Balkan Air Force
1944-1945 Royal Air Force formation
The Balkan Air Force (BAF) was an Allied air formation operating in the Balkans during World War II. Composed of units of the Royal Air Force and South African Air Force under the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces command, it was active from 7 June 1944 until 15 July 1945. Air Vice Marshal William Elliot and then George Mills, both RAF officers, were its Air Officer Commanding (AOC).
The BAF operated mainly over Yugoslavia, supporting the Partisans against Germany and its allies, but occasionally supporting the Greek and Albanian resistance movements also.
History
The formation was based at Bari in Italy, and formed on 7 June 1944 from AHQ 'G' Force, to simplify command arrangements for the air support of Special Operations Executive-operations in the Balkans, i.e. across the Adriatic and in the Aegean and Ionian seas. The Desert Air Force had been responsible for those operations, but its prime job was the support of the troops of the Commonwealth Eighth Army which was fighting its way up through Italy, thus making operations over the Balkans a distraction. The Balkan Air Force was a subordinate to Mediterranean Allied Air Forces, the overall allied air formation in the Mediterranean.
The BAF mainly supported the operations of the Partisans, led by Josip Broz Tito, against German forces in Yugoslavia, but also provided support to Greek and Albanian resistance organisations. It transported supplies to the Partisans, evacuated wounded, dropped agents to help them, and provided air support in their operations against German troops.
The Balkan Air Force was a multinational unit, with 15 types of aircraft and men from eight nations: Greece, co-belligerent Italy, Poland, South Africa, Yugoslavia, the UK, USA and USSR (a transport squadron).
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Balkan Air Force” as 1944-1945 Royal Air Force formation. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as 1944-1945 Royal Air Force formation. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 16, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q608386. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1944 and 1945.
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This entry incorporates text from “Balkan Air Force” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.