Secret Letters

by John Willis

  Although the squadron leader had banned David from leaving the aerodrome, the rule was not being strictly enforced and so, with encouragement from Myers – who no doubt empathised and felt the pain of separation from his own wife – the Hunts had some semblance of a married life. ‘It was a delightful and terrifying life. David would spend his last energy coming over to the house, washing perfunctorily in cold water, and falling into bed. We had no alarm clock. I would get into bed too and, with David already asleep, prop myself upright against the wooden rails of the bed and watch the dark and the searchlights away over the aerodrome. There was his breathing, an occasional plane engine roaring, when the plane itself might soar like a ghost across the window. There might be a bomb or two away in the distance. Time barely moved: certainly, it was not to be measured.’

  August 18 was a critical juncture in the Battle of Britain. Fighter Command had already lost more than one hundred pilots in the previous nine days and were significantly below strength overall, though not as threadbare as the Germans imagined. But the rate of losses was too high to sustain for long. Although Squadron Leader Harkness led 257 Squadron into combat that day, it was Hugh Beresford and his section who managed to get through the fighter escorts to attack the Luftwaffe bombers. Beresford himself hit a Heinkel 111.

  Sergeant Alexander ‘Jock’ Girdwood, Beresford’s number two, joined in the attack and also hit the bomber. Jock described the scene. ‘As I broke away, bullets entered my cockpit which exploded and caught fire. After a struggle I managed to bail out and as I fell I succeeded in pulling the ripcord and in untwisting the lines which wound round my legs. After that, I was nearly strangled by the lines which got entangled round my neck. A toe of my right foot was fractured by a bolt which was forced into it by a bullet.’30 He successfully crash-landed on Foulness Island not far from the destroyed Heinkel, whose pilot later died. Girdwood was taken to Foulness Hospital – and 257 Squadron was another pilot down.

  As if in response to the terrible losses already suffered by the young pilots of Fighter Command, Winston Churchill made his famous, rousing speech on August 20. He thanked the British airmen ‘who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the world war by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’

  The next week was relatively quiet, full of patrols and escort duties rather than more intensive combat, but with 257 at full ‘readiness’ on most days. Flying Officer Lancelot Mitchell was still able to claim a Dornier 215 during this period.

  On August 26 at 3.30pm the Luftwaffe mounted a huge raid of forty Dornier bombers on RAF Hornchurch and also RAF Debden, the forward base of 257 Squadron, where their groundcrew was stationed.

  Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) Corporal Daphne Wallis, who had joined up aged seventeen, described taking shelter. ‘In August we had a really bad bombing raid. We had all been given a shelter number but if you were on duty in the Ops Block you stayed at your post. As far as I can remember, some of the shelters did not have tops on them and my number was for one such trench. We had to jump in very fast, bearing in mind that the enemy was already dropping their bombs. I remember a girl jumping right on top of me and can still remember her name. We were devastated when the raid was over, so much damage, huge craters everywhere.’31

  Daphne Wallis was lucky. Three 257 aircraftsmen, Underhill, Holmes and Collier, were killed as they took cover in a shelter trench. Myers recorded in his official file, ‘Squadron Leader Harkness and Flying Officer Bolton had narrow escapes in the same shelter. Bolton helped in salvage work. Apart from the three dead airmen, several buildings were damaged and a plane destroyed. The three sticks of bombs which were dropped made tracks running from east to west. A bomb fell between the second and first hangar in which 257 Squadron had its headquarters.’32

  Wendy Walker, niece of Aircraftsman Second Class Sid Collier, recounted that her uncle ‘had been in the Air Force a few weeks when he was killed in a raid at Debden. As the attack took place, Sid and his friend ran to a shelter which was hit and collapsed on them, killing them instantly.’33

  Sergeant Pilot Reg Nutter recalled, ‘It is funny how things stick in one’s memory but I remember that the sergeants’ mess at Debden had a grand piano. The only one I ever saw in an NCO’s mess, but the last time I saw it, just after the bombing, it was trying to hold up the concrete roof!’34

  In his notebook, Myers described the horror of the bombing raid.

  Holmes did not understand what we were fighting for. He was one of the three RAF clerks blown to bits when a bomb was dropped on Debden. He knew nothing about the war, regarded it as the weather, as something that happened.

  One of the three dead men was married.

  The wise old adj wrote to his widow saying what a fine chap he was. ‘Luckily’, he told me, ‘I noticed that not all his letters were from his wife, but from a mistress of his in London. I burned the lot. His wife will be able to talk about her dear, faithful husband.’

  Bolton, this morning over breakfast, couldn’t think of anything better to say than to describe in detail how he dug out bits of Holmes and the other men who were blown to pieces… he relished describing the whole thing. ‘We couldn’t find one of the heads,’ he said as a grand finale.

  As August wore on, Flight Lieutenant Beresford’s frustration with Squadron Leader Harkness had turned into anger.

  Beresford would come back to the subject most on his mind. ‘Why does Harkness just go into his tent after a blitz and read Men Only instead of talking things over with the other fellows? Why doesn’t he attempt to lead them? Why does he even refuse to get on with all the administrative work that a CO must do? He might at least make up a bit by going on some of the dull convoy patrols. But he simply disappears into his tent and goes to sleep while the boys are wearing themselves out. When they make mistakes he just bawls them out with bursts of short-tempered abuse like a turkey.

  Hugh Beresford had an aristocratic bearing although, in fact, he was a vicar’s son. His father had been the Vicar of Hoby and Rotherby in Leicestershire for twenty-eight years. Some of the sergeants called him ‘Blue Blood Beresford’ because he was strict and serious. To his sister, Pamela, he was just a normal young man. ‘Hugh did not feel he had any vocation… he liked to play cricket, kick a ball around. He had a rifle and a gun. The air force seems to have fascinated him.’

  Myers said, ‘I thought he was a good man. He took his responsibilities seriously. If anybody should have been squadron leader, it was Hugh Beresford.’35

  The officers largely agreed. As Pilot Officer Alan Henderson put it, ‘Beresford was a very nice chap. He wasn’t a line-shooter, but friendly with a sense of humour. He was a complete gentleman, friendly to everyone.’36

  As the days of adversity piled up, he became a bit fidgety on the ground, but he remained brave and cool-headed in the air. ‘Do you think there’ll be a blitz tomorrow Geoff?’ he would ask me. ‘Look at the weather! What’s the time?’ A few minutes later he would look out and repeat, ‘I’m sure there’ll be a blitz. What’s the time?’ Sometimes he would ask that question four or five times in a quarter of an hour. The strain under which he was living penetrated my system, and I could do nothing for him. It was tough.

  On August 31, British radar reported 200 German planes airborne and heading across the Channel. 257 Squadron, led that day by Hugh Beresford again, was one of thirteen squadrons ordered into the air. After they left Martlesham Heath that morning they engaged the enemy over Clacton at 18,000 feet. Both flight commanders, Hugh Beresford and Lancelot Mitchell, claimed Me 110s destroyed. Terry Hunt wrote that at the aerodrome ‘a beaming man said that my husband had just called in after shooting down a plane and was pleased with himself.’ So was Pilot Officer Alan Henderson, who shot down two Me 110s himself. For a moment it seemed as if the tide had turned for 257 but, as ever, good fortune did not last.

  Alan Henderso
n, something of a playboy with a queue of women chasing him, did not have long to savour his downing of enemy aircraft. Keen to add more hits to his tally, he singled out another German target and fired. The next thing he knew, his own small fuel tank had been hit. ‘The cockpit was full of flames. I’ve never been so terrified in my life. There was a smell of cordite. With a superhuman effort I opened the canopy and jumped out.’37 The parachute seemed to take a long time to open and, when it did, the jerk was so fierce that it dislocated his shoulder. Henderson recalled, ‘I drifted out to sea. I thought, Christ, I’m going to drown.’

  Fortunately, a motorboat already carrying several German pilots pulled him out of the water. To his astonishment, one of the men who had come to his rescue was his peacetime stockbroker. Alan Henderson was still alive but he was another 257 pilot whose part in the Battle of Britain was over.

  On that same day, Pilot Officer Gerry Maffett – a relation of the Harmsworth family who had worked on the family newspaper, the Daily Mail – was killed. Outnumbered four to one in the aerial battle, Maffett’s plane was hit and then crashed at Walton-on-the-Naze. It was concluded that his parachute failed to open and he had died on landing. Alternatively, the Hurricane may have been at too low an altitude before Maffett tried to open the parachute.

  Only a few days earlier, Maffett had written to his parents about a moment of glory when he claimed a Dornier 215:

  ‘I attacked him from above and dived down on him. The intelligence people have given me the aircraft as shot down, as there was quite a glow in the fuselage as I dived away. I suggested that the glow might have been the sun but they think he was destroyed. The Hurricane certainly is a grand aircraft.’38

  That evening, Myers counted up the 257 squadron casualties so far. Since Harkness had become their squadron leader in late July, they had been engaged in about half a dozen major battles with the enemy. Despite the relatively small number of serious combats, the human cost had been high. Myers recorded the tally in the OPR. ‘257 Squadron result up to the end of August were nine enemy aircraft destroyed. Squadron losses F/L Hall, F/O D’Arcy Irvine, Sgt Smith, P/O Chomley, P/O Maffett, killed or missing. P/O Coke, Sgt Girdwood, P/O Henderson wounded. Sgt Forward sent for a rest after suffering shock. Eight Hurricanes destroyed. Three damaged.’ 39 These fatalities listed did not include the three RAF ground staff killed in the bombing raid on Debden.

  Pilot Officer Charles Frizzell summed up their vulnerability. ‘The German fighters were tactically very smart and experienced… their tactic was to wait high on the perch a few thousand feet above their bombers and then, like Tennyson’s eagle, who “watches from his mountain walls and like a thunderbolt he falls,” would swoop down on some unsuspecting Spitfire or Hurricane… It was a form of back-stabbing. When we had the chance, we did the same thing. This was the case with D’Arcy Irvine, Hall, Fraser and the others from 257 – all stabbed in the back.’40

  Only a few days earlier, one August evening after 257 Squadron had moved to Martlesham Heath, David and Terry Hunt had held a small party to celebrate his twenty-third birthday. His wife, Terry, later wrote:

  ‘There were eight pilots at the party and Geoff, the intelligence officer… after three weeks no one was in commission. David and I made a list. It was too complete to be shocking. It was perfect in its completeness.’

  Terry Hunt found herself next to a stranger. ‘[It was] the same squadron leader who had tried to wreck our own married life by keeping David in like a child; and so we had plenty to say and I was charmed, and it was only when we were driving home that David had told me where I had expended my own charm.’

  In fact, Terry had been conversing with Hugh Beresford, who was not squadron leader but had enforced the decision of Hill Harkness to separate the couple. ‘I never met him. Darkness they called him. He told David, “If you marry, you’ll soon be popping out babies and won’t be able to live in.” I didn’t like him for that.’41

  Of course, Beresford was the de facto Squadron Leader in the vacuum created by the inadequacy of Harkness.

  Myers noticed the intense strain on the other senior pilot in the squadron, Lancelot Mitchell. After Hall’s death on August 8, Mitchell had been promoted to Acting Flight Lieutenant in charge of B Flight, despite being at fault when the squadron was separated and Hall and two others were killed. He now shared a room with Myers, who was surprised by a sudden rise in Mitchell’s confidence.

  He even appeared to be overconfident. He began to feel he was a virtuoso in the air. So he was, at aerobatics. When one flew with him, one felt him pass through the element like a bird. Every movement was natural and graceful. In the little Maggie, sitting in front of me, he would hedge-hop between the trees and above the cottages, skim up the hills and glide down the valleys with unbounded elation.

  Yet underneath all this bravado, Myers saw the stress and tension.

  The life of perpetual readiness, the strain of the air battles and the heavy odds had begun to tell on Mitchell. He had become fidgety and his big brown eyes would not come to rest.

  In central France Margot Myers, despite her piano player’s hands, worked the farm at Beaurepaire hard, hoeing beets or bringing in the cows. The outdoor work brought some peace to her anxious mind. ‘I savoured enormously the silence and solitude of the fields. Yes, I savoured all this in spite of the anguishing news of the war, in spite of my worrying about Geoff.’42

  One day Margot heard that a Dutch ship had been sunk by the Germans, ‘She vowed never to board a ship with her children as long as we were at war. She could not guess what lay ahead!’43

  The house at Beaurepaire, with a small old house in its grounds, was swiftly full up, ‘People who could began to flee the big cities. We were lucky to be at Beaurepaire. Many family friends began arriving. My grandmother took them all in. The house was full to bursting, sleeping in all rooms, including the attic.44

  Margot, her mother and grandmother housed not just friends and family but some of the increasing stream of refugees passing through, many from Paris but from elsewhere too, escapees. She took in a mother and her four children who had arrived on a lorry. The family lived in the old house for several months before heading back to Paris. Then a man, his wife and nephew arrived on a little horse and cart. They had travelled all the way from Belgium like this. They, too, stayed for a time and the nephew worked on the farm attached to the house at Beaurepaire. But as the German grip in the area tightened, the Belgians moved on. Margot remembered, ‘They were good people. Soon it was our turn. The rout had begun. Refugees blocked the roads, airplanes were shooting on civilians with machine guns and the French army were helpless. It was hell. We were aware of the German advance but had no idea of the magnitude of the disaster.’45

  The prison in the border town of Moulins, La Mal Coiffée, which was housed in a fourteenth-century tower of what had once been the castle of the Dukes of Bourbon, had already received its first male internee. In August the first female internee was incarcerated there. At its height, it was to house nearly 500 prisoners, mainly Jews and resistance fighters, primarily within its three floors of dungeons below ground. Margot Myers had good reason to be frightened.

  In late August, Geoffrey Myers began to send coded letters to his family in France. He was aware of the increased level of German propaganda, including the broadcasts of Lord Haw-Haw. ‘We were told that Britain was finished but I was absolutely confident that we were going to win,’ said Myers. ‘But I also knew that the atmosphere in occupied France was very difficult and I was afraid that my family might be denounced. So I couldn’t afford to wait.’46

  Geoffrey discovered that letters could be sent through Thomas Cooks for half a crown. They were open letters with no envelope, just a sheet of paper. Cooks said they would try to get these letters through to occupied France but that they couldn’t guarantee success.

  So Myers sent anodyne letters through to his wife and children in the name of his mother, using a code agreed between Margot and Geoffrey
before the war. The first coded letter said, ‘If you can get over here it is all right.’ But Myers had no idea if the letter ever reached his family, and so he continued to write his secret letters into his notebook.

  27Interview with Author, 1981

  28Interview with Author, 1980

  29Esther Terry Wright, Pilot’s Wife’s Tale (Bodley Head, 1942)

  30Alfred Price, The Hardest Day (Macdonald and Jane’s, 1979)

  31Battle of Britain Monument

  32National Archives, Kew

  33Wendy Walker, WW2 People’s War: BBC History. WW2 People’s War is an online archive of wartime memories contributed by members of the public and gathered by the BBC. The archive can be found at bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar

  34Battle of Britain Monument

  35Interview with Author

  36Interview with Author

  37Interview with Author

  38Winston G. Ramsey, ed., Battle of Britain Then and Now (Battle of Britain Prints, 1980)

  39National Archives, Kew

  40Letter to Geoff Rayner, July 28 1981, copied to Author

  41Interview with Author

  42Memoirs of Margot Myers translated by her daughter, Anne

  43Memoirs of Robert Myers with his sister, Anne

  44Memoirs of Margot Myers translated by her daughter, Anne

  45Memoirs of Margot Myers translated by her daughter, Anne

  46Interview with Author

  CHAPTER SIX

  At Martlesham Heath, David Hunt and Terry did not live close enough to the aerodrome for her to use her trusty telescope to watch over her husband landing safely. So, Terry took to waiting at the gate for his return in the evenings. ‘Once it was dark, it was better than my room with its black-hooded light like an old-fashioned train. Tonight I had Mother with me. We looked at the immense sky, and the cage the searchlights made, closing us in almost. We agreed about their beauty.’