Air-Marshal Sent To Orient

Northern Advocate, 13 January 1941, Page 8

Air-Marshal Sent To Orient

It is by no means just because the air service looms predominant in the present war that an Air Chief Marshal, Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, has been made Britain’s Commander-in-Chief in the Far East. Sir Robert, who recently arrived at Singapore, is one of the sort who emerge when crises face the British Empire, states the “Christian Science Monitor.”

Generally credited with being one of the originators of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, he came out to Ottawa with the British Air Mission in the fall of 1939 when the present gigantic enterprise with training schools right across Canada and swarms of airmen keeping hundreds of planes in the air daily, was merely being talked about. Possibly no one man has done more organising of military air developments. Only remaining officer left of the Air Battalion that preceded the World War, he started the Royal Air Force Staff College in England, was Commandant of the Imperial Defence College from 1931 to 1933, and spent the succeeding two years as Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Air Defence of Great Britain.

Civil Post in Iraq.

It was when Sir Robert was in Iraq, as head of the Iraq Air Command in 1928, that the sudden death of the High Commissioner caused him to step in the post in an acting capacity. This was his first service as a civil administrator’.

By 1938 he was occupying one of the most difficult posts in. the British Colonial Service —Governor of Kenya Colony, British East Africa, the most “temperamental” colony the Empire has ever possessed. Both in London and in Nairobi he is rated probably the most successful Governor Kenya has ever had.

There he found a country mainly suitable to farming, inhabited by a million or so aboriginal blacks and a few thousand whites, none of whom were farmers; retired army, navy and civil officers, younger sons, and explorers. Though Kenya possesses an elected Assembly, it is in perpetual minority to the Government, and the Colony is governed by Great Britain through a Governor, w'ho is the real authority. Kenya came near to staging a second Boston tea party in the early twenties. The settlers, not liking certain legislation originating in England, announced to the then Governor that the day it went into effect they would bundle him with his whole staff on the first boat headed for England and proceed to run the country themselves. They could have done it, too, because every settler had to be a hunter with guns and ammunition to stave wild game off his crops and cattle. Needless to say, the proposed legislation never weht into effect. This episode indicates the sort of community Sir Robert was later well able to handle.

Germans Rounded Up. With the crisis of September, 1938. Kenya hastily organised itself for the worst. This Sir Robert found a useful dress rehearsal, and when war actually broke out, comprehensive machinery of organisation was ready for action. The day war was declared, Sir Robert rounded up every* .German in the country, and this was a group as large as Canada’s entire lot of interned aliens at the end of a year of war. The black population gave not a threat of ti'ouble of any kind, but were deeply impressed by the mopping up of the German population without a shot being fired, since many of them could remember the hot fighting in East Africa during the World War, when. Germany began in possession of what is now Tanganyika, next door to Kenya Colony, Sir Robert commandeered every aeroplane in the country, a considerable number of private planes and the whole of the Wilson Air Line, which now form part of a small but wellorganised Kenya Air Force, whose exploits against the Italians are continually chronicled in the news. Sir Robert also had worked out a scheme for keeping the farms running, the fields producing both for food and for export. Kenya adopted universal service, all white males registered and listed as to physical fitness and general’ capacity. A central executive was established in the capital, Nairobi, with the job of seeing to it that all farms were financed and furnished.

with the necessary" seed, equipment, and labour for the duration. Blacks continued to do the manual labour. Farms were then handled in groups, with one white supervisor, perhaps a man physically unfit f6r active service, above age limit, or merely so much more useful as a farm administrator that he was not permitted to leave his post. In other words, armed only with authority that he could never execute against the will of the inhabitants, Sir Robert put through a complete mobilisation of the country, manpower, transport, farms and all. Long Service in, France.

Sir Robert reached France in the W rf orld War on, August 12, 1914, and .left only in February, 1919. After returning to England early in 1940, when the present air training agreement had been accepted, Sir Robert was sent out to South Africa on a similar mission as liaison officer-in-chief to the South African Air Ministry. He had absorbed Canada, through a leisurely trip to the coast, inspecting all the training field sites, getting the feel of the country, and no doubt making mental notes on many, many subjects non-military in nature. He now knows Africa as few men. do, from every angle.

Africa has seen much of the German, served as background of Germany’s finest accomplishments in colonisation. No one knows better than Sir Robert where it succeeded and where it failed as a coloniser. There must be many Germans somewhere in the world who would be moved today to hear Sir Robert’s appraisal of the contribution their particular race would have been specially fitted to make to the world’s development, had they been willing to work with the world as hard as they are now destroying it.