This weekend marks the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. This book is a worthy memorial to these young heroes and to the modest intelligence officer who recorded their triumphs and tragedies
October 30, 2020 11:11
Secret Letters: A Battle of Britain Love Story by John Willis (Mensch Publishing, £18.99)
In the months before the start of the Second World War, tens of thousands of people who feared they would be trapped by a German advance fled the Continent for the relative safety of Britain. But one RAF officer, Geoffey Myers, sent his young French wife Margot and their two small children in the other direction, deep into central France, to stay with her family.
It was a move Myers soon regretted bitterly — and it was all the more extraordinary as he was Jewish, and an intelligence officer to boot. For Margot and the children soon found themselves trapped in the German-occupied zone, their lives increasingly endangered. The wife of a British Jewish officer and two half-Jewish children would almost certainly have been deported to a concentration camp had they been discovered.
While they laid low and hoped the neighbours wouldn’t betray them, Myers was having a busy war, the details of which he noted in letters to Margot that he would never send, for fear that the Germans would intercept them. These letters form the basis for John Willis’s book.
They show Myers to have been a caring, thoughtful man with a sharp eye, as befitted a former Daily Telegraph correspondent in Paris before the war. He seems to have been a secular Jew — the son of a wealthy stockbroker, he went to University College School, Hampstead, before becoming a journalist. He was well suited to the role of intelligence officer and was soon in the thick of it, being sent to northern France just before the German invasion.
In his letters, he graphically describes the retreat to Dunkirk before being posted to 257 squadron, initially at RAF Hendon. Before long, its young pilots and their Hurricanes were pitched into the Battle of Britain, which Myers vividly describes. He was a decade older than the pilots and became a sort of father-confessor to them while concealing from them his own private anguish about his family’s fate.
As the Nazi noose tightened round their French bolt-hole, Margot decided to make a run for it with the children, heading for Lisbon, and, hopefully, a plane or ship to Britain. Willis’s account of their perilous journey is as deft and gripping as his linking commentary on Myers’s letters.
John Willis is a distinguished television producer and executive who first got to know Myers when making a documentary in the 1980s about the Battle of Britain pilots. Through these pages flit the legendary ace Wing-Commander Bob Stanford-Tuck and many less famous young men who would be drinking with Myers in the evening and be shot down the following day.
This weekend marks the conclusion of the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, the aerial triumph that saved Britain. Willis and publisher Richard Charkin at Mensch have combined to produce a worthy memorial to these young heroes and to the modest intelligence officer who recorded their triumphs and tragedies, as well as his own moving family story.
Robert Low is Executive Editor of ‘The Critic’ magazine