by John Willis
I count those pilots that have disappeared and turn on myself saying ‘You are still here. You have not shared their risks.’ If I am called upon to play with death, I will do so Ducky, and you will know that I thought of you all.
Myers had a keen eye for the absurdities of service life but the inefficiencies also made him cross. Young men were risking their lives every day but even the RAF, to whom he was very loyal, continued to make mistakes. He had also seen plenty of laziness and time-serving when he was stationed in France in the Phoney War. This anger came to a head when Norman Heywood was needlessly shot down by his own air defences.
October 27 1940
There are still too many useless posts in the Air Force and in the Army. Up till now we had a very capable warrant officer with an efficient bomb disposal squad. Their work is to dig up unexploded bombs and render them harmless. Since bombs began to drop about the aerodrome they have been doing their work quietly and satisfactorily. Tonight, for no particular reason, an officer turned in the mess and said his job was bomb disposal. I asked him if he was an expert. He replied that he knew nothing at all about bombs but had come to look after the administrative side of bomb disposal. As if the administrative side of bomb disposal had not been attended to by the warrant officer!
Andrews, the bomb disposal warrant officer, laughed at this colossal waste of time and effort.
Then he told Geoffrey an even more absurd story of military hopelessness.
‘Some weeks ago, a fellow came along to the mess and seemed to do nothing all day except drink like a fish. He said he was an “aerodrome discipline officer”. He didn’t know what the job was and it took him some days to make up his mind as to what he should do. He came to the conclusion the job must have something to do with flying, so he decided to tell the pilots when he thought they were taking off or landing carelessly. The pilots, of course, just laughed at him. So, he kept his mouth shut and went on drinking until he was found one day wandering aimlessly in Kent. They took him to a lunatic asylum. He had gone raving mad with the DTs.’74
The Battle of Britain was to come to its official conclusion at the end of October but there was still time for the squadron to suffer a final loss. On October 29, Sergeant Alexander ‘Jock’ Girdwood from Glasgow, who had been with 257 throughout the Battle of Britain, was killed at RAF North Weald. Pilot Officer Tom Neil from 249 Squadron, which shared the station at North Weald with 257, was a witness. ‘A Hurricane, pointing west, sat outside our dispersal hut. On its belly and on fire. I hurried towards it to find Crossey and others standing beyond the circle of intense heat with their hands in their pockets. I peered through the smoke and flames. Not our code letters. Must be one of 257’s. I turned to Crossey. Where was the pilot? A nod. Inside!’75
October 29 1940
My Love, My Children,
Sergeant Girdwood went this evening. I saw a great fire a few hundred yards away from our dispersal point. I didn’t even know that he was in the middle of the fire. A few minutes before he went we were joking together. We just had to carry on as if nothing had happened. It was like that.
When Tuck heard how Sergeant Girdwood died, he looked down for a moment and thought. He said, almost under his breath, ‘What tough luck.’ Then he raised his head, flicked his fingers and said, ‘Can’t be helped. It’s all in a day’s work. There’s a war on.’
22-year-old Jock Girdwood had joined 257 in May 1940 at RAF Hendon. He had survived virtually to the very end of the Battle of Britain. His friends and fellow sergeant pilots, Bobbie Fraser and Ronnie Forward, had joined on the same day. Jock Girdwood had taken off just as bombs were dropped on RAF North Weald in Essex where 257 had just been re-stationed. The legendary Major Adolf Galland led the escorting Luftwaffe aircraft that day. Girdwood had only just returned to 257 after having been shot down in August when he broke his foot. His plane was one of a flight of three Hurricanes – one flown by Squadron Leader Bob Stanford Tuck, the other by Polish Pilot Officer Francizek Surma – that had reached flight speed just when they were hit by the German bombs. Jock Girdwood’s plane took the brunt of the blast.
Tom Neil continued to helplessly watch the Hurricane burning. ‘It was like a funeral pyre. As the flames took hold, we watched a blackened and unrecognisable ball that was a human head sinking lower and lower into the well of the cockpit until, mercifully, it disappeared. Then the fuel tanks gaped with whoofs of flame as the ammunition began to explode, causing us all to step back a pace, and the fuselage and wings began to bend and crumple in glowing agony. Finally, there was only the heat and crackling silence and ashes.’
It was really tough luck. Girdwood took off from the airfield just as the bomb dropped and blew him into the air. His plane, which must been hit by bomb splinters, crashed a few hundred yards away and burned furiously. We did not see this happening from our dispersal point because there were bombs dropping all over the airfield. We lay down in a ditch not more than three inches deep where they had put down a telephone wire. There had been no time to take cover.
Five of the ground staff were killed and about a dozen injured. It was a surprisingly small number for the twenty-seven bombs that dropped. Our good fortune.
The attack was beautifully planned and perfectly carried out. I take my hat off to those German pilots. They did their job properly.
Tuck knew he was very fortunate that his own luck had held and both he and his Hurricane were unscathed. He was a big fan of Polish pilots, all of whom were desperate to revenge the brutal annexation of their country by the Nazis. 257 Squadron had four Poles in its ranks. Tuck said, ‘The Poles were utterly bloodthirsty. They wanted to kill all the time. When I stopped them flying for just a day they just stood on the runway and cried, tears rolled down their cheeks.’76
The day Jock Girdwood was killed, one of the Poles, Pilot Officer Francizek Surma, was lucky not to become the seventh death in the bombing raid. He was flying at less than 1,500 feet when he was hit, but he still managed to bail out over the nearby village of Moreton. His Hurricane crashed in a rubbish dump to the south of the village.
His cockpit was a mass of smoke and his plane out of control when he jumped out. He landed in a treetop in the garden of an inn a few miles away. When the innkeeper satisfied himself that he was a Pole and not a German he gave him two whiskies and soda.
The story in the North Weald archives is more vivid. Surma was wearing a leather flying jacket with Nazi insignia on it, a trophy from an earlier wartime encounter. He was suspended above the ground in a line of elm trees. The North Weald archive adds, ‘At this point two slightly different variations on his subsequent rescue exist. One, the least tasteful, has it that two French sailors climbed up to the helpless pilot and attempted to entangle his Germanic neck in the parachute shrouds, before help arrived. The second, acceptable, version of his rescue simply places two Dutch merchant seamen in the role of straight rescuers. When brought to the ground the worried Surma was whisked off to North Weald in a large Hispano Suiza sent to rescue him.’
In the notes written by Myers that evening, the intelligence officer made no mention of either French or Dutch sailors or, indeed, of Nazi insignia, despite what must have been a tempting story for a journalist like him.
Surma was lucky in more ways than one. Not having the correct uniform on could have been fatal. An interview with an anonymous pilot revealed a sad and grisly incident in the Battle of Britain. ‘One man got shot down and bailed out. The fields were full of harvesting people and they killed him with pitchforks and farm implements. He didn’t have a Royal Air Force suit on and he was chucking money down and papers to try and convince them who he was but they wouldn’t have it. We took that very bad.’77
Flight Lieutenant Pete Brothers coped with the destruction caused by the brutality of the raid by trying to see the funny side of things. He was having tea in the mess when the raiders struck. ‘We all dived under the table! My car, an open 3-litre Bentley, was parked outside and I was livid to find the ne
ar-miss bomb had filled it with soil, which took forever to clean out.’78
The bomb disposal warrant officer, Andrews, took a similar approach – describing, to much laughter, how a new aircraft hand reported for duty.
The chap went to report at the adjutant’s office explaining, ‘I started to report at the guardroom, sir, but it’s no longer there.’
Tom Neil from 249 recorded, ‘A number of 257’s ground staff had also been killed and others wounded and a Polish officer of theirs had been forced to bail out.’79 The overall damage to the aerodrome and all the squadrons stationed there was far worse. The German raid left nineteen dead and forty-two wounded. Five of the casualties were from 257 squadron.
Later, Pilot Officer Tom Neil reflected on what he had seen and felt, ‘I retired that night more than a little concerned that I had treated the cremation of 257’s chap so lightly. What on earth was coming over me? I had watched a colleague burned to a cinder and had felt… well… almost nothing. Not like me at all. Downright worrying, in fact.’
Although 257 did not know it then, October 30 was later determined as the end date of the Battle of Britain. In that context, Sergeant Jock Girdwood was the final 257 pilot to die in the Battle of Britain, just twenty-four hours before its official end.
70Battle of Britain Monument
71National Archives, Kew
72Battle of Britain Monument
73Interview with Author and Jane Nairac
74Delirium tremens, severe shakes and confusion due to alcohol withdrawal
75Tom Neil, Gun Button to Fire (Amberley, 2011)
76Interview with Author
77Joshua Levine, Forgotten Voices (Ebury Press, 2006)
78Nick Thomas, Hurricane Squadron Ace (Pen and Sword, 2014)
79Tom Neil, Gun Button to Fire (Amberley, 2011)
CHAPTER TEN
Fighter Command had been victorious in the Battle of Britain simply by virtue of not being beaten. Hitler no longer planned to invade Britain nor did he expect that his air force would inflict so much damage that Britain would sue for peace. Hitler turned his attentions elsewhere. The heroic defensive courage of the young fighter pilots had been crucially helped by the skilful use of radar and other intelligence work, including that of the Observer Corps. The Germans had made mistakes, shifting attacks to London just when their airfield bombing strategy was starting to bear fruit. They consistently underestimated the strength and resilience of Fighter Command. As Pete Brothers put it in his biography, ‘The winter was coming and clearly there was not going to be an invasion. The Battle of Britain had been won.’
But for 257 Squadron, the war, rather than the battle, was far from finished. Bombs were still being dropped, convoys still needed to be protected and danger was still high. For Geoffrey Myers, his family situation was unchanged. His wife and two children were still trapped in occupied France and stories about Jews being persecuted or rounded up grew in frequency. His desperation to smuggle his family out of the occupied zone, across the border to unoccupied territory and down to Spain or Portugal, intensified. It was an escape plan fraught with danger.
In October 1940, Philippe Pétain passed a restrictive Jewish statute but already the 150,000 Jews who had travelled south to escape the Nazis had apprehended the discrimination against them in the so-called free zone too. The statute banned Jews from public posts and some jobs. The collaborationist policies of Pétain meant that, between 1940 and 1943, the Vichy government was implicated in the transportation of Jews to concentration camps. Overall, of the 76,000 Jews from France sent to Auschwitz and other camps in the war, fewer than 3,000 returned alive.
Myers was still trying to send money to his family and, through his friends and journalistic contacts, find an escape route for Margot and the children. He sent messages to his family through his friends – the Renards, in Clermont-Ferrand – but he had no idea whether those messages, or any money, was reaching his family in Lucenay-lès-Aix. In return, he had heard nothing from France since July, over three months earlier.
November 2 1940
My Ducky,
I wrote to you last night through our friend telling you that I could not send you any money. I was afraid that you might receive the two monthly instalments that I sent through Cooks and then expect others to follow. Perhaps I may hear that the arrangement has been resumed. I would prefer you to get even a few shillings out of the ten pounds than nothing at all. But I have no choice. Payments have been stopped.
In France the Guimiot family was focused on survival. They worked the fields, raised chickens and rabbits and killed a pig. There was no petrol and the family relied on a little donkey cart and horse wagon. Margot’s thoughts, however, were centred on what to do next. ‘I was becoming more and more worried. I felt danger approaching. England was still resisting. Should I try to pass into the free zone? I knew that freedom was only a relative thing, but perhaps all the same it would be safer there.’80
Myers had been on a visit to see his mother, Rosetta, and it brought back memories of happier times.
Only fourteen months ago you were in this house in Furzedown Road with Robert and me. I could see you at the dinner table. Your presence, and your little presence, Robert, filled the rooms. When I play with little children I half play with you, Robert and Anne. And I long for you.
He went with his mother on a visit to the countryside but, to him, the cottage they were in was an unhappy place.
We were in the cottage which recently belonged to a woman who left for America with her children. She went because her husband is a prisoner of war in Germany and her parents were in the United States. She left probably thinking that her husband would feel more at ease if he knew her to be in America. She and her family went down in a boat in the Mid-Atlantic. The man’s fate haunted me in the cottage. I was lucky compared with so many others.
Myers’s colleagues in the squadron tried to persuade him to join them at a dance but his thoughts were too much with his family
November 9 1940
But they did not insist because they know that when I wanted to stay in alone, my thoughts are dancing with you, dancing over the meadow at Beaurepaire, down to the stream where the watercress grows, to the river where the white cows stand under the oaks. The boys are enjoying the dance. Oh how I adore you my Luvvie.
Eventually, after many months of unnerving silence, Myers received news that his family were alive in France. He also learnt that Margot’s brother, who had joined the French forces at the start of the war and been captured by the Germans, was a prisoner in Germany. But at least he was alive.
November 18 1940
For hours last night I was trying to write a letter to you. I have received news of you through Portugal but this was tempered by a feeling of guilt that I have messed things up. I should have tried more ways to get in touch with you. Perhaps some of my messages have reached you at last and you are no longer anxious. What would be the good of raising your hopes too much?
I must tell you about Peter Blatchford tonight. He is not the tall fair-haired hero who appears in little boy’s dreams. He is stocky, thickset with a big head well planted on his body. Dark silky hair brushed back above a broad forehead. The whole is a setting for eyes that glint strength, and diffuse tenderness. His movements, like his eyes, are sometimes so swift that they surprise onlookers. Usually they are gentle and a natural dignity accompanies them. The first time I saw him I said to myself, ‘that is a man whom I shall like and respect.’
In fact, Peter Blatchford’s given name was Howard but he preferred to be called Peter. Inevitably too, given his roots in Alberta, Blatchford was often called Cowboy. This was Bob Stanford Tuck’s favourite name for him, although he occasionally called him Fat Arse. In turn, Blatchford called Tuck Beaky. The two superb pilots had great mutual respect for each other.
In Tuck’s biography, Cowboy is described affectionately. ‘He was cheery-faced, chunky and chuckle-voiced with an extraordinary large backside that made him w
addle and roll like an overfed puppy. The slowness of his movements and mannerisms proved wholly deceptive – his mind was rapier-swift, his reflexes instantaneous. He was a brilliant shot, never got excited – all told, a natural.’
Tonight, Blatchford had too much to drink. He remained responsible for his movements but not always his words. ‘Come on, Geoff, and have a drink,’ he said to me before dinner, taking me by the arm. He, Tuck and the pilots had been celebrating the birth of Pete Brothers’s daughter. They were on their third bottle of champagne and had been having stronger drinks earlier in the day. He had been doing all the heavy lifting in the squadron for the last three weeks. Stanford Tuck had been letting things slide and Brothers had had several grants of special leave. It was always Blatchford who did the organising, checked the state of the aeroplanes and shouldered responsibility for everything that went on in the squadron.
Blatchford had hitherto had no glory. Three times he had come back from air battles and made no claims. I know others in the squadron who would have made out a good case for having at least damaged an enemy. Blatchford would not stoop to that sort of thing if there was the slightest doubt in his mind. His courage was natural.
Three weeks before, Blatchford was almost blown out of the sky by cannon from a 109. He went on fighting with a huge rent in his fuselage and petrol streaming out from under his aircraft.
He treated the whole thing as a joke. Blatchford bent down and swung his arms quickly to show me the movements of the planes. Those dark vivacious eyes of his followed the movements of his arms until the pupils, like little stars, were shining through the corners of their windows.
On November 11 1940, Blatchford became a popular hero when he led the squadron on a dull convoy patrol over the east coast. For the first time, Italian planes came to attack the RAF. They had almost no involvement in the aerial war over Britain thus far, but Mussolini had insisted in helping the Luftwaffe. The Italian pilots were brave but their Fiat CR.42 biplanes and Fiat BR.20 bombers were no match for the speed and firepower of the Hurricanes and Spitfires from Fighter Command.
