Christopher Dermont Salmond Smith

Christopher Dermont Salmond Smith was born on 11 September 1916 in Bruton, Somerset, the son of the artist Matthew Arnold Bracy Smith and his wife Mary Gwendolen Salmond. Educated at Bradfield College and then the RAF College Cranwell, where he entered as a flight cadet in September 1934 and graduated with a permanent commission in July 1936, he was among the most technically minded officers of his generation, spending time at the Aeroplane and Armament Experimental Establishment at Martlesham Heath before becoming deeply involved in the secret development of airborne radar. Flying a Bristol Blenheim with the RAF’s Special Duties Flight, he was centrally involved in early airborne interception trials and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, gazetted on 7 May 1940, for this pioneering radar work. He subsequently served as a flight commander with No. 25 Squadron at North Weald from September 1940, before taking command of No. 79 Squadron — equipped with Hawker Hurricanes and based in south Wales — in November 1941. On 22 December 1941, at the age of twenty-five, he was killed when his Hurricane IIB (serial Z5255) was lost off the Saltee Islands off the south-east coast of Ireland, apparently brought down by return fire from a Heinkel He 115. His body was never recovered, and he is commemorated on Panel 28 of the Runnymede Memorial in Surrey, alongside more than twenty thousand airmen of the Second World War who have no known grave.