Park: The Biography of Air Chief Marshal Sir Keith Park, GCB, KBE, MC, DFC, DCL

by Vincent Orange

still, the crater’s edges were promptly manned by numerous

Park was also a soldier and an officer before he became an airman. He knew what it was to be in the ranks and had been taught what an officer should do. He had himself marched across the country he later flew over: he knew what it was like down there, he knew what information or help soldiers needed from him and he knew how to win the cooperation of his men in providing that information or help.

Reflecting in 1922 on the lessons he had learned during the war, Park made four points. Firstly, in a future war, squadrons should be more widely dispersed on the ground, but even if they were, continuous bombing – night and day – should be necessary to put an aerodrome out of action. Secondly, ground-strafing would best be carried out by small, fast, agile scouts with two or more forward-firing guns. Thirdly, he believed that ‘close escorts are not as effective as offensive patrols over selected areas where opposition is likely to be encountered.’ And fourthly, Park believed that ‘against an enemy of equally high morale, we shall be forced to study tactics on the ground, instead of leaving decisions and methods to be devised on the spot.’

Park always insisted that Fighter Command was not created between 1936 and 1939; not even Dowding’s driving force could have got it ready in time for war without the decade of effort before 1936.

He cited the example of Brazil’s Military Air Mail Service. The aircraft and engines used were American (Waco and Curtiss Wright), they performed well and the Brazilian authorities were therefore in favour of American equipment. Although the service was expensive, it offered a first-class training to aircrews and ground staffs and provided a rapid, economical means of communication in an enormous country which was short of roads and railways. Park’s

Ramsay at Dover had borrowed from the army some Lysander aircraft to work systematically with rescue launches and the use of fluorescine

enemy aircraft but does not achieve our main aim, which

In Churchill’s opinion, ‘jealousies and cliquism’ were rife in the Air Ministry.

between one observer area and another. Thirdly,

‘To my dying day,’ he said in 1968, ‘I shall feel bitter at the base intrigue which was used to remove Dowding and myself as soon as we had won the battle.’ Leigh-Mallory, recalled Park, showed no generosity in victory: ‘He did not even bother to attend to the usual formality of taking over from me, so I handed over to my Senior Air Staff Officer.’

Too many senior officers at that time were quite ignorant about aircraft performance and the needs of their pilots, but Park had studied both.

However, he did not hesitate. Quite simply, he agreed to supply General Slim’s Fourteenth Army from the air throughout its advance on Rangoon. It was an immense undertaking, calling for the greatest supply operation of the war. Park’s aircraft would sustain an army of more than 300,000 men, fighting in a country mostly unsuitable for aerial operations. But Park agreed to carry nearly 1,900 tons of supplies every day from 20 March and a little over 2,000 tons every day from 1 April. If the Japanese could be beaten in the central Burmese plains around Mandalay in a short campaign, the port of Rangoon might fall before the monsoon began in June and the reconquest of Burma would be practically complete. The penalty for failure would be severe: if Rangoon was not taken by June, Park’s transport squadrons would have to continue supplying the Fourteenth Army throughout five months of steady rain.

Christopher Courtney, Air Member for Supply and Organization,

Slim’s army was almost entirely maintained by the American Combat Cargo Task Force, and the British 221 Group provided most of his artillery support.

Park also visited the headquarters of the US Tenth Air Force at Bhamo in north Burma and called at Myitkyina East to watch the despatch of supplies across the Hump to China. As at all American stations, he was greatly impressed by the amount of equipment available, domestic as well as military, and the efficient methods employed.

In the South Pacific, where transport difficulties were as taxing as in Burma or India, Australian and American forces had numerous live shows arranged for them right up to the front line. But virtually nothing was done in South-East Asia, where at least seventeen per cent of personnel were ineffective because of sickness caused by the alien climate and bad conditions.

how dependent the army had been on air support for its victory in the battle for Mandalay. Undisputed aerial superiority enabled close support squadrons to concentrate on accurate firing and also permitted the carriage of whole divisions up to the battle zone, together with the bulk of their supplies.

on the Western Front ‘the Armies of Liberation are advancing under the protecting wings of the Air Forces. But here in Burma our Armies are advancing on the wings of the Allied Air Forces.’

A week later, he sent Portal a ‘strictly personal’ signal to warn him that Mountbatten had signalled London alleging that extraordinary efforts would be needed to cover the deficit in air supply. That signal, said Park, had been sent without his knowledge and did not represent the correct situation. He had already strengthened the maintenance backing by transferring to Dakotas personnel and resources from other aircraft types and had also borrowed Dakota spares from the USAAF Servicing Command and improved field maintenance.

Park appointed a Maintenance Investigation Team in April to examine and compare methods and rates of aircraft replacement, repair, inspection and wastage in the RAF and USAAF, in order to see if the performance of the British organization could be improved. His aim, he told Leslie Holl-inghurst, head of Base Air Forces, South-East Asia (BAFSEA), was to ensure that every hundred American aircraft allotted to the RAF produced as good a flying effort as an equal number of USAAF aircraft doing the same job. He knew that the Americans had more of everything: All right, let us shout and bullyrag the Air Ministry until our squadrons enjoy the same good facilities as our Allies. Let us raise our standards and go one better than our American cousins, but for heaven’s sake don’t let us sit down and accept the lower standards of the past.

Leese had set up his headquarters at Hastings Air Base, near Calcutta, alongside those of George E. Stratemeyer, who had unfortunately been given operational control of Allied air forces long before Park had reached South-East Asia.

Stratemeyer, as an American airman, was used to obeying orders from the army and Leese was now dominating him.

It was with Leese in mind that Park wrote to the Director of Air Information, Eastern Air Command, on 27 April, enclosing comments by a visiting British journalist on the lack of publicity for air force achievements in South-East Asia. Greater publicity, said Park, would not only be deserved and a boost to morale, it would prevent the army from receiving ‘a disproportionate share of the credit which might serve to strengthen any move of theirs postwar to demand a separate Army Air Force.’ He drew attention in his April report to Slim’s Order of the Day (16 April) in which he had said: ‘Nor could there have been any victory at all without the constant ungrudging support of the Allied Air Forces. It is their victory as much as ours.’ Park wanted this tribute widely publicized. Otherwise, the postwar integrity of the air force would be jeopardized by a belief that the air was ancillary to the ground effort and that the direction of air warfare could therefore be undertaken by soldiers.

Park signalled Stratemeyer on 24 May to pay tribute to the work of his command since December 1943 in helping to obtain air supremacy in Burma, without which air supply would have been impossible. He emphasized that American transport squadrons had carried the greater part of the airlift in support of British land forces in Burma. Without them, ‘we could not have defeated the Japanese Army so rapidly and decisively in 1945.’

On 7 August he wrote to Air Marshal Sir Richard Peck at the Air Ministry to ask for his help in getting a really first-class writer of international reputation to come out and write the story of air power. The chance to emphasize as clearly as possible the fact that no navy or army could fight a major battle successfully until the air battle had been fought and won should not be missed.

The next day, he got from Mountbatten himself some of the recognition he sought for the achievements of air power. ‘No Army in history,’ said Mountbatten in a radio broadcast from London, ‘has even contemplated fighting its way through Burma from the north until now, not even in Staff College studies. The Japs came in the easy way and we pushed them out the hard way.’ To keep the troops supplied, Mountbatten had asked the air forces to fly at double the authorized rates per month. It has been by far the biggest lift of the war, ‘though heaven knows most other theatres had many more transport aircraft and they didn’t have the monsoon and the jungle to fight.’

At a press conference on 9 August, Mountbatten paid generous tribute to Park, ‘who has brought with him the fighting spirit which he showed in the Battle of Britain and the Battle of Malta.’ The campaign certainly turned round the Mountbatten-Slim axis. Men with little in common save ‘the power of commanding affection while communicating energy’, they har-nessed and drove the Allied forces to victory. However, the contribution of air power to the defeat of the ...

From the moment of the surrender, the liberation and transport of about 125,000 surviving prisoners, civilian and military, women and children, became Park’s principal concern.

Park spoke of ‘the greatest mercy mission of the war’ in a message to his tireless air and ground crews – tireless because the joy of those released made up for everything. There was, however, the agonizing fact that aircraft could move ex-prisoners more quickly than the system could handle them: if the uplift from Bangkok and Saigon, for example, was not strictly controlled, accommodation in Rangoon would be crowded out before shipping was available to take them home.

Park visited the island late in October, en route to an American base at Kunming in China, and wrote to Harcourt while flying from there home to Kandy. He would try to open regular air services to Hong Kong from Calcutta and Singapore, he said, and also to stage flying-boats through Shanghai.

On Park’s orders, Stevens used Japanese aircraft and aircrews to assist in the withdrawal of former prisoners from the interior of Java and Sumatra. At first, he restricted the use of Japanese aircraft to freight work in case lives should be lost through the use of uncertain equipment, but during a visit to Java in December, Park found that unless he authorized the use of Japanese aircraft to carry passengers, evacuation would be delayed and suffering prolonged among the thousands still to be rescued. He would also be placing a still heavier burden upon his own hard-worked men and machines. Consequently, he recommended that the risk of using Japanese aircraft and crews, under Stevens’s control, be accepted. The Air Ministry and the Chiefs of Staff agreed.

In addition to setting up subordinate formations far from Kandy and seeking a new basis for relations with old allies, Park was also deeply concerned with the problems of flying home enormous numbers of soldiers and airmen. This task attracted the closest scrutiny from both the politicians and the services because the government had promised that releases at home would keep in step with those from abroad; in effect, every man returned enabled about five to be released in Britain. Responsibility for air trooping was divided between Transport Command and ACSEA and relations between two such far-flung empires, one centred in London, the other in Kandy (and later in Singapore) were unavoidably uneasy.

Carr signalled him from India on 13 October to say that a great deal of dissatisfaction had been caused by ministerial statements and press articles which showed the RAF’s release rate to be well behind that of the other services. The Air Ministry must explain why, said Carr, or there would be serious unrest in India. Park agreed and so informed Slessor, who drew his attention to a statement made in the House of Commons by the Under-Secretary of State for Air, John Strachey, on the 12th. According to Strachey, an immense transport task faced Britain over the next nine months in getting men and women home. Between now and 30 June 1946, he said, one million service personnel had to be moved. A larger proportion of airmen than of other servicemen must therefore be retained to move those people. The RAF faced a difficult time, Strachey admitted, but these were not tasks that recruits could perform. Park

The ejection of the Japanese from Burma had been made possible, in Park’s view, by air power – both air supply and direct support of land forces. Air supply depended on good ground organization. Unfortunately, this had not been appreciated by the army authorities, whose attitude had been consistently parsimonious and compared poorly with that of the Americans. They had understood more clearly than British commanders that once air superiority had been achieved, the availability of airfields and transport aircraft governed the maintenance and supply of forces in the fields. The Japanese had failed to appreciate the importance of the air supply organization and had used their fighters only against forward troops.

The value of air supply was appreciated, continued the War Office, and it therefore regretted that Park should set out for posterity ‘a series of small faults on the Army side of air supply.’ There was much to learn in dealing with a problem never previously visualized, let alone tackled. The comparison with the Americans was unfair because they worked from bases established months before and lavishly equipped; the British had had to make do from hastily built bases stocked as best as possible. Numerous changes to Park’s text were suggested, four of which had particular substance. One, that the prime cause of Japan’s defeat in Burma had been the victory of the British infantry; air supply and support had not been, in the army’s opinion, the prime cause. Eventually and reluctantly, Park accepted this. Two, although Park had said, justly, that without air supply the campaign could not have been successful, it was equally true that without ‘horrific efforts’ by the army to provide airfields, fuel and bomb dumps, air supply could never have been exploited.

Three, he had given the impression that the construction of the Ledo Road (the line of communication for Stilwell’s Chinese-American forces) had been an army decision. The War Office insisted that it had been a political decision, made before the value of air supply had been proved. Although the road had been begun by the British, American engineers had continued and completed it and it had been entirely under American control. Park accepted that correction without reserve.