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| This Handley Page Halifax B III was flown in 1944-45, a high-performing plane, as good as the Lancaster. |
A public event will be held at Buckingham Palace on July 10.
The RAF was formed on April 1, 1918 by the amalgamation of the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS), so that it stood as a coequal branch of the armed forces.
The Women’s Royal Air Force (WRAF) was created at the same time to provide female mechanics to free up men for service in World War I. An unexpectedly large number of women volunteered. WRAF ended in 1920 and was recreated in 1949 as the new name of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, founded in 1939. As more women joined the RAF staff, WRAF formally merged into the RAF in 1994.
Successes of the RAF's Predecessors in WWI
In April 1911, an air battalion of the British army’s Royal Engineers was formed at Larkhill in Wiltshire, including aircraft, airship, balloon, and man-carrying kite companies. It was less than a decade after Wilbur and Orville Wright made the first flight of a self-propelled, heavier-than-air aircraft, at Kitty Hawk, on North Carolina's Outer Banks.
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| The predecessor Halifax B II Bomber was deployed until 1944 by RAF's 10 Squadron, from Melbourne, Yorkshire. This shows the inside of the plane. A model is on display at the Yorkshire Air Museum. Note rounder tail fins than on the III. |
The following May, the army's air battalion and the navy's flying school were absorbed into the newly created RFC, which established a new flying school at Upavon, Wiltshire, and formed new airplane squadrons.
In July 1914, navy needs led to the creation of RNAS. A month later, on August 4, Britain declared war on Germany and entered World War I. At the time, the RFC had 84 aircraft, and the RNAS had 71 aircraft and seven airships. Four RFC squadrons were deployed to France to support the British Expeditionary Force.
Germany dominated the air at first, with superior weapons like the manually directable machine gun. Britain suffered from bombing on the ground and defeat in the skies against German flying aces such as Manfred von Richthofen, “The Red Baron.” The British military responded with a separate air ministry, committed to retaliate against Germany with strategic bombing.
By war’s end, November 1918, the newly created RAF had gained air superiority on the western front, with nearly 300,000 officers and airmen, and more than 22,000 aircraft.
The RAF in WWII
In September 1939, RAF strength had fallen to about 2,000 aircraft, when Hitler shocked the world by invading Poland. World War II was on.
On May 10, 1940, Hitler invaded Holland, despite having promised to allow it to remain neutral. After he carpet-bombed Rotterdam, the Netherlands surrendered and was occupied by the Wehrmacht and (much worse) the SS police, as the Nazis continued their advance through Belgium to France.
In June 1940, Britain was alone in Europe in its resistance to Nazi Germany. Hitler planned to invade Britain and prepared maps of British cities and factory centers showing strategic sites. In July 1940 he ordered his air force, the Luftwaffe, to soften up Britain by destroying their ports, as he did in Holland. However, this time the outnumbered RAF fliers put up a fierce resistance in the Battle of Britain.
Luftwaffe commanders then made it their priority to destroy the British air fleet. The Germans intended to wipe out the RAF during the summer, and invade Britain in the autumn. During the next three months, however, the RAF resisted the massive German air attacks, relying on radar technology, more maneuverable aircraft, and sheer, exceptional bravery. For every British plane shot down, two Luftwaffe planes were destroyed.
In October, Hitler postponed the planned invasion. In May 1941 he opted to save his planes for the Eastern Front, and the invasion was off the table. The Battle of Britain ended. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said of the RAF pilots: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” I was required had to write out this sentence many, many times when pronounced guilty of an infraction against school rules as a pupil in Gilling Castle and Junior House, the younger classes of Ampleforth College near York.
By war’s end in 1945, the RAF employed a staff of nearly one million. After the war, as in the United States, British military personnel strength was drastically reduced and RAF staff stabilized at about 150,000 men and women.
The RAF's 10 Squadron
My uncle, Willem van Stockum, was a pilot for the 10 Squadron of the RAF in World War II. He piloted a 10 Squadron Halifax bomber on six missions during the ten days surrounding D-Day. Leaving from Melbourne, Yorkshire, his plane was downed over Laval, France.
A Dutchman, born to a Dutch Navy Captain (Abraham van Stockum) who married one of the six daughters of the publisher of the main newspaper (the Algemeen Handelsblad) in Amsterdam, Willem earned a B.A. and M.A. in mathematics from Trinity College, Dublin, winning a large gold medal. He went on to obtain a doctorate in mathematics from Edinburgh University. He won a position at Einstein's Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, NJ and was the first person to write in English about the potential for time travel suggested by the "time-like curves" implicit in Einstein's equations for Special Relativity. (His "van Stockum dust" theory is considered the beginning of scientific time-travel speculation.) He was teaching mathematics at the University of Maryland when Hitler invaded Holland.
Outraged by the invasion of his native country, van Stockum went to Canada to volunteer to fight Hitler. For months he taught navigation and the physical principles of flight to pilot trainees in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Then he asked to be sent to the RAF to fly bombers. He qualified as a flying officer himself, although older than most pilots, and went on six missions during the ten days around D-Day. On June 10, ten RAF Halifax B III planes went out from Melbourne. Eight returned. The missing two were downed by German anti-aircraft fire.
Dutchman Willem van Stockum piloted one of these planes. A book has been written about him by US army major Dr Robert Wack, Time Bomber. Six other crew members killed in the crash of the plane in a pear orchard in Entrammes, near Laval in the Mayenne.
The other was piloted by an Australian and crashed nearby. The son of this pilot, Rex Henderson, visited Laval at the same time as I did and on the 70th anniversary of V-E Day we drove together through Normandy with my wife Alice and his wife Deborah.
Two memorials were erected by a local French group at the ceremony that we attended, organized by Souvenir Français representative Jean-Louis Cholet. Details on the mission are here: http://aircrewremembered.com/stockum-willem-jacob-van.html
My wife Alice and I are visiting York on April 20-21, 2018 and intend to visit what is left of the base in Melbourne and speaking with anyone with a shared interest in No. 10 Squadron in WW2. If we have time, we would like to see the Halifax bomber on display, and the War Museum. I have sent a note to the 10 Squadron Association (10sqnass.co.uk). Willem's 10 Squadron, part of No 4 Group in December 1941, moved from its original location in Leeming in August 1942 to Melbourne. In 1942-1944 it deployed the Handley Page Halifax B II bomber; starting March 1944 through August 6, 1945 (when disbanded) it used the Handley Page Halifax B III.
A book by Jon Lake, Halifax Squadrons of World War II covers its role as a front line bomber, and other topics.
For more, see http://www.historyofwar.org/air/units/RAF/10_wwII.html and
http://aircrewremembered.com/stockum-willem-jacob-van.html
Postscript, April 4, 2018
I received the following email this morning from the man who started, in 1988, the annual commemoration on V-E Day (May 8) of the sacrifice of the crews of the two planes that were downed in the Laval area, Jean-Louis Cholet. He gives credit for the monuments or steles to Jean-Luc Peslier, a French Air Force veteran.
Dear American friend,
Thank you for your message and documents attached. You know how much I am attached to the memory of your uncle and his comrades. I am not alone in the realization of the steles recalling the fall of the Halifax bombers. The realization of the steles was possible only thanks to the work of Mr. Jean-Luc Peslier president at the time of the Amicale Mayennaise of the Ancients [Veterans] of the French Air Force. Without him, nothing could have happened. We will think a lot about you and them on May 8th.
Very cordially,
Jean Louis Cholet
I plan to visit Melbourne on April 20, 2018. That was the RAF 10th Squadron base from which my uncle Willem Jacob van Stockum flew a Halifax six times during the days before and after D-Day. He is buried in Laval, France with his crew of six and the crew of a second Halifax that was on the same mission. The local French group Souvenir, led by Jean-Louis Cholet, has erected two monuments where the two planes crashed. The planes were brought down by flak after they completed their assignments, and are given credit for steering their flaming planes away from French homes, into the pear orchards.
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