Secret Letters

by John Willis

  When I am with the squadron doing my work I don’t have so much time to think, but, when I’m on leave, it’s different. I am most of the time with you, and have difficulty remaining with the others and not showing that I am far away. Then I start wondering.

  I am sure you are strong, Ducky, and brave. I have great confidence in you. I adore you. My feelings are constantly overflowing like water rippling over a deep pool at the waterfall.

  Inevitably, Myers compared the Oxfordshire farm to Beaurepaire, Margot’s family house in occupied France.

  Tonight I went down the hill to the farm. It had the atmosphere and smell of Beaurepaire. Even the old pump was at the sink. It made me think of the electric pump we hoped to install at Beaurepaire. What happened to the trench I was digging? Robert was expecting his Daddy to come back and finish it. He was expecting his Daddy to keep the invader away from Beaurepaire. What does he think now? I try to peer into the future and I wonder how an end can come to this disaster which has overwhelmed us all.

  Myers was also tormented by the question of whether he had been wrong to leave his family in Beaurepaire. The house had been a place of safety before and he thought that Margot’s family needed their daughter with them.

  I dared not believe what I feared was coming last May. When there was still time for me to call you and ask you to come. I could have said, ‘Come,’ but I would have asked you to leave your family, who had given you and the children a safe home, just at the moment when disaster was facing them. I could not have left them myself at that time, and I did not think that you would, so I struggled inwardly and knew you would not be coming.

  Since then I have tormented myself hundreds of times, feeling that I did the wrong thing. I constantly ask myself that old, old question. Would it have been better for all if you and the children had left? Did I act rightly? What a calamity for you, my Beloved! Be strong in your thoughts. I am with you, and you are not alone. And if, by chance, I may stop writing to you and the ink runs dry before its term, I shall still be with you. A little particle of God will keep me burning within you and give you courage.

  Goodnight my Love, Goodnight Robert, Goodnight Anne.

  In central France, Margot and her children were surviving but she was acutely aware that one day they would be discovered. ‘I was in a state of total uncertainty. What to do? Attempt to flee before the controls became stricter? But go where?’64 Now there was no petrol. Even a bicycle was a precious possession but getting new tyres and other spares was impossible. Sometimes, in bad weather, they had to walk three miles to the village and back just to buy bread. In Paris, where her brother, Octave, was studying, even the children of Jewish families were being picked up.

  In Lucenay, the occupying Germans were behaving reasonably well. Some people in the village even admired them. One woman told Margot perhaps the German victory would be a good thing. Another, that they had ‘real class,’ others said the Germans ‘were not bad chaps.’65 A few blamed the Jews for France’s plight. Insidious propaganda was a regular feature of radio broadcasts, all of it pro-Pétain, some of it anti-Semitic. Margot was desperate to listen to the BBC to find out what was really happening. ‘On French radio the voice of the old General Pétain, urging the French to submit to the Germans made my mother cry with rage. Only the BBC counted for her and many others from that day.’66

  It was now more than four months since Margot had heard from her husband. Her only assumption was that if he had been killed in a bombing raid she would have been informed.

  In his letters that were never posted, Geoffrey also exposed his anxiety about his mother, Rosetta. Short of funds and on her own, she was living in a hut in the garden of a cottage at Chinnor where she had taken refuge from the bombs raining down on London. Myers was relieved to be near her.

  October 2 1940

  Mother is still unwell. She says she is very lonely and may not have long to live. She says she is in despair over living alone. I hope she will keep her hut… The war is gradually and inexorably taking everybody in its grip. Every day another street is subjected to more terrors. The bombing also goes on in the country districts. Even the farmers in Chinnor look out for bombs. Three were dropped in the area this week. Not good for London women and children who had taken refuge in this village.

  Mother told me of some friends of hers whose house had been bombed. The mother and father were downstairs. Their children, who were upstairs, were buried under the rubble of the explosion and killed. The parents were left to mourn.

  While he was away from his squadron recovering from his car crash injuries, Myers wrote of his experiences in France and his escape at Dunkirk. In October, he returned to service with 257 Squadron and resumed his regular letters to his family about life in the Battle of Britain.

  One of his first jobs after his return to duty was to visit David Hunt in hospital. His wife was virtually living in the hospital, giving her husband nursing care and support. Terry Hunt wrote, ‘That night the door opened and in came the adjutant, and Geoff, the intelligence officer and dear David Coke whom we had not seen for stations and stations, since he landed his plane and was hurt. He held it up to show the place where his little finger had been and settled on the end of the bed… there was plenty of good talk that night, and we were all very cheerful. And Geoff, who always said the right thing, remarked that I was nursing on the front line which was a novel idea.’

  They talked about David’s birthday party and Terry asked about Lancelot Mitchell, who she thought was the last surviving member of the squadron at the party, ‘The adjutant cornered me in the corridor and fixed me with his pale eyes, and told me that Lancelot had just disappeared during a patrol. So now the party was indeed over.’

  Back at 257 Squadron, Bob Stanford Tuck was still leading from the front.

  The Tuck legend rapidly grew. Twenty-seven swastikas were photographed on his plane and the newspapers spoke of the twenty-seven he had destroyed. It just happened that an overenthusiastic flight rigger had included the ‘probables’ and ‘damaged’ in the swastika score [Tuck’s official list of victims was fourteen]. Tuck was photographed and filmed. He was described as the great ace of the war. The publicity did not affect his simplicity and sense of humour.

  As intelligence officer Myers studied Tuck he began to understand him better. Tuck was determined and ruthless, ‘a hard case,’ as Larry Forrester put it, who ‘would recognise only good and bad, strong and weak, truth and untruth, and had no time for in-betweens. A man whose mind was wondrously quick and clear, but not broad – a mind that could be at peace only with extremes, and couldn’t cope with nuances.’

  Myers understood that Tuck was ceaselessly trying to impress his father, for whom he was not the favourite son.

  Tuck himself saw no room for sentimentality. ‘The death of my close friend, Caesar Hull, had made me more tense than ever, more determined and ruthless with myself as well as with others. You couldn’t think too much about the newcomers fresh from flying school. They were pathetically surprised to find themselves killing or being killed.’67

  Tuck told me that he was once the black sheep of the family. His father did not trust him and shook his head as he used to say ‘that boy will come to a bad end.’ Tuck’s brother, a lieutenant in the tank brigade, was the hope of the family until he was taken prisoner near Dunkirk. At that time, Tuck was flying madly over Dunkirk, covering the great evacuation of the BEF from the sands into our little boats. He shot down several Ju 88s and Me 109s in that struggle. Over Dungeness a few weeks later he shot down a Ju 88 in a head-on attack. Those hawk’s eyes of his found his mark. The Tuck legend began to grow from that time.

  For all his heroics at Dunkirk it was still his brother – the tank lieutenant now a prisoner of war – who was the favoured son, even after Tuck’s successes on Battle of Britain Day and all the attendant publicity for him, Immortal Tuck, the fighter ace.

  Talking of his father Tuck said to me, ‘the old man may be changing his ideas abo
ut me now. Up to recently he had nothing good to say for me and always talked of my brother… it’ll shake him a bit now.’

  Myers understood more about Tuck’s complex relationship with his father when he discovered that, like himself, Tuck was Jewish. Forrester records, ‘Geoff had a writer’s habit of assessing and analysing character. He tried now to make a preliminary summing-up of Tuck:

  “A brilliant flying record – fourteen kills… fantastic luck and a series of incredible escapes… reputedly a precise craftsman and incredible shot… a big drinker and party man, a tireless driving character who could go for days without sleep… an inspirer of men… tough and ruthless… deep down insecure about his father and obsessed by the trappings of success in an attempt to impress the old man.” ’

  The adjutant, less a student of human nature than Myers, had been perplexed by the new squadron leader.

  I thought of the adjutant’s look of bewilderment when he spoke of Tuck. ‘But he seems so foreign to me, Geoff,’ he would say, opening his big, blue eyes unusually wide. Then he would pout a bit and mutter, ‘I don’t know but he seems more like a Mexican to me.’ Tuck’s brown face certainly had something Mexican about it. Sharp, sensual, cunning eyes, made to devour women or hunt down prey; dark, slightly wavy hair above his sloping forehead. Below his sharp nose, a little moustache cut well above his upper lip and slightly turned up; a small mouth. A film fan’s idol, and something more behind.

  Others in 257 took a more pragmatic view of Tuck and why he was such a success. Pete Brothers was clear.

  Brothers knew what he was talking about when he said, ‘Old Tuck is about the best shot in the Air Force. That’s how he gets his stuff. I’ve seen him at target practice. There was no one to touch him.’

  Myers grew to respect and admire his squadron leader but he was a careful, punctilious man and sometimes the claims of Tuck made him uncomfortable. ‘Some pilots I knew had done their stuff, some had been shooting a line. Sometimes I had to check the ammunition to try to verify. It was difficult. With Tuck, line-shooting didn’t matter compared to a man willing to take risks and inspire the squadron.’68

  He was also ruthless when it came to pilots who let the RAF down. When, not long after he joined, Tuck saw two young sergeant pilots peel away from the action rather than engaging the enemy he was furious. His biography records, ‘There was a white smouldering rage in the depth of his being. His eyes were vicious black pebbles. On the tarmac, he lifted his Mauser pistol and raised it at the two young pilots, saying, ‘In time of war desertion is as bad as murder. Sometimes it is murder. It bloody nearly was today… you two deserve to be bloody well done! A bullet a piece – that’s all your worth.’

  He had the two men arrested. One was court-martialled and then demoted, last seen sweeping the control tower. The other, who had admitted his fault more honestly, was given a second chance and grew into a very capable pilot.

  When he wasn’t sorting out the remnants of 257 Squadron, Tuck flew from the front and his good fortune continued. Even the other pilots were amazed by what they called ‘Tuck’s luck’.

  Tuck’s luck became proverbial. He would go up on a weather test and come down after shooting a Ju 88 or a Dornier 17 into the sea. The difficulty for me as intelligence officer was to get confirmation. If a plane crashes into the sea, it usually sinks without leaving any traces behind. Tuck often said, ‘Don’t leave the bugger once you’ve got onto him. Hang on to him until you see him crash or the chaps bail out.’ He used to describe to us how he followed his own advice. In fact, after shooting down a Dornier or a Ju 88 single-handed into the sea, he would come back with such a wealth of detail that I was sometimes incredulous.

  For an intelligence officer, accuracy was important but hard to achieve. A pilot might claim to have shot an enemy aircraft down but cloud or haze could have obscured the view. A Luftwaffe plane might be hit but could limp home to France instead of crashing into the sea. Collating successes in aerial combat was an inexact science. Stanford Tuck was obsessed with his own tally of ‘kills’.

  One day he asked me why I was so intent on getting the exact number of his combats and on compiling every detail. ‘When you have shot down eighteen, recognised as destroyed,’ I said, ‘you will be ripe for the DSO.’

  The next morning, he asked me for my records of his combats. He and I were alone at the dispersal point. I watched him sitting in an upright armchair by the fire with his feet on another chair and the file in his hands. His eyes seemed to be penetrating the paper, and his brain running under high-power… I was surprised at the long time Tuck spent pondering his score.

  Despite Myers’s cautious outlook on claims of ‘kills’ by Bob Stanford Tuck, he could see that Tuck was respected by his squadron. The two men developed a good personal relationship and, when a new boss arrived on the station, Tuck was positive about Myers.

  The new station commander was pleased to find the fighter-hero in his mess and had a long talk with him. Tuck spoke about me. Afterwards, the station commander said to me, ‘He’s a splendid chap.’

  So, to the RAF at large, and the wider public, Tuck was a hero, an ace, a film star. Myers saw this clearly when he was showing a fellow intelligence officer from 11 Group around the aerodrome.

  He was proud to meet the great Immortal Tuck and to see him saunter out to his aeroplane to do a little local flying. As Tuck got into his plane, I said to him, half in a joke, ‘Nice evening to bring one down. Cheer ho!’ Before he landed forty minutes later, he shot up the aerodrome, diving down among the trees on the perimeter and zooming upwards a few feet above the dispersal hut. He was marvellous at aerobatics. As I watched him climb and roll in the sunlight, I thought I was looking at a swimmer revelling in the warm water of a clear lake. A slow roll to the right, and the ripples flowed down from the body of the plane, the billowing air caressed him and stroked the tips of his wings. Another dive in silence, and then the happy sound of the engine throbbing gently in the calm air.

  As Tuck finally came into land, Myers was told via a call from operations that Tuck had shot an enemy aircraft down.

  Tuck described the combat as a sporting journalist would a boxing match. He dictated his report to me, sometimes searching for several seconds to find the right adjective. He walked up and down the room, stopped by the fire, took a quick glance at a periodical lying on the table, and all the while went on dictating, ‘I then gave him a forty second burst from 250 yards, closing to about 100 yards, seeing bits flying from his port engine. I dived below him and repeated my attack and… no, don’t put that… say… made a similar attack from the starboard, firing two bursts of two seconds each. Return fire from the starboard gun was inaccurate. The enemy aircraft then dived into a cloud and I followed… no… I succeeded in keeping on his tail and made a three-second burst from port as he emerged. This time I closed within fifty yards. One of the crew bailed out as the Dornier 17 dived slowly down to the sea and skimmed over the surface of the water. As I dived down to investigate, I noticed a last desperate attack before the plane hit the water and disappeared.’

  Myers never denied Tuck’s great skill, his gunnery expertise or his leadership but he had to smile at the Hollywood-scriptwriter style of his reports.

  His combats usually had some outstanding feature which struck the popular imagination. In his combat reports he was particularly careful to polish the language describing the dramatic moments.

  My colleague, who had not been with the squadron before, was thrilled at hearing the great war ace dictate his combat report. He was enthusiastic over the luck which had brought him down to the dispersal point just to see the air ace do a good piece of work. Tuck just smiled and brushed the compliments aside.

  Peter Brothers was, in contrast perhaps, happy to share credit for ‘kills’. ‘What did it matter, I mean you gave away bits of your own score, but it built up the morale of the chaps you were leading.’69

  Overall, the squadron were delighted to now be surrounded by success
rather than failure. For those few who remembered the dark days of Squadron Leader Harkness this was a very welcome change. Tuck was not a man to leave 257 to their own devices because it was his day off. His leadership was quite the opposite.

  The boys were pleased at Tuck’s luck and a little jealous that he always caught the German planes while they hardly ever saw any. They congratulated him as a matter of course. He took it all with a smile trying to assume modesty, and ordered a round of drinks.

  The intelligence officer was a careful person. He respected Tuck and took notice of the positive views of Pete Brothers, but he also knew that it was his job to investigate and corroborate the claims of all pilots, even the Immortal Tuck. He did not want to give Group HQ incorrect information.

  Before going up to the mess I checked up on Tuck’s expenditure of ammunition. He had fired only 480 rounds, that is to say for about three seconds. In his combat report he had stated that he had fired for eleven seconds. It was a common mistake among less experienced pilots to imagine that they had fired three or four times as long as they did in reality… Nevertheless I was surprised that Tuck had so much overestimated the length of his bursts. He was usually more accurate.

  Sometimes Tuck’s fame was too exaggerated and overblown even for him.

  I shall not forget his reactions to a full-page article which appeared in the Daily Post under the headline ‘Tuck the Conqueror’. It described in rich, melodramatic journalese the conqueror’s encounters with planes which, in point of fact, other members of his squadron had shot down. It depicted him succouring a dying airman whose last words were, ‘I am happy to die under your leadership, sir. Keep this ring of mine. It will tell the world how you tried to save my life and it will preserve you from death.’