To end our air war series, we travel across the landscape of the Western Front,

those battlefields of the First World War, and find what we can of where those men flew and where they fell.

In this fifth and final episode in our Air War series, we look at what we can find of the men of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Air Force on the landscape of the Western Front today.

The very nature of looking at aspects of combat in the air might suggest there is very little to find of what happened above those trenches,

but in fact there are many places where we can uncover aspects of this part, this layer of the

Great War. Back in the late 1980s a video came out which I purchased from an advert in Stand 2, the Journal of the Western Front Association.

Now back in those days, videos about the First World War were pretty unusual,

and this one was called Where They Flew and Where They Fell,

and it was presented by actor John Graham Davis who I understand was deeply interested in

the subject matter of the war in the air during the First World War. Now in that film he took a

journey across the landscape of the old Western Front not from the perspective of the trenches or

the war undergrounds or tanks or anything

like that, but he followed it from the perspective of the pilots and the observers and the history

of the Royal Flying Corps, Royal Naval Air Service and the RAF. And that inspired me to go and

look into that aspect of the Great War on the next few trips that I did over onto those battlefields.

And what it made me realise that there were so many more layers to this subject of the Great War

and that the landscape of the First World War extended way beyond

the area where the fierce fighting had been and it wasn't just a case of looking around or looking

down it was a case of looking up as well and thinking about those events in that sky above the battlefields of the Western Front.

So when it came to drawing up this air war series for the podcast, I wanted to do something

similar to that video here and that's what this episode is all about.

And while that video is hard to find, there is a really poor quality

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