[3] The squadron received its first Sopwith Pup[4] on 3 February 1917, and deployed to Vert Galant aerodrome (between Talmas and Beauval) in the Somme département, France on 12 March 1917.

On 13 March 1918 Lieutenant Alan Jerrard engaged nineteen enemy aircraft on his own; he managed to destroy three before he was forced to land and taken prisoner.

[6] The 21 aces who had served with the squadron during the Great War were: William George Barker VC, Alan Jerrard VC, Peter Carpenter, Harry King Goode, Francis S. Symondson, Gerald Alfred Birks, Charles M. Maud, Gordon Apps, Hilliard Brooke Bell, Christopher McEvoy, Harold Ross Eycott-Martin, William Myron MacDonald, Augustus Paget, John Oliver Andrews, Harold Koch Boysen, William Carrall Hilborn, Thomas Hunter, James Lennox, Walbanke Ashby Pritt, Patrick Gordon Taylor and, John (Jack) Wallis Bishop.

The first contact with the enemy was an attack on a Heinkel He 111 of the Norfolk coast near Cromer, the German aircraft subsequently crashed in Denmark.

Faith after Germany's invasion of Belgium and the Netherlands, the squadron destroyed its first enemy aircraft[clarification needed] on 12 May 1940 over the Hague.

After a break in South Wales the squadron continued to support the advancing allied forces being based at Abbeville in September 1944 and then on to Grimbergen in Belgium.

In June 1962 it left the UK for Seletar in Singapore, where it provided heavy lift helicopter support for forces operating in Malaya.