Hi Chug
IB, what is it about the RAF and its leaders that so enrages the RN?
Moving Australia! I joined the Navy hoping to fly as my father had, in the same entry as the "bearded one", of whom the less said, probably the better, but unlike whom I fell foul of the sudden reduction in the need for aviators, thanks to the RAF cheating in their presentation to an innocent, and ill-informed, Denis Healy, which led to the cancellation of the carrier programme.
You don't have to talk up Admiral Cunningham.
I'm glad we agree on that, but ...
... and yet the tremendous victories achieved; ... and most vital of all Mers el Kebir. The latter was an example of how war requires tough mindedness
Actually Mers-el-Kebir was not Cunningham, but Somerville and a disaster. The French Navy has never forgiven us. Cunningham, at the other end of the Med, by incredible diplomacy and bluff, persuaded the French admiral to surrender - exactly the opposite of the gung-ho aggressiveness that you seem to admire in Harris.
Because he wouldn't divert his heavies to the Battle of the Atlantic? It wasn't his call but the Air Staff's.
Almost certainly true but don't tell me that his voice in Churchill's ear didn't have a strong effect on the aircraft production and deplyment priorities
Finally, hero? What's that got to do with the price of fish? Commanders at his level must be leaders, it is those they lead that are the heroes.
Both. For many years England's greatest hero was Nelson, in whose company (but not league) I'd class many RAF commanders, Dowding and Park for example (but not Tedder). But of course, and this is where the whole argument gets very tricky, amongst that list of heroes, I'd include every single one of those men who each night climbed into their bombers knowing their chances of safe return were ... what? less than 10%, anyway