Dominions and Britain. Following World War I, both Dominions sought greater independence in defense and foreign policy. Public aversion to military matters and the economic dislocation resulting from the war and later the Depression left little money that could be provided for their respective air forces. As a result, the Empire’s air services spent the entire interwar period attempting to create a strategy in the face of these handicaps. In order to survive, the British Empire’s military air forces offered themselves as a practical and economical third option in the defense of Britain’s global Empire, intending to replace the Royal Navy and British Army as the traditional pillars of imperial defense.
Author: Michael Napier
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472825381
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
A fully illustrated history of the Royal Air Force while on operations, publishing to mark the centenary of its foundation in World War I. The world's first independent air force, the Royal Air Force celebrates its centenary in 2018. In the 100 years since the end of World War I, the service has been involved in almost continuous operations around the globe, giving the RAF the longest and most wide-ranging history of any air force in the world. But over the years this history has also become entangled with myths. The Royal Air Force: A Centenary of Operations sets the record straight, dispelling these as it uncovers – in both words and photographs – the true exploits and accomplishments of RAF personnel over the last 100 years. From its formation as an independent service in the dying days of World War I, its desperate fight against the Axis air forces in World War II, to its commitments during both the Cold War and modern times, this is the complete story of how the RAF has defended Britain for a century.
Author: Maurer Maurer
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
ISBN: 1428915850
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 520
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Book Description
Author: Daniel J. March
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781840133912
Category : Airplanes, Military
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Fully illustrated analysis of all World War II aircraft in British military service, including full descriptions and specifications, hundreds of action photos and highly accurate, full-color artwork.
Author: Malcolm Cooper
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000338975
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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Book Description
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.
Author: Richard Overy
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393652300
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 175
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Book Description
“Packed with drama, both military and political.… It will surely prove definitive.” —Lewis Jones, Daily Telegraph This compact, masterful work by an outstanding historian marks a pivotal moment in military history: the birth of Britain’s Royal Air Force. Writing with great clarity, Richard Overy shows how the RAF emerged from the deadly stalemate of trench warfare during World War I. With German bombers attacking British cities by 1917, Prime Minister David Lloyd George and his minister of munitions, Winston Churchill, navigated the organizational breakthrough that made the RAF an independent force in spring 1918. The RAF would prove highly influential in the development of air power around the world.
Author: Charles River Charles River Editors
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781986568807
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 108
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Book Description
*Includes pictures *Includes accounts of the fighting *Includes online resource and a bibliography for further reading "My Luftwaffe is invincible...And so now we turn to England. How long will this one last - two, three weeks?" - Hermann Göring, June 1940 The Third Reich's Luftwaffe began World War II with significant advantages over other European air forces, playing a critical role in the German war machine's swift, powerful advance. By war's end, however, the Luftwaffe had been decimated by combat losses and crippled by poor decisions at the highest levels of military decision-making, and it proved unable to challenge Allied air superiority despite a last-minute upsurge in German aircraft production. Given its unique strengths and distinctive weaknesses by the personal quirks of the men who developed it, the Luftwaffe initially overwhelmed the more conservative, outdated military aviation of other countries. Its leaders embraced such concepts as the dive-bomber, which proved both utterly devastating and extremely useful for supporting the sweeping, powerful movements of Blitzkrieg, while other martial establishments rejected dive-bombers as impractical or even impossible. Though the superb fighting qualities of highly trained and motivated German soldiers, and the Third Reich's technological superiority in tank and weapon design, also had crucial roles to play, the Luftwaffe represented the key element making the successes of all other branches possible. While the Luftwaffe enjoyed air superiority, the combat fortunes of the Third Reich continued to ride high. When control of the air passed decisively to the Allies, Germany's hopes of victory began accelerating into a spiral of defeat. The Luftwaffe's eventual loss of aerial domination exposed the Germans to precisely the same misfortunes on the ground as they had once relentlessly inflicted on the Poles and Russians. In the Falaise Pocket in Normandy, for example, the splendidly lethal Panthers, Tigers, and Tiger II tanks of the Nazi Panzer Divisions never had the opportunity to destroy the flimsily-armored, outgunned Sherman tanks of their American opponents. Instead, American fighter-bombers systematically annihilated them and their supporting infantry formations from the air, leaving the landscape strewn with flipped-over tank hulks and in places literally carpeted with the flesh of dead men. Some 10,000 Germans died and 50,000 surrendered to the Western Allies at Falaise, due to Hitler's order to counterattack without air support. Of course, the loss of that domination was due in most part to the efforts of Britain's Royal Air Force, which prevented Nazi Germany from conquering Britain on their own. The Battle of Britain, fought throughout the summer and early autumn of 1940, was unquestionably epic in scope. The largest air campaign in history at the time, the vaunted Nazi Luftwaffe sought to smash the RAF as a prelude to German invasion, leaving the British public and its pilots engaged in what they believed was a desperate fight for national survival. The fate of the free world, at least as Europe knew it, hung in the balance over the skies of Britain. Of course, the RAF was instrumental in other ways during the war. The RAF supported Allied forces all over the world, from Norway to Burma to Tunisia, and the RAF conducted devastating bombing campaigns against German industry and cities. In the end, the Allies emerged victorious, even as Britain fell behind other leading nations in air technology. World War II witnessed the birth of the jet age, a future glimpsed briefly in the spectacular but doomed appearance of the Messerschmitt Me 262 near the war's end, and Britain would be the only nation other than Germany with a jet fighter in combat by the time World War II was through. The Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force: The History and Legacy of Nazi Germany and Great Britain's Air Forces in World War II
Author: Ken Delve
Publisher: Pen and Sword Aviation
ISBN: 9781399083263
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
This is a comprehensive reference to the structure, operation, aircraft and men of the 1st Tactical Air Force, or Desert Air Force as it became known. It was formed in North Africa to support the 8th Army and included squadrons from the RAF, SAAF, RAAF and eventually the USAAF. The book includes descriptions of many notable defensive and offensive campaigns, the many types of aircraft used, weapons and the airfields that played host to these events. The five main sections of the book include a general historical introduction and overview, operations, operational groups, aircrew training and technical details of each aircraft type. Lengthy annexes cover personnel, the squadrons in World War II, accuracy of attacks, orders of battle for each wartime year, maps of airfield locations and numbers of enemy aircraft downed.
