Churchill's Few by John Willis

Author:John Willis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mensch Publishing

As intelligence officer at 257, Geoff Myers was responsible for informing the next of kin, including Lancelot Mitchell’s fiancée, Margery. Mitchell had used to talk about her late into the night. ‘I don’t think she’ll let me down. She’s the most wonderful woman in the world. Don’t smile, Geoff, I know that’s been said before.’ Myers, who had met Margery at Hendon, wrote:

There was something about Mitchell that attracted women, and they really intended to get married, I think. They had been telling everyone in the mess that the wedding was for the next month. Now Margery will wait awhile for another man.

Mitchell’s mother at first found the news impossible to take. No one had been able to find and identify his Hurricane, and this gave her some hope to cling to; her son’s photograph was even taken to a medium, who reported that Lancelot was safe – ‘but it will be weeks before you hear from him’. It was the intelligence officer’s job to dash such hopes.

Nineteen-year-old Pat Beresford had been married to Hugh for only eleven months. Of her grief, Myers wrote:

Hugh Beresford. Another hero gone. Mrs Beresford rang up last night. She was in tears. The Adjutant tried to soothe her over the telephone. He didn’t quite know what he was saying, spoke about boats that might have picked Beresford up at sea. We told her not to give up hope, but she knew. She asked if she could fetch his clothes. ‘She sounds sweet,’ the Adjutant said. He was almost in tears himself. He had a double whisky after that.

While Mrs O’Brien, Mrs Hughes, Mrs Beresford and Mrs Mitchell mourned the loss of their husbands and sons, the East End of London was cruelly ablaze. That day, more than 1200 German aircraft, half of them bombers, had flown over the capital. From east London, the whole city appeared alight. Every fireman in the south of England was pushed into dockland to fight huge fires in the warehouses on the waterfront. One blaze at the Surrey Docks was reputedly the most savage single fire ever seen in Britain. The attack had been the most powerful mass bombing raid on a city in history.

Goering was delighted with his day’s work. Four hundred and forty-eight civilians were dead; east London was an inferno. The bombers had caught British defences unawares, destroying or damaging about forty British aircraft and killing nineteen RAF pilots. If Fighter Command was as low in aircraft as German intelligence claimed, they would not be able to survive much longer. ‘I personally have taken over the leadership of the attacks against England,’ said an elated Goering, ‘and for the first time we have struck at England’s heart. . . this is an historic hour.’ The expected victory proved elusive, however: 7 September was the first of nearly sixty consecutive nights of raids on London. That date, as Francis Mason has suggested, marked ‘the irretrievable turning point of the Battle of Britain’.

Eventually, as the long nights of

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