Coningham : a Biography of Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham, KCB, KBE, DSO, MC, DFC, AFC

by Vincent Orange

Air Marshal Sir Arthur "Mary" Coningham KCB, KBE, DSO, MC, DFC, AFC (19 January 1895 – presumably 30 January 1948) was a senior officer in the Royal Air Force. During the First World War, he was at Gallipoli with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, was discharged in New Zealand as medically unfit for active service, and journeyed to Britain at his own expense to join the Royal Flying Corps, where he became a flying ace. Coningham was later a senior Royal Air Force commander during the Second World War, as Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief 2nd Tactical Air Force and subsequently the Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief Flying Training Command. Coningham is chiefly remembered as the person most responsible for the development of forward air control parties directing close air support, which he developed as commander of the Western Desert Air Force between 1941 and 1943, and as commander of the tactical air forces in the Normandy campaign in 1944. However he is frequently lauded as the "architect of modern air power doctrine regarding tactical air operations," based on three necessity of air superiority as first priority, centralised command of air operations co-equal with ground leadership, and innovative tactics in support of ground operations. On 30 January 1948, he disappeared along with all the other passengers and crew of the airliner G-AHNP Star Tiger when it vanished without a trace somewhere off the eastern coast of the United States in the Bermuda Triangle.

Paperback

First published February 22, 1990

About the author

George Vincent Orange was a British-born New Zealand historian of military aviation. A lecturer at the University of Canterbury for many years up until his retirement in 2002, he wrote several biographies of senior Royal Air Force officers, including Hugh Dowding and Keith Park.

Reviews

[Eric Grounds · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Mary' Coningham was truly a man's man, and women loved him too. He was a fluent, natural leader, who always sought to provide more for his team than they expected. Work hard, play hard. A tragedy that he, like many important airmen of the Second World War, died in an aircraft crash