ARTHUR TEDDER, 1ST BARON TEDDER

(Redirected from Arthur William Tedder)

Marshal of the Royal Air Force 'Arthur William Tedder, 1st Baron Tedder', GCB (11 July 18903 June 1967) was a senior officer in the Royal Air Force and a significant British commander during the Second World War.

Contents
Early life
Military career
Later career
Family life
References

Early life


Arthur Tedder was born in Glenguin near Stirling, Scotland in 1890. He was the son of Sir Arthur John Tedder and Emily Charlotte Bryson. His father was distinguished as the Commissioner of the Board of Customs who devised the old age pension scheme. He was educated at Whitgift School and Magdalene College, Cambridge where he read history.

Military career


Tedder was commissioned into the Dorsetshire Regiment in 1913, then transferred to the Royal Flying Corps in 1916, serving in France from 1915 to 1917 and then in Egypt from 1918 to 1919. After the War, Tedder accepted a permanent commission in the new Royal Air Force (RAF) as a squadron leader. By 1931 Tedder had reached the rank of group captain and from 1934 to 1936 he served as Director of Training . Prior to World War II he was commander RAF Far Eastern Forces and was director general for research in the Air Ministry.
Portrait of the Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Middle East Forces, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder sitting at his desk at Air House, his official residence in Cairo, Egypt.

As head of the RAF Middle East Command in the Second World War, he commanded Allied air operations in the Mediterranean and North Africa, covering the evacuation of Crete in May 1941 and ''Operation Crusader'' in Africa. After experiencing victories and defeats supporting troops fighting General Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps, Tedder's air forces were key to the Allied victory at the Battle of El Alamein. One of his bombing tactics became known as the "Tedder Carpet".
Promoted to Air Marshal, Tedder was involved in the planning of the Allied invasion of Sicily. When Operation Overlord -- the invasion of France -- came to be planned, Tedder was appointed Deputy Supreme Commander beneath General Eisenhower. Finding himself with little responsibility in this new role he wrested control of the air planning for D-Day from the commander of the Allied Air Expeditionary Force, Trafford Leigh-Mallory.
Arthur Tedder (centre) at the ceremony of the German unconditional surrender (May, 1945). Standing is Soviet Marshal Zhukov reading the act of the surrender.

In the last year of the war Tedder was sent to Russia to seek assistance as the Western Front came under pressure during the Battle of the Bulge. When the unconditional surrender of the Germans came in May 1945 Tedder signed on behalf of General Eisenhower.
Knighted in 1942, Tedder was granted a peerage at the war's end. He followed Charles Portal as Chief of the Air Staff and served in that post from 1946 to 1950. In 1947 he delivered the Lees Knowles Lecture, which was then published as ''Air Power in War''.

Later career


Tedder was the author of a historical study of the Royal Navy and also composed his war memoirs. In 1950 he became chancellor of Cambridge University. In 1950 he served as the British representative on the military committee of NATO in Washington DC. He also served as Vice-Chairman of the Board of Governors of the BBC. He received at least six honorary LLD degrees, and was avidly interested in astronomy. In his later years he contracted Parkinson's Disease and died in Surrey in 1967.

Family life


He married Rosalinde Maclardy who was killed in a plane crash in Egypt in 1943, an event that Tedder witnessed. Tedder remarried but his second wife predeceased him by about two years. Tedder was the parent of: Dick (killed in France 1940), John Michael (1926-1994; Late Purdie Professor of Chemistry, University of St. Andrews), and a daughter Mina. His stepson Alasdair was also killed.

References



Air of Authority - A History of RAF Organisation - MRAF Tedder

★ ''Dictionary of National Biography, 1961-1970'' (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 1002-1005.

★ Obituary: "Lord Tedder - A Man of Destiny," ''RAF Quarterly'', 7 (Autumn 1967): 193-195.

★ Orange, Vincent. ''Tedder: Quietly in Command''. London and Portland, UK: Frank Cass Publishers, 2004. ISBN 0-7146-4817-5.

★ Probert, H. ''High Commanders of the Royal Air Force''. London: HMSO, 1991. ISBN 0-11-772635-4.

★ Roderick Owen. ''Tedder'' London: Collins, 1952.

★ Tedder, Arthur W.''Air Power in War''. The Lees Knowles Lecture, 1947. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1948; reprint edition, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1975).

★ ________. ''The Navy of the Restoration, from the death of Oliver Cromwell to the Treaty of Breda'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916; reprint edition, London: Cornmarket Press, 1970.

★ ________. ''With Prejudice: The War Memoirs of Marshal of the Royal Air Force, Lord Tedder''. London: Cassell, 1966.

This article provided by Wikipedia. To edit the contents of this article, click here for original source.

psst.. try this: add to faves
Featured Companies
Vacation By VVacation By V