I have to agree with the comments about Keith Park.
I do volunteer work in an old people's home and one of the fellows who I see there, whose name is Monty, was Keith Park's dentist. (OK, I'll agree, on the three degrees of separation scale, a pretty tenuous one.) Monty's an interesting character - 96 going on 65 if you get my drift; still drives his own car, bright as a button, and has quite a few stories about working the system to his own advantage during the war, late in the war, by then a Sqn Ldr, commandeering a Mosquito (with pilot) every weekend to visit a girlfriend in Glasgow (from near London) as he couldn't make the journey both ways by train, but train back to base was do-able if he could fly up by Mosquito on Friday afternoon.
He speaks very highly of Park while Park was AOC Malta (where he was sent [supposedly into career oblivion] after daring to play a major role in winning the BoB, but where he played a relatively major (again successful) role in the defence of Malta in what was a very critical period of the Middle East war).
Monty tells of Keith Park turning up one at the day at the base dental section to have a filling done and asking Monty if he'd like to join him on his pinnace the following day.
Flight Lieutenants who are invited to join the AOC anywhere do not say 'no',so whatever he was doing the following day was dropped. He joined Park, not knowing that the AOC, who, because of security considerations, could not say that he was inviting him to join him to witness the whole Italian fleet steaming into Valetta Harbour under the black flag of surrender.
I'm still a little awe-struck when I think that (a) I know a man who's peered into the mouth of of Sir Keith Park, and (b) that that same man was one of the 50 or so people who actually witnessed the surrender of the Italian fleet in 1943.