Wilhelm Mohr

PART V–An address to the Royal Norwegian
Air Force
Academy on the fifty-year
anniversary
First of all, I would like to thank you for the invitation here today, and
at the same time thank you for pointing towards one of us elderly to
mark our service’s fifty-year anniversary. We appreciate immensely that
in your efforts to prepare for the future, wish and muster the will to
bring the past with you.
The Royal Resolution of 10 November 1944 begins in a direct manner:
’Until Stortinget [Parliament] chooses to decide otherwise, the Air
Force is established as the third armed service, in which, among others,
today’s Army and Naval Air Arm units, personnel and materiel of all
kinds are included’.
Among other things, it states later on: ’When planning and developing
the new service, in close cooperation with the authorities of the
Navy and Army, one shall develop air units that can meet the necessary
demands of naval and land warfare’.
Other amendments in the Resolution have less interest here, but a
work program to see the process through was set as a precondition. As
a matter of fact, I myself have searched for Stortingets [Parliament’s]
follow-up on this Resolution, which was provisional as were other
governmental issues during World War II. I have not found anything
that concerns this issue, which we can conclude means that there was
consensus, in other words that Stortinget [Parliament] supported the
decision. Thus, we can consider 10 November 1944 as a rightful birthday.
And that is why we are gathered here today.
Well, a birth signifies a step in an evolution. A step from an eventful,
if not a particularly easy past. That given, I can only say that we experienced
its pregnancy during the war as quite easy. One could say that it
gradually developed itself almost automatically. If not, we presumably
would still have had a separate Army and Naval Air Arm. But suddenly
the circumstances had provided us with a new start signal and a new
track for running. We got our training camp in Toronto, as the torch of
recruitment it became, and where joint efforts created the foundation
for further education. The process of further refining the fighting skills
was performed within the Royal Air Force, which already embraced
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