This dissertation supplements previously conducted research on aviation in interwar Britain by providing a necessary examination of the appearance of aerial warfare on British cinema screens between 1927 and 1939. It examines the presentation of the First World War, military aviators, the Royal Air Force, bombing, and aerial warfare to the British public. More specifically, it examines the connections between flying, aerial warfare, cinema, and the popular imagination in interwar Great Britain. It uses feature films, specifically Hell’s Angels, The Dawn Patrol, Things to Come, documentaries like RAF, The Gap, and The Warning, and newsreels. In additional to examining cinematic sources, it also extensively utilizes film press books, scripts, programmes, and British Government documents to determine the motives for producing these pictures, what influenced their writing, how they were promoted to the British public, and how cinema reviewers responded to them. It reveals that the cinema helped shape British perceptions of aerial warfare (and the First World War) during the interwar period, providing insight into how the British state and military interacted with the nation’s mass media complex. In doing so, it highlights the important, and often underappreciated, symbiotic relationship between mass culture and government policy.

Purpose: This work examines the transition in aerial warfare that took place during the Korean War (1950-1953). Before the conflict, air power was conceived of primarily an instrument of unlimited, or total, warfare. Yet Korea, and all subsequent air wars, have been limited. The transitional nature of the Korean air war has not yet been adequately explored by historians. Methods: The story of this shift is presented in two parts, the first examining the doctrines of the United States Air Force (USAF) immediately before the Korean War, the second comparing them to the USAF’s actual campaigns in Korea. This focus on the USAF reflects both its status as the principal air service in Korea and its influence on the theories and doctrines of all air arms in the post-World War Two era. The USAF’s planning immediately before the Korean War focused on its role in a possible total war between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was thus unprepared and ill-equipped for the limited war in Korea and had to improvise its operations there. Findings: The inability of the USAF to conduct an unlimited war in Korea frustrated many Americans, who could not understand the political considerations that limited the conflict, seeing only that the USAF, the world’s most powerful air arm, was prevented from using all of its resources. While the resulting controversy contributed to a change of administration in the United States, it had less of an effect on the USAF. After the Korean War ended, its leadership continued to focus on unlimited war, dismissing the conflict as an aberration from which little about the operation of aircraft in war could be learned. Conclusions: The failure to recognize the lessons of the Korean War has had serious consequences. There have been no total wars since 1945; every air war of the past sixty years has been limited. Limited warfare is defined by restrictions on air power. The USAF and other air arms were slow to adapt to the changing conditions. The Korean War was a more significant event in the history of aerial warfare than is generally appreciated.