F/Lt. J. C. Mungo-Park was born in Wallasey, Cheshire in 1918.
He was educated at Liverpool College and joined the RAF in 1937.
He was posted to 74 Squadron at RAF Hornchurch on 4th September, 1939. He fought with this squadron all through the Battle of Britain and by the end of November, 1940, had twelve confirmed victories.
He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross on 15th November, 1940.
He had been commanding 'A' Flight of the squadron since 8 September 1940 and was promoted to command the squadron on 10 March 1941 when the existing commander, the famous South African 'Sailor' Malan, was posted to another appointment.
On 16th June, 1941, he shot down two Messerschmitt 109's over the French coast but his own aircraft was damaged and he glided back with a dead engine to crash land at Hawkinge near Folkestone.
On 27th June, 1941, John Mungo-Park was shot down and killed at Adinkerke, Belgium and is buried there.

John Mungo-Park was the descendant of Alexander Mungo-Park, who was an eighteenth-century adventurer and explorer.

John was a get-up-and-go pilot, and for the time he was with 74 Squadron, he was always in the thick of things.He was also the one who organised a low-flying competition one afternoon at Rochford airfield, with the other pilots he had talked into flying with him. The pilots all put in half-a-crown into a kitty; whoever flew the lowest would collect the winnings.
Flight Rigger John Gill remembers:
So every pilot flew a low pass across the airfield, much to the disgust of the Flight Sergeant, who didn;t want any damaged aircraft, but the flying went ahead and the winner was Mungo-Park himself. He had actually touched the ground with his propeller tips.We had seen clogs of earth fly up as hew flew across a very shallow depression on the airfield, where he more or less went out of sight. We thought he'd gone in, but he appeared again; he managed to land safely and when he taxied in, we could see that the tips of his prop blades were bent.
He was full of apologies to the Flight Sergeant, who was pretty annoyed about it. The next things was we had to get busy with blocks of wood and hard-faced hammers, to hammer the blades straight, so there was no evidence if anybody came back to find out what had been going on. All the winnings were actually used to buy beer for the lads who had put the damage right on his aircraft.