by John Nichol
Apart from this I have the inner conviction, as I write, of a force outside myself and my brain, that I have not trusted in vain. All I am anxious about is that you and the rest of the family come to know Him. Ken, I know, already does. I commend my Saviour to you …
Well, that’s covered everything now I guess, so Love to Dad and all,
Your loving son, Cyril.
A funeral date was set. Cy’s body was returned to New Malden, later than planned. In her grief, his mother was determined to know what had killed him and see his injuries for herself, but when the coffin finally arrived there was a notice on it: ‘Not to be opened under any circumstances.’
The funeral took place on Maundy Thursday, 6 April 1944. The spring flowers were out, and a long, cold winter was behind them, but all that lay ahead for the Barton family was grief and misery. Mr Barton was especially devastated. ‘He was in an awful state,’ Cynthia says. ‘If Mum hadn’t been there I don’t know how he’d have coped at all. Mum had to hold him up.’ Of the girls, only Cynthia was allowed to attend. Joyce and Pamela peered through a window as the funeral party left; they remember the Union Jack draped over their brother’s coffin all too vividly.
Cy’s friend Frank Colquhon, a curate of the local church, gave the eulogy. He spoke of Cy’s ‘radiant Christian character’ and his faith in God. He also reminded the gathering that Cy’s last flight was not one in which his aircraft had crashed and he was killed, but one in which his spirit had flown upward into the arms of God. They sang ‘When I Survey the Wondrous Cross’ and ‘Abide with Me’, and then Cy’s body was buried at Kingston cemetery among the sprouting daffodils.
An excerpt from Romans 8.28 was carved on to his tombstone: ‘And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose.’
Roger Coverley had spent four days on the run in the heart of Germany. The railway tunnel he walked into a few minutes after parachuting to the ground had given him cover, and then, hiding by day and travelling by night, he managed to make good progress to the west, eking out his meagre escape rations. The cold was not unbearable, but after four days the hunger became so. At one stage he stole into a vegetable patch, dug up some leeks and ate them raw. They were disgusting. ‘It put me off that vegetable for a very long time,’ he says.
He estimated he had covered 30 miles in four days by the time he reached the River Rhine. Given the current, and the cold, there was no way he could swim across; he needed a bridge. He found one, near Bonn, but he was captured as he walked across it. Imprisoned with fellow captured airmen and taken to Dulag Luft, he discovered that his determination to stay at the helm of his plane for as long as possible had not been in vain. All but one of his crew had managed to parachute to safety.
The only casualty had been Sergeant Motts, the flight engineer. He managed to escape the burning aircraft, but as he jumped his parachute had caught fire and his body was found hanging in a tree, the remains of his canopy draped around him. The wreckage of their Halifax was scattered over an area one mile wide.
Three days into his incarceration at the interrogation centre at Dulag Luft, in a tiny cell with the heat turned up to maximum at night to make him as uncomfortable as possible, Dick Starkey noticed a black discharge seeping from the plaster cast on his leg.
He knew immediately it was frostbite, caused by parachuting to the ground through sub-zero temperatures, without boots, then lying in the snow for several hours. The camp medical orderly checked on him each day, but ignored Dick’s concerns. He was taken to another building in the camp and interrogated, still in shock and racked with pain. Despite being questioned twice and threatened with a visit by the Gestapo, he still did not crumble.
During his second interrogation, an ‘immaculately dressed and perfumed’ Luftwaffe officer told him that 97 Allied bombers had been shot down. ‘It was a hell of a shock,’ Dick says, but he did not doubt what he was being told or dismiss it as propaganda. The evidence of his own eyes told him it was ‘near the mark’. He couldn’t help but add those losses to the ones racked up in the week before Nuremberg, during raids on Berlin and Essen. He estimated that Bomber Command had lost 204 aircraft, which meant 1,440 men killed or missing, in the space of a single week. That’s the equivalent of 10 squadrons, he thought.
Of the men who were shot down over enemy territory on the night of the Nuremberg raid, all but one were apprehended and sent to Dulag Luft. Don Brinkhurst, a mid-upper gunner in 101 Squadron, was the only airman to escape. His Lancaster had been brought down, probably the result of friendly fire when a nervous gunner on a Halifax just 300 feet away mistook them for a German fighter. Brinkhurst was one of three who parachuted to safety; the other five all perished. They were only two ops short of completing their tour.
On the ground, approximately a dozen miles into German territory, Brinkhurst hid his parachute and started to walk towards Belgium. He managed to avoid capture for four days, despite the proximity of patrols with dogs, having to take shelter at one point near a German airfield, and suffering a debilitating bout of stomach cramp when he ate raw potatoes from a field. He walked 40 miles cross-country from the place he landed to the Belgian border, where he made himself known to ‘a very fat lady at an isolated farmhouse who was putting out her washing’.76
He had chosen well; the woman took him in.
Cy’s funeral was over, but the Bartons’ suffering had only just begun. His distraught mother was tireless in her efforts to discover all she could about the last few moments of his life. She remained desperate to know whether he had experienced any pain, and to learn more about the nature of his injuries. His Commanding Officer at Burn replied to her letters, informing her that it was probably shock that killed him, and ‘his cheery face with which we have become so familiar was still the same, even at the last’.
A more detailed picture of his last moments was provided by the Ryhope GP, Dr J. Bain Alderson, who had been with the rescue party. He described Cy’s head injuries and traumatic blood loss. ‘He was insensible when I saw him; he was not burnt in any way, as the plane only burnt a little and the crew were pulled out without any burns … I very much regret that the hospital authorities and myself were unable to do any more for him … Please also accept my personal sympathies in your great loss.’77
Her questions answered, it was time for the Bartons to start grieving the loss of their treasured son and to try and pick up the pieces of their lives. But the gap he left proved impossible to fill. Cynthia was particularly aware of the toll it took on her father. ‘He almost became an old man overnight.’
Her mother appeared to cope better, at least superficially, but the girls could tell her heart was broken.
CHAPTER 18
A Charmed Life
Sam Harris and his crew flew on, nearing the end of their tour in May 1944. When they were five short of the golden target of 30 completed ops, their pilot Ken Murray told them that he wanted to volunteer for yet another five.
This announcement was met with a mixed response from the rest of them, to put it mildly. Chalky had only recently married, and Mac planned on doing so when his tour was over. There was no chance they were going to put their head back in the lion’s mouth five more times if they made it all the way to 30.
Sam was the only one who said he might consider it, because he did not want to be sent to an Operational Training Unit, away from his crew-mates. But that wasn’t enough for Ken. ‘Right, that’s it. You’re a bunch of yellow-bellied bastards.’ He turned and stormed out of the room.
The crew were quite perplexed by his attitude; if Ken was determined to do more ops, then the squadron would find him another crew. They wondered whether their Flight Commander had approached him with the idea. They were extremely short of experienced and battle-hardened crews; perhaps they were desperate to keep Ken and his crew together? Whatever the reason, it created tension and bewilderment where previously there had been comradeship.
&
nbsp; ‘Well, that’s it, chaps,’ Chalky said after Ken walked out. ‘We still have five trips to go and it looks as if they are going to be a right bundle of fun.’
Their last op as a crew came on 6 June 1944. They gathered around their aircraft that night, the warm summer air a stark contrast to the teeth-rattling cold of winter at the start of their tour. They were smoking their cigarettes, as they had on 29 previous occasions, when a voice came out of the darkness. ‘One way or another, if we go to the target, this will be the last night we will ever stand here.’ There was no more to be said.
The op was routine. At 2.39 a.m. they returned to base; they had flown together for the last time. As they sat on their bunks later that morning, unable to sleep, they smoked more cigarettes and reminisced. They talked of Nuremberg and its exceptionally high losses; and G2, their ‘ropey old aircraft’ which they had last flown on 13 April, before it was taken out of service. Luff summed it up: ‘Well, lads, you have to admit it, we have been a very lucky crew.’ They were all quick to agree.
Little more than a month later the brand-new Lancaster which they had been given to replace G2, and which they passed on to another crew as they left the base, collided with another aircraft and all but the gunners were killed. ‘It could have been us,’ Sam said.
Ken did return to a squadron, but not until 1945. Sam also returned to the front line, this time in a Mosquito.
The story of Cy Barton’s heroism spread to the higher echelons of the RAF. One day in late June a dispatch rider arrived at the Bartons’ house. He carried a letter from the Under-Secretary of State at the Air Ministry.
His father opened the letter. His mother asked what it said. He told her that Cy had been awarded the Victoria Cross for ‘conspicuous bravery’.
Mrs Barton remained unimpressed. ‘It won’t bring him back,’ she said.
‘But it’s the highest honour any serviceman can earn,’ he explained.
‘I don’t care. It won’t bring him back, will it?’
Newspaper reporters arrived at the house in packs to revel in the family’s reaction. Mrs Barton stayed in her bedroom, still too distressed to speak publicly of her son’s death.
The next day his citation appeared in the London Gazette, providing the world with the first official account of Cy’s outstanding heroism. The honour bestowed on her brother was mentioned at Joyce’s school assembly the next day. ‘My teacher was so excited she put her arm round me and sort of lifted me up. I was excited, but I didn’t really know why I was excited. I didn’t understand what it all meant.’
The publicity brought a rush of letters through the Bartons’ door, from hundreds of people wanting to congratulate Cy’s family on the bravery of their son as well as offering their sympathy. Amongst them was a letter from Sir Arthur Harris, the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command.
My dear Mr Barton
I write to inform you that His Majesty The King has been graciously pleased to confer upon your son the Victoria Cross.
I ask you on behalf of Bomber Command, and for my own part especially, to accept our sympathy in your loss.
I hope, however, that this loss will be to some extent mitigated by the manner of your son’s passing and by his high award, so well deserved, so hardly won.
Your boy set an example of high courage and, finally, of extreme devotion to duty towards his crew, which will go down in history in the annals of his Service and shine as an inspiration for all who come after him.
I hope indeed that a rightful pride in his achievements and his conduct will be of some consolation to you and yours at this time.78
These letters, sent by people she had never met from halfway across the world, did in time give Cy’s mother succour. She kept every single one. Once the media frenzy had abated, she wrote to the lady who had looked after Cy when he was training in the USA. Her letter revealed both her stoicism and her profound sadness: ‘… I have been very brave, and try hard to carry on as he would wish me to. I feel so overcome when I sit down to write. Now he has been awarded the VC I have had to do a good deal of writing, we are very pleased this honour has been awarded him, but it has brought it all back again tenfold.’79
In June the Panton family was informed that, in his absence, Chris had been given a commission and made a Pilot Officer. But there was still no news of his whereabouts.
The weeks of waiting turned into months. Eventually, so much time had passed that Chris’s status was now ‘Missing, presumed killed’. But their father refused to give up hope. He wrote letter after letter trying to find out what had happened to his son. It was Fred’s job to take them to the post office before school and check if there were any replies, a two-mile round trip, because his father couldn’t wait until the postman’s delivery later in the morning.
Fred and his little brother created a series of daily rituals to help sustain their hope that Chris would miraculously reappear. He would watch Harold run between two elm trees; if he made the distance before Fred counted to 10, then Chris was definitely still alive. Of course, he always made it, and just for a few moments both the boys felt better.
The waiting went on for half a year. Six months of agony, of clinging to the faintest hope; six months of wishing, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, that Chris was alive and well and being held by the Germans as a prisoner-of-war. Even more fancifully, they sometimes liked to imagine him making his way across Europe like Pimpernel Smith in the Leslie Howard film, evading the enemy pursuers, and finally arriving back in England, safe and sound.
Then, one autumn morning, there was a letter. The same sense of foreboding that told him Maurice Fenwick’s envelope contained bad news told him this one did too. He ran back to the cottage and watched his father tear it open. The letter listed those on Chris’s Halifax who had survived, and those who had been killed.
Chris was one of the two who had died.
Fred used to think that if anything happened to Chris, it would ‘just about kill my mother’, but she had come to terms with the possibility over the months that had passed since Nuremberg, and now, at last, she could begin to grieve.
For his father, it was different. ‘It knocked the stuffing out of him.’ He was never the same again. Christian Nielsen, Chris’s pilot, travelled to Spilsby to see him when the war was over to explain what had happened that night, and told him how Chris had passed out the parachutes before the plane exploded and that those who had survived had been blown free. He also received a letter from another crew member, Canadian Jack McLauchlan, who was still grappling with the mystery of why everyone except Chris and one other airman had been spared on that dreadful night:
‘What I cannot understand is if the Lord helped Chris [Nielsen] and Harry, why didn’t I get killed and let your Chris escape unscathed. If anyone had a right to live it was this Panton! Gladly would I have laid down my life for Chris. He was the truest friend I have ever had. I believe Chris will be buried around a town called Bamburgh [sic] near Nurnberg. We were not allowed to attend the funeral and it broke my heart.
‘At the time I went missing, no doubt Chris told you I owed him a pound note, so I have enclosed a postal order for the sum.’80
But that was it. Chris’s death was never spoken of again in the Panton household, and neither was the war.
On a cold and damp day in December 1944, Cy Barton’s parents received his Victoria Cross from the King at Buckingham Palace. They had been offered third-class rail vouchers to make the short trip to London, but their local MP, Sir Percy Royds, a former Admiral in the Royal Navy and himself a decorated veteran of the Battle of Jutland, asked to ‘honour’ their brave son by driving them.
Cyril’s brother Ken took Joyce, Cynthia and Pamela to London by train, and they waited near the gates for their parents to emerge. There were no celebrations, just quiet pride at the honour bestowed on their son, and their lingering sadness at his loss. As they strolled around St James’s Park, their mother told the girls that the King had praised Cyr
il’s actions.
On another cold winter’s day they made a sadder pilgrimage – to Ryhope, the place where Cyril crashed and died. But the distress of the visit had taken its toll on Mr Barton’s failing health, and so they were unable to meet those who saw Cy make his last heroic landing. Among them was Mrs Richardson, whose house was half demolished by the wing of Cy’s Halifax. She had exchanged letters with Mrs Barton. The two women shared the bond of motherhood, though one had suffered a great loss and the other had been spared. In May 1945 Mrs Barton wrote again: ‘This has been a dreadful war and about time it was over. We all feel war weary, don’t we?’81
Cyril was rarely mentioned at home. Mr Barton simply found it too upsetting. The silence heightened the sense of unreality for the girls. The Christmas after he died, Joyce believed he might come home, that it had all been a terrible mistake.
Cynthia says: ‘This shadow that was cast over our family never went away. Mum never recovered. No one talked about him. Mum would have preferred people to talk about him and remember him. But it was a different time; people didn’t talk about their feelings that way, did they?’
Mrs Barton carried the letter informing them Cy was to be awarded the VC in her handbag until the day she died, and gradually, over time, the sisters and their mother did speak more of him. ‘All these years on, Cyril is clearly still a big part of our lives. There was something special about him, not because he’s dead or because he won the VC, but just because he was a very special young man. He would have gone on to do good, I think.’
CHAPTER 19
A Wing and a Prayer
The decimation of their squadron at Nuremberg was so extensive that for a long time afterwards Rusty Waughman would scan the list of names on a battle order of those taking part and barely recognise more than a handful.
On 11 May, during a raid on the railway marshalling yards at Hasselt, Belgium, in the run-up to the Allied invasion of Europe, they collided with another Lancaster. The other aircraft’s mid-upper turret and propeller blades tore into their fuselage and bomb bay before they had a chance to react.
