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No. 222 Group RAF

military unit

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 24, 2025
Entity authorityQ17012652 ↗
Source-derived summary

No. 222 Group was a group of the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. Formed on 1 September 1941, based at Ceylon. Squadrons were stationed around the Indian Ocean. The group undertook long-range bombing and mine-laying operations that took them as far afield as Sumatra and Singapore.

When it became clear that Japanese forces posed an imminent threat to Ceylon, the airfield at Ratmalana was requisitioned to form part of the air defences for Colombo. It opened as RAF Ratmalana on March 1, 1942, when No. 258 Squadron RAF was reformed. They were followed by the arrival of No. 30 Squadron RAF. RAF Station Ratmalana closed in October 1945.

Editorial summary

“No. 222 Group RAF” enters the record as military unit. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Group, military and unit can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1941, 1942, 1945—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Group, military and unit.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“No. 222 Group RAF” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Group, military and unit provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

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 Aug 24, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q17012652. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1941, 1942 and 1945.

Critical limits

A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

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  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “No. 222 Group RAF”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow No. 222 Group RAF primary sources, No. 222 Group RAF archive and Group research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “No. 222 Group RAF” 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.