ABSTRACT
The contemporary evidence is very clear, nevertheless, that strategic bombing hopes were connected with the birth of the Royal Air Force (RAF). In fact, the progress from the Smuts report to the creation of the Royal Air Force was laboured, halting and hardly assured. In the postwar era, official British statements which described the creation of the Royal Air Force glossed over the part played by the desire for a strategic bombing force. The launching of the Royal Air Force therefore started in a prophetic manner, that of passionate charges and countercharges and generally heightened emotions. The RAF's continued status as a separate military service in the interwar years greatly depended upon its insistence that the independent action of strategic bombing was necessary to English defence needs and that this military purpose could only be achieved by a separate air force.
