Those magnificent men - and women - watch the RAF flypast. Credit: Jack Taylor / Getty Images
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The Royal Air Force’s centenary fly-past over the capital was not just a delight for Londoners, many of whom will have reason to remember the Blitz, it was a reminder that one element at least of our armed forces is entirely clear about its purpose.
The British army is once again struggling to answer the question “What is the army for?” (first posed in 1905, by the then new war minister, Richard Haldane). The Royal Navy is equally unsure what it is for, save to operate Trident, the strategic nuclear deterrent.
But the Royal Air Force has its sacred and eternal mission: to defend the skies above Britain. It may, and does, do many other things – fly soldiers around the battlefield in big helicopters, fly soldiers to the battlefields in ever-bigger aircraft, kill the Queen’s enemies with air-launched missiles from fast jets or drones – but first and foremost it is the guardian of our towns and cities from aerial attack.
It is not just airmen and airwomen who know this, but (give or take the odd dullard) everyone in the country, not least because The Battle of Britain (1969) is a great film and shows up on one TV channel or another every September.
It is by no means certain that the Germans could have invaded in 1940 if the RAF had lost that battle, but the Luftwaffe’s failure to gain control of the air that summer meant that invasion was impossible. That was the import of Churchill’s encomium to Fighter Command: “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.”
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