To Rule the Winds is the story of how a coordinated force of the Royal Air Force's fighter squadrons came into being as Fighter Command in 1936 and what became of it after the Battle of Britain. It is a large story, to be told in a series of volumes.

This first volume recounts the origins of military aviation in Britain, up to the beginning of the First World War in the August of 1914. By the 18th and 19th Centuries, balloons had been tried in various conflicts on the Continent of Europe, during Britain's involvements in the Napoleonic wars, the Crimea, South Africa and elsewhere,...

This second Volume in the To Rule the Winds series deals with the evolution of the Royal Flying Corps through the First World War and its transformation, in 1918, into the Royal Air Force. It focuses on the migration of the Army's Air Service - and to some extent the Navy's separate Air Service - towards a British Air Force intended to wipe the enemy's Air Service from the sky and provide an aerial umbrella under which the Army's Expeditionary Force on the ground could eventually move forward to victory. While the resulting Air Force was not entirely successful in the grand objective of...