by John Willis
The dentist commander enjoyed this sense of power. He showed Geoffrey an old mill where hundreds of Belgian refugees were sheltering, and told him that ‘the aged and the weak are being succoured by us… a beautiful sight.’
Everywhere (in Montreuil) there were broken-down cars and crowds around them, clamouring to push on southwards. Belgian generals, high Dutch officials, French industrialists jostled one another on the market square, crowded the small restaurants and fought at the petrol pumps to obtain a gallon or two of precious fuel. Lorries passed by with peasants and minor officials. Ambulances pulled up with wounded Belgians.
The restaurants ran out of food. The baker shops and grocery stores were emptied. The dusty trail of cars with mattresses on their roofs passed on. The sun was relentless. ‘The people of Montreuil are frightened at this sight,’ said the Captain, ‘but I have reassured them. While I am Commander of this town the Germans shall not enter.’
Finally, the afternoon after their arrival, the intelligence officers received a phone call ordering them to repack the secret documents into the car and drive immediately to Boulogne. Offices were swiftly found by Charles Belmonte in the Metropolis Hotel, and Myers and the other officers slept in an uninhabited house at the top of a hill. A lorry arrived and delivered all material still relevant to the intelligence section, even the camp bed belonging to Myers.
Boulogne then experienced the first of the bombings which, in the months to come, were to turn the harbour area into a shambles. German raiders sprinkled bombs on the lower town and then in our area. One bomb whistled down not far from the house and went into the ground with a dull thud. I woke up stiff with fright about five o’clock the next morning when the bomb exploded.
An hour or two after dawn an orderly came up from the harbour area to tell us that the Metropolis Hotel had been hit. A perfect piece of bombing had left a dark, jagged hole in the façade of the white building. That morning, news came through that German tanks had reached Abbeville, cutting off retreat from Boulogne to the south.
Command in Boulogne felt that the dangers of bombing had been overstated, but that is not what the Photographic Intelligence Unit thought. Their deputy leader, Charles Belmonte, said
‘If we don’t get out before nightfall we’ll all be in for it. Boulogne will be bombed to buggery.’
So, Belmonte arranged that they would move on to Wimereux. The documents were packed once again, this time into a lorry which headed for their new offices at the Picardy Hotel in Wimereux. Luckily, Belmonte found a nursing home in the town for the intelligence team to sleep in. It had already been evacuated and the doctor willingly handed the keys over to the RAF.
We tried to get supper in Wimereux but found nothing, so we motored to Boulogne and had a good meal in a restaurant by the harbour which was almost deserted since the air raids on the area had taken place. As we were finishing our meal the bombing began again. Peter walked quickly to the door, ‘Come along. Let’s clear out of here. Don’t waste time. I’m off.’
That night at Wimereux, we watched Boulogne being bombed as we stood in our pyjamas on the terrace of the nursing home. After daylight, I was sent up to the Picardy Hotel and ordered to wait there for Charles Belmonte. I passed the time writing a letter to you and wondered whether it would be posted once the Germans caught up with us. I was interrupted by an air raid.
The men were ordered to destroy the rest of the documents apart from two cases of the most secret material. These were put in the charge of an officer who took them straight back to England in a destroyer.
‘We saw him off,’ Belmonte said, ‘but for some minutes we doubted whether the destroyer would reach the open sea. The bastards went on plastering the whole harbour area, trying to hit her.’
When they could not find the keys to the remaining trunks, the small band of intelligence staff improvised.
Belmonte threw the trunks out of the window on the top floor of the Picardy and they flew open as they hit the ground. I turned the trunks on their sides with their backs to the sea and the lids open, screening them against the wind. Then we piled the papers up against them and set them alight. Soon, a roaring fire was consuming our records.
Peter found an abandoned staff car which the men pushed to get started, and Paul, the Frenchman, turned up in his immaculate American car. They had instructions to head for the coast at Dunkirk.
He [Paul] might have been a tourist. ‘Did you see anything in Boulogne?’ I asked. ‘No, nothing special except the bombing,’ he replied.
We spent the whole afternoon driving north-eastwards. I was in Peter’s staff car with the gun I had picked up at the Picardy. The hapless refugees were now moving along the road in both directions. Thousands persisted in thinking they would find refuge by moving south. Others were returning northwards after finding they had been cut off by the German advance. Ploughs, tractors, prams and handcarts slowed down the traffic.
When cars broke down or ran out of petrol, they held up the painful procession for a few minutes before ruthlessly being pitched into a hedge or a ditch by those pressing on from behind. Most of the wanderers were too worn out to care but some still had terror in their eyes. They feared more machine gun attacks from low-flying planes.
Finally, the intelligence officers could make out Dunkirk ahead.
‘Dunkirk appeared on the horizon like an ugly bit of black lace, but the black cloud above it across the sky did not seem natural. The cloud gradually changed into a huge serpent of smoke creeping above the factory chimney. It came from an oil tank which the German bombers had set on fire by a direct hit. Red flames were licking its tail. Peter looked at the smoke for a while, then turned to me. ‘Filthy,’ he said, and then kept quiet.
From Dunkirk, they were instructed to move five miles inland to Bergues. Myers was well aware that intelligence officers, men who most likely had never fired a gun, were a hindrance to a retreating army now.
A high staff officer, probably a respected member of some civilian profession less than a year ago, sat in his car with his pet dog and golf clubs… the headquarters was being established [by him] as if for at least six months. We went about billeting as if the enemy were hundreds of miles away… the apprehension which filled the town was oppressive.
The next day all our telephone communications were cut off. About fifteen planes had dive-bombed the town of Cassel, wrecking the telephone exchange, the post office and most of the houses on one side of the marketplace. The townspeople were removing the dead on improvised stretchers.
Two peasants were dragging a frightened, middle-aged man through the marketplace while angry women were shouting, ‘Kill him! Kill him!’ The man beseeched them in broken French to let him go, saying he was innocent. Others cried, ‘Take no notice of him! Kill him! He’s a German spy. He signalled to the bombers.’
Luckily for the man, the intelligence officers intervened before he could be killed by the crowd.
We stopped them from lynching a ‘German Spy’. He was a German, indeed. He had fled Berlin from the Nazi persecution and had established himself in Brussels where he continued to teach oriental languages. We grabbed him from the crowd, took him back to Bergues and handed him over to the gendarmes there.
In the early hours of the morning, the men were all woken to be told that German tanks were close by.
I felt like a rat in a trap. So did the others. Unarmed men feel silly facing tanks. The German tanks were fifteen miles away and we had two hundred clerks, batmen and waiters with a few dozen rifles to defend us.
Some of the officers advised an immediate retreat to Dunkirk. Others insisted that we should stand and defend Bergues. They shouted at one another. Nobody was in command.
Fortunately for him, Geoffrey escaped the chaos and confusion when he and the other men from his section were yet again given new orders. On May 26 1940, Myers and Peter were sent on a drive into Poperinghe in Belgium with a secret message to be delivered to the colonel in Ypres.
Poperi
nghe was swarming with Belgian soldiers wandering about aimlessly, waiting for something to happen. We made our way through the crowds and drove on. Refugees were camping on the roadside. Peter delivered the secret message to the colonel, who told him it was pointless.
The drive into Belgium had been a waste of time, the secret message valueless, but at least they had escaped the chaos at Bergues and, in Belgium, there were no tanks to be seen.
When we returned to Bergues we found that makeshift defences had been put up. Ploughs and farm carts had been thrown across the roads. An odd assortment of British and French soldiers were on the lookout with cocked rifles at cottage windows.
In Bergues, Myers and Peter heard news of their former colleague in the intelligence section, Philip March, who had finally got his wish to fight. Near Bergues, his reconnaissance unit lorry had run into a column of German tanks. They were ordered out of the lorry by the Germans.
As they were scattering, another burst of machine gun fire came from the first tank. Philip, who had remained in the lorry until all the men had jumped out, must have been mortally hit. He fell off the lorry onto the road.
Also on their arrival at Bergues Myers discovered, to his horror, that Charles Belmonte and the rest of the intelligence unit had already left.
We were told that all non-combatants had been moved to Dunkirk. We were given orders to go immediately to Dunkirk. Without any sign of the enemy, we drove along the road bordering the canal, almost as if on an excursion. By contrast, Dunkirk was being dive-bombed when we arrived. The dock area was already in ruins. The red flames seemed to lick up the soot around the great cloud of smoke.
From the air, the sight of Dunkirk was disturbing as the American pilot, Flight Lieutenant Jimmy Davies from 79 Squadron, observed. ‘The smoke from the innumerable fires in Dunkirk and the other French coast towns was terrific… A fellow pilot described it as being like a gigantic piece of cotton wool lying right across the seashore as far as he could see, even from two or three miles up.’16
Raids had become such a routine that the French port officials looked at our papers impassively while the place was being bombed. By a freak of nature, a local thunderstorm burst over the port during the bombing. Our car got stuck in the debris. Under torrents of rain, we tried to push it out of a hole. We got it moving again and Peter drove to the quay where a destroyer was moored in readiness to take off for England with the rest of our unit.
We dumped the car and ran up the destroyer’s gangway just before it was lifted. Four minutes later we left for England.
This was the last destroyer to leave Dunkirk. The rest of the massive evacuation was by fishing vessels and other little boats. All told, 243 ships were sunk in the evacuation and 68,000 people were killed.
On arrival at Dover, all on board were seen off the destroyer by a policeman whose routine had not changed since the cross-Channel services had been stopped. People were enjoying a warm spell. Some were sauntering along the jetty after a bathe. The only soldiers about were those who had already returned from France. Not far away, people were playing tennis. We had come from another world.
Geoff was attached to RAF Hawkinge for a few days to take reports from pilots about the evacuation at Dunkirk.
Above Folkestone, a few white lines of chalk showed up the scattered trenches and gun pits in the Downs around Hawkinge Aerodrome. Thinking of what I had left behind on the other side of the Channel I looked around uneasily, hoping to find some indication that our Channel coast was defended. There were none.
After his dramatic and fortunate escape on the last destroyer to leave France, one of 330,000 military personnel evacuated from Dunkirk, the thoughts of Geoffrey Myers were never far away from his wife and family, hiding deep in rural France. Communication was impossible with Margot and she had no idea that Geoff had made a dramatic escape from Dunkirk. But what would have happened to them if he had not made it safely out of France?
Then Myers’s notes turn back to the battle for supremacy in the air.
I was sent to Hendon as intelligence officer in our fighter squadron which was being formed to fly out to the Cherbourg Peninsula, where it was thought we would hold a bridgehead. But we were soon engulfed in the Battle of Britain.
16Jonathan Reeve, Battle of Britain Voices (Amberley, 2015)
CHAPTER FOUR
The first days for 257 Squadron under their new leadership were spent at RAF Northolt. The uncertain start to the Battle of Britain had continued with the change of squadron leader. For some of the pilots it was difficult to get used to the new approach of Squadron Leader Hill Harkness, after the strategies they’d been taught by his predecessor. The words of one pilot, spoken on the day David Bayne had been replaced by Harkness, echoed in the head of Geoffrey Myers.
Sergeant Pilot Conroy, a chatterer, told us later that as Bayne walked away, he thought he heard him mutter under his breath in despair, ‘And God help you all.’ And I am beginning to think he was right.
So from the start, Myers was cautious about the new boss, especially given the outstanding leadership skills shown by Bayne. Nonetheless, he believed that concerns about Harkness would fade over time as the squadron got to know their new leader and vice versa. Fortunately, the first few days of August brought little action for 257 Squadron, just routine patrols, so there was a chance for Harkness and his squadron to develop an understanding of how to work together, without the pressure of endless scrambles and dogfights.
Light relief was provided for Pilot Officer David Coke, Pilot Officer Carl Capon and Sergeant Pilot Reg Nutter when they were drafted onto VIP escort duties. In early August they escorted the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, from RAF Hendon to North Coates, Manby and Coltishall before returning to Hendon. Churchill flew in a de Havilland Flamingo piloted by Flight Lieutenant Blenner-Hassett. Reg Nutter recalled, ‘This trip remains vivid in my memory as the Prime Minister persuaded Blenner-Hassett to do some very low flying, for his benefit, across the Wash.’17
Only a few of the men in 257 Squadron were married. They were largely separated from their wives, who stayed at home in England, although Margot Myers was of course trapped in her remote home in German-occupied France.
As an exception, Pilot Officer David Hunt’s wife of just a few weeks, Terry, moved round the country with her husband’s different postings with the squadron. That is why her 1942 memoir Pilot’s Wife’s Tale was subtitled, the diary of a camp-follower. Writing under the name of Esther Terry Wright, she described how she regularly waited anxiously at RAF Northolt for her new husband to return. She watched the pilots coming into land through a telescope she poked out of the window in their rented room near the airfield, ‘I watched through the telescope the sudden blur of a plane coming into range, too near to be in focus, big and flat and grey and barely opaque, and the port-light liquid red against the thin mist that was creeping over from the far side of the field… then there was a roar in the sky and David was over the roof, and home: a flashing of recognition-lights, and a shock in the air after him.’
On August 8 1940, the days of escort duties and routine patrols came to a shuddering end. A large fleet, CW9 code-named Peewit, consisting of about twenty-five merchant ships, set off as a Channel convoy. It was the Luftwaffe’s job to destroy the convoy and the Fighter Command’s task to defend Britain’s merchant ships.
From France, the Germans sent up fifty-seven Ju 87 Stuka bombers to attack CW9 near the Isle of Wight. They were supported by fifty fighters.
The day was a disaster for 257 from the start. Squadron Leader Harkness refused to fly, which was, to Myers, an extraordinary decision at this first critical moment for his unit.
There had been a mess up at the start from Hendon. Harkness stayed in his room, said it was his day off. Jimmy Cochrane, who had been drinking with the adjutant until four in the morning, did not wake up until someone called him a second time at nine o’clock. He was a bit put out when he was told that the squadron had pushed off to the south coast …
they were ordered right up into a blitz.
The first British plane to reach the enemy was flown by Flight Lieutenant Noel Hall, commanding A Flight of 257 Squadron. For the next twenty minutes, the sky was dark with planes in combat. Some of the pilots from 257 wondered what was going on; they had never encountered such ferocity.
That day, their first of serious aerial combat, three 257 pilots were shot down: Flight Lieutenant Noel Hall, Flying Officer D’Arcy Irvine and Sergeant Kenneth Smith. The pilots were all killed within a frenzied few minutes around noon. In return, the squadron had one victory – an Me 109 was shot down by Pilot Officer Kenneth Gundry. Overall, the RAF lost thirteen pilots that day with three men severely injured. Of CW9’s more than twenty ships, only four survived the brutal attack from a hundred German aircraft.
To cap it all, 257’s two Flights lost contact with each other at a vital time in the combat. Lancelot Mitchell, a twenty-four year old from Scotland who was acting in charge of B Flight in the absence of Squadron Leader Harkness, had left his colleagues in A Flight vulnerable when he and his section charged off towards France.
Noel Hall led the squadron, but Mitchell suddenly left him and dashed off with his section towards France. I still don’t know what possessed Mitchell that day. He told me afterwards, ‘I can’t think what happened. I must have misunderstood the vectoring.’
There were recriminations all round after a day of chaos and deaths, some of them avoidable. When the pilots failed to return, Mitchell and the late-rising Jimmy Cochrane, both consumed by guilt, flew back out again to search for them.
When they came back Mitchell looked at me blankly. ‘I saw nothing,’ he said, ‘just the rest of our convoy the Germans had bombed, two ships on fire and a raft with dead men on it. No sign of Hall or D’Arcy Irvine. No sign of Sergeant Smith.’
