Beschreibung:

Air Marshal Sir Robert Victor Goddard. A WWII RAF officers tunic belonging to Air Vice Marshal Victor Goddard, the blue cloth tunic with Gieves Ltd tailors label to the inner pocket, stamped L/3/46 47/5456 R.V. Goddard R6., cloth RAF brevet to left breast and ribbon bar representing extensive service throughout WWI & WWII, brass King's crown buttons by Gieves Ltd and Air Marshal rank insignia to the cuffs, some moth damage, 80cm long Air Marshal Sir Robert Victor Goddard, KCB, CBE (1897-1987) was born in Wembley, he was educated at St George's in Harpenden before attending the Royal Naval College at Osborne and Dartmouth. He served as a midshipman during WWI and transferred to the Royal Naval Air Service serving as an airship pilot until 1917 (he was good friends with Barnes Wallis). During the Battle of the Somme in 1916 he was tasked with assisting the RFC by using his airship to drop agents behind enemy lines at night. Goddard held a number of senior posts throughout WWII, he played a major part in preserving British air assets in the face of German attacks and in September 1941, shortly before Pearl Harbour was appointed Air Commodore Chief of the Air Staff, Royal New Zealand Air Forcde (RNZAF). As commander, he was prominent in the operations against the Japanese initial advance and commanded the RNZAF in the Battle of Guadacanal and the Solomon Islands campaigns (for which he was awarded the American Navy Distinguished Service Medal). Goddard is perhaps best known for his interest in paranormal phenomena, in which he claimed to have witnessed a clairvoyant incident in China in 1946, when he was at a party in Shanghai and scheduled to fly to Tokyo that same night, when he heard of another officer having a dream in which Goddard was killed in a plane crash. In the dream an aircraft was carrying Goddard, two other men and a woman, when it experienced difficulties with atmospheric icing, and crashed on a pebbled beach near mountains. That night Goddard was persuaded to take two men and a woman on the Douglas Dakota transport flying to Tokyo. As in the other's officer's dream, the Dakota plane iced over and was forced to make a crash-landing on the Japanese island of Sado; the crash scene, a pebbled beach near mountains, resembled that described in the dream. Unlike the dream, however, no one was injured. The story was published in The Saturday Evening Post of May 26, 1951 and in 1955 the film The Night My Number Came Up was produced based on Goddard's paranormal phenomena.