Nineteen-eighteen saw the formation of the world's first independent air force, and the inauguration of the first independent chaplaincy organisation devoted to military aviation. However, the neglected creation of the Chaplains' Branch of the Royal Air Force (RAF) towards the end of the First World War represents far more than just a minor footnote in the institutional history of Britain's armed forces. The circumstances of its creation, which occurred just as the German sociologist Max Weber was identifying scientific progress as driving the ineluctable "disenchantment of the world," not only belied this famous sociological maxim in the highly technological and supremely modern context of aerial warfare but also demonstrated the competence of Anglican chaplaincy methods and the resilience of British '"Christendom" in the context of a war which is widely perceived as having exposed and exacerbated the weaknesses of both.On 22 October 1918, and amidst one of their thrice-yearly meetings at Lambeth Palace, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, announced to his fellow bishops a new development concerning armed forces chaplaincy. Less than a month before the end of the First World War, around two thousand clergy of the Church of England were engaged as commissioned chaplains in the British Army and Royal Navy, the vast majority (nearly 90 per cent) in the Army Chaplains' Department. 1 With nineteen items to discuss, theirs was a crowded agenda, and Davidson's news was largely a matter of report. Speaking on the subject of "Religious Services In English Aerodromes," and in response to the Bishop of Chelmsford, John Watts Ditchfield, who had aired concerns about "the inadequate provision at