Spitfires in Japan (From Farnborough to the Far East. A Memoir)

‘Boy’ Bouchier, as he was known, who died in 1979, was both a remarkable ‘soldier’s soldier’ and a ‘diplomat’s diplomat’, combining battlefield courage and endurance with great leadership skills and a keen understanding of human nature. As a soldier in World War I in the Honourable Artillery Company, he found fighting the Senussi in the desert so gruelling, he recalls gazing up at the small aircraft of the Royal Air Corps and longing for a life that might be short but at least would be clean! He soon managed to get transferred to the RAC and learned to fly, so successfully, in fact, that, before long, he was training others and by the end of the war had become a talented test pilot. Between the wars, Bouchier went on to form the Royal Indian Air Force, successfully combating much prejudice in the process. In World War II he held key positions in Fighter Command and was Station Commander of Hornchurch during the Battle of Britain; he also both planned and supervised air cover for D-Day. By war’s end he was in the Far East, where he took the initial surrender of the Japanese in Burma, and went on to command the Commonwealth Forces of Occupation in Japan, after which he represented the British Chiefs of Staff at General MacArthur’s HQ during the Korean War and was responsible for bringing Britain into that war. This memoir, long-awaited by many, and skilfully edited for publication by Dorothy Britton (Lady Bouchier) concludes with Bouchier’s day with Winston Churchill and, in retirement, for the RAF, single-handedly achieving the funding for the rebuilding of St Clement Dane’s church in the Strand, London.