John Slessor

John Slessor (1943)

Sir John Cotesworth Slessor GCB , DSO , MC (born June 3, 1897 in Ranikhet , British India , † July 12, 1979 in Wroughton , Wiltshire ) was a British Air Force officer, most recently Marshal of the Royal Air Force , and Chief of the Air Staff from 1950 to 1952.

Life

Slessor was born the son of an officer of the Sherwood Foresters stationed in British India and trained at the Haileybury Public School on his return to England in 1903. Due to a poliomyelitis infection in his childhood, he suffered from paralysis in both legs, which led to his being rejected when he tried to enlist in the army in 1914 . But thanks to good family connections he was able to join the Royal Flying Corps as an officer in 1915 . During the First World War he served with the No. 17 Squadron in Sinai and Sudan , for which he received the Military Cross . After being wounded and returning to England, he came to the Western Front in April 1917 , where he served with No. 5 Squadron , an observation team, served. In the summer of 1918 he was promoted to temporary major and transferred to the Central Flying School as an instructor.

After the armistice, Slessor temporarily resigned from service, but after four months he was employed as a flight lieutenant in the Royal Air Force and served for a time with the No. 20 Squadron on the north-western border of British India. In 1923 he returned to the motherland to take up a post in the Air Ministry . He attended RAF Staff College and after three years was No. 4 Squadron at Farnborough , was appointed to the Directorate of Operations and Intelligence in 1928. From 1931 to 1932 he attended Staff College Camberley , where he then taught until 1934. From 1935 to 1937 he served again in India, where he published his most important work Air Power and Armies in 1936 . This was followed by promotion to Group Captain and post as Deputy Director and Director of Plans . From January 1939 he also held the post of Air ADC of King George VI.

Promoted to Air Commodore on the first day of World War II , Slessor was the Director of Plans for the planning of the unrealized Operation Pike , the bombing of the Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus due to the Hitler-Stalin Pact . In the spring of 1941 he took part in the ABC-1 talks with the US military . In May 1941 he assumed command of No. 5 Bomber Group . In April 1942 he was appointed Assistant Chief of the Air Staff and as such took part in the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, at which the Combined Bomber Offensive against the German Reich was decided. In February 1943, at the height of the Battle of the Atlantic , Slessor was appointed Commander in Chief of the Coastal Command . In June 1943 he was knighted as Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB). In January 1944 he was transferred to the Mediterranean , where he was Deputy Ira C. Eakers as Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces and at the same time Commander-in-Chief of the British Air Force units in this area. In April 1945 he was appointed Air Member for Personnel . His temporary rank as Air Marshal was confirmed in June 1945.

At the beginning of 1948 Slessor succeeded William Slim as commandant of the Imperial Defense College for two years . In June 1948 he was raised to the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath (GCB). He then took over the post of Chief of the Air Staff and was promoted as such to Marshal of the Royal Air Force in June 1950. His three-year term in office was marked by the Korean War and the beginning of the British atomic bombing fleet, what he called the V-Force . In retirement he published the autobiography The Central Blue (1956) and the work on nuclear doctrine The Great Deterrent (1957). From 1962 to 1966 he served as High Sheriff of Somerset and from 1969 as Deputy Lieutenant of Somerset. He died at the age of 82 at the Princess Alexandra Hospital on RAF Wroughton.

The Slessor glacier in Antarctica is named after Slessor .

literature

• Vincent Orange: Slessor: Bomber Champion. The Life of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Slessor, GCB, DSO, MC. Grub Street, London 2006, ISBN 978-1-904943-57-0 .

Web links

Commons : John Slessor  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• Marshal of the RAF Sir John Slessor on rafweb.org
• Bomber Command group commanders on raf.mod.uk

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Knights and Dames: SEL – SU at Leigh Rayment's Peerage

predecessor	Office	successor
Arthur Tedder	Chief of the Air Staff 1950–1952	William Dickson