This is a rather hasty reissue of Sir Keith Park published in hardback in 1984. I say 'hasty' because the illustrations are supposed to be spread through the book in four different places, but are actually all in one group in the middle. A plus is that the many maps do on the whole include the places referred to in the text, which is not all that common. However, why is the one of Parks' round-Britain flight in April 1919 placed in the middle of the narrative about his time at Bentley Priory in 1938? 

What is new is an Introduction written by Christopher Shores in 2001 which questions at least one of Parks' claimed victories in World War I, due to the strange reporting procedures of the RFC which I had not previously known about. Apparently, days sometimes went from 4pm to 4pm and not midnight to midnight, which must have confused everybody.

However there is no doubting Parks' brilliance as a leader, especially in the Battle of Britain and subsequently at Malta, then Burma, nor his luck in surviving Gallipoli as an artilleryman in 1915. After that, he came through the Somme before transferring to the RFC and 48 Squadron on Bristol Fighters. He gained at least 10 victories, and two MCs. After the War, he stayed in the RAF and eventually played a decisive part in World War II. The impression given is that Park felt slighted at the end of his career because he was made to retire at the age of 54, and that he was never awarded the honours that a grateful country should have bestowed upon him. It has always been RAF policy to retire people at that age, and to be less keen than the other services to claim awards. Park was not, I feel, treated in any way differently from his contemporaries in the RAF, and although he remains an unsung hero, this is partly his own fault, as he was a modest, intensely private man who never blew his own trumpet. This useful book does a great deal to correct that.