165. Independence and partition

The stimulus provided by the Second World War had raised RIAF personnel strength to 28,500 including some 1,600 officers, by the time hostilities terminated. In August 1945, No. 4 Squadron was designated a component unit of the British Commonwealth Occupation Forces in Japan, exchanging its Spitfire Vllls for Mk XlVs in October and arriving in Japan aboard HMS vengence on 23 April 1946.

Meanwhile, from late 1945, the remaining Hurricane-equipped RIAF fighter squadrons converted to the Spitfire at Kohat, Samungli and Risalpur and by mid-1946 the entire RIAF fighter force was Spitfire-equipped. The year 1946 also saw the establishment of the first RIAF transport unit, No.12 Squadron which had first been raised on Spitfires at Kohat in December 1945 and received C-47 Dakotas in Panagarh in late 1946. A decision had also been taken to re-equip the fighter squadrons with the Tempest II, and implementation of this decision began during the autumn of 1946, No. 3 Squadron at Kolar becoming the first to re-equip, followed by No.10 Squadron later in 1946.

Personnel strength had meanwhile been virtually halved to some 14,000 officers and men in the post-war rundown, but the British authorities had made their own assessment of India's post-war defence needs. As of October 1946, they envisaged expansion of the existing ten RIAF squadrons into a balanced force of twenty fighter, bomber and transport squadrons. Owing to the rapidly changing political situation, however, definitive decisions concerning Indian defence were, in the event, to be left to the emerging Government of Independent India.

No. 4 Squadron converted to the Tempest 11 upon its return to India from Japan and Nos.7 and 8 Squadrons also relinquished their Spitfires for the more efficacious Tempest fighter during the summer of 1947. Nos. 1 and 9 Squadrons, too, received Tempest lls at this time, but on 15 August 1947, and with the division of both India and its armed forces, these units stood down and their equipment was transferred to the newly created Royal Pakistan Air Force.