Ronald Ivelaw-Chapman
Royal Air Force air marshal
Air Chief Marshal Sir Ronald Ivelaw-Chapman, (17 January 1899 – 28 April 1978) was a senior commander in the Royal Air Force (RAF) in the middle of the 20th century and the penultimate RAF commander-in-chief of the Indian Air Force.
Early life and the First World War
Ronald Ivelaw-Chapman was born on 17 January 1899 in British Guiana. He came to England with his parents in 1903 and attended Cheltenham College. He joined the Royal Flying Corps in 1917 and served as a Bristol Fighter pilot on the Western Front with 10 Squadron in the last eleven months of the First World War.
Between the wars
In January 1929, then a flight lieutenant in the RAF, Ivelaw-Chapman participated in the Kabul Airlift, a successful evacuation of the British Legation in Kabul amidst the Afghan Civil War and a bitter winter. On 27 January a Kabul-bound Vickers Victoria, piloted by Ivelaw-Chapman, was forced to make an emergency landing in the mountainous Surobi District. Rescued by an Afghan royalist officer, Ivelaw-Chapman was awarded the Air Force Cross for his handling of the incident.
Second World War
At the outbreak of the Second World War Ivelaw-Chapman, now a wing commander, was part of the operations staff of RAF Bomber Command headquarters. In June 1940 he was promoted to group captain and was appointed station commander at RAF Linton-on-Ouse, a No. 4 Group bomber station near York.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ronald Ivelaw-Chapman” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.