Timeline of the Air War

Willy Messerschmitt's prototype — the aircraft destined to fly in every Luftwaffe combat unit of the war — takes to the air for the first time.

Mitchell's elliptical-winged monoplane leaves Eastleigh for twenty-three minutes. The RAF orders 310 aircraft within three months.

The Condor Legion demonstrates the technique of the terror raid over the Basque town. Its lessons are studied everywhere.

Ju 87 Stukas scream into action as the Luftwaffe executes the first Blitzkrieg campaign. The Polish Air Force fights hard but is destroyed.

German air superiority underpins the armour thrust through the Ardennes. By 25 June, France is out of the war.

Fighter Command, radar-equipped and desperately outnumbered, must hold the line over southern England. The next twelve weeks will decide whether Britain fights on.

Peak Luftwaffe effort is met and broken. The invasion, Operation Sealion, is indefinitely postponed. Hitler turns east.

RN Swordfish torpedo biplanes strike the Italian fleet in harbour — a blueprint studied closely by Japanese naval planners.

Six Japanese carriers launch 353 aircraft in two waves. Eight American battleships are hit; four are sunk. The United States enters the war.

G4M and G3M bombers sink HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse off Malaya — the first capital ships destroyed at sea by aircraft alone.

Sixteen B-25B Mitchells launch from USS Hornet to bomb Tokyo. Material damage is negligible; the psychological effect is enormous on both sides.

SBD Dauntless dive bombers catch four Japanese fleet carriers with armed, fuelled aircraft on deck. Three are destroyed in minutes; a fourth follows. The tide turns.

Twelve B-17s strike the Rouen-Sotteville marshalling yards. The strategic bombing of Europe begins in earnest.

RAF Bomber Command sends 1,047 aircraft against Cologne under Operation Millennium — a demonstration of Harris's vision for area bombing.

617 Squadron Lancasters breach the Möhne and Eder dams with the Upkeep bouncing bomb. Eight of nineteen aircraft are lost.

Sixty B-17s lost in a single day of unescorted deep-penetration raids. The limits of daylight bombing without escort are made brutally clear.

P-51 Mustangs escort B-17s all the way to the German capital. The Luftwaffe day-fighter force, bled white in defence, never recovers.

Complete Allied air superiority over the Normandy beachhead. Typhoons, Thunderbolts, and Spitfires hunt anything that moves behind the lines.

The Fieseler Fi 103 flying bomb announces a new era of unmanned aerial weapons. Intercepted by the fastest piston fighters — Tempests, Meteors, Mustangs.

US Navy Hellcats annihilate Japanese naval aviation at the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Japan loses 346 aircraft; the USN loses 30.

The world's first operational jet fighter flies against Allied reconnaissance over Germany. Too few, too late — but a glimpse of what comes next.

Combined RAF and USAAF raids ignite a firestorm that kills tens of thousands of civilians. Strategic bombing's moral questions have never fully settled.

Roughly 100,000 die as 279 B-29s under LeMay drop incendiaries on the Japanese capital. The deadliest air raid in history.

The B-29 "Enola Gay" drops the "Little Boy" uranium weapon over the Japanese city. Three days later, Nagasaki.

Japan signs the Instrument of Surrender aboard USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. The Second World War ends. The air age has arrived.