article for April 13, 2019

Article of the day for April 13, 2019 is Joe Hewitt (RAAF officer).
Joe Hewitt (13 April 1901 – 1 November 1985) rose to be an air vice-marshal in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). Appointed the RAAF's Assistant Chief of the Air Staff in 1941, he was posted the following year to Allied Air Forces Headquarters, South West Pacific Area, as Director of Intelligence. In 1943, he took command of No. 9 Operational Group, the RAAF's main mobile strike force, but was controversially sacked by the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Vice Marshal George Jones, less than a year later over alleged morale and disciplinary issues. As Air Member for Personnel from 1945 to 1948, he was directly responsible for the consolidation of what was then the world's fourth largest air force into a much smaller peacetime service. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1951. Retiring from the military in 1956, he went into business and later managed his own publishing house. The book Adversity in Success is his first-hand account of the South West Pacific air war.