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Up for sale a VERY RARE! "Flying Ace" Arthur Coningham Hand Written Envelope Dated 1943. This item is certified authentic by JG
Autographs and comes with their Certificate of Authenticity.
ES-4301
Air Marshal Sir Arthur "Mary" 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
principles: 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. Coningham was born in Brisbane, Queensland, on 19 January 1895. His early life was one that made
him learn to be adaptable. His father, also Arthur Coningham,
was noted for playing Test cricket, but was by
disposition a con man who was exposed in court for fabricating legal evidence
in a trial designed to extort a Catholic priest, Denis Francis O'Haran,
secretary to the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney. The resulting scandal drove the
older Arthur Coningham to remove the Coningham family to New Zealand while
Coningham was still young. The change of scene to New Zealand did not
change the father's modus operandi; he spent six months imprisoned there resilient enough and sufficiently motivated to win a scholarship to Wellington College.
Although Coningham had won a scholarship, he was not an academic star. However,
he was athletic and an outdoorsman, with expertise in horsemanship and divorced when he was seventeen; grounds were his father's infidelity.
Arthur Coningham was maturely assured enough to remark, "Look here,
Coningham, you may be my father, but I am ashamed of you." The comment
reflects Coningham's persona; he was abstemious by nature, being a non-smoker,
near teetotaler and impatient with obscene
language.