Tom Hopkins, the RAF Museum Curator of Aircraft and Exhibits, will discuss Coastal Command during the first years of the Cold War.

There were 21 years of peace between November 1918 and September 1939. The period between the end of the Second War and the ill-defined beginning of the Cold War was far shorter. Both periods however saw rapid defence-cuts followed by rapid re-armament as new political tensions materialised.

The U-boat Campaign of 1914-1918 was a hard-fought battle that very nearly brought Britain to its needs. Incrementally, the allies mollified this menace through the development and integration of new tactics and weapons, of which aviation was an important part. But any lessons learned would be quickly forgotten, as a victorious Britain entered into a post-war world with very little interest in either using submarines or furthering countermeasures against them, and a newly independent air force whose priorities were remaining independent and developing an offensive bomber force.

RAF Coastal Command entered the second world war with very low numbers and increasingly obsolescent aircraft, while the Royal Navy’s ASW capabilities had stagnated since the end of the first war and slowly been forgotten. It would take until the middle of the war for these two forces to re-learn the lessons from 1914-1918 and turn the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic.

The period of peace beginning in 1945 also saw rapid defence cuts across the board, but this time Britain’s ASW capabilities would remain mostly intact and RAF Coastal Command remained a viable, if not numerically impressive, force.
 As the enemy submarine threat re-emerged in the early 1950s – this time from the Russians – the RAF and RN, although much reduced in size, were not taken on quite the same back-foot as they had been ten years earlier.

In this talk, Tom will examine the various factors which explain the context of Coastal Command's early Cold War era.

Cold Waters: Coastal Command in the Early Stages of the Cold War