War & conflict · People & lives

He helped build Australia's naval air arm, then had to save it

Burrell's career is a case study in how one officer's stubbornness can outlast a cabinet decision: he was central to creating the RAN's Fleet Air Arm in the late 1940s, and a decade later, as head of the Navy, he moved to overturn a government plan to dismantle it. The rest of his path is a compressed history of a small navy growing up — a 13-year-old cadet in 1918, years on loan to the Royal Navy as a navigator, a wartime liaison job with the Americans, then a destroyer command in action. His final years in charge were a buying spree: submarines, minesweepers, helicopters, guided-missile destroyers. He then went farming outside Canberra and wrote a memoir with a title no admiral would be expected to choose.

Burrell entered the naval college at 13, in the last year of World War I, and his memoirs — published in 1986 — were titled Mermaids Do Exist.

Read the whole of Henry Burrell (admiral) on Wikipedia

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