ABSTRACT
The position that the aviator Colonel William Forbes-Sempill (or Lord Sempill as he would become on the death of his father in 1934) holds in Anglo-Japanese relations is a strange one that is full of ironies. As the head of the unofficial British naval aviation mission to Japan in 1921 Sempill was the last major figure of the Alliance years to collaborate extensively with the Japanese. His work, however, was to backfire, for twenty years later the seeds that he had sown turned upon Britain when the pilots of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s (IJN) air service were responsible on 9 December 1941 for the sinking of HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse. Moreover, Sempill, the distinguished ambassador for British aviation and friend of Japan, was by then in disgrace with the cloud of treachery hanging over his head.
