A little before midnight in the spring of 1918, London was still a city at war, but no longer a city protected by distance. Aircraft could now cross the Channel and strike British cities directly, and that single fact was about to force a question no one could keep avoiding: who was actually responsible for stopping them?

This episode matters because the creation of the RAF on 1 April 1918 wasn't a tidy piece of administrative housekeeping. It was Britain's answer to a much bigger wartime argument about who controlled air power, and whether the old army-navy divide could still make sense of a war that now reached into British skies.

In this episode:

• Why the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air Service developed along separate lines before 1918
• How German air raids on Britain in 1917 exposed the weakness of a divided system
• The Smuts Report, and why it became the decisive turning point
• Why home defence and long-range air power didn't fit neatly into army or navy priorities
• What Hugh Trenchard's role really was, and wasn't, in the RAF's creation
• How institutional independence let the RAF argue for its own future through the interwar years

Listen if you're interested in:

• Royal Air Force history
• British military history
• The First World War
• Air power and strategy
• The politics behind how the RAF came to exist

Explore more from The RAF Chronicle: For more on the history of the Royal Air Force, visit therafchronicle.co.uk to read the latest articles and explore the archive.

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