Arthur Tedder, 1st Baron Tedder

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Arthur Tedder (centre) at the ceremony of the German unconditional surrender (May, 1945). Standing is Soviet General Zhukov reading the act of the surrender.

Marshal of the Royal Air Force Arthur William Tedder, 1st Baron Tedder, GCB (July 11, 1890–June 3, 1967) was a senior officer in the Royal Air Force and a significant British commander during World War II.

Arthur Tedder was born in Glenguin, 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.

Tedder joined 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. Commissioned into the new Royal Air Force (RAF) he became director of training from 1934 to 1936. Prior to World War II he was commander RAF Far Eastern Forces and was director general for research in the Air Ministry.

As head of the RAF Middle East Command in World War II, 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.

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 (1946–50). In 1947 he delivered the Lees Knowles Lecture, which was then published as Air Power in War. 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.

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.

[edit] Reference

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

[edit] Bibliography

• 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).
• Air Power in War. The Lees Knowles Lecture, 1947. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1948; reprint edition, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1975).
• With Prejudice: The War Memoirs of Marshal of the Royal Air Force, Lord Tedder (London: Cassell, 1966).

[edit] Biographical Sources

• 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.
• Vincent Orange, Tedder: Quietly in Command (London and Portland: Frank Cass Publishers, 2004). ISBN 0-7146-4817-5
• Roderick Owen, Tedder (London: Collins, 1952).