Log of the R.C.A.F.

444 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY was cultivated in the Empire, and admlnistered under proper control in the' provinces, the invaders of the Byzantine territory were everywhere unsuccessful."2 Equally clear and important are the sections devoted to the administration and to the growth of the bureaucracy. The author views the latter with considerable suspicion, and closes his work with the statement that eventually its "red tape stretched its tentacles into the farthest ,corners of the Empire, throttled initiative and finally squeezed out its very life's blood." This is of course to a c'ertain extent quite true, but our present consciousness of the evils of bureaucratic government should not blind us to its advantages. It was the high standard of administrative efficiency by means of a highly trained civil service that preserved, even under an inefficient ' or tyrannous executive, such anomalous andurireasonable institutions as the Roman empire, the Hapsburg monarchy, and the Venetian republic. After all, the Roman empire survived for fifteen centuries , and its Decline and Fall really begins when the Comnenideliberately , destroyed the great 'bureaucratic machine that had been founded by - Augustus and developed by Claudius and Hadrian. ~OG OF THE R.C.A.F.* EDGAR McINNIS The struggle in the air over western Europe and the Atlantic is one of the great epics of this war. The story of how Allied inferiority in 1939 was transformed into our crushing superiority in 1944 is here, even more than in other fields, far more , than the story of battI,es. It is the story ot the laboratol:'ies and the drafting -boards and the factories, of training-fields in Canada and transport-bases scattered from Greenland to West Africa, of heroism in the air made possible by the skill and devotion of men and women on the ground. It is a story of the evolution of strategy and tactics to keep pace with the expansion of ,resources, of the application- of electronics to revolutionize .the technique of both defence and attack, of the integration of the efforts of many nations under the auspices of the R.A.F. and the integration of that body's own efforts with those of the American air force to complete the rounded pattern of the final air offensive. I In this story Canada has an honourable plac~. The expansion of her air strength, from a handful of fliers equipped with obsolete machines to an organization embracing over 200,000 personnel, is not the least striking aspect of her war-effort. Her part in the Commonwealth j\.ir Training Plan is a story in itself, and one which has a real bearing on the wider story of the war effort of the British nations and their. contribution to a general Allied victory. 2George-Finlay, A His/ory oj Greece (ed. Tozer, 1877), II, 24. *Thc R.C.A.F. Ooeruas: The First Four Years. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 1944. Pp. xv, 376. ($3.00) REVIEWS 445 The record of the R.C.A.F. emhraces a wide variety of factors and aspects . This book makes no attempt at a comprehensive story covering them all. It concentrates on the single theme of Canada)s airmen in action. In a sense it is a log of the combat activities of the R.C.A.F. from the formation of its first squadron to the invasion of Italy in the autumn of 1943. It is an account which does full justice not only to the courage and skill of the men whose deeds it recounts, but also to the wide variety of activities . in which they were called upon to engage. It will undoubtedly be of very great interest to the actual participants as well as to their intimates at home. .If on the other hand the average lay reader finds the narrative less vivid and exciting than he might expect, that is at least partly owing to its natur~ ~nd limitations. In concentrating on their chosen theme, the authors have deliberately avoided any attempt to sketch the broader picture of which it is a part. Yet the two things are extremely hard to separate. The R.C.A.F. was aJIotted no special and...