The RAF in camera 1903-1939: Archive Photographs from the Public Record Office and the Ministry of Defence (Aviation)

For many decades a fascinating and sizeable archive of photographs, depicting the operational and ground activities of the RAF, has remained unrecorded and largely unseen in thousands of documents held at the Public Record Office at Kew. Other equally important images of the RAF can be found in the official archives of the Ministry of Defence in London. Together these two important collections cover a period from 1903, when the RAF's predecessors became interested in the possibilities of military aviation, through to the high-technology application of air power in the Gulf War of 1991.
The RAF in Camera 1903-1939 is the first volume in a series which will bring a representative selection of these two collections to the notice of a wider audience. Many of the photographs are published here for the first time and give the reader a fascinating kaleidoscope of images depicting the nascent RAF and its subsequent growth into a world-class air arm in the course of the Second World War.
Included in this first volume are images of man's early attempts to fly, the experiences of the First World War, operations during the interwar years in the far-flung corners of the Empire, and the desperate attempts to re-arm the RAF as the storm clouds of war gathered, heralding the outbreak of the Second World War.