Secret Letters

by John Willis

  The British convoy had been smashed. From the sky the pilots could see the Channel full of debris and men clinging desperately to life rafts, as they tried to avoid the burning oil that swirled beneath the thick black smoke from the burning ships.

  Jimmy Cochrane tried to atone for being late by catching up with his colleagues and sticking the battle out to the very end. Indeed, he claimed an Me 109 destroyed but that, and any other successes for the squadron, were totally overshadowed by the horror of losing three colleagues in their very first blitz. The guilt Jimmy Cochrane felt was heightened by seeing Brian D’Arcy Irvine shot down right in front of him.

  Cochrane was in a bad way. He felt guilty about his lateness and that drinking business, but he saw the end of the action. ‘Poor D’Arcy boy. He yelled out to me over the RT [radio transmitter] “There’s a Gerry on your tail,” and they must have got him at that moment. I swung round, got on the tail of the Gerry and beetled after him. I’m buggered the Gerry didn’t go splosh in the drink. Never been so surprised in all my life. He just dived and disappeared. All there was left was a big splosh of foam without me firing a shot at him.’

  Brian D’Arcy Irvine was just twenty-two. He was a talented sketcher of birds and planes and had been tutored by his friend, the famous naturalist Peter Scott. Before the war he had studied architecture at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was also a member of the Air Squadron. Irvine had used his artistic flair to create a camouflage scheme intended to confuse German air gunners as to which direction a Hurricane was actually flying in.

  Geoffrey Myers had the unenviable job of finding the right words to say in letters to parents or partners of the dead pilots.

  D’Arcy Irvine, always ready with a new scheme to improve the squadron, always keen. One of the best. I tried to write of D’Arcy Irvine as a hero to his parents, but all the time I seemed to see him grinning over my shoulder. I could hear him saying, ‘Looks all right that sob stuff, but a fat lot of use it is to anyone. Damn silly waste of a pilot, and then you write pretty letters about it. Well, I suppose you’re trying to do your job.’

  Sergeant Kenneth Smith was one of the airmen attached to 257. He was a popular young man, born in Bromley in Kent, ‘one of the lads’18 as a fellow sergeant pilot put it. Smith was twenty-one.

  Soon after his death, Nazi propagandist Lord Haw-Haw broadcast Smith’s name and address, and claimed he was now a prisoner of war. As a result, his mother kept his room untouched for many years in the false hope that he would one day return home.

  Flight Lieutenant Noel Hall had joined 257 as a Flight Commander at Hendon in early June and, after a short spell away, had rejoined them on July 27 1940. The son of an admiral, Hall was a regular, with several years of flying experience under his belt. Born in Hampshire but educated in South Africa, he was a small, dapper man with wavy hair who was always immaculately turned out. He was shot down by Me 109s while defending convoy CW9 over St Catherine’s Point. The loss of such a superior and experienced officer in their first major combat was a serious blow to the squadron. Hall was one of the senior pilots who could have filled the leadership vacuum created by the puzzling behaviour of Squadron Leader Harkness.

  Noel Hall’s body was recovered by the Germans and he was buried as an unknown airman. It was not until 1948, a full three years after the war ended, that his cigarette case with his initials, a watch and a gold cufflink were identified by his father, and he was finally laid to rest in a marked grave in Criel Cemetery in France.

  Lancelot Mitchell was distraught about his role in the disastrous events of the day. Exactly why he flew off in the wrong direction was unclear but given the scale and ferocity of the combat and the lack of leadership, it was not completely surprising. In any event, Mitchell had stepped up unexpectedly into a leadership role when Harkness had refused, not that Squadron Leader Harkness was in a forgiving mood.

  We tried to make a loophole for Mitchell, talked of the difficulties in catching the vector over the RT, but Harkness wouldn’t hear of that. ‘It’s just bloody rot,’ Harkness shouted at Mitchell, in front of all the young pilots. This from a squadron leader who had not been up in the air in the first real emergency. ‘You simply made off like a damned fool instead of following your leader.’ That – coming from Harkness! I could have hit him.

  That night, Myers went to see Mitchell, who was desperately upset.

  Mitchell was cut up as it was. He talked to me for a long time that night. I wasn’t sharing a room with him then, but I went in just because I knew he wanted to talk to me. ‘I never let poor Hall down before,’ he kept on saying. ‘I’ll admit it was my fault.’ He looked haggard. ‘This is a dog’s life. I sometimes think I shouldn’t have been a pilot at all.’

  Not all the pilots of 257 were sympathetic to Lancelot Mitchell, as Myers recorded of Camille Bonseigneur, one of the Canadians.

  Bonseigneur was the most unaffected chap you could imagine. He was small with rather a haunted look and a little light brown moustache. ‘Bonseigneur never shot a line,’ Cochrane said very recently, ‘he thinks too much for that.’ Bonseigneur felt very deeply about everything that went on in the squadron. For nearly a week after Hall disappeared he refused to talk to Mitchell. ‘Hall would have been our Flight Commander,’ he said, ‘if Mitchell had not been yellow.’

  It was of no use telling Bonseigneur that Mitchell had a brainstorm and had flown off on a tangent. He scoffed at the explanation, but I knew it was the right one.

  To the pilots of the bedraggled 257 Squadron, Hill Harkness had already committed the cardinal sin of refusing to fly in the squadron’s biggest action of the war so far. As one sergeant pilot, Ronnie Forward, put it, ‘He used to hide away somewhere. I don’t think he led us at all. He didn’t inspire us and he didn’t always fly with us.’19

  Myers was deeply concerned about how quickly his squadron was falling apart with three young pilots already dead. In the shadows of the evening, when he wrote his letters to his family, the anxiety of what was happening during the day only heightened the emotion of what he wrote down in his notebook at night, as he thought of the house in the country near Lucenay-lès-Aix where his family hid.

  As the conflict unfolded, Margot and Myers realised they had probably made a mistake when they decided that Margot and the children should stay in France. Through smuggled messages from friends or via his journalist contacts, Myers heard of increasing Nazi activity in the area where his family was hiding. He knew from his pre-war years in Berlin that round-ups of Jews and deportations to camps, or worse, would be the next step for the German-occupying forces. He took some comfort in the enduring nature of the landscape.

  I get the sudden terrors when I think about you and the babies but I will not let them get the better of me. You would be ashamed of me. They have not interned you, Darling. I hope you are able to bear up. What have they done with the crops? They can’t destroy the rivulet or the lovely shape of those gentle hills. They can cut down the oaks, they can empty the barns of their stocks and they can take away the poultry. They can persecute you, my Ducky. They could take you away from the children, destroy their souls. My God. I believe they are human, as we are human, but I have terrors. I pray for you my beloved and for my little children. We are fighting for hope, and as long as we are fighting, hope cannot be destroyed.

  Trapped in France, Margot Myers had no idea whether her husband was dead or alive. Months after the evacuation from Dunkirk she received a letter that had been posted in England weeks before. It told her that Geoff had been on the beaches at Dunkirk but had just managed to escape. She was relieved that he was alive, but the letter was so old Margot had no idea what was happening to her husband in the Battle of Britain.

  Although he could write down his most personal and tender feelings during the night, by day Myers needed to be alert and strong and not let his emotions hinder his work.

  The catastrophic start to the Battle of Britain for 257 Squadron did not let up. Monday August 12 was a fin
e and clear day. Such was the unreality of the war for some of the nation that, on that particular day, twenty-seven people wrote to The Times about hearing a cuckoo call.

  The Luftwaffe had more serious matters on its mind. The Germans’ strategy was to precision target key radar installations in Sussex and Kent, followed by attacks on airfields on the south coast. Just four days after losing three pilots over the channel, 257 Squadron lost another man, John Chomley, a former sergeant pilot. Young and fresh-faced, with soft brown hair, Chomley had been flying one of the fifty-odd planes sent to defend Portsmouth from a massive German raid when he was shot down and killed. Squadron Leader Harkness and Flight Lieutenant Beresford both claimed ‘probables’20 that day but, once again, any success was blotted out by the loss of a pilot.

  John Chomley had been with 257, his first squadron, for just over a month. He was only twenty years old.

  Chomley and I got friendly. He had spent most of his life in Durban and his people were still in South Africa. He took me up in the Maggie [Magister training aircraft] when I chased after the squadron to be with them at the advanced airfield and take their combat reports when they landed. The job usually fell to new pilots… When we went home that night he shot up a friend in a little Sussex village, just clearing the trees as he dived down to greet her and then swooped up again. Two days later he disappeared in a blitz. I can’t help thinking at times that he’s still with the squadron and will walk into the mess with D’Arcy Irvine, Hall and the others.

  A second 257 pilot, the Honourable David Coke, was shot down in the same raid that morning and had a finger amputated at the Royal Naval Hospital, putting him out of action until much later in the Battle of Britain. Coke was the son of the Earl of Leicester of Holkham Hall in Norfolk and godson of the previous king, Edward VIII. Like John Chomley, Coke was a popular colleague. Terry Hunt recalled, ‘He was very good-looking and charming. He had a terrible stammer which miraculously disappeared when he was flying.’21

  The squadron’s cause was not helped by some inadequate equipment, particularly radios. Sergeant Pilot Reg Nutter recalled, ‘I am sure that many early casualties were caused by the inability of pilots to communicate with one another quickly and clearly. I can remember being at the rear of the squadron with Pilot Officer Capon when we were jumped by Me 109s over the south coast. I attempted to warn him of one on his tail but, on talking to him later after he bailed out, I found my transmission had not reached his ears.’22

  After the horrors of August 8 and August 12, the next few days, despite a strong increase in intense action from the Germans, were relatively uneventful for 257 Squadron. But on August 15, one of the young pilots in Myers’s squadron, Pilot Officer Charles Frizzell was forced to bail out over London when the engine of his Hurricane caught fire. Frizzell remembered, ‘Smoke and flame began to spew out from the protruding exhaust on both sides of the fuselage just ahead of the cockpit. With no power, I began to glide towards the rooftops of London below. Anxiously searching for an open space, I could find none.’23

  He decided to bail out with his parachute from about 800 feet. ‘I managed to land near a see-saw in the playground of an establishment called St. John’s Orphanage, just off Edgware Road. I suffered not a single bruise. I began to be approached by some people who appeared to be anything but friendly. The reason was that, my name being what it was, I had painted in large, block letters across the back of my Mae West [life jacket] my nickname FRITZ. Once I had convinced the natives that I was not one of “them” everything changed. I was welcomed into the orphanage for a cup of tea.’

  It was a close enough call for Frizzell to take a stark and unromantic view of aerial combat. ‘Unlike a commando who has to do it with a knife, the fighter pilot was well insulated from the harsh realities of his action. He didn’t get splashed by blood, hear the squeals or see the mutilated remains of his victim. It is in fact a nasty brutal little business.’24

  On August 18, 257 Squadron moved out of Northolt to RAF Martlesham Heath, near Woodbridge in Suffolk. Perhaps it was an attempt to ease them back from the aerial front line over the home counties and to enable them to regroup. Martlesham Heath was one of the most northerly aerodromes in 11 Group of Fighter Command, but was well placed to defend both the east coast and the Thames Estuary.

  However, the move away from Northolt did not signal an improvement in fortunes for the ragged squadron. On their first day at RAF Martlesham Heath, they were immediately sent to their forward base at RAF Debden, near Saffron Walden in Essex.

  With Harkness rapidly losing the confidence of the squadron, much of the responsibility and the strain of leadership fell on the shoulders of Hugh Beresford, flight lieutenant in charge of A Flight. A vicar’s son from the small village of Hoby in Leicestershire, Beresford had joined the RAF straight from school, somewhat against the wishes of his father. At the beginning of the war he had married the nineteen-year-old daughter of an RAF officer. They had been married for just over ten months when 257 moved to Suffolk. The move away from London did not diminish Beresford’s deep anxiety about the lack of leadership, as Myers reported in a letter to his wife.

  ‘Harkness makes me tired,’ Beresford said. ‘I just can’t stand the way he frigs about in the air every time there is a blitz on. We all shout at him that he’s not following the vectors given by the controller, but it makes no difference. He just goes the wrong way then circles round and round in the air until the section leaders peel off and leave him.’

  One of the Sergeant Pilots in 257, Ronnie Forward from Glasgow, explained the crisis in the squadron simply. ‘I would say that morale was not at its highest… there was no leadership.’25

  Pilot Officer Alan Henderson was blunter. ‘Harkness would lead us away from possible action. He was also completely useless over the RT. Morale was terrible.’26

  Geoffrey Myers was a sharp observer of human behaviour and had no doubt about the intense pressure Hugh Beresford was under.

  Beresford had a nervous flicker in his eyes which might have made a man doubt his personal courage if he did not know him. There were no doubts about Beresford for the pilots in his section, though. He knew the risks but he did the job properly every time. If there is no leadership it costs lives. Pilots were killed through no fault of their own.

  17Battle of Britain Monument. The operations record book has PO Chomley, not Capon, as one of the escorts.

  18Ronnie Forward, Interview with Author 1981

  19Interview with Author

  20Enemy aircraft pilots believed they had ‘probably’ shot down

  21Interview with Author, 1981

  22Battle of Britain Monument

  23Letter to a collector of memorabilia, April 29 1977, copied to Author

  24Letter to Author, March 20 1982

  25Interview with Author

  26Interview with Author

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Geoffrey Myers recognised that Squadron Leader Harkness was doing his best but was just not up to the job. His tolerance had limits, however, because the arrogance shown by Harkness was more difficult to forgive. ‘Harkness did not realise what was happening. He was egocentric and self-centred.’27

  Harkness was unwilling to listen to advice or ideas from the rest of the squadron, often shouting at anyone who disagreed with him. Pilot Officer Alan Henderson, a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge, was upset that Harkness sometimes led his squadron away from the action; but Henderson was even more shocked to realise there were embryonic signs of defiance, even mutiny, among the unit. ‘Some of the sergeants were talking about running away. I tried to cheer them up.’28

  A short pause in their flying in August also gave the pilots of 257 more time to contemplate their own mortality. As Henderson put it, ‘Anyone who says he was not frightened in the Battle of Britain is either a liar or an idiot. One of the best reasons for choosing to be a fighter pilot was that you were only shit-scared for forty minutes at a time. The other was that we were kings of everything. Girls we
re flinging themselves at you all the time.’

  For the wives of the tiny number of men who were married, life was not easy either. The women wanted some semblance of normal married life but, in addition to their continuing worries about the safety of their husbands, the men were endlessly moved round the country from one RAF base to the next.

  Being a newly married wife of a Battle of Britain pilot was unreal and difficult, as Terry Hunt outlined in her 1942 book. Her dream of living with her husband in their own little house seemed impossible – and as 257 moved from Hendon, then to Northolt, Debden and on to Martlesham Heath in Suffolk, she moved from rented room to rented room. Meanwhile, David had been banned from staying off the aerodrome with his new wife.

  ‘David had telephoned me about a fortnight before our wedding to say that his CO had warned him that children would result; and that David would not be able to live out until the war was over.’29

  As Terry could not live with her husband, she moved back home with her mother. ‘We lived quietly together, Mother and I, while David led his outlandish life. From 3.30 every morning to 11.30 every night there were terrible telephone conversations to and fro, when neither of us heard a word; or I would gather only that he was out of socks; and buying those and sending them off would make something to do.’

  Myers was sympathetic, even if Harkness was not. Clearly, Terry Hunt appreciated him, particularly when Myers defied orders to ensure the newly-weds could actually meet. ‘And then there was a message from the admirable Geoff, the intelligence officer, whose wife was in France with their baby. Geoff said it would be quite in order for me to come over and join David. It seemed a bold undertaking with the area banned and things beginning to happen at last.’

  So Terry Hunt moved into a room in a house facing the aerodrome. Terry watched the planes take off and land, always looking for her husband. ‘I saw David and the others fly away one late afternoon. From the road I had watched David himself climb; and I had seen them all go and grow small in the sky.’