The war in the Western Desert before El Alamein was one of the RAF’s hardest schools. It lacked the compressed defensive geometry of the Battle of Britain and the confidence that came later with the Allied advance across North Africa. It forced the Service to operate over enormous distances, from rough airstrips, in a climate that punished men and machines alike, while supporting an army that was itself often retreating, regrouping or trying to recover the initiative. Aircraft, command arrangements, maintenance practice, reconnaissance methods and ideas about cooperation with the army all had to be tested against a campaign that refused to stand still.
The pre-El Alamein desert air war shaped the way the RAF fought mobile warfare for the rest of the Second World War. It exposed weak assumptions inherited from peacetime and from more static thinking about air operations, and it rewarded officers who understood that air power in an open theatre had to be flexible, closely informed, logistically resilient and willing to strike at an enemy’s movement rather than wait for a set-piece battle. The road to El Alamein was a long process by which the RAF, together with squadrons of the South African Air Force, the Royal Australian Air Force and other Commonwealth and Allied air forces in the desert, learned to survive repeated crises and turn adaptation into advantage.
A Theatre Few Had Fully Imagined
Before the great seesaw battles of 1941 and 1942, the desert war already posed problems unlike those faced in north-west Europe. Distances were vast, lines of communication fragile and permanent infrastructure thin. Airfields were often little more than strips levelled from hard ground, vulnerable to dust, heat and rapid abandonment. Navigation was difficult across terrain that offered few obvious landmarks. Supply was a constant anxiety: every gallon of fuel, every spare part and every bomb had to be moved forward along a long, exposed chain. If the land battle shifted suddenly, the air force had to shift with it.
British air power in the Middle East entered the war with commitments spread across a broad region and with resources that were seldom generous. In September 1939, at the outbreak of war, what had been known as Egypt Group was redesignated No. 202 (Operations) Group under Air Commodore Raymond Collishaw, providing the RAF’s initial desert command structure. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Longmore took over as Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief, RAF Middle East, in May 1940, taking on responsibility for the desert squadrons as Italy entered the war. In North Africa the RAF faced the Regia Aeronautica first, and later a much sharper contest once German air power entered the theatre. The early desert force flew a mixture of aircraft, some already obsolescent, directed by a command system still learning the particular demands of mobile operations. From the beginning, though, the RAF held one real advantage: a growing instinct that air operations in the desert had to be integrated with reconnaissance, interdiction and the practical needs of the army, rather than treated as a separate aerial contest.
That understanding grew out of necessity. The Western Desert was too fluid for rigid habits. Armoured columns could advance or withdraw over great distances in a matter of days. Ports, depots and landing grounds held outsized importance, because the side that lost touch with its supply lines could not sustain operational rhythm for long. The RAF had to watch roads, landing grounds, ports and concentrations of transport, then react quickly enough to matter. Desert air warfare would be won not by occasional brilliance alone but by sustained control of movement, support and tempo.
Operation Compass and the First Test, 1940–41
The first major test came in December 1940, when General Sir Richard O’Connor’s Western Desert Force, under the overall direction of General Sir Archibald Wavell, launched Operation Compass against the Italian Tenth Army in Egypt and eastern Libya. Collishaw’s group provided reconnaissance, fighter cover and attacks on Italian airfields, transport and retreating columns as the offensive rolled the Italians back through Sidi Barrani, Bardia, Tobruk and beyond towards El Agheila. The campaign was won chiefly by the army, but RAF support helped isolate Italian positions, harass withdrawing forces and give British commanders a clearer picture of an otherwise confused battlefield. Commonwealth squadrons were part of this effort from the outset: No. 3 Squadron RAAF had been operating in the desert since November 1940, flying a succession of different aircraft types over the course of the campaign, and took part in the advance through Sidi Barrani and beyond as one of the first Commonwealth units to serve alongside the RAF’s own desert squadrons.
Operation Compass also revealed how different desert warfare would be from a front fixed by trenches or defended by heavy urban infrastructure. A column could be turned not only by direct attack but by interruption of its fuel, water and ammunition. An advanced position might be less secure than it appeared if the roads behind it were under threat from the air. Even when bombing accuracy was limited by the standards of later years, the operational effect of repeated harassment could be serious in a theatre where mobility decided everything. A force that had to halt, disperse or consume precious transport capacity to protect itself was already losing freedom of action.
At the same time, the RAF’s own limitations were obvious. Aircraft serviceability in desert conditions was a perpetual struggle. Sand worked into engines and instruments; heat reduced performance; improvised landing grounds demanded relentless labour from ground crews. Pilots and observers operated in a physically exhausting environment before combat even began, and the campaign depended on the quality of fitters, armourers, drivers and signals staff as much as on aircrew. Men improvised shelters, dispersal methods and maintenance routines because there was often no alternative, learning to move fast, conceal what they could and accept a level of discomfort that would have seemed extraordinary in peacetime station life.
In April 1941, as the campaign against Italy gave way to a far more dangerous contest, Collishaw’s command was reorganised as No. 204 Group, the formation that would eventually grow into the command known as the Western Desert Air Force.
The Afrika Korps and the Shock of Reversal
The arrival of German forces transformed the desert campaign. The Afrika Korps, under Generalleutnant Erwin Rommel, altered the tempo of the land war from the spring of 1941, and the Luftwaffe’s intervention raised the quality of the air opposition sharply. What had been difficult became far more dangerous. The RAF now faced an enemy better able to contest local air superiority, strike forward airfields and coordinate closely with a fast-moving ground offensive. Retreat in these circumstances put the entire apparatus on which air operations depended at risk, since landing grounds, stores, signals links and repair facilities all had to move with the front or be abandoned.
This was one of the central realities of the pre-El Alamein period: the RAF had to learn how to fight while falling back. A retreating army drew the air force backwards with it, often at short notice. Landing grounds had to be evacuated, stores moved or destroyed, and squadrons re-established further east before they could resume effective operations. A headquarters that clung too long to one location risked being overtaken by events; one that moved too early risked losing contact with the battle. Every withdrawal placed strain on command and control as well as on physical supply.
The reverses of 1941 exposed the cost of fragmented effort. Fighter units tied too closely to local defensive demands could be spread too thin across too wide a front. Bomber and reconnaissance effort that was not concentrated against the enemy’s vulnerable movement and supply risked becoming merely busy rather than decisive. The desert punished dispersion and rewarded commanders who could identify what mattered most at a given moment, whether a transport route, a forward concentration, an enemy landing ground or a threatened sector where army morale depended on visible air support.
The learning process that followed was contested, uneven and sometimes costly, without a single easy formula for meeting the German challenge. Aircraft types changed, tactics shifted and expectations had to be revised. Fighter squadrons once thought of chiefly in defensive terms found themselves escorting, strafing and operating over a vast battle area. Light and medium bombers were used against transport and communications as well as fixed targets. Tactical reconnaissance became indispensable. The Western Desert was pushing the RAF towards a more operationally connected idea of air power, in which the air battle could not be separated from the movement battle below.
Tedder, Coningham and the Reordering of Command
The campaign’s deeper significance lies partly in the command changes that gave this experience a firmer shape. Arthur Tedder took over as Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief, RAF Middle East, from Longmore on 1 June 1941, and moved quickly to establish a clearer relationship between air power and the army’s needs. On 30 July 1941 he brought Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Coningham to Egypt to take over No. 204 Group from Collishaw. In October 1941 the group was upgraded into a full headquarters, Air Headquarters Western Desert, working alongside the newly formed Eighth Army. The organisation was renamed Air Headquarters Libya for a few weeks in early 1942 before reverting to its former name. By the time of the fighting around El Alamein in the summer of 1942, official RAF accounts already refer to the command as the Western Desert Air Force, the name by which it is remembered today, even though the sources consulted do not agree on exactly when that title became formal rather than descriptive; what is clear is that the command Coningham built from July 1941 had, in substance, been operating under that character for more than a year.
That reorganisation counted for less as a change of name than for what it allowed the command to do. Under Tedder’s direction and Coningham’s energetic field command, the RAF in the desert moved away from piecemeal habits and towards a clearer conception of how air power should support mobile warfare. One of the emerging lessons was that air assets had to be centrally directed enough to be concentrated where they would have a real effect, rather than parcelled out piecemeal across the front or handed automatically to whichever army unit asked loudest.
The need for reform was already visible before Coningham arrived: the attempts to relieve Tobruk in Operations Brevity and Battleaxe in May and June 1941 showed how far air and ground cooperation still had to travel, as requests for support moved slowly through still-developing liaison arrangements and neither operation produced the close, responsive air cover later associated with the desert command. Central control and forward liaison remained a work in progress through Crusader and into 1942, only gradually formalised as the Air Support Control system, rather than a settled doctrine handed down when Coningham took over in the summer of 1941.
That approach made sense because armies under pressure naturally wanted fighters overhead at every threatened point and bombing support for every local engagement. In the desert, such dispersion often wasted strength. The better approach was to use reconnaissance to understand enemy intentions, then strike at transport, assembly areas and forward movement in ways that shaped the battle before a crisis ripened. This demanded trust between commanders and a common language about priorities. It also demanded confidence from air leaders, who had to resist being reduced to a flying artillery reserve while still providing visible and timely support to troops on the ground.
This reordering also helped the RAF make better use of improved equipment as it arrived. Hawker Hurricanes remained important, but newer American-built types such as the Curtiss Tomahawk, and later the Kittyhawk, widened tactical possibilities, while bombers and reconnaissance aircraft were employed with growing attention to the enemy’s transport lifeline. Even so, equipment alone was not the answer. The desert consistently showed that aircraft were only as effective as the system that sustained and directed them. New types could blunt enemy advantages, but only if repair, supply, command and target selection kept pace. Arthur Tedder would carry the lessons of this period into much larger commands as the war went on.
Operation Crusader and Mobile Air Support
The value of the reformed command structure was tested in November 1941, when the Eighth Army launched Operation Crusader to relieve the besieged garrison at Tobruk and drive Axis forces out of Cyrenaica. Air Headquarters Western Desert supported the offensive with fighter cover, reconnaissance and attacks on Axis transport and landing grounds, working more closely with army headquarters than earlier operations had allowed. The fighting was hard-fought and the front shifted repeatedly, but the campaign showed a command system able to concentrate effort where it counted rather than dissipate it defending every threatened point.
Crusader also tested the air-ground liaison arrangements that Tedder and Coningham had been building. Forward air support signals units, attached to army formations, helped requests and information move between the army and Air Headquarters Western Desert, supplementing the pre-arranged missions that had dominated earlier operations. The arrangement remained far from assured: wireless links could fail under pressure, responses were frequently delayed, and what would later become the Air Support Control system was still being worked out in practice rather than operating as settled doctrine. Even so, Crusader marked a real advance on the more improvised cooperation of 1940 and early 1941. By the time Tobruk was relieved and Axis forces fell back towards El Agheila in December 1941, the RAF had shown that a mobile, centrally directed air force could keep pace, however imperfectly, with a fluid land campaign across hundreds of miles of desert.
The gains proved temporary. Rommel’s counter-offensive in January 1942 pushed the Eighth Army back once again, a reminder that no single campaign had settled the argument between concentration and dispersion, or between offence and the unforgiving logistics of the desert. Each swing of the front required the RAF to relearn, under pressure, lessons that no amount of planning could make permanent.
Fuel, Filters and Forward Landing Grounds
The desert air war is often described in terms of manoeuvre, but it was equally a war of maintenance and movement. Ground crews lived with a relentless cycle of servicing, repair and salvage in conditions that attacked machinery every day. Engines ingested dust. Airframes suffered from rough strips and hard use. Vehicles wore out across long desert distances. Water, always scarce, had to be rationed with care. Even the most aggressive air plan depended on whether fuel bowsers, spare parts, ammunition lorries and workshop vehicles could get forward in time.
Forward repair and salvage organisation became one of the desert campaign’s most distinctive features. Under No. 206 Group, the repair and salvage organisation built by Dawson and Cooke connected forward recovery parties directly to rear workshops, so that damaged airframes could move quickly from the point of loss back into productive repair rather than being written off outright. RAF salvage parties recovered airframes from forward landing grounds and even from no man’s land where conditions allowed, returning many to service far more quickly than a system reliant on rearward depots alone could have managed. Advanced landing grounds, often no more than a strip cleared of stones and marked with fuel drums, were built, abandoned and rebuilt as the front moved, sometimes within days of each other. The construction and defence of these strips was as much a part of the campaign as any sortie flown from them.
Reconnaissance and signals intelligence also became more capable over the course of the campaign. Wireless intercept and reports from forward observers increasingly helped commanders judge enemy intentions and the strength of concentrations forming beyond visual range, even where formal early-warning coverage in the desert remained thinner than in the defence of Britain. Inaccurate or delayed intelligence could be as dangerous as none at all, but the trend across 1941 and 1942 was towards a better-informed and more responsive desert air force.
This was where the RAF’s institutional resilience was tested most severely. A squadron on paper might appear intact, yet its real combat value could change sharply if the transport tail behind it faltered. The desert campaign rewarded administrative foresight and punished complacency. Repair and recovery became operational acts, as did the construction of landing grounds, the camouflage of aircraft on exposed surfaces and the rapid re-establishment of communications after a move. In a theatre defined by distance, logistics functioned as combat in its own right, not merely its background.
Gazala, Tobruk and the Retreat to Egypt, 1942
The crisis of 1942 brought the earlier learning to its harshest test. Rommel’s offensive at Gazala in late May and June overwhelmed Eighth Army positions after weeks of hard fighting, and the fall of Tobruk on 21 June 1942, with the loss of much of its garrison, was among the heaviest blows suffered by British and Commonwealth forces in the desert war. The retreat that followed carried the Eighth Army, and the RAF squadrons supporting it, back through Cyrenaica and Egypt towards the defensive line at El Alamein, barely sixty miles from Alexandria.
Once again the RAF had to move, preserve serviceability and support hard-pressed ground forces during a dangerous withdrawal. Landing grounds built up over months had to be abandoned at short notice, sometimes with stores destroyed rather than left for the advancing enemy. This time, though, the Service brought accumulated experience in concentration, reconnaissance, mobile support and logistical survival from Compass, the German intervention and Crusader. Those lessons reduced the danger of collapse without guaranteeing against defeat. Squadrons that had practised rapid displacement before could fall back, re-form and resume operations with less confusion than in 1941.
The retreat also drew South African, Australian and other Commonwealth squadrons more deeply into the fighting alongside the RAF, reflecting how much of the desert air effort by mid-1942 depended on forces from across the Commonwealth working within a common command structure under Air Headquarters Western Desert. The strain fell on all of them alike: on ground crews improvising repairs under fire, on aircrew flying repeated sorties from exposed strips, and on the staff officers trying to keep supply moving along a shrinking and increasingly congested line of communication.
Holding the Line Before El Alamein
As the front contracted towards the Alamein position in July 1942, geography began to help impose a more manageable shape on the campaign. The narrowing of the battlefield, bounded by the Mediterranean coast to the north and the impassable Qattara Depression to the south, reduced the wide turning movements that had characterised earlier desert fighting. For the RAF this offered a better chance to bring air effort to bear with greater density and to interfere more effectively with Axis movement and supply. The enemy remained formidable, but the operational conditions were becoming less favourable to sweeping manoeuvre and more favourable to sustained air pressure against a confined battlefield.
The First Battle of El Alamein in July 1942 halted Rommel’s advance, and Air Headquarters Western Desert, still under Coningham, provided fighter cover and attacks on Axis transport and supply columns as the line stabilised. When Rommel attempted to break through again at Alam el Halfa at the end of August, the RAF flew intensive operations against his armour and against the fuel columns trying to sustain it on the battlefield itself. Those attacks were only part of a wider supply crisis for the Axis forces, compounded by the interdiction of Mediterranean shipping bound for Libya and by the strength of Eighth Army’s prepared defensive positions; taken together, they produced a defensive victory that left Eighth Army’s position secure heading into the autumn. It was only after this stabilisation that the Second Battle of El Alamein and the decisive Allied offensive followed, under the Western Desert Air Force name by which the command had become known, developments that lie beyond the scope of this account.
By the time the line held before that decisive offensive, the RAF and its Commonwealth partners had endured the retreat and built a more mature desert air system in the process. It was still imperfect, still dependent on secure supply from the rear and still vulnerable to hard fighting, but it was far better adapted to the theatre than the force that had entered the campaign in 1940. Its commanders had clearer ideas about concentration and cooperation. Its ground organisation was more experienced in mobility. Its squadrons had a firmer sense of the balance between air combat, reconnaissance and strike.
What the RAF Had Learned
The RAF’s story in the Western Desert before El Alamein is the story of an air force forced to learn under pressure. It had to fight in a theatre of immense distances, fragile supply and repeated reverses, against increasingly capable opposition and in close partnership with an army struggling through the same cycle of advance and retreat. What emerged from that experience was a more effective way of waging mobile air war, built through Operation Compass, the shock of German intervention, the command reforms brought by Tedder and Coningham, the hard test of Operation Crusader, and the harsh retreat from Gazala to Egypt.
By the autumn of 1942, the RAF in the desert had become better at concentration, reconnaissance, air-ground cooperation and the demanding practical business of keeping aircraft flying from exposed forward bases. Those gains were earned through hard experience rather than granted by any single reform or victory. That is why the pre-El Alamein desert air war holds such an important place in RAF history. It was the campaign in which the Service, together with its Commonwealth partners, learned how to survive, adapt and remain operationally decisive in one of the most demanding theatres of the Second World War, and in doing so laid the groundwork for the offensive that followed. Readers looking for the wider arc of that campaign can turn to The RAF in the Desert Air War and the North African Campaign, which follows the fighting on to its conclusion.