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It’s said an army marches on its stomach but somewhere along the way they need not only food, but petrol and socks as well as all the other bits that make things work, and what is true for the Army must also be true for the Royal Air Force. As the prospect of war increased in 1938, a military command was formed to provide logistical support to the RAF. RAF Maintenance command formed on the 1st April 1938 and a few months later in September of that year, a site very close to me in Worcestershire, Maintenance Unit (MU) Number 25 - RAF Hartlebury was deployed. As a large logistical hub for the RAF, MU25 handled general logistics for the RAF bases of the region as well as overseas. Certainly from records, it acted as a medicine storage and creation centre 1. Other than medicines, it appears to have handled storage and logistics for everything not a munition or actual plane in 7 distributed sites. Certainly it handled Rolls Royce Merlin engines and likely took in parts from Gloster (Hawker) works in Hucclecote 25 miles away, as well as Vickers-Armstrong engines and parts from Castle Bromwich near Birmingham. Its proximity to the industrial city of Birmingham and the manufacturing centres of the West Midlands, presumably also meant it was well supplied from industries close by, before distributing to the regional RAF bases like RAF Pershore and RAF Defford - who were doing some very interesting things with radar development - as well as further afield. ...

The modern county of Worcestershire is about as far from the sea as it’s possible to be in the UK. It’s 2 hours to what can be charitably called sea in Weston-super-mare down the M5 motorway and the largest body of water is probably some reservoir somewhere. It’s also notable as not a tropical place. 400million years ago however, things were somewhat different. The land that would eventually become Worcestershire was somewhere in the tropical Southern hemisphere in the middle Silurian period of around 420 million years ago. A coral reef would later become layers of limestone across the hills of the county and it swam with Triolobites, giant Nautilus and Brachiopodes as well sea lilies growing up on the reef. ...

Mention the defence of the UK during the early years of World War two and most people of a certain age think of the comedy ‘Dads Army’. Certainly I’m just about old enough to have watched the endless repeats of this on TV. The hapless activities of Pike, Mainwaring et al are quite a long way from the real home guard and even further from the hard, trained secret army that operated on home shores at the time. I recommend the book ‘The Mercian Marquis’ for further details. Even the maligned home guard themselves, would largely have been ready, if not always entirely able, to fight and to die defending the country. ...