Thankfully i have just finished my uninversity dissertation. It feels great!! RED - Finshed you thesis yet?
Stevin - Thanks. No this one is one RAF Tactical Air Power in North Africa. I finished the Dieppe project while back.
Congrats Ross! I finished school a while back but I still remember the great feeling of finishing exams papers. A thesis would be even more stress to relieve. So tell me, how many drinks did you have to celebrate? or can you remember?
Cheers Guys. It feels good that its done. The final title was: 'The Genesis of a Doctrine: The Development of RAF Tactical Air Power in North Africa' This is the abstract which outlines what it dealt with. Abstract: The purpose of this paper has been to describe the areas where RAF Tactical Air Power evolved during the North African campaign of 1940 to 1943, and to discuss its strategic effectiveness upon the nature of the campaign. It also hopes to show that while many of the deficiencies were caused by inadequate inter-war planning, and that there was a viable theory discussed in this period that could, and would, be applied to the war in North Africa. It has done this by looking at the discussions that occurred in the interwar years and the failures discovered during the Battle for France. It then outline the five areas were RAF Tactical Air Power is thought to have developed in North Africa. Phillip Meilinger in his work Airwar: Theory and Practice outlined five areas where air power could have an effect upon the nature of joint operations if the field. It is these areas where tactical air power in North Africa developed. These areas to be examined are Air Superiority, Intelligence and Reconnaissance, Personalities, Command and Control and finally Aerial Interdiction. It then concludes with an appraisal of its effect upon the Axis powers and how it was appreciated by the British High Command, in effect it concludes that the development in tactical air power shaped the thinking of the generals on both sides of the war and would lead to there use late on in the war. The study was conducted by using period documents, contemporary printed sources and a variety of secondary sources on the subject of the North African campaign and tactical air power.
