In the first weeks of the campaign they took over 700 photographs of the peninsula, and conducted other ground support tasks including spotting for naval gunfire, and reporting the movements of Ottoman troops.

[4] On 19 November, during a raid against a railway junction near the Maritsa River in Bulgaria, Squadron Commander Richard Bell Davies won the Victoria Cross for landing to rescue a pilot who had been shot down, in the face of intense enemy fire.

[5] Among its notable Officers Commanding were Canada's first ace, Redford Mulock; Lloyd S. Breadner, future Air Marshal of the Royal Canadian Air Force; Raymond Collishaw, sixth scoring ace of the war; and Tom F. Hazell, the Royal Air Force's tenth scoring ace of the war.

[5] The squadron produced a number of other notable aces, including Leonard Henry Rochford; Arthur Whealy; James Alpheus Glen; Edwin Hayne; William Sidebottom; Frederick C. Armstrong; Joseph Stewart Temple Fall; Harold Beamish; future Air Marshal Aubrey Ellwood; John Joseph Malone; John Denis Breakey; Frederick Britnell; Francis Casey; Australia's highest scoring ace, Robert A.

Little; Harold Spencer Kerby; Alfred Williams Carter; and Herbert Travers.

It was equipped with Nieuport Nightjar biplane fighter aircraft, however, on 1 April 1923 it was reduced to Flight status as No.

At the end of 1941 the squadron operated Bristol Blenheim IV, undertaking reconnaissance over the Mediterranean from various bases in Western Egypt, flying patrols from the Libyan coast out as far as Crete.

In 1942 the squadron re-equipped with Martin Baltimore, an American twin-engined light attack bomber, also used as a reconnaissance aircraft and was involved in operations in Syria.

In 1943 the squadron was posted to RAF Santa Cruz,[8] in Bombay (now called Mumbai), then British India and was re-equipped with Vickers Wellington, a twin-engined long range medium bomber, to fly coastal patrols.

The squadron converted to Consolidated Liberator aircraft in November 1944 and began anti-shipping patrols over the Bay of Bengal.