In May 1941, he was Mentioned in Despatches for his initiative in sending a Maryland aircraft to reconnoitre for the German battleship Bismarck after poor weather had prevented RAF reconnaissance.

* Invasion, 1940 ( 2005 ), a non-fiction work about World War II which aims to debunk " two powerful myths ": first, that the RAF alone prevented an invasion of Great Britain by Hitler's Germany ; and second, that such an invasion force would inevitably have conquered Britain.

History Today magazine in summer 2006, published an article by Brian James describing how three military historians, Drs Christina Goulter and Gary Sheffield as well as Dr Gordon, who teach on the higher command and staff course at Shrivenham have concluded that it was the Royal Navy, and not the RAF, that prevented a German invasion in 1940.

On 14 February, he was killed at RAF Northolt after his Spitfire ( BL432 ) broke up at and the resulting G-forces as the aircraft corkscrewed held him inside and prevented him bailing out.

Poor eyesight prevented him following a similar career in the RAF, so he instead planned to become a theatre director.

* The RAF was to be " beaten down in its morale and in fact, that it can no longer display any appreciable aggressive force in opposition to the German crossing ".

Although Meinhof was not considered to be a leader of the RAF at any time, her involvement in Baader's escape from jail in 1970 and her well-known status as a German journalist led to her name becoming attached to it.

This panel arrangement was incorporated into every RAF aircraft, from the light single engined Tiger Moth trainer, to the 4-engined Avro Lancaster heavy bomber, and minimized the type-conversion difficulties associated with Blind Flying, since a pilot trained on one aircraft could quickly become accustomed to any other if the instruments were identical.

In cases where the coast guard is primarily concerned with coordinating rather than executing rescue operations, lifeboats are often provided by civilian voluntary organizations, such as the Royal National Lifeboat Institution in the United Kingdom, whilst aircraft may be provided by the countries ' armed forces, such as Sea Kings operated by the RAF and Royal Navy in addition to any of the coast guard's own assets.

With the demands of the RAF for almost all light metals and machinists, the Predictor was far too difficult for the Army to produce in any quantity.

He goes on to describe that the loss of 5. 5 % of the attacking force was no more than to be expected on a clear moonlit night, but if that loss rate was to continue for any length of time RAF Bomber Command would not be able to " operate at the fullest intensity of which it were capable ".

The British Forces Cyprus are stationed there to defend them, and they contain a British defence radio listening post, and the only full-fledged Royal Air Force air base in the Mediterranean region ( since Gibraltar does not have any aircraft permanently based there ), called RAF Akrotiri.

Three waves of aircraft bombed the area, and a successful diversionary raid on Berlin by RAF Mosquitoes attracted the main Luftwaffe fighter effort and meant that only the last of the three waves was met by any sizable group of night fighters.

28, 145 British and 4, 439 Allied personnel, mostly RAF groundcrew, were taken off on 16 and 17 June without any major interference by the Luftwaffe and were landed at Plymouth.

RAF commanders, along with the other partners in the coalition, deemed it necessary to prevent the Iraqi Air Force ( IAF ) operating to any significant degree.

French Indo-China was handed back to French control a great deal more quickly than the type were avoided was to provide some spare Spitfires in the command to Armée de l ' Air pilots who were being sent to the colony, and had Netherlands East Indies to Dutch control, meaning that RAF aircraft did not have to get involved in suppressing any revolts in the area, apart from one occasion when Spitfires attacked enemy forces with cannon fire to support French ground troops.

Although Cambridge University had the better nuclear physics facility ( the Cavendish Laboratory ), the RAF did not want to abandon any of its eastern airfields ( because of the new threat of the Cold War ), therefore Harwell was chosen when the RAF made the airfield available.

But the stage and pit area became too large to fit into any of the conventional studios, so filming was later moved to an aircraft hangar at RAF Newton.

When mounted in an RAF Mosquito, the " Perfectos " device revealed the position of any German nightfighters fitted with an FuG 25a.

These sympathies could have been due to tensions between these senior RAF officers and Dowding rather than any thought on how Britain could be most effectively defended.

Plans were set in motion within the RAF to see if it could carry out any operations near the Falklands.

38 Wing was a new formation and was unable to provide any aircraft or trained aircrews for the raid, meaning that No. 51 Squadron RAF under Wing Commander Percy Charles Pickard was selected to provide the aircraft and aircrew needed for the operation, although Group Captain Nigel Norman would remain in overall command.

These people were very valuable to RAF Bomber Command, since between them they natively spoke any German accent and hence were capable of countermanding the orders given from the senior officers in the Air Defence headquarters, and so could redirect the nightfighters to other targets or give them orders to land immediately at an airbase.

Originally established for the Royal Flying Corps, it has the longest history of continuous use of any RAF airfield.

Despite the absence of any operational airfields, at least one RAF Gladiator flew against a raid of 55 Savoia Marchetti SM 78a and their 20 escorting fighters on 11 June.

With such a force established, the RAF had the firepower to deal harshly with any Axis attacks.

Many SAC Squadrons had aircraft at RAF Greenham Common on a transitory basis without any recorded deployment to the base.

Deliberately breaking the standing operating procedure of radio silence to conduct the jamming made the aircraft highly vulnerable to being tracked and attacked, which resulted in 101 Squadron having the highest casualty rate of any RAF squadron.

Carl Meinhof was the great-uncle ( the brother of the grandfather ) of Ulrike Meinhof, a founding member of the German Red Army Faction ( RAF ), a left-wing militant group, which operated in West Germany in 1970s and 1980s.

Additionally Britain's use of radar and the advantages of fighting above Britain's home territory allowed the RAF to deny Germany air superiority, saving the British Isles from German invasion and dealing the Axis their first major defeat of the Second World War.

The RAF raided German cities at night, and both sides developed radar-equipped night fighters for these battles.

German Bf 110G-4 night fighter with nose-mounted radar at the RAF Museum in London

At the British Bomber Command, Dyson and colleagues proposed ripping out two gun turrets from the RAF Lancaster bombers, to cut the catastrophic losses to German fighters in the Battle of Berlin.

Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe continued to defend German – occupied Europe against the growing offensive power of RAF Bomber Command and the United States Army Air Forces.

Inevitably, both the Bomber B and Amerika Bomber programs were victims of the continued emphasis of the Wehrmacht's insistence for the Luftwaffe to support the Army as its primary mission, as well as the increasingly devastating results of the RAF Bomber Command at night, and by 1943 the USAAF's Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces ' heavy bomber raids by daylight on the German aviation industry, which catastrophically diminished the Third Reich's overall aviation production capacity later in World War II.

* 1943 – World War II: the Dambuster Raids by No. 617 Squadron RAF on German dams.

* 1942 – The Bombing of Lübeck in World War II is the first major success for the RAF Bomber Command against Germany and a German city.

Beginning in August 1940, the German Luftwaffe began a series of concentrated aerial attacks ( designated Unternehmen Adlerangriff or Operation Eagle Attack ) on targets throughout the United Kingdom in an attempt to destroy the RAF ( Royal Air Force ) and establish air superiority over Great Britain.

The Red Army Faction or Red Army Fraction ( RAF ; German: Rote Armee Fraktion ), in its early stages commonly known as Baader-Meinhof Group ( or Baader-Meinhof Gang ), was one of post – World War II Germany's most prominent left-wing militant groups.

Although better-known, the RAF conducted fewer attacks than the Revolutionary Cells ( German: Revolutionäre Zellen, RZ ), which is held responsible for 296 bomb attacks, arson and other attacks between 1973 and 1995.

On 20 April 1998, an eight-page typewritten letter in German was faxed to the Reuters news agency, signed " RAF " with the submachine-gun red star, declaring that the group had dissolved.

On 24 April 1975, the West German embassy in Stockholm was seized by members of the RAF ; two of the hostages were murdered as the German government under Chancellor Helmut Schmidt refused to give in to their demands.

After German reunification in 1990, it was confirmed that the RAF had received financial and logistic support from the Stasi, the security and intelligence organization of East Germany, which had given several members shelter and new identities.

On 20 April 1998, an eight-page typewritten letter in German was faxed to the Reuters news agency, signed " RAF " with the machine-gun red star, declaring the group dissolved:

In 2007, amidst widespread media controversy, the German president Horst Köhler considered pardoning RAF member Christian Klar, who had filed a pardon application several years before.

RAF member Brigitte Mohnhaupt was granted release on five-year parole by a German court on 12 February 2007 and Eva Haule was released 17 August 2007.

** WWII: Operation Chastise by RAF 617 Sqdn are carried out on German dams.

* October 22 – WWII: The RAF delivers a highly destructive airstrike on the German industrial and population center of Kassel.

He authorized the GSG 9 anti-terrorist unit to end the Palestinian terrorist hijacking of the Lufthansa aircraft Landshut, undertaken to secure the release of RAF leaders imprisoned in Stuttgart, after it landed in Mogadishu by assaulting the aircraft during the German Autumn of 1977.

German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and other high-ranking officials of the Third Reich frequently described attacks made on Germany by the Royal Air Force ( RAF ) and the United States Army Air Force ( USAAF ) during their strategic bombing campaigns as terrorangriffe-terror attacks.