Secret Letters

by John Willis

  SECRET LETTERS

  A Battle of Britain Love Story

  JOHN WILLIS

  To Odette

  In memory of Ted, Audrey and Ken

  Without whom

  ‘… the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin… The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science… If the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.” ’

  Winston Churchill June 18 1940

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The letters of Pilot Officer Geoffrey Myers are not conventional. For a start, they were never posted, never dispatched to his wife, Margot, and his two young children, who were trapped in that part of France occupied by the Germans. The letters, in English, were written by hand in four small notebooks and start with the heading: SECRET. PRIVATE. They were to be read after the conflict and remain secret while the war was being fought. Whether he survived or not, Myers wanted his children, whom he hadn’t seen for months, to know exactly what their father was experiencing as the brutal aerial war raged over southern England.

  Myers was the intelligence officer attached to 257 Squadron in Fighter Command during the dramatic and dangerous days of the Battle of Britain. He was born into a Jewish family in Hampstead, North London, and had been a journalist for the Daily Telegraph before the war. At different times he was based in Berlin, just before the Nazis were beginning their ruthless rise to power, then London and Paris. As he wrote his letters, he had no idea if he would ever see his family again. In their hiding place in occupied France they were in constant danger of being arrested by the Nazis. Equally, as a Jewish journalist, now in the intelligence section of the RAF, Geoffrey himself would have been rounded up and killed had Hitler’s invasion of Britain been successful.

  The letters do not follow a neat, chronological structure through the Battle of Britain. In fact, they do not begin until September 8 1940, when the aerial war against the Luftwaffe had already been raging for several weeks. Geoffrey, it seems, had bottled up all his fears about his family trapped in occupied France, as well as the horrors of the Battle of Britain that he had already witnessed.

  Eventually, the emotional dam burst and the words came pouring out. For days afterwards, almost in a stream of consciousness, he explained to his wife and family what had happened to 257 Squadron with a mixture of deep feeling and journalistic skill.

  The letters zigzag backwards and forwards, starting with the Battle of Britain at its height then stepping back to Dunkirk, for example, and then back again to the middle of the Battle of Britain and then to its start. I have tried to keep faith with Geoff’s intentions, but have occasionally reordered material to make more sense of it for the reader. If any of that does not work it is my responsibility, not Geoff’s.

  In addition, in common with many letters or memoirs written during the war, Myers changed names, even in the privacy of letters to his own family. This was presumably because he knew that one day his words would be read by outsiders, perhaps by accident. Geoff even gives himself a pseudonym, referring to himself as George in his notebooks. Flight Lieutenant Officer Hugh Beresford is called Allen and Flight Lieutenant Peter Brothers is named Eric Paisley. The legendary Squadron Leader, Robert Stanford Tuck, is dubbed Lucas and his unhappy predecessor, Squadron Leader Hill Harkness, is called Wight. To add to the secrecy, some pilots were given two pseudonyms; Carl Capon is both Capell and Masters, and Peter Blatchford is both Blackford and Fenley.

  In the much more limited extracts I included in Churchill’s Few (Michael Joseph, 1985), I also used a pseudonym for Squadron Leader Harkness – Sharp. This was because so much of the material is deeply critical of his behaviour, I did not feel comfortable with such public censure of an elderly man who was then still alive. Now, and in the updated edition of Churchill’s Few (Mensch, 2020), I can use his correct name which, in the intervening years, other authors have put into the public domain.

  I have changed names wherever I could to the real ones, and all the major participants in this narrative are identified by their true names. On a few occasions, when it has been difficult to be absolutely certain of a pilot’s legal name, I have stuck with the pseudonyms given by Myers. At the same time I have, wherever possible, labelled geographical places correctly rather than by the initials used by Myers. So, for example, M is RAF Martlesham Heath and L is Lowestoft.

  As the footnotes show I have used many other sources to add extra testimony and support to the letters of Geoff Myers. I was lucky enough to interview Geoff and several other 257 squadron members back in the early 1980s. More recently, the Myers family kindly gave me access to the short memoirs of their mother, Margot, translated from French by her daughter, Anne, as well as other fascinating material from the war.

  As with all history, truths can be slippery. Even the Myers letters have a number of passages crossed out or changed. There is an occasional conflict between different sources or two contrasting recollections of the war. The chaos of scores of aircraft shooting at each other is a contributory factor to this, as is the natural desire to come out on the right side of history. As a virtually contemporaneous record from a respected journalist, I have given the letters of Geoffrey Myers significant weight.

  No one can question the punctilious way that Myers did his job. In addition to Geoffrey, I met several members of 257 Squadron and read other accounts of events inside the squadron when I initially researched this period for Churchill’s Few, and also more recently for this book. Everyone I met spoke of the integrity and conscientiousness of Geoffrey Myers and supported his record of the tragic events that befell 257.

  The almost unique mix of personal and professional anxiety gives these secret letters an emotional charge and an intensity that is rare. Myers was reaching down into the very depths of his feelings to write with great frankness and openness. For him, after the war there was a constant tension between a wartime spent accumulating secrets and confidential information, and his training as a journalist which advocated a commitment to exposure and publication. I know that Geoff had been considering publication for some time before he gave me permission to use these letters back in the 1980s. His children, Robert, Anne and Bernard, have generously supported their father’s wishes and let me see further unique notes and memories. They have also given me access to their father’s original, handwritten notebooks which contain some differences to the typewritten copy I had received from him. Geoff believed that, eventually, these materials needed to be put on the public record and had already given the BBC access to some.

  I only knew Geoff in the later stages of his life. We met in London and I took my young son to see him in Paris. My wife, Janet, spent some happy and stimulating hours int
erviewing his remarkable wife, Margot.

  In these letters, Geoffrey Myers can be seen as serious, even severe. That is perhaps the effect of being a relatively older man attached to a squadron of young pilots who were facing probable death or injury on a daily basis during that summer of 1940. I find it hard to fully reconcile that with the Geoffrey Myers I knew. Small and darting, with wavy grey hair and twinkling eyes, Myers was warm and gentle. He cared very deeply about other people as well as the wider world, as his letters show, but he was also entertaining and fun. Those lighter characteristics, and his sense of absurdity, only creep into this correspondence from time to time.

  I had enormous respect as well as affection for Geoff and felt honoured that he trusted me enough to permit me to publish his letters. Most memoirs of the Battle of Britain were written long after the war, with an inevitable risk of time dimming memory. Contemporaneous accounts of such a frank and intimate nature are extremely rare. Individual narratives on this scale, encompassing two of the great turning points of the war, the Battle of Britain and Dunkirk, and much else besides, just do not exist.

  The letters from Geoffrey Myers to his family are unique, offering an original insight from a witness to so much history. More than that, the letters tell a powerful love story of two people caught up in war and at real risk of never seeing each other again. As their son Robert told me, his parents enjoyed a devoted marriage and so theirs was a love story that continued for the rest of their lives.

  Now, the eightieth anniversary of that momentous instant in the history of this nation, with less than a handful of Battle of Britain pilots still alive, seems absolutely the right time to put their story on the record in a fuller and more detailed form.

  CHAPTER ONE

  September, 1940

  Three months now, and I have kept silent. I have been hoping to write letters that would reach you. I have been wanting to do something that would help you to escape from Occupied France and to get us all out of this living grave. I haven’t had the courage up to now to write letters to you like this, in a notebook, with the knowledge that you may never see them. My Duckies, you know without my writing that my thoughts are all the time with you. And yours are with me, my Lovvie. They bear me up.

  These were the first words written by Pilot Officer Geoffrey Myers, intelligence officer attached to 257 Squadron, when he opened his notebook during the Battle of Britain to record scores of vivid and often intensely personal letters to his family. They were to be read after the war in the event that he never saw his wife and two children again. A disastrous day for his squadron in early September had finally propelled Myers into writing his experiences down.

  We’ve all grown old since the Squadron was formed a few weeks ago. We’ve changed. It’s grim.

  By early September 1940, the Battle of Britain was close to its most intense. 257 Squadron, based then at RAF Northolt in West London, had been torn apart by a never-ending succession of deaths and injuries. Just a few days before his first letter was written, Geoffrey’s anxiety had been heightened by Hitler’s September 4 speech at a rally in Berlin in which he repeated his desire to invade England:

  ‘In England they’re filled with curiosity and keep asking, “Why doesn’t he come?” Be calm. Be calm. He’s coming! He’s coming!’

  Geoffrey Myers was born into a wealthy Jewish family in North London. In the 1920s, he was sent by his stockbroker father, Nathaniel, straight from his schooldays at University College School, in Hampstead, to Berlin to learn German. There, he managed to find a job as an office boy with the Morning Post and impressed everyone with his intelligent and conscientious approach to work. He was swiftly promoted to be the telephonist and then a subeditor.

  Yet even in a cosmopolitan city like Berlin, with its cafe society and cultural progressiveness, Myers could see the early seeds of Nazism being sown as the country sought to recover its national pride, almost extinguished in the ashes of World War I and the ignominious peace that followed.

  Geoffrey enjoyed his life in Berlin, attending concerts and parties, going canoeing or to the theatre. An elderly German-Jewish woman taught him the German language. Yet he was cautious about Germany and the Germans, especially as a Jew from England. He watched the looming post-war economic crisis emerge, and with it a lack of social and political cohesion. By the time he returned to England in 1931, where his father was ill and died soon after, he was clear; in Germany, Jews were becoming the enemy.

  When Geoffrey returned home, he was pleased to be out of Germany. His work on the Morning Post and his knowledge of the country was impressive, and so he managed to land a job as a temporary sub-editor for the Daily Telegraph. He also enrolled on a Russian course at King’s College, London. However, the worldwide economic depression put a sudden end both to his temporary job and his studies, and so, in 1932, he moved to Paris as a summer relief in the offices of the Daily Telegraph.

  He soon met and fell in love with a nineteen-year-old music student called Marguerite Guimiot, who was a friend of his sister’s. There was a difference in both age and life experience, but they were immediately happy together. Even Guimiot’s strict mother was forced to admit that, though at twenty-seven Geoff was older than her daughter, as well as out of work and a British Jew, he was ‘a very, very decent fellow.’ Indeed, she thought that he was ‘a feather in her daughter’s cap.’1

  In 1933, Geoffrey and Marguerite, or Margot as she was commonly called, were married, but Geoff was soon back in London working for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Margot stayed behind in Paris to finish her studies, and the newly wedded couple were only able to meet at weekends when they slept at Geoff’s office in London or occasionally at his sister’s flat in Gordon Square. Separation was hard for the two; so, in 1934, Geoffrey gave up his job and moved to Paris so that the newly-weds could be together. Fortunately, Geoff was eventually able to return to the Daily Telegraph in Paris on another temporary contract, standing in for someone who was ill. The job uncertainty was frustrating but at least he and Margot could be together.

  Geoffrey and Margot were soon settled and happy in pre-war Paris. Margot taught music and played in concerts, and Geoffrey finally secured a permanent job as a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and also translated a book by the French writer, Jean Giono. The couple bought a flat where they lived with their two young children, Robert, born in 1936, and Anne, who arrived two years later. Only the dramatic changes in Germany, highlighted by the horrors of Kristallnacht in November 1938, posed a threat to their happy family life.

  In Paris, the noises of impending war began to grow louder. Two of the weekly newspapers were openly anti-British and anti-Semitic. Je suis partout published special editions, Les Juifs (The Jews) and Les Juifs et la France (The Jews in France), which were full of racist propaganda. The arrival of many Jewish refugees from Germany stoked up further anger. Even Margot’s previously liberal brother began to suggest that Hitler would bring order to the chaos of Europe.

  Margot recalled, ‘Geoff could see the war coming but I did not believe it was. I didn’t want to think about it. I was absorbed in my own happiness: a husband I adored, two children who were my joy. I acted like an ostrich and hoped that Geoff would prove to be a poor prophet.’2

  Determined to defend freedom against the Nazis, Geoffrey hurried to the British embassy in Paris to volunteer. Training was merely a few days’ drill in the embassy cellars with three other volunteers. A tailor was even sent over from Savile Row to measure the men for their uniforms.

  In July 1939, the Myers family had a gentle holiday on the Isle of Wight. The tranquillity of the little island sat in stark contrast to the dramatic events taking place in Europe. Geoffrey recalled, ‘I knew war was going to break out any moment. I just had to get back.’3 Margot solemnly noted that they were virtually the only passengers on the boat heading to France.

  Once he had volunteered, Geoffrey Myers was desperate to get into action, to be on the front line. Finally, the day before wa
r broke out, the patience of Pilot Officer Geoffrey Myers, as he now was, was rewarded. He was dispatched to join two RAF squadrons at Berry-au-Bac near Guignicourt, north of Reims.

  As soon as the war started and her husband joined the RAF, Margot Myers took her children south to the Guimiot family home at Lucenay-lès-Aix near Moulins, north of Vichy in central France. The house, Beaurepaire, was large and square, with a slate roof and large French windows. In the grounds sat a seventeenth-century timbered barn. The family home seemed as solid and safe a refuge as it had been for her father in the Great War. Margot remembered, ‘I was naive about the political situation then. I never imagined that we would be overrun by the Nazis. I felt very safe in central France in the house I was born in. The house had been in the family for nearly a hundred years. I lived there as a young child during the 1914–18 war. I imagined that this would be the same. I thought that this was the safest place in the world.’4

  Her assumption was not unreasonable. Her grandfather had worked as a labourer on the farm at Beaurepaire, eventually buying it from the owner. He later showed his cleverness by also acquiring neighbouring farms. So Margot was surrounded by neighbours who were aunts, cousins and other relatives.

  Moulins, on the River Allier, less than twenty kilometres from their home, was the border town between the two halves of France – the demarcation line. Margot and her children lived just inside the occupied zone where the Germans controlled every aspect of life. From Moulins, heading south, lay the unoccupied or free zone of France run by Marshal Pétain from headquarters in Vichy. Pétain was compliant, indeed complicit, with the Germans, and so the freedoms of the unoccupied zone were only relative.

  By 1940, as the Battle of Britain started, Margot’s family house had shifted from being a safe refuge to a dangerous trap. Although the solid house was buried deep in the Allier countryside, Geoff fully understood that his half-Jewish children could not survive the surrounding Nazi occupation for long.