In World War I it served in a strike role against enemy bases and airfields in Belgium.

[2][3] The new squadron conducted daylight raids using Airco DH.4s on enemy bases and airfields[2] in Belgium until the end of World War I.

[3][2][4] Equipped with Avro Ansons, the first RAF monoplane with retractable undercarriage, the squadron performed general reconnaissance duties until the outbreak of World War II.

217 Squadron moved to its brand-new war station at RAF St Eval on the north Cornish coast, which it occupied in an unfinished state.

[2][4] From May 1940, the squadron started to be equipped with the Bristol Beaufort torpedo bomber, but serious problems with the new aircraft's Taurus engines meant that the Avro Ansons remained in service until December 1940.

Torpedo attacks were difficult because the aircraft had a tendency to roll, the height of weapon release meant that the distance to target was hard to judge and the aircraft were forced to overfly their target ships, rather than expose their belly to flak by turning away.

One such anti-shipping mission set out on 12 February 1942 to intercept the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau as these fled from their safe haven at Brest, making the daring Channel Dash for Germany.

On their first sortie, two aircraft made contact with a different warship, believed to be the German cruiser Prinz Eugen but their torpedoes missed.

[2] However, many of the Bristol Beauforts were found to be unserviceable on arrival, having problems with their torpedo loading and dropping mechanisms.

On the morning of 15 June 1942, a force of eight Bristol Beauforts attacked an Italian fleet that was steaming south, seeking to intercept the convoys.

[5] A single torpedo from one Beaufort[5][6] crippled the Italian cruiser Trento, which was later sunk by the British submarine HMS Umbra (P.35).

217 Squadron remained on Malta for two months, carrying out anti-shipping attacks across a wide section of the Mediterranean, reaching as far as Greece.

[9] The surviving aircrew arrived in Ceylon in July 1942, but had no aircraft, having left their battered Bristol Beauforts behind in the Middle East.

217 Squadron was initially based at RAF Minneriya, an airstrip located in the east central part of Ceylon.

[3] A detachment was sent to a location 20 km south of Colombo, to clear and construct a new airstrip at RAF Ratmalana in the jungle.

22 Squadron RAF to become a torpedo-carrying anti-shipping force; however the Imperial Japanese Navy failed to show up, as they were busy in the Pacific Ocean at the time.

[10] From June-July 1944,[11][3] they started to receive the new Bristol Beaufighter TF.X, an aircraft far better suited to maritime anti-shipping operations.

Their new commander, Wg Cdr John G Lingard, DFC, trained the crews in the use of rocket projectiles and raised the squadron to an effective strike unit.

22 Squadron was moved in a ground attack role to the Burma theatre, where Gen Wingate's Chindits had been more successful than expected.

[11][12][13] In March, 1945 a group of Royal Engineers on Direction Island, one of the Cocos Islands, was secretly joined by an advance group of 15 airmen, later supplemented by 200 airmen in three transport ships, to prepare Station Brown, the staging post.

On West Island, they cleared palm-trees from the beach and laid steel planking on crushed coral to serve as an airstrip.

[11] Unaware of this clandestine activity, groups of up to 12 Beaufighter crews practised long-distance formation flying down the east coast of India from Karachi to Colombo in Ceylon, without being told their true target.

[11][12] Aircraft would be lost on the 1,700 mile outbound journey to the staging post, or would be spotted flying over Sumatra and finally, if they survived the attack, the planes would run out of fuel and have to be abandoned on Phuket Island.

[11][13] On 22 June 1945, some air and ground crews were relocated to RAF Gannavaram on the Indian east coast in preparation for Operation Zipper.

On 7 April 1952, the squadron moved its base of operations to RAF Kinloss[3] and was fully equipped with Neptune MR.1s by July 1952.