10 June, 2022
Nine Lives: Air Vice-Marshal Raymond Collishaw and his Many Wars
Raymond Collishaw is arguably one of the greatest Canadian airmen of all time. He was the third leading British Commonwealth ace of the First World War behind Billy Bishop and went on to have a successful career in the RAF during the interwar period and the early stages of the Second World War. Though he spent his entire career in the Royal Naval Air Service and Royal Air Force, he always remained a proud Canadian and never forgot his Canadian roots.
Collishaw was a very successful commander at the squadron, wing, and group level and he found himself at the genesis of many aviation developments - air-to-air fighting, strategic bombing, tactical air support, carrier air power, colonial air control, and others. He is best known for his time as a fighter pilot over the Western Front, but he also fought the Bolsheviks in South Russia, Persia, and Mesopotamia, took part in the Jewish-Arab conflict in the Middle East, deployed to Sudan during the Abyssinian Crisis, defeated the Italians in the Western Desert in 1940 and 1941, and finally, disrupted Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's plans when he arrived in North Africa. There is much to learn about the development of air power from his extraordinary career.
Watch Video
Watch the full video of Mike Bechthold's presentation, followed by Q&A (53:45).
About the Presenter
Mike Bechthold holds a PhD in History from the University of New South Wales, Canberra, Australia and an MA & Honours BA from Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Mike is the author or editor of eight books and numerous articles. His most recent monograph is Flying to Victory: Raymond Collishaw and the Western Desert Campaign (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017) and he is the co-author of a series of guidebooks about the Canadian battlefields of the Second World. He specializes in the fields of military air power (especially tactical air operations in the First and Second World Wars), the Canadian army in Normandy and Northwest Europe, and the Canadian Corps in the Great War. He has taught history at Wilfrid Laurier University, the University of Waterloo, Conestoga College, and the Schulich School of Business at York University. For 22 years Mike worked as the Communications Director of the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies and the Managing Editor of Canadian Military History, an academic quarterly journal.
Mike is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in the UK, a Fellow of the Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society at the University of New Brunswick, a Research Fellow at Nipissing University Centre for the Study of War, Atrocity, and Genocide, and he recently served as the Executive Director of the Juno Beach Centre Association. Mike is currently employed as a historian with the Royal Canadian Air Force History and Heritage section.