Charles Portal

Portal, Charles, 1st Viscount Portal (1893-1971). Portal came from a gentry family of Huguenot ancestry. After Winchester and Christ Church, Oxford, he joined the army in 1914 but in 1915 transferred to the Royal Flying Corps, and flew more than 900 sorties before 1918. Promoted air marshal in 1939 he took over Bomber Command in 1940, but after six months became chief of the air staff, which he retained until the end of the war. Eisenhower thought Portal the finest of all the war leaders, ‘greater than Churchill’, and Churchill himself remarked that Portal ‘had everything’.