Arthur Tedder (11 July 1890 – 3 June 1967) was a Marshal of the Royal Air Force of the United Kingdom and the deputy supreme Allied commander during World War II.
Biography[]
Arthur Tedder was born on 11 July 1890 in Glengoyne, Scotland, and he graduated from Cambridge University in 1909. Tedder served in the Royal Flying Corps during World War I and became a squadron commander in 1917; he was briefly a Lieutenant-Colonel from 1918 to 1919. Tedder rose in the ranks of the newly-formed Royal Air Force (RAF) during the Interwar period and became an Air Marshal in 1940. On 1 June 1941, Tedder was given command of RAF forces in the Middle East, and his planes took part in the Western Desert Campaign in North Africa and in other battles with the Axis Powers in the Mediterranean, such as Sicily. In 1944, he would become the deputy of Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower during the invasion of continental Europe, and he signed Nazi Germany's document of unconditional surrender on 7 May 1945 as Eisenhower's representative. On 12 September 1945, he was promoted to Marshal of the Royal Air Force, and he retired in May 1951. Tedder died of Parkinson's disease in Banstead, Surrey in 1967 at the age of 66.