The Auster Mark III, IV and V were issued to twelve RAF, one Polish and three
Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) air observation post (AOP) Squadrons. The first to deploy was
651 Squadron. The leading elements landed in Algiers on 12 November 1942 with eight aircraft, eleven Royal Artillery (RA) pilots, 39 RA soldiers and 25 airmen (mostly maintenance technicians). The normal strength of an AOP squadron was 12 aircraft, 19 RA officers (all pilots), 83 RA other ranks and 63 RAF including two administrative officers. Aircraft were fitted with an Army No 22 Wireless, an HF set providing two-way voice communications with artillery units and formations on the ground. On 31 March 1943 Army Cooperation Command was disbanded, most of its assets being used to form the
Second Tactical Air Force. Four squadrons (651,
654 Squadron,
655 Squadron and
657 Squadron) fought in North Africa and Italy, being joined from August 1944 by
663 Polish squadron. The other seven RAF squadrons (Nos.
652,
653,
658,
659,
660,
661 and
662) operated after D-Day in France, the Low Countries and into Germany.
664 Squadron,
665 Squadron, and
666 Squadron RCAF were also issued with the Auster Mk. IV and V, formed at
RAF Andover in late 1944 and early 1945. The RCAF squadrons were manned by Canadian personnel of the
Royal Canadian Artillery and the RCAF, with brief secondment to the squadrons with pilots from the Royal Artillery; control was maintained in Britain by 70 Group,
RAF Fighter Command. The three squadrons deployed from RAF Andover to the Netherlands, to Dunkirk in France, where the last Canadian 'shots' in Europe were fired and later to occupied Germany.
656 Squadron RAF was assigned to the
Fourteenth Army and used Austers in Burma, generally with flights assigned to each corps. In the European theatre a squadron was generally assigned to each corps but under command for technical matters of an RAF group. The
16 AOP Flight and
17 AOP Flight of the
Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) operated Auster Mark III aircraft in support of the
Australian Army in the
Pacific War from October 1944 until the end of the war. Postwar Auster AOP aircraft were reorganised into independent flights (probably because the RAF used Wing-Commanders, equivalent to Lieutenant-Colonels, to command squadrons while the army insisted on Majors) including 1903 Flight in Korea that had artillery pilots from several Commonwealth countries. There was also an Auster-equipped 1913 Liaison Flight. Air OP flights also operated in the Malayan Emergency. Several AOP squadrons were reformed within the
Royal Auxiliary Air Force in 1949 and these operated some AOP.5s,
AOP.6s and AOP.9s until at least March 1957, when the Auxiliary Air Force was disbanded. All Auster AOP units were transferred to the
Army Air Corps when it was formed in September 1957, with AAC squadrons using numbers starting with 651. The air observation duties, counter-insurgency and casualty evacuation performed by Auster and similar
light aircraft were generally taken over by light
helicopters from the mid-1960s. Several Taylorcraft Austers formed, with other civil light aircraft, part of the initial equipment of the
Sherut Avir, formed in November 1947 as the air component of the Jewish paramilitary organisation
Haganah, which later became part of the
Israeli Air Force. They were supplemented early in 1948 by six ex-RAF Austers that had been assembled from hulks of 25 aircraft purchased as scrap. These aircraft formed the core of Israel's air force in the early part of the
1947–1949 Palestine war, being used for reconnaissance and supply missions, while also being used to drop home-made bombs on Arab forces. ==Variants==