Secret Letters

by John Willis

  Flying Officer John Claverly Martin, the twenty-six-year-old from Timaru in New Zealand, had been very lucky to survive the snowstorm at RAF Coltishall on January 1 1941 when Carl Capon had been killed. For several tense minutes, Myers and the rest of the squadron had mistakenly thought he was the one who had perished. But Martin did not benefit from his luck for long. He was posted missing in action over France a few months later on August 27 1941. He had died in a mid-air collision with a Hurricane from another squadron on his 131st operational sortie.

  Overall, nearly 800 men who survived the Battle of Britain went on to be subsequently killed between 1940 and 1945 in other theatres of war. Only a few of 257 Squadron’s Battle of Britain pilots managed to survive through five more years of the conflict.

  Pilot Officer Kenneth Gundry, some of whose letters are in the Imperial War Museum, was wounded on October 12 1940 in combat over Deal and made an emergency landing at nearby RAF Detling. Eighteen months later, Gundry was shot down and killed in North Africa aged twenty-five. He is remembered on the Alamein Memorial.

  Pilot Officer Francizek Surma, who had been shot down over Essex a day before the official end of the Battle of Britain on October 29 1940, had been lucky to survive. Surma had been caught in trees when he parachuted out at Moreton and, wearing a jacket with a German insignia, had only escaped a worse fate when he finally persuaded his rescuers that he was Polish and not German. A year later, Surma’s luck ran out when he was shot down over the Channel on November 8 1941. Neither his body nor his aircraft were ever recovered.

  Flying Officer David Coke, godson of Edward VIII and son of the Earl of Leicester from Holkham Hall, determinedly went back into action before the end of the Battle of Britain having had his finger shot off near the start. He returned to 257 before moving off to other squadrons. Flying with 80 Squadron in the Western Desert in Egypt, he was killed in action on December 9 1941, aged twenty-six, and buried in Libya. Coke was awarded a DFC on December 26 in the same year. The citation praised ‘his skill and leadership.’

  When Pete Brothers, the steadfast right-hand man of Stanford Tuck in the difficult days following the early disasters for 257, died at the age of ninety-one, his brilliant career meriting national newspaper obituaries. Brothers was credited with sixteen ‘kills’ in the Battle of Britain and, in 1943, was awarded the DSO. The citation noted, ‘Wing Commander Brothers is a courageous and outstanding leader whose splendid example has inspired us all.’

  After a distinguished career, including a spell in the Malaysian Emergency, he was made an Air Commodore in 1966. Brothers was always keen to remember those who had been less lucky than himself so, for many years, he was Chairman of the Battle of Britain Fighter Association.

  Peter ‘Cowboy ‘Blatchford, perhaps the man that Myers respected and liked the most, succeeded Stanford Tuck as Commanding Officer of 257 Squadron. He leadership skills were not just apparent to Myers, as intelligence officer, but to Fighter Command more widely. In 1941, Cowboy was promoted to wing commander and he eventually returned to RAF Coltishall as wing leader in 1943. On May 3, he was leading his wing in an escort of British bombers attacking a power station in Amsterdam when he was involved in a desperate fight. Cowboy was hit and forced to ditch into the sea when his aircraft lost fuel. Despite several searches, Peter Blatchford’s body was never found.

  In 1979, nearly forty years after he was shot down over Kent, the body of Flight Lieutenant Hugh Beresford was finally lifted out of its muddy grave on the Isle of Sheppey. His Hurricane from 257 Squadron had crashed from around 20,000 feet and pieces of the plane were everywhere, but his body was surprisingly well preserved. His torso stayed intact, still held in place by the straps and harness. His legs had been smashed off at the knees but his flying boots were still neatly in place. Later the coroner noted a bullet hole in his back but could not be sure if that was the cause of Beresford’s death.

  As his colleague in 257, Sergeant Ronnie Forward, put it, ‘Finding him was absolutely out of the blue. I can’t believe he was found forty years later, buried in that muck. Terrific.’128

  The coroner in 1979 said about Beresford, ‘One of our national heroes. There were those who with undoubted courage and determination were prepared to sacrifice themselves for their country.’

  Hugh Beresford was finally laid to rest in Brookwood Military Cemetery in Surrey with full military honours in November 1979. A fifteen-man escort party fired a three-volley salute and the band of RAF Cranwell played the ‘Last Post’.

  And what of our chronicler, Geoffrey Myers, and his family? Myers continued in the world of information and secrecy that he had been part of in France at the beginning of the war and then as an intelligence officer in Fighter Command. He was posted to the legendary code-breaking unit at Bletchley Park. Here the codes and cyphers of the German Enigma machine were broken and the intelligence gathered from decoding – known as Ultra – was assessed. It is only relatively recently that historians have fully understood the huge impact of Ultra on the outcome of the war because it gave Britain and its allies access to high-level German secret intelligence without the enemy knowing it.

  Myers worked right at the heart of the operation in the legendary Hut 3. He acted as a translator on what was called the Watch, a group of first-class German speakers, many of whom were peacetime schoolteachers, who translated and sifted often incomplete German messages. As Peter Calvocoressi, who also worked in Hut 3, put it, these dozen operators were more than translators because ‘they needed to be familiar with the whole intelligence picture in order not to miss a significant clue hidden in the seemingly prosaic message on the scrap of paper before them.’129

  Three months after she had arrived in Britain following her complex and hazardous journey, Margot Myers moved into a house near Bletchley Park. It was wonderful to be reunited with her husband and to be a family unit once more. But there was still a war going on, and swapping an existence on the family property in occupied France with the relative safety but also banality of life in England’s home counties was not without its pressures.

  It was, perhaps, something of an anti-climax after her dramatic escape from German-occupied France. Top Secret Ultra was a demanding master and Myers, conscientious as ever, worked very long hours, sacrificing the family life he had missed so much. Margot understood the desperate importance of the work at Bletchley Park and that losing family time was a sacrifice they needed to make. Yet, unlike most partners, her husband could never discuss his work. Even within Bletchley Park, Hut 3 was isolated and the work was both very complex and extremely secret.

  As Calvocoressi rather blandly put it, ‘One of the consequences of war is to allow the workplace to usurp many of the hours which a more tranquil dispensation allots to domesticity.’

  As his vivid and frank letters show, for Geoffrey Myers being a husband and a father was much more than ‘domesticity’. Inevitably, during this period Margot often felt like an outsider, living in an alien environment. News from her family in France was almost non-existent and she was forced to avoid attempting to contact them for fear that her Jewish connection would endanger their lives. She found compensation in her growing children who numbered three when, to great joy, Bernard was born in 1944.

  Margot had been lucky to escape the Nazi occupiers. In July 1942, the Nazis arrested more than 13,000 Jews in Paris including over 4,000 children. After being penned like cattle for several days in a velodrome, most, including thousands of children separated from their parents, were transported to Auschwitz.

  Torture by the Nazis continued to be commonplace at the local prison in Moulins, La Mal Coiffée. ‘They preferably attacked the sexual parts, twisted them with a hand or with a wire, made them grill with a burning newspaper or tore them off with pincers.’130

  On the exact day in August 1944 that Paris celebrated the surrender of the Nazi garrison, the Germans dragged fifty-six men, nine women and a seven-year-old child from their dungeon in the Gestapo Prison at Moulins, just a
few miles from Margot’s home. Instead of being liberated, as they should have been under the terms of the German surrender, this mixture of Jews, resistance fighters and the unlucky were bundled onto trains and sent to the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Ravensbrück. Although the war in France was over, only thirty-five of the sixty-six prisoners survived.

  Later in the war, Myers worked in 3A, the air intelligence part of Hut 3, as an air advisor. Here his experience at 257 Squadron proved vital. Everyone in 3A had been RAF or USAF officers with experience in the Watch. Now, operating in pairs, they sifted and analysed the material that passed through the Watch before passing the most important and relevant material onwards. Margot knew that she had to support the war effort and her sacrifice was nothing compared to the sacrifices made by the young men whose lives were so dramatically and emotionally described in the letters her husband wrote in his notebook.

  Before the war ended, he was elevated to Head of Hut 3, Air Intelligence Section, and is now commemorated on the Codebreakers’ Wall. Geoff’s work was so secret he could not even tell his family about it, ‘Our lips on our work, called Ultra, were sealed for thirty-five years and nobody in the family knew until recently what I was doing in the last five years of the war.’131

  After the liberation of Paris, Margot was amazed that her husband, on a mission to Paris, successfully made his way down to Beaurepaire where, Margot recalled, he astonished the locals in Lucenay by escorting his mother-in-law to the village wearing his RAF uniform. But it was not until after the war, in spring 1946, that Margot was able to return home to Beaurepaire herself. She had not seen her mother for nearly five years and it was thrilling to embrace her again. Yet, Margot detected an underlying bitterness in her mother towards some people in the area. Many had been true and kind but others had waited for her mother to fall. ‘She had developed a deep resentment towards certain people in her midst. She could see how cowardly they were and how they compromised her principles.’ Some locals still thought that, ‘The Jews, the communists and the British were responsible for all the misfortunes.’132

  At the local town hall, Margot was shocked to learn that just after she had escaped a local had denounced her to the Nazis. The Germans who came hunting for Margot and her soon after they escaped had been tipped off by someone the family knew. The officials offered to give her the name of the person who had betrayed her, but Margot decided it was best not to know.

  After the war, adjustment to civilian life was difficult for Myers, who had formally left the RAF in 1946 with the rank of Squadron Leader and an MBE. He had lived through the Battle for France, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and had been at the heart of the Enigma operation at Bletchley Park. Yet, these experiences and the maturity they brought with them seemed to count for nothing in 1946. It was as if these critical moments in the war, where he had been witness to some of the most significant turning points, had never happened or he had never been there.

  Back in Paris, he was taken back on by the Daily Telegraph but at the same level he had reached in 1939. He had lost many of his journalistic contacts and some of his pre-war colleagues had overtaken him as a result of successful careers as war correspondents.

  His sense of alienation, of difference, was accentuated by having spent seven years in the dark world of secrets and confidential information. Now, back on the journalistic beat, instead of suppressing information he was required to publish it, and instead of accurately weighing up the significance of material, the journalistic need was to often make stories bigger than they really were.

  Myers was such a diligent and careful journalist that he slowly overcame this innate conflict within himself and began to shake off the chains of excessive secrecy. He worked hard for the Daily Telegraph and when the Sunday Telegraph started, he was promoted to be their number-one correspondent. As he admitted, he was happier with the precise requirements of news rather than the features he had to write and he led a successful career for almost all his working life within the Telegraph Group. His final job, six years before he retired, was as correspondent at the United Nations in New York. It was the ideal job for Myers. It was fresh and exciting and he worked happily there until his retirement at the age of sixty-five. His son Bernard has collated a self-published book of Geoff’s journalism.

  In retirement he was always on the move, visiting his children in different parts of the world, or looking after his grandchildren while Margot continued to give music lessons in their flat in Paris. The last time I saw him was for lunch in a small French restaurant in Notting Hill Gate in March 1982. He had a huge suitcase that he lumbered about with him because he was on his way to visit his daughter in the USA. After that he was headed back to Beaurepaire, where his wife and children had spent so many agonising months in fear of the Nazis. He was planning to spend the winter there looking after his elderly mother-in-law.

  It was typical of Geoffrey’s kindness, and also symbolic of his conscientiousness and sense of responsibility, that he had spent the morning at the Public Record Office in Kew double-checking the records of 257 Squadron to ensure that all the information he gave me was accurate. He wrote to me in May 1982 thanking me for the lunch and adding that, having re-examined the squadron records that same morning, ‘I knew it would upset me to go through those reports again in detail after more than forty years, but I did not realise that I would also be filled with admiration for what those men accomplished at the time.’133

  During our warm and friendly meeting, he was twinkly and fun. He confided in me some incidents involving high-profile pilots that he had never told anyone before. ‘Someone needs to know,’ he kept saying. Having lived with the weight of all that had gone on in one of the most battered squadrons in the Battle of Britain, so much of it secret, it was as if he finally wanted to unburden himself. He was keen that what had been hidden for so long should now be in the open, as any journalist would. He gave me permission to publish his letters and sounded relieved as much as pleased that publication would go ahead.

  I should have realised why. Just before our lunch, Myers had been diagnosed with cancer and told he only had a year to live. Of course, his dignity and courage was such that he never told me anything of his illness, and throughout our lunch he was cheerful and convivial.

  Myers never had the final year he was promised. Six weeks after our lunch, he died in France, aged seventy-six. His wife, Margot, went on to live to the age of ninety-nine. In 2012 she died in Lexington, Massachusetts, where her daughter, Anne, lives with her family. According to the local obituary Margot continued to teach piano into her late nineties and was known to the family as Mamie Piano. She had nine grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren. Robert, Anne and Bernard are no longer young, but in good heart, and cherish the extraordinary story of their mother and father.

  118Interview with Author, 1981

  119Interview with Author

  120Diaries of Guy Mayfield, edited by Carl Warner, Life and Death in the Battle of Britain (Imperial War Museum, 2018)

  121Interview with Author

  122Letter to Geoff Myers, 1980

  123Interview with Author

  124Interview with Author, 1981

  125Interview with Author

  126BBC TV ‘ Inside Story: Missing’ September 7 1980

  127Letter to a memorabilia collector April 29 1977, copied to Author

  128Interview with Author

  129Peter Calvocoressi, Top Secret Ultra (Cassell, 1980)

  130Jacky Tronel blog ‘Histoire Penitentiaire et Justice Militaire’

  131Letter to his grandson, Danny, May 18 1982

  132Margot Myers memoir, translated by her daughter, Anne

  133Letter to Author, May 1982

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  No book is written in isolation and so I have to thank the many diligent historians and archivists who have recorded the events of the Second World War. Few conflicts have been as comprehensively written about as the Battle of Britain. For Secret Letters, t
he Battle of Britain Monument and Imperial War Museum have been particularly helpful sources as have several books that I have credited.

  Thanks also to Janet Willis, whose valuable interviews from the 1980s were found in the loft, still extant, and to those who helped start this enterprise off many years ago including Andy Saunders, Battle of Britain historian, and my colleagues at Yorkshire Television, particularly Peter Moore and Jane Nairac. Special thanks to the late Peter Gordon, whose superb BBC documentary Missing first opened the door on 257 Squadron. We later enjoyed working together at Yorkshire.

  Miranda Vaughan Jones, supported by Saba Ahmed, has edited the book meticulously and thoughtfully and Philip Beresford created a memorable cover. Tom Willis who did a great job on the promotional videos. My publisher, Richard Charkin, was, as ever, both a wise counsel and good companion and my agent, David Grossman, a diligent supporter.

  Yet, of course, the greatest debt of gratitude lies with those who lived through these events of 1939-41 and recorded their thoughts. I was lucky to have met, or been in touch with, several members of 257 squadron back in the 1980s and they are credited in the footnotes. They were, without exception, unfailingly honest and thoughtful about their experiences. Particular thanks to Esther Terry Wright (Terry Hunt) who I met at that time near her flat in Victoria when she was not only fascinating company but agreed that I could use excerpts from her beautifully written book.

  However, the deepest thanks must be reserved for Geoff and Margot Myers whose war time experiences, and love for each other and their children, are the rock on which this book is built. Although I have added many other voices, and significant further information into the story in order to amplify what Geoff wrote between 1939-41, without their candour and generosity of spirit there would have been no book.

  In addition, I was lucky that Geoff wrote so intuitively and often beautifully about the extraordinary circumstances they both faced. I felt privileged to know them both and to be trusted to tell their astonishing story. If the book has failings, they are of my making not Geoff’s.