The first letters and diary entries written by airmen after their return are touched with melancholy and regret. They had caught a glimpse of the life they would lose if they went the way of so many of their friends. And the biggest loss of all would be the chance to find lasting love.
15
Love in Uniform
Love flourished in wartime. Doubts and inhibitions withered in the heat of instant attraction and the knowledge that time might be short. Starting a romance was relatively easy. The problem was how to keep it going. The road to happiness was blocked by many practical and bureaucratic obstacles. Bomberland was a conglomeration of backwaters and was badly served by trains. Unless your girl was in Lincoln or Norwich or York, you faced a long and erratic journey getting to see her on leaves. Speaking on the phone was almost more frustrating than not speaking at all. The maximum length of a trunk call was six minutes and it could take hours to get a line. Often one party or the other would find themselves tongue-tied as they struggled to find the words that would make the most of the brief opportunity. At least the mail worked. It was a reasonable assumption that letters written one day would arrive the next, no matter where they were coming from or going to. But they too brought their problems. It was tricky conducting a love affair by correspondence. Feelings were pitched high and the words often tumbled on to the paper, unrevised. Burning sentiment might have cooled in the grey light of a Lincolnshire morning, or a cautious or hesitant remark seem ungallant after a few drinks in the mess. Either way it would take another letter and another delay for the first impression to be corrected.
Frank Blackman fell for Mary Mileham in the early summer of 1943. He was a flying officer with 429 RCAF (Bison) Squadron and she was working at the Admiralty in London. They came from very different backgrounds. She was the eldest of six children, the daughter of a prosperous solicitor who lived in bourgeois comfort in Boxmoor, Hertfordshire. There was enough money to send all the children to fee-paying schools and to St Moritz to ski in the winter.
Frank Blackman’s father had been killed in the First World War and never saw his son. His mother worked as a housekeeper to provide for her two boys. He wanted to become a doctor but had to settle for training as a pharmacist. Before joining the RAF he had a post with a big pharmaceutical company and lived in a flat in London where he took care of his mother. Mary’s family had servants. Frank was the son of one. ‘In peacetime in no way would we have been on the same road,’ Mary wrote later. ‘But in war it is different. We became friends as we were both on an escape path and the companionship was comforting to us both.’ Mary was recovering from ‘a long unsatisfactory relationship’. Frank was seeking some relief from the ‘fire of landing in a bomber squadron’.
According to Mary he was ‘a gentle person’, ‘well-informed’ and ‘knowledgeable’. He was sensitive and literate, knew some German and Russian and was teaching himself Italian. She considered herself ‘wild’, loved the country and sport, but was ‘academically completely dim’.1 This made no difference to Frank. In the ten months they knew each other, Mary and he wrote to each other constantly, sometimes twice a day. For Blackman, the relationship became the central point of his precarious life. ‘Forgive me,’ he wrote one June night shortly after he had spent a leave with her, ‘if just for one moment before I close I send you again my love and tell you – as I began to do on the phone before people started coming through the hall – that as a direct result of that one short week the whole tenor of my existence seems to have altered. Life is now an infinitely sweet thing and the thoughts of all the things we have yet to do or see and hear – music, holidays, fun in crowds and joy alone – are the things which my mind turns constantly towards … blast this war darling.’
At that point their story was only a few weeks old. They appear to have first met properly on 26 May 1943 when Frank visited her office at the Admiralty. He recorded the encounter in verse.
I bless the day I wandered in
To see you – and still full of doubt
Asked bashfully to take you out
For truth to tell I always knew
I’d like to come to mean to you
No mere acquaintance but a friend.2
The following day they went for a drink. Two days later they had supper together. On 1 June they saw Arsenic and Old Lace and dined at the Waldorf. Just before he returned to Blyton where he was in the throes of converting to Halifaxes, he took her to meet his mother. After that they spent every leave together. Letters and phone calls flew between them during the long spaces apart. Mary’s correspondence has not survived but she kept all of Frank’s letters. They brim with gratitude and delight. ‘Life has come to mean much more than all the year that went before,’ ran one of his couplets.
Love breeds optimism. In the beginning, Frank allowed himself to believe that he might survive. One summer morning, sitting in a garden in the grounds of East Moor, the squadron base, he wrote her a letter while he waited to hear whether or not ops were on that night. ‘In such surroundings on such a lovely day, one’s thoughts turn to the sweet things of life,’ it said. ‘Truly this moment is so peaceful that the prospect of the next hours seems like an evil dream.’
The romance was proceeding at a hectic wartime pace, but he, at least, did not care. ‘Don’t worry Mary about the rushing of fences,’ he reassured her a few days later. ‘I do have sense in this matter – nevertheless I don’t think any of us can be quite happy without some little dream tucked away in his mind, even in self-deception. Without it existence for most of us would be a barren experience. Probably most of us has his idea of the sought-for peace. Mine could not be complete without – indeed depends on – someone to idealize and love.’ He believed he had found in her ‘that tiny sheet anchor upon sanity and faith’ that would enable him to keep going.
Frank’s love affair seems to have become more real to him than the ‘evil dream’ of flying over Germany at night. He wanted the nightmare to end as quickly as possible, and his waking life to begin properly. In the middle of June he was alarmed by a rumour that the squadron might be posted ‘to the Middle East which God forbid.’ The relative safety of the Mediterranean theatre held no attraction if it meant he was away from Mary. Yet weighed against the optimism was a fatalism that he had learned from cold experience. ‘You ask if I believe one has any control over one’s destiny,’ he wrote. ‘Darling, much as I would like to believe it – I don’t.’
Frank and Mary were baring their souls to each other on the basis of a very short acquaintance. Sometimes it worried her. ‘I hope that you don’t quite mean it when you say sometimes you are writing to a stranger,’ he fretted. ‘I understand the feeling that must go through your mind. Nevertheless, I do hope and believe that we are beginning to understand each other.’
The next proper leave was a long way away. Frank recorded gloomily that ‘with the present rather grievous losses in the squadron I see our 48s receding further and further in the background.’ The Battle of the Ruhr was at its height and 429 Squadron had lost seven aircraft, nearly a third of its strength, in the previous few nights in major attacks on Krefeld, Mülheim and Wuppertal.
He suggested she come north to visit him, even though there was a high likelihood that he would be flying most nights. At least she would be able to watch him depart. He gave her directions to the airfield. ‘If you care to walk along the road past the telephone box and turn right you will come to the edge of the ‘drome and can, if you want to, see us take off. If you do, I can’t wave to you exactly – but you can be sure that that mile between us will be positively sizzling with telepathic activity.’ On 25 June she travelled to York then north to East Moor, near the village of Sutton-on-the-Forest. Frank was indeed on ops. Despite its recent mauling the squadron was detailed for an attack on Gelsenkirchen in the Ruhr. The raid was not a success and losses were heavy. Thirty aircraft failed to return, more than 6 per cent of the force.
Mary arrived too late to meet him before he left but
was able to watch him take off and stayed up all night to see him safely home. After he woke they enjoyed one of the days they had fantasized about. ‘Frank came round just before lunch,’ she wrote in her abbreviated diary. ‘Lunched, walked sunbathed dinner talked early to bed.’3 He had arranged for her to stay with a Mrs Skinner who lived near the base. The following day he picked her up in the morning. They had a blissful Sunday before going into York for dinner. He put her on the 9.30 train and she arrived back in London at 3 a.m.
The visit reinforced his desire ‘to get this business done.’ In the days after her departure he flew operations by night and wrestled with his feelings by day. On Wednesday 30 June he wrote that he had ‘been trying to analyse my own state of mind since the weekend. I’m not being really introspective about it – I’ve been too busy for one thing – but emotions have been so mixed that I had to give it some thought.’ On Monday he had been ‘excited – perhaps even intoxicated and much of this has survived.’ But overlaying this elation was ‘a strong feeling of resentment that so much sweetness is so near and yet so far. I think this last day or two – since you opened once again my eyes to such boundless happiness – I have hated this war more … than at any time since it began.’
The righteousness of the fight seemed of lesser importance than the fact that he was in love for the first time. He now knew what he wanted and was sure he could attain it ‘but for this wretched stupid war.’ Viewed in this light, Frank saw little that was noble about his work. What lay ahead were ‘possibly months of bitter, destructive, death-dealing labour.’ He was ‘not able to hate enough to feel otherwise.’ He was suddenly gripped by fear, but ‘not of dying. That must be … usually at least, thank God, oh so simple – but fear of losing the good things of life.’ And by far the most important of these was Mary Mileham.
By the end of July the Battle of the Ruhr was over and Harris turned his attention to Hamburg and then Berlin. The squadron converted from Wellingtons to Halifaxes. Its losses declined dramatically and only thirty-seven men were killed in the last five months of the year, seven fewer than had died in three nights in June.
Mary went to see Frank again at East Moor early in August and spent a ‘lovely weekend’.4 Back in London she visited his mother and was waiting for him when he came to London on leave on 14 August for a few days. In September he had a ‘48’ and they spent it together dining one night at Quaglino’s.
On 22 October she made the arduous journey north again to visit him at his new base, Leeming, in Yorkshire. Afterwards he wrote to Mary in some confusion. ‘You know, Mary that I cannot yet ask you to marry me. Indeed if I did you would be afraid to say yes – being far, perhaps, from knowing your own wish. Yet Mary you must know that I wish it above all things and I am supremely happy even in the hope and anticipation of it.’ By that stage they had spent only seven short spells of time together. Frank’s hesitation appears to have been selfless. He wanted her to be his wife. But he knew that the squadron’s good luck could not last for ever and the chances remained high that if they did marry, Mary would soon be a widow. Despite the time they had spent together, which was considerable by wartime standards, she seems to have been much less certain about her feelings and more hesitant about committing herself. Her emotions were tender. As well as the ‘unsatisfactory’ romance she had lost her brother Denys, a fighter pilot who had fought in the Battle of Britain, who was shot down over the Channel in April 1942. Nonetheless they showed every sign of being a couple on the two leaves that Frank took in London in what was left of the year. They played bridge, visited his mother and ate out at the Liaison-Slavia Club and the Argentina.
On 20 January 1944 Frank had a week’s leave and came to London. For once he did not call her immediately, provoking in Mary a pang of suspicion. ‘Out with his other girlfriend?’ she wondered in her diary. No one reading his love-struck letters could believe him capable of any romantic deception. The more likely explanation is that he felt his first duty was to attend to his mother. He rang on the twenty-second and the following day they went to the country and spent the afternoon playing bridge. On the last night of their leave they went to dinner at the Argentina then to the cinema to see Jane Eyre. ‘Felt disturbed,’ Mary wrote in her diary.5 The following day he dropped by her office to say goodbye and took the train north to Leeming.
Frank always kept his hope warm, searching for positive signs in the swirling confusion of the war. Late in October 1943 he had written that ‘the beginning of the end is in sight … with the Soviets doing these incredible things … there is no doubt that a point is coming when tremendous air armadas will operate day and night with at first great losses perhaps – but with an effect that may finish the war without invasion.’ He was well aware of his ignorance of the big picture. ‘I have no knowledge of these things at all of course,’ he admitted. But it was ‘obvious that this is the next step – and God help the Hun.’
His prediction was already coming true. As he wrote, the Battle of Berlin was beginning and 429 Squadron were part of it. On the snowy night of 19 February 1944 they went on one of the bloodiest raids of Bomber Command’s war. Altogether 823 aircraft set off. The target was Leipzig. Frank’s aircraft was among the force of 255 Halifaxes. A diversion towards Kiel aimed at drawing away the German night-fighters was unsuccessful and the bomber stream was under attack all the way to the target. The wind was stronger than forecast and pushed the bombers along so fast that many got there early and were forced to orbit until the Pathfinders arrived. Four bombers were destroyed in collisions and twenty shot down by flak. Leipzig was covered by cloud and the Pathfinders had to mark blind. Immediately there ‘was a wild scramble as several hundred bombers came in from all directions, anxious to bomb quickly and get out of the area.’6 The raid was considered a success in that more than 50,000 Germans were bombed out. But the price was appallingly high. Bomber Command recorded its worst night of the war to date with seventy-nine aircraft lost. Almost 15 per cent of the Halifaxes that reached enemy territory never returned. Many had turned back before crossing the enemy coast. Thereafter Halifax IIs and Vs, the older types, were withdrawn from operations to Germany. The raid had been a disaster.
Frank’s Halifax was shot down by a night-fighter near Berlin. All on board were killed. It was Mary who received the telegram telling her that he was missing. He had listed her, rather than his mother or elder brother as his next of kin. Then came a last letter, postmarked 21 February and presumably posted by a comrade. There is no indication of when it was written. After the passion and enthusiasm of his other letters the tone seems flat and stilted and there is a feeling of resignation behind the unconvincing optimism.
Well Mary, dear.
This will tell you if something unfortunate has happened. I shall hope in due course to be writing to you again either from some Oflag or other – or with any luck from England on return.
In the meantime it is hard to know what to say. You have meant so much to me – and been so very charming to me during these last few months that it is hard to say ‘Goodbye’ even if only for a while.
God bless you darling and thank you again – a million times. Lots of luck and my deepest and sincerest wishes.
Despite the chaos of wartime, Frank and Mary had at least managed to have something like a fulfilling courtship. They had met and flirted, fallen for each other, though he clearly more heavily than she. They had shared rich experiences leaving memories that lasted Mary the rest of her life. They revealed themselves to each other with a rare frankness and traded more sincere endearments than many couples do in a lifetime.
George Hull’s relationship with Joan Kirby was less satisfying. He met her at the funeral of her brother who had been killed in a training accident in July 1943. George had made friends with John Kirby in Canada where they were both training to be navigators.
He was brought up in Stepney, east London, the only son of Jack and Margaret Hull. As a boy he was interested in science and once rigged up an ele
ctric sign that flashed ‘Happy Christmas’ to visitors when they stepped on the doormat. George belonged to a category of young men who grew up in the nineteen-thirties that was particularly well represented in the ranks of Bomber Command. He came from an ordinary background and received an ordinary education. But the walls of deference were crumbling, a process that was hastened by the war, and he was eager to plunge into the world of high culture that had previously been the domain of the wealthy. He loved good books and good music as well as the ordinary pleasures of the British male. His idea of a perfect evening was a visit to the Proms followed by a few pints and a game of darts. He had, Joan remembered, a strong social conscience. ‘He was a great believer in social justice,’ she said. ‘He would have been a leader in some form.’ His initial ambitions were simple enough. If he got through the war alive he planned, like Frank, to be a pharmacist. He was, in a quiet way, a patriot who felt his Englishness with a poetic intensity. Nazism represented everything that repelled him and he had joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve as soon as the war began.
George disguised an attractive naivety behind a show of sophistication and pragmatism and there was enough of the lingering legacy of Victorianism in his make-up for him to affect a dislike of overt displays of feeling. ‘He was a very jolly sort of chap,’ Joan said, ‘an optimist full of plans for getting the war over and getting on with life. Yet he had a very serious side to him and was quite unsentimental. I got a bit mawkish one time, I remember, and he more or less said, don’t be ridiculous. Sentiment is fine but sentimentality is not.’7
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945 Page 85