Obituaries

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Morris 'Dick' Jeppson at 87; weapons specialist armed the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima
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On Aug. 6, 1945, Jeppson and another man armed the bomb called 'Little Boy' aboard the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay. The bombing is credited with bringing an early end to WWII.
Morris "Dick" Jeppson, a weapons specialist who was mid-flight when he completed arming the first atomic bomb, which the Enola Gay B-29 Superfortress dropped on Hiroshima in World War II, has died. He was 87.

Jeppson, a retired scientist and businessman, died March 30 of complications related to old age at Summerlin Hospital Medical Center in Las Vegas, said his wife, Molly.

The historic combat mission on Aug. 6, 1945, was the only one Jeppson ever flew.

Worried about his family's safety, he remained silent for decades about his role in the attack that killed at least 80,000 people, leveled two-thirds of the Japanese city and ignited controversy for having unleashed atomic power as a weapon.

When the Army Air Forces unit that flew the mission gathered in 1995, Jeppson attended and spoke in public about the bombing for the first time.

"You had a job to do, you just did it," Jeppson had often said since then.

The mission is credited with helping to bring an early end to the war. Three days after the bombing of Hiroshima, another B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, prompting the Japanese surrender.

Navigator Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk, 89, the only surviving member of the 12-man Enola Gay crew, told The Times that Jeppson was "quiet, efficient and businesslike" during the mission. "He wasn't the type of guy to blow his own horn."

Jeppson, one of several men trained to arm the bomb, was a 23-year-old second lieutenant when he was chosen to climb into the bomb bay on a coin toss.

With him was weaponeer Navy Capt. William "Deak" Parsons. Together they began arming the bomb with Jeppson acting as assistant, handing over tools.

"They did that very early in the mission, in the first half hour," said Dick Daso, curator of Modern Military Aircraft at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. "After that, they had to come inside the cabin because the bomb bay wasn't pressurized."

A few hours later, Jeppson made a final visit to the bay to change out three green safety plugs -- each "the size of a saltshaker," he later said -- for the red plugs that armed the bomb.

He made his way to the cockpit and told the plane's pilot, Col. Paul W. Tibbets Jr., that the bomb called "Little Boy" was set to go.

Once Jeppson felt the B-29 jerk up, he knew the bomb had been dropped.

"People were looking down and seeing this enormous cloud coming up and the destruction spreading," Jeppson told Time magazine in 2005. "And that's the point that it's somber because you know a lot of people are getting destroyed down there in the city."

After the 12-plus-hour flight, the plane returned to Tinian Island in the Pacific, where Jeppson was unexpectedly greeted by a good friend who was a Navy lieutenant. They were sharing dinner when a Navy officer asked Jeppson, "What did you do today?" he recounted in Time. "I said, 'I think we ended the war today.' "

Morris Richard Jeppson was born June 23, 1922, in Logan, Utah, one of three sons of Robert and Elsie Jeppson. While he was growing up in Carson City, Nev., his father worked in agricultural education for the state.

At 19, Jeppson joined the military and was part of a group that spent 10 months studying engineering and radar at Yale and Harvard universities and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

With several others, he was assigned to remote Wendover, Utah, and the 509th Composite Group. It was the first military unit formed to wage nuclear war.

At the end of the Enola Gay mission, Jeppson kept a few of the plugs that signified his role in the bombing. When he sold two of them for $167,500 at auction in 2002, the federal government claimed they were classified material and tried, but failed, to block the sale.

After the war, Jeppson studied toward a doctorate in physics at UC Berkeley, working at its radiation laboratory and the Lawrence Livermore laboratory.

He also founded a number of companies, including Applied Radiation Corp., which built electron-beam accelerators for nuclear physics research, and Cryodry Corp., a maker of industrial microwave ovens.

A longtime resident of Carmel, Calif., he retired to Las Vegas 20 years ago.

In addition to Molly, his wife of 48 years, Jeppson is survived by a brother, four daughters, two sons, 11 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.
 
"Mr Höss told me, as unemotionally as if he were talking at the breakfast table, that 2.5 million people were killed at Auschwitz."

There can have been little in his legal training or service in the United States Navy that prepared Whitney Harris, then in his mid-thirties, for his encounters with many of the worst Nazi war criminals. His three-day interrogation of the former commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, was part of Harris's work as a member of the US prosecuting team at the International Military Tribunal which tried Third Reich figures in Nuremberg in 1945 and 1946.

It was a challenge demanding legal skills, tenacious research and the psychological ability to cope with the revelations of Nazi barbarity. Höss suddenly became available as a potential witness when he was captured by the British after most of the evidence had been gathered for the trials.

The aim at Nuremberg was to assemble, from the postwar chaos of Europe, what Harris called "an irrefutable record set of what happened under the Nazi regime", as well as a case against the worst perpetrators that would secure their punishment and establish new principles of international law. So Harris had to hear Höss describe what he had done at Auschwitz while retaining the detachment of the legal mind.

The revelation of 2.5 million deaths, Harris recalled, "did not unnerve me, it affected me like a statistic. If, however, he had described the death of a single child, I would have been shocked."

It seemed hard to link the often pathetic-looking figures on trial with what they done at the height of their power. Harris later told the German magazine Der Spiegel that Höss "was not in the least bit imposing; there was nothing about him that suggested a monstrous murderer".

Before the trials, Harris later admitted: "I did not have the slightest idea of the scale of genocide that had taken place . . . we didn't have much solid evidence." But, by the painstaking assembly of factual evidence through interrogation and the sifting of many documents, Harris and his prosecuting colleagues were able to build a case that secured convictions and revealed much to the outside world about how the Holocaust had come about.

Höss (who would later be tried and executed near to the scene of his crimes in Poland) was used in evidence for the broader case that Harris was compiling against Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who had been chief of the Reich main security office, and against two of its principal agencies, the Gestapo and the security service or SD. This investigation helped to reveal the origins of the mass extermination of Jews and others in Eastern Europe before the death camps were established, in particular the horrific work of the Einsatzgruppen, special units that followed behind the advance of the German Army eastward in 1941.

In another grimly successful interrogation, Harris heard Otto Ohlendorf, who had commanded one of the Einsatzgruppen, admit that his men had murdered 90,000 men, women and children in 1941 alone.

Such confessions were combined with documentary evidence gathered as far as possible amid the rubble of the Reich and its former territories. "We were really surprised at the documentation we were able to come up with," said Harris, who began his work at Nuremberg armed only with a second-hand typewriter and the help of a secretary. "I went through Gestapo offices and dug through rubbish and found documents ordering the extermination of Jews. We scurried all over Europe getting evidence."

The case against Kaltenbrunner became formidable. While "most of the defendants admitted that war crimes and the Holocaust had occurred but tried to play down their own individual involvement", Harris sensed that "Kaltenbrunner did not believe he would be spared". He was the only one of the defendants sentenced to death who did not appeal.

It was all a far cry from the professional legal routine that Harris had settled into a decade or so earlier. Born in 1912 in Seattle, the son of a car salesman, he graduated in 1933 from Washington University and then, as jobs were hard to find in the Depression, continued studies at the University of California law school.

After working as a lawyer in Los Angeles for five years he joined the US Navy as his country joined the war in 1941, served in the Pacific and became an officer, before in 1945 he was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services, an intelligence agency, investigating war crimes in Europe. Based in London, he began to work with Justice Robert Jackson, who had been sent by the US to London to prepare for the indictment and trial of Nazi leaders. Harris joined Jackson's team, which then moved to Nuremberg to begin the prosecutions in collaboration with other teams from the victorious Second World War powers. He was there from August 1945 until October 1946.

As well as preparing his own cases, Harris had a ringside seat at the macabre theatre in the Nuremberg courtroom, making his own assessments of the different defendants. There was Julius Streicher, former publisher of the particularly vile anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer, "without a doubt the most unpleasant of them all". Albert Speer, Hitler's former architect who escaped a death sentence, "made a very positive impression because he did not try to talk his way out of it". And there was Hermann Goering, former head of the Luftwaffe, arrogant to the last, who "assumed the role of leader of the defendants", trying to "challenge the prosecution in every possible way".

There were even moments of black humour, when the prosecution tripped up Rudolf Hess, once Hitler's deputy, who ludicrously claimed to be suffering from complete amnesia.

When the trials came to an end Harris also witnessed the final drama, as Jackson's personal representative at the hanging of those sentenced to death in the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg on the night of October 15, 1946. Goering cheated the executioners by committing suicide. But early the next day, recounted Harris, "two trucks, carrying eleven caskets, left the prison compound . . . bound for Dachau Concentration Camp, near Munich, where . . . the bodies were burned in ovens which had been designed, and used, for Dachau prisoners".

After Nuremberg, Harris worked in the late 1940s as legal adviser to the US military government in Berlin as the Cold War began to intensify. He then returned to the US to pursue an academic and private career in law.

But the Nuremberg experiences continued to dominate his thoughts. In 1954 he published a book, Tyranny on Trial, giving a full account of the prosecutions and what they had uncovered. He was a regular contributor to seminars and media accounts of those momentous months.

He also campaigned vigorously for a permanent international court to uphold what he saw as the principles that the Nuremberg trials had established. Nuremberg, he pointed out, had been established only in retrospect, after the crimes had been committed. A permanent court would mean that "no one — whether general, or head of state — could ever say again, he didn't know that he would be called to account for his actions".

As proposals for an International Criminal Court advanced, Harris was dismayed that the US, which had taken such a strong lead in prosecuting in Nuremberg, now refused to accept the jurisdiction of the new court. But he took great pleasure in his invitation in 2000 to witness the German state accede to the court's jurisdiction in Berlin. This was, he said, final recognition by the Germans that "what we did in Nuremberg was right".

Those months in 1945 and 1946 had been not only a huge legal challenge, but also the most testing of times for a young man suddenly confronted with the human detail of the Holocaust. That experience haunted him, and he could be pessimistic. "I believe there is a God; I believe God is merciful and just, but if Man desires to destroy himself, I believe God will not save him," he once said. But the Nuremberg trials, he believed, stood "firmly against the resignation of Man to the tyranny of evil leaders".

Harris was married in 1964 to Jane Foster, who predeceased him, in 1999. He is survived by his second wife, Anna Galakatos, and by a son, three stepsons and a stepdaughter.

Whitney Harris, lawyer and prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, was born on August 12, 1912. He died on April 21, 2010, aged 97
 
Posted to 603 Squadron in the spring of 1942, John Mejor was among 47 Spitfire pilots launched on April 20 from the American aircraft carrier Wasp in the Mediterranean north of Algiers, from where they made the 667-mile flight to Malta. There they were welcomed as a reinforcement to the air defences of the beleaguered island, but Malta's joy was to be short lived.

Enemy intelligence had learnt of the Spitfires' arrival and both the Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica launched a series of devastating attacks, catching many of the Spitfires on the ground. It was the beginning of a summer of intense air combat as the Axis air forces based on Sicily strained every nerve to neutralise Malta's threat to Rommel's supply lines in North Africa.

Mejor flew 48 sorties over the island and the convoys that brought it desperately needed supplies. Among these was Operation Pedestal whose arrival — albeit after huge losses — in Grand Harbour in August 1942 was vital to the island's survival. The tanker Ohio entering Valletta under tow in a sinking condition with her decks almost awash has become one of the imperishable images of the Mediterranean war.

As a flight commander of 1435 Squadron Mejor flew four sorties over the Pedestal convoy, repelling dive-bombing attacks on a number of ships by Ju87s and coming to the aid of the badly damaged MV Melbourne Star, which was a sitting duck as she limped painfully towards Malta. He thwarted an attack by an Italian flying boat, a strafing run by an Me109 and at mast height chased off three Ju88 bombers which menaced her. As a result the Melbourne Star survived to limp into Valletta, one of only five survivors out of the 14 merchantmen that had left the Clyde on August 3. Informed on his return to Malta that he had been invited to dinner by the Melbourne Star's grateful master, Mejor found that this was no other than his uncle, Captain David MacFarlane, subsequently to be awarded the DSO.

Mejor was credited with two combat victories, two shared and two further "probables". On one occasion he was shot down himself as he simultaneously brought down a Ju87 Stuka.

John Mejor was born in Antwerp in 1921, the son of a Belgian engineer and a Scottish mother. His father died when he was young and his mother brought the family to Liverpool. Mejor was educated at Bootle Grammar School.

As soon as he was old enough he enlisted in the RAF Volunteer Reserve in 1940 and after basic and then operational flying training was posted to 132 (Spitfire) Squadron in 1941. From there he went in April 1942 to 603 Squadron whose Spitfires and pilots were embarked in USS Wasp on the Clyde for the passage to the Mediterranean.

Shortly after Pedestal Mejor was posted back to Britain for a "rest" as a flying instructor. But he was back on operations by July 1943 with 122 Squadron, flying Spitfires on bomber escorts and fighter sweeps over France. Among the many engagements he was involved in was an encounter with a Messerschmitt 210, an aircraft intended as an improvement to the 110 which had never really lived up to its baneful sounding sobriquet Zerstörer. The 210 fared no better and Mejor added it to his tally of combat victories in a clash over the Pas de Calais.

Later in the year the squadron became part of the 2nd Tactical Air Force, created to provide battlefield support for the projected invasion of occupied Europe. Until that day dawned it was deployed in attacks on gun emplacements, army trucks, trains, aircraft on the ground and coastal shipping. In February 1944 it was re-equipped with Mustang IIIs, whose much greater range enabled it to penetrate deep into enemy airspace. Mejor was awarded the DFC towards the end of this tour of operations, which ended after D-Day on which he flew his last combat sorties, over the Normandy invasion beaches.

Rested from operations, Mejor spent the remainder of the war as a test pilot. In 1945 he was offered a permanent commission. The Cold War was soon an established geopolitical fact and among his postwar appointments was a spell in strategic intelligence in Ottawa, helping to analyse the capabilities of the Soviet and Chinese air forces for the Royal Canadian Air Force in the light of the Korean War experience.

In 1953 he was appointed CO of 1953 Squadron, flying successively Vampires, North American Sabres and then Hunter Mk IVs. From its base at Brüggen, West Germany, the squadron operated intensively in the strained Cold War atmosphere, often confronting aggressive attempts by Soviet fighters to penetrate Nato air space as the air forces of both sides tested each others' willingness to resist incursions.

In a climate of defence cuts Mejor left the RAF in 1964 and moved to Exmouth where he worked for Devon County Council and became chairman of the Devon Conservation Forum.

He is survived by his wife, Cecile, whom he married in 1945, and by two daughters.

Wing Commander John Mejor, DFC, RAF fighter pilot, was born on July 12, 1921. He died on March 24, 2010, aged 88
 
One of the Battle of Britain's top scoring pilots, Bob Doe became an ace (five kills) in his first week of air fighting, which coincided with the Luftwaffe onslaught of mid-August, 1940, Goering's vaunted Adlerangriff (Eagle attack) that was to have swept the RAF from the skies. Doe was one of the few RAF pilots to score combat victories in both the Spitfire and Hurricane during the Battle, switching to the latter — slower and less manoeuvrable — fighter with 238 Squadron, when his original squadron, No 234, had lost most of its pilots and was posted to Cornwall for a rest.

Strangely, perhaps, Doe regarded himself as a timorous individual with no gifts as a pilot. His superiors disagreed and his record, 15 combat victories (14 kills and two shared) speaks for itself. Reticent he might have been on the ground, but once in the air Doe was imbued with that desire to be at grips with the enemy that is the hallmark of the finest fighting troops.

Having survived the Battle of Britain and serious injuries in a crash in 1941, he was posted to the Far East, leading ground attack operations in support of Slim's 14th Army in difficult conditions over the jungles of Burma. His skill and leadership earned him a DSO to add to the two DFCs he had won in 1940.

Robert Francis Thomas Doe was born in Reigate, Surrey, in 1920. At 15 he left school to work as a messenger boy at the News of the World. He joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve in March 1938 and in January 1939 was accepted for a short service commission. On his own admission he was rated merely "average" and only just won his wings. All this was to change in the heat of battle.

Posted to 234 (Spitfire) Squadron he was pitchforked into action on August 15, 1940, and maintained an extraordinary tempo of combat over the next two months. On that day his first victory was a shared one, over a Messerschmitt 110 twin-engined fighter off the Dorset coast, and soon after he shot down a second. The fighting over the following weeks was unrelenting. On August 16 he shot down a Messerschmitt 109 and a Dornier Do18 flying boat. Two days later he downed a second Me109 and damaged another. A shared Ju88, on August 21, made him an ace in just six days of fighting.

The attack on 11 Group's airfields in the last week of August took the battle into a crucial phase for the RAF as packed bomber formations and fighter escorts repeatedly fought through the air defences. Doe's next six victims were Me109s — on September 4 he shot down three in a single sortie. But the attrition was frightful. In a few days No 234 had all but ceased to exist. On September 7 Doe flew his last sortie with it, shooting down an He111 over London. After that, with only three of its pilots remaining the squadron was sent to Cornwall to rest and rebuild.

Doe's respite was brief. Posted as a flight commander to 238 (Hurricane) squadron, he was back in action by the end of the month, and had three more combat victories by the time the battle began to die down in October.

On October 10 he was shot down in the Luftwaffe's last big daytime sortie and baled out of his Hurricane with severe wounds to his leg and shoulder. He was awarded the DFC on October 23, and a Bar on November 26. He rejoined his squadron in December, but on January 3, 1941, his aircraft suffered engine failure during an attempted night interception. He managed a forced landing, but his harness broke with the impact and his head was smashed against his gun sight. He suffered severe facial injuries and broke his arm.

Lengthy surgery involving 22 operations was done by the brilliant New Zealand-born plastic surgeon Sir Harold Gillies. Astonishingly, Doe resumed flying in May 1941, and joined 66 Squadron as a flight commander. After front- line and training appointments, in August 1943 he was posted to India and tasked with forming and training 10 Squadron, Indian Air Force. With their "Hurribombers" — Hurricanes armed with four 20mm cannon and carrying two 500lb bombs — No10 supported the 14th Army campaign that drove the Japanese out of India and pursued it south through Burma. Air power was decisive in the fighting, and 10 Squadron's precision air strikes played an important role. The citation for Doe's DSO, gazetted in October 1945, commended his "unconquerable spirit".

At the end of the war Doe gained a permanent commission and after a period training the Royal Auxiliary Air Force, was in 1950 given command of 32 (Vampire) Squadron in Egypt after a few hours in the cockpit to familiarise himself with jets. In his two years in command he raised it to a level of efficiency envied by other units in the theatre.

Subsequent appointments included the Fighter Gunnery Wing at Leconfield, the Joint Planning Staff and Senior Personnel Staff Officer at Flying Training Command after which he opted for retirement in 1966. Settling in Kent, he set up a garage and car hire company. His autobiography, Bob Doe: Fighter Pilot, was published in 1991.

Bob Doe is survived by his third wife, Betty, and by six daughters and a son of his second and third marriages. The daughter of his first marriage predeceased him.

Wing Commander Bob Doe, DSO, DFC and Bar, wartime fighter ace, was born on March 10, 1920. He died on February 21, 2010, aged 89
 
Derek Hodgkinson began his war in Coastal Command, flying reconnaissance sorties over German and Norwegian waters. Later he took part in Bomber Command's campaign against Germany in 1942 when his Operational Training Unit (OTU) was "volunteered" to make up the numbers in the third of Bomber Harris's "1,000 Bomber" raids.

Shot down on his way home from Bremen, he spent the rest of the war as a PoW in Stalag Luft III, from which he led a group of prisoners on the "Long March" when the camp was evacuated in the icy winter of 1945.

After the war he continued in Coastal Command, going on to high rank within the RAF, during which time he was involved with the Multi-Role Combat Aircraft consortium which led to the Tornado strike bomber.

William Derek Hodgkinson was educated at Repton, from where he joined the RAF on a short service commission in 1936. In 1937 he was posted to 220 Squadron, a Coastal Command unit flying Ansons. After a period with a Lockheed Hudson conversion unit, he returned to No 220, which in the early months of the war still operated the Anson, an aircraft of limited performance soon to be replaced by the US-built Hudson, a patrol bomber of vastly improved range, with which Hodgkinson was already familiar.

He flew anti-shipping strikes over the North Sea from Thornaby on the Tees from May 1940. When the squadron moved to northern Scotland in April 1941, Hodgkinson undertook "battle flights" in which the Hudson, with its forward-firing armament, was used as a long-range fighter, attacking aircraft and flak ships in Norwegian waters. He had several narrow escapes when attacked by Me109s but gained a combat victory, a Heinkel He115 float plane, over the Skagerrak. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his performance.

In 1942 he was "rested" from operations through a posting to an OTU, though this given no respite from the perils of the front line. In a determined effort to prove that strategic air power could win the war, the pugnacious head of Bomber Command, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, had determined on a series of 1,000 bomber raids against German cities, and instructors and pupil pilots from the OTUs were mobilised for the demonstration.

The first raid, on Cologne on the night of May 30-31, 1942, stunned the Germans; the next, against Essen at the start of June, was much less successful. Nothing daunted, Harris planned a third raid on the night of June 25-26 when 1,006 bombers (including 272 from OTUs of which Hodgkinson's Hudson crew was one) took off to attack Bremen. Damage was extensive, as at Cologne, but at a high cost — 5 per cent of the bombers failed to return.

Hodgkinson's bomber dropped its load successfully but as he approached the Dutch coast on the flight home, his aircraft was attacked by a German night fighter and caught fire. With great skill he managed to ditch in the sea off the Frisian Islands. Surfacing after the aircraft had broken up and sunk, he found one of its main wheels was the only part still floating. He and his navigator, the only other survivor, clung to it for more than an hour when, almost exhausted, they were joined on the surface by the aircraft's dinghy, broken free from the submerged bomber. They scrambled in and were eventually washed ashore on one of the islands and taken prisoner.

He spent most of the rest of the war at Stalag Luft III at Sagan in Silesia, where he played a big role in organising escape efforts. On the night of January 27, 1945, with Red Army approaching, the Germans suddenly decided to march their prisoners out of the camp to prevent them falling into Russian hands. Hodgkinson was in a group headed towards Bremen. After a 50-mile march in sub-zero conditions in one of the coldest winters in northern Europe for years, they were entrained at Spremberg for a naval PoW camp, Marlag Nord, near Bremen. There they remained until April when, with British troops approaching, they were again marched to a camp near Hamburg where Hodgkinson was eventually liberated at the end of the war.

Granted a permanent commission in 1947, he served for 15 years in Coastal Command, as CO of 210 Squadron (Lancasters) at St Eval, Cornwall, and 240 Squadron (Shackletons) at Ballykelly, Northern Ireland. In between, he had helped to set up the Australian Joint Anti-Submarine School, and, from 1958 to 1961, commanded RAF St Mawgan, in Cornwall.

From 1966 to 1968, as Assistant Chief of Staff Operational Requirements, he played an important role in ensuring that the UK joined the Panavia consortium developing the multi-role combat aircraft. After this was achieved in 1967 he spent much time shuttling between London, Bonn and Munich persuading the other members of the consortium, Germany and Italy, to accept the RAF Air Staff requirement for a deep-strike aircraft rather than the short-range battlefield weapon favoured by them.

In the middle of this onerous task he was also required by the Air Force Board to write a report on the RAF officer career structure. He recommended, among other things, the abolition of the supplementary list of "second class citizens" in favour of promotion based on ability and potential. His proposals were accepted.

From 1970 to 1973 he was AOC-in-C Near East Air Force, Commander British Forces Near East and Administrator Sovereign Base Areas, Cyprus. It was a tense period: there was a struggle in Dhofar, where rebels backed by the Communist People's Democratic Republic of Yemen threatened the stability of Oman, whose ruler, Sultan Qaboos, asked Britain for help. With British forces sent to Dhofar to fight the guerrillas, Hodgkinson toured the region to procure support for British policy from the rulers of Jordan and Iran. Several British officers were seconded to the Oman armed forces.

In Cyprus, the return of the former Eoka leader, Colonel Grivas, previously supported by Archbishop Makarios in his policy of enosis (union) with Greece, also raised tensions. But Hodgkinson struck up a good relationship with Makarios, by then weaned away from enosis, and Grivas's agitation with a new Eoka-B proved ineffectual.

In his final appointment as Air Secretary, 1973-76, Hodgkinson had to cope with large reductions in RAF personnel after the British withdrawal from East of Suez. This cost the careers of many middle-ranking officers of great promise, a blow whose effects Hodgkinson and his staff did their best to mitigate.

After retiring from the RAF, Hodgkinson helped to run the Regular Forces Employment Assocation of which he was vice-chairman and chairman from 1977 to 1982 and thereafter president, 1982-86.

He had been awarded the Air Force Cross in 1942, was appointed CBE in 1960, CB in 1969 and KCB in 1971.

He married Heather Goodwin in 1939. He is survived by her and by their son and daughter.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Derek Hodgkinson, KCB, CBE, DFC, AFC, wartime Coastal Command pilot and Air Secretary, 1973-76, was born on December 27, 1917. He died on January 29, 2010, aged 92
 
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