Robert Brooke-Popham

Air Marshal Brooke-Popham (left) with General Archibald Wavell , who later became the ABDACOM in chief

Sir Henry Robert Moore Brooke-Popham , GCVO , KCB , CMG , DSO , AFC , ( 18 September 1878 - 20 October 1953 ) was a British Air Marshal in the Royal Air Force . At the beginning of the Pacific War in Southeast Asia he was Commander in Chief of the British Far East Command .

Life

Born Henry Robert Moore Brooke in 1904, he added the name Popham, the surname of an ancestor he valued who was purveyor to the British court .

After graduating from Haileybury and Imperial Service College and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst , he began his service in the British Army in 1898 . In the Second Boer War he served between 1899 and 1900 in the Orange Free State , Transvaal , the Orange River Colony and the Cape Colony . During the 1911 maneuvers, Brooke-Popham was assigned to a flight battalion, and he decided to get his pilot's license . In July of the same year he acquired the Royal Flying Corps license No. 108 . In the following years he became the first in command of the Royal Air Force College and the Imperial Defense College . Between 1933 and 1935 he held the post of Air Officer Commanding, Fighting Area and was thus responsible for the entire air defense of the United Kingdom. Before the introduction of radar , Brooke-Popham had a number of acoustic listening stations set up across the country to monitor the airspace. His far-reaching plans to equip a fighter plane with a closed cockpit and eight machine guns , however, met with little recognition. In 1937 he retired from the military at his own request and was governor of Kenya for two years .

From November 1940 Brooke-Popham served as Commander in Chief of the British Far East Command. In this role he endeavored to expand the defense of the British colonies on the Malay Peninsula , Singapore and North Borneo . However, the decisions to defend Singapore had been made before his appointment, so that the Japanese invasion from early December 1941 could not be stopped with the few resources available. At the end of December, Air Marshal Brooke-Popham was replaced by Lieutenant General Henry Pownall .

Between 1944 and 1946 Brooke-Popham was President of the British Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes . In addition, he was Inspector General of the Air Training Corps until 1945 .

Henry Robert Moore Brooke-Popham died in 1953.

Web links

• Administrative / Biographical history of Brooke-Popham at Liddell Hart Center for Military Archives (English)