The hangar is patriotically dressed with tiny flags and a large resin model of a Sunderland bomber. Miniature pilots in its cockpit have painted smiles. Sensible women are handing out buns and tea. Forties jazz plays; I might be in a J.B. Priestley novel, or at a village fete. The war may never have ended. And dotted around the room, unmistakable, unmistakably old are 43 RAF veterans.
This is Project Propeller, today. Every year, since 1999, it has spirited Royal Air Force vets up in the sky again. Younger pilots come for the war stories, and to say thank you. The vets meet their old comrades.
But we are close to the end. This year is the final meeting of Project Propeller. The number of Second World War pilots is dwindling. The last veterans of the last good war are now in their farcically late nineties. Their trademark taciturnity is becoming tombstone silence. The few keep getting fewer.
This was the last time these pilots would be in the same room together. They would be thanked and saluted and coddled to the very end. Their story, the myth — the good war — is where modern Britain was founded. Now, their hair is mercury and silver. Their hands are curled and cubed. Their skin is translucent, tattooed with melodramatic blotches. A whole century laden on their faces. Some are negligibly less ancient than others. All of them wear uniform blazers, and rustle with medals.
People are exquisitely careful with them. Utterly decorous and graceful. They are so valuable, and there are so few of them left. It is as if we are in a room with Henry’s longbowmen, or Nelson’s sailors. Our scope for reverence, usually so limited, is much larger here. There are many quiet grandsons, and great-grandsons, wheeling around their relatives.
Most of the veterans served with Bomber Command. There are pilots and engineers and navigators and gunners and bomb aimers. They had to be bloodhounds; they dropped a boiling furnace down on Germany for years, and 55,000 of them were killed doing it. All of them volunteered.
Bomber Command’s role in the war is ambiguous. Watching footage of German cities obliterated by the RAF in 1943, Winston Churchill asked: “Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?” He preferred the underdog, classical heroism of 1940. But the campaign never relented. There was no memorial for Bomber Command until 2012.
I speak to Andy Andrews who was wireless operator in a Halifax, and John Bell, who was a bomb aimer in a Wellington. Andrews is 98, still standing, still driving. Bell is 100, in a wheelchair, but terrifyingly unsenile. He chews a ham sandwich, viciously, like it insulted his mother. Another vet toddles shakily over to Bell and asks him how he is getting on.
“About as well as you can be for a hundred not out”, says Bell. “Well, I am completely… buggered” says the other, with a spluttery laugh.
Bell and Andrews start telling me two quite insane stories about their bomber days.
Bell was 20 before he got in a plane. His legs were too long and prevented him from being a fighter pilot. The bombers were crewed by mostly teenage boys who all wanted to fly Spitfires.
“We lost an engine on the way to Hamburg”, he recalls. It was the end of July, 1943. They could not maintain their normal height of 20,000ft; the night air around them swam with flak. Turning back would look like cowardice, so they flew the raid at 10,000ft, underneath the other British bombers. German guns on the ground, and thick gusts of their friends’ bombs blowing above them.
I don’t understand how he wasn’t scared, but Bell simply says he was “indifferent about his feelings”. He would not worry about what he could not control. “Courage comes over a city at night.”
Beneath his plane, Hamburg was being incinerated during Operation Gomorrah. They set the air alight. 37,000 civilians died. It sounded, said one survivor, “like an old church organ where someone is playing all the notes”. Bell was a vengeful God then, raining fire and brimstone down from the heavens.
He is a more peaceful deity now, a bit more New Testament. “All I did was bomb the targets I was given… I’m quite happy with what I did.” He returns to his sandwich. Andrews bombed Dresden. He does not feel guilty, but he is not comfortable about it either. “I think it was a mistake. It never should have happened.”
Andrews was flying over Denmark in 1945 when his plane was hit by a Junkers Ju 88. Everything was on fire; three of the crew bailed out, two were quickly dead. He woke up after the plane had exploded. “I came to, pulled a rip cord, and my life was saved.” When he tells the story he looks like he might burst into laughter at any moment.
“I ended up in a POW camp in Denmark.” The war would be over in weeks and they all knew it. No need to do any Great Escape stuff. “We were liberated by General Patton. It’s the happiest I’ve ever been to see an American.”
Andrews misses his friends. “I’m the only one left now.” All his close peers were dead, his enemies were dead, much of his family was dead. The world he grew up in had more in common with the Victorian era than the Britain he lived to see. Barely a generation back from Darwin and Dickens. But he flew in the stratosphere.
These pilots and their machines figured in the stories we’ve been told all our lives. Velvety stories that roll between the spoken memories of relatives and old snapshots of uniformed men, between Where Eagles Dare and The Longest Day; stories that fold into the pewetery weight of a toy Spitfire in your hand. After the war Britain required myths. We were bankrupt, exhausted, confused. The myth we built around the RAF — that it was alone, that it muddled through, that it was uniquely courageous — was a form of compensation. It was the best we could do.
But these are men, not statues. Calling someone a hero is like comparing them to Casanova, or saying they’re a great dancer. From then on they are a greyhound chasing a mechanical hare. Always trying to catch up. If Bell and Andrews are heroes, then their whole existence after the war has been posthumous. Their unsurpassable status makes them less than human. All that mattered happened to them in the war.
Bell says that when the crew were trying to decide whether to turn their queasy bomber around 79 years ago, they thought: “Why not keep going to Hamburg.”
Why not? It was not about heroism — these men were fatalists. It was about fear and survival. To go on without stopping, never looking back, as the world below them cracked and collapsed. They were not destroying an enemy or defending their homes: they were fighting their own terrors. To overcome them was the only way to navigate a course towards life after the war.
When I ask them whether it was all worth it, Bell looks at me like I’ve asked him to describe the bottom of the ocean. An impossible question. “I don’t really want to go down that road.”
I cannot tell whether he means it was worth it, or it was not.
It’s one of those June days that cannot decide whether to be warm or cold, so we have both. There is blossom on the grass. All the vets have been brought in now, by light aircraft the same white colour as yachts. I am told that one of them hasn’t made it — he died yesterday afternoon.
A Spitfire sits outside a hangar. Men in deep middle age take selfies with it, as if they have met Kim Kardashian. It is a celebrity. The only Allied plane in service from the first day of the war until the last. So brilliant, so adaptable, so fast.
I speak to a selfie taker. There is a male glee in technical details. He knows the names of the parts. Words decorated with beads of numbers. Rolls-Royce Merlin 61 liquid-cooled 12-cylinder Vee piston engine, he says. Bellcrank hinge control. He smiles. Browning 0.303in (7.7mm) machine guns. He is talking in small prayers.
A plane is an orchestra of parts, playing together, he says. The machine is the point for him. He tells me this Spitfire was bought privately for £3 million. He has spent many afternoons mulling the Spit. You can hold its parts, weigh them, pet them. Machines are more manageable than emotions. When I look at the fuselage of that plane, the metal rounded to a propellered nose, I see slightness and fragility. I look at the sky, fill it with Germans, and imagine the terror.
A tiny man is trundled towards the Spitfire. This is Bill Williams, he is one of the last people alive who flew them during the war. He is 101 years old, and he is my lift home. He contemplates the Spit. It is like seeing a snail come face-to-face with a past shell.
His war was not glamorous. Bill is not part of the myth. He missed the Battle of Britain by three years. After training he flew out to Cairo, then to Calcutta.
There he made reconnaissance missions over the Irrawaddy Delta, photographing Japanese railways lines and fuel depots. His real enemy was the weather in monsoon season, which made flying deadly, not the Japanese, whose planes were not fast enough to get near his Spitfire.
Bill remembers it so well that he can take a pencil and draw a map of Burma for me on a flyer. He sketches out hills, rivers, and weather patterns. (I checked it against Google’s satellites later. It is absurdly accurate.)
The only weapon Bill’s plane had was a revolver. “I realised it was for me, if the plane came down and it was a choice between that and being captured by the Japanese”.
In their memoirs, Spitfire pilots often compare the machine to a woman. They were slenderly experienced teenagers. She was a perfect lady. She had no vices. She was beautiful. Most of them only knew sisters, mothers, aunts. They were describing falling in love for the first time.
“Oh the Spit was a lady in the air”, Bill says. “But a real bitch on the ground.” The undercarriage was narrow and weak. Landing it was never easy. “But it was very, very easy to fly. So light. You could literally fly it with this. With one finger.”
We have to get Bill back in the sky. He is cradled, with care and difficulty, into the cockpit of a Cessna 414. Graham, the pilot, does his checks. The plane begins to shudder and wobble.
Soon we are airborne, buffering and swaying, rapidly climbing over the East Midlands. Graham explains the controls to Bill. He is supposed to be flying three tonnes of metal in a minute. He has not flown anything bigger than a kite since the war. I am… somewhat concerned that Bill might accidentally kill all of us.
It is all in my head. Bill knows everything. He is taking us on a right turn, towards Nottingham, then levels the plane out. He checks the air speed. Altitude is perfectly maintained.
“It feels heavier than a Spitfire”, he mutters to himself in the headset. Suddenly he is attentive, composed, professional. Bill flew 1000 hours in the war. Suddenly a man who cannot walk has his wings back. I watch him closely, everyone in the plane does. Bill looks younger, visibly freshened. He is 20 again, avoiding purple-black monsoon clouds above a Burmese delta. He is not flying. He is travelling back in time.
The land below opens up. The yellow fields give way to rashes of red brick suburbs, ringed with motorways, and further out the south of England, and cities, and millions of people.
At this height everything is simplified and clarified. The problem with the myth around these men is that it makes them peaks. All the rest of us can do is dwell in their foothills. A beautiful, hobbling myth: Churchill as King Arthur, the RAF boys like Bill as his gleaming knights, Spitfire as Excalibur. “Nothing surpasses 1940” Churchill said. But how are you supposed to live if your greatest days are behind you?
All at once the stories seemed ridiculous and naive. Bill, Andy, John, and all the others were not myths or legends or heroes. They were survivors. They were skilled, they were dogged, and they were very lucky.
Up here there is only light, wind, and speed. Nothing else matters. England is streaming below us. I look at the list of questions, of the ‘what was it like back then’ variety, for Bill on my phone. They seem stupid now. There is only one thing it makes sense to ask him: how does it feel to be back?
“Oh.” He pauses, searching for the right word. “It is wonderful.”
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Beautiful essay. The quality of the writing is outstanding.
“He chews a ham sandwich, viciously, like it insulted his mother.”
What a vivid image!
Paul Rogers
2 years ago
Thank you. A really lovely piece. “Suddenly a man who cannot walk has his wings back. He is 20 again, avoiding purple-black monsoon clouds above a Burmese delta.” Beautiful.
Matt Hindman
2 years ago
This story reminds me of my late grandpa. He was a navigator and gunner on a B-17. I still remember some of his stories and I wish he lived long enough to ask him about it when I was old enough to appreciate it.
I know the feeling. My own grandfather was an artillery man in New Guinea and sadly passed away when I was 12. I had asked him about the war but he never wanted to talk about it. Going by some of the stories my mother told about growing up with him he sounded like he had PTSD and dredging up those memories would be too painful.
Tom Lewis
2 years ago
Thank you, wonderful essay. Incidentally, my favourite war, flying, book, and thoroughly to be recommended, by me, is ‘Ghosts of targets past’, a bomber pilots journey during the closing years of the war.
Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll get that book. My father was in Bomber Command, would never talk about it at all, didn’t march in the annual veterans’ march, or have any contact with his former ‘crew’. When he came home he had an ‘anxiety condition’ and was put under ‘deep sleep’ as a treatment. I think the nearest I ever got to understanding what it might have been like was from Kate Atkinson’s novel “A God in Ruins”.
Last edited 2 years ago by Russell Hamilton
Simon Diggins
2 years ago
Great essay: thank you. You have humanised, as well as extolled, our ‘greatest generation’, whose proudest boast, if they were anything like my great Uncle (Merchant Navy, WW1 & 2; OBE for his service in WW2; Lloyds Silver Medal for saving his ship), was, “I served.”
Marc Franklin
2 years ago
Wonderful essay, and yes the few are getting fewer. My father Sydney was an RAF Mosquito Pilot who passed away last September. He was 98. He joined the RAF as a volunteer in 1940 he boasted that he got his wings before he could drive a car. The RAF shipped him off to Canada as an instructor where he flew Harvards and taught aerobatics in the Stearman. In 1944 he was posted to the 110 Hyderabad Squadron of Bomber Command in Labuan, where he was given the new Mosquito fighter bomber the “Wooden Wonder” – he never got to fly the Spitfire but used to say “I had Two Merlin Spitfire engines” and it was the fastest plane in the world at the time. His last combat mission (unknown to him at the time was a few days before Hiroshima and the eventual Japanese surrender) was a low level bomb and canon attack on a heavily defended Japanese ferry-crossing in Burma, a 500lb bomb exploded prematurely beneath him which blew the canopy off his aircraft, on his return to base the ground crew told him that his plane had taken over 100 hits from ground fire, the wooden frame had absorbed most of the damage. He said that the atom bomb probably saved his life as flying low level bombing missions against the Japanese over dense jungle with limited or no safe places to land must have been quite daunting to a 20 year old Essex boy. He was one of the first To fly into liberated Singapore and he never lost his disgust for the Japanese after witnessing the atrocities inflicted on the Singapore civilians. He was offered a full time job when his 110 squadron was transferred to Hong Kong, but decided to return home and his last Job for the RAF was to fly a DC3 back to Berlin in late 1946 as part of the lend/lease refund. He loved flying and continued privately after the war even teaching my brother and I some of the basics when we were kids and we both have our PPL. We must never forget all those who fought and and still fight today for our freedom. Thanks for the report.
Condolences on the loss of your father. The Mosquito was a fantastic aircraft. My father who died during lock down flew in Lancasters in the war but had a couple of post war Mosquito entries in his logbook before his demob. He rejoined the RAF later serving almost right up to the end of the Cold War.
Thanks Bill. Same to you. You’ve reminded me that I must find my fathers logbook. As a kid I found his trunk in the attic – wow! What treasures! Incl his survival escape kit with a silk scarf with a Burmese map, a small rubber button with a concealed mini compass, amphetamine tablets with the instruction ‘only to be used in emergencies and authorised by an officer..’ an escape saw…
Real Boy’s Own stuff!
Jeff Butcher
2 years ago
I grew up in Biggin Hill which was a Spitfire base during the war. It was still an RAF base until the 90s – they used to train pilots there. I grew up watching Spitfires fly at the air show they had there every year. Such an elegant design! The sound of the engine alone is gorgeous.
At Biggin Hill You can fly in the rear cockpit of a modified Spit for half and hour if you have £3000 available. If I had the money I think I’d do it.
Aww. I was born within walking distance of Biggin Hill and did some flight training there.
I attended every airshow – but they often just flew over our house.
Wonderful time.
I flew one at Sywell in Northampton and paid an extra £500 for an extra 10inutes. Best 40 minutes and £4,400 I have ever spent. Flew it for 10 minutes and had some aerobatics. This plane can literally fly itself in a straight line.
Richard Parker
2 years ago
Beautiful. Reading that was… emotional. Thank you.
John Szente
2 years ago
Thank you for bringing us with you on your journey with these amazing souls. Your writing is truly visual and enthralling. Rarely do I find myself reading an entire piece, but every word drew me in to read the next until the end. Wonderful! The passing of the #GreatestGeneration will leave a hole not easily filled for generations.
FacRecte NilTime
2 years ago
Thank you. Reminded me of First Light, a beautiful memoir by Geoffrey Wellum DFC, who at 18 was the youngest Spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britain. He appears in a BBC dramatisation of it made in 2010 to mark the 70th anniversary.
“If you could survive three weeks, you had a good chance of surviving six. Or even longer.”
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SubscribeBeautiful essay. The quality of the writing is outstanding.
“He chews a ham sandwich, viciously, like it insulted his mother.”
What a vivid image!
Thank you. A really lovely piece.
“Suddenly a man who cannot walk has his wings back. He is 20 again, avoiding purple-black monsoon clouds above a Burmese delta.”
Beautiful.
This story reminds me of my late grandpa. He was a navigator and gunner on a B-17. I still remember some of his stories and I wish he lived long enough to ask him about it when I was old enough to appreciate it.
I know the feeling. My own grandfather was an artillery man in New Guinea and sadly passed away when I was 12. I had asked him about the war but he never wanted to talk about it. Going by some of the stories my mother told about growing up with him he sounded like he had PTSD and dredging up those memories would be too painful.
Thank you, wonderful essay. Incidentally, my favourite war, flying, book, and thoroughly to be recommended, by me, is ‘Ghosts of targets past’, a bomber pilots journey during the closing years of the war.
Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll get that book. My father was in Bomber Command, would never talk about it at all, didn’t march in the annual veterans’ march, or have any contact with his former ‘crew’. When he came home he had an ‘anxiety condition’ and was put under ‘deep sleep’ as a treatment. I think the nearest I ever got to understanding what it might have been like was from Kate Atkinson’s novel “A God in Ruins”.
Great essay: thank you. You have humanised, as well as extolled, our ‘greatest generation’, whose proudest boast, if they were anything like my great Uncle (Merchant Navy, WW1 & 2; OBE for his service in WW2; Lloyds Silver Medal for saving his ship), was, “I served.”
Wonderful essay, and yes the few are getting fewer. My father Sydney was an RAF Mosquito Pilot who passed away last September. He was 98. He joined the RAF as a volunteer in 1940 he boasted that he got his wings before he could drive a car. The RAF shipped him off to Canada as an instructor where he flew Harvards and taught aerobatics in the Stearman. In 1944 he was posted to the 110 Hyderabad Squadron of Bomber Command in Labuan, where he was given the new Mosquito fighter bomber the “Wooden Wonder” – he never got to fly the Spitfire but used to say “I had Two Merlin Spitfire engines” and it was the fastest plane in the world at the time. His last combat mission (unknown to him at the time was a few days before Hiroshima and the eventual Japanese surrender) was a low level bomb and canon attack on a heavily defended Japanese ferry-crossing in Burma, a 500lb bomb exploded prematurely beneath him which blew the canopy off his aircraft, on his return to base the ground crew told him that his plane had taken over 100 hits from ground fire, the wooden frame had absorbed most of the damage. He said that the atom bomb probably saved his life as flying low level bombing missions against the Japanese over dense jungle with limited or no safe places to land must have been quite daunting to a 20 year old Essex boy. He was one of the first To fly into liberated Singapore and he never lost his disgust for the Japanese after witnessing the atrocities inflicted on the Singapore civilians. He was offered a full time job when his 110 squadron was transferred to Hong Kong, but decided to return home and his last Job for the RAF was to fly a DC3 back to Berlin in late 1946 as part of the lend/lease refund. He loved flying and continued privately after the war even teaching my brother and I some of the basics when we were kids and we both have our PPL. We must never forget all those who fought and and still fight today for our freedom. Thanks for the report.
Condolences on the loss of your father. The Mosquito was a fantastic aircraft. My father who died during lock down flew in Lancasters in the war but had a couple of post war Mosquito entries in his logbook before his demob. He rejoined the RAF later serving almost right up to the end of the Cold War.
Thanks Bill. Same to you. You’ve reminded me that I must find my fathers logbook. As a kid I found his trunk in the attic – wow! What treasures! Incl his survival escape kit with a silk scarf with a Burmese map, a small rubber button with a concealed mini compass, amphetamine tablets with the instruction ‘only to be used in emergencies and authorised by an officer..’ an escape saw…
Real Boy’s Own stuff!
I grew up in Biggin Hill which was a Spitfire base during the war. It was still an RAF base until the 90s – they used to train pilots there. I grew up watching Spitfires fly at the air show they had there every year. Such an elegant design! The sound of the engine alone is gorgeous.
At Biggin Hill You can fly in the rear cockpit of a modified Spit for half and hour if you have £3000 available. If I had the money I think I’d do it.
Aww. I was born within walking distance of Biggin Hill and did some flight training there.
I attended every airshow – but they often just flew over our house.
Wonderful time.
I flew one at Sywell in Northampton and paid an extra £500 for an extra 10inutes. Best 40 minutes and £4,400 I have ever spent. Flew it for 10 minutes and had some aerobatics. This plane can literally fly itself in a straight line.
Beautiful. Reading that was… emotional. Thank you.
Thank you for bringing us with you on your journey with these amazing souls. Your writing is truly visual and enthralling. Rarely do I find myself reading an entire piece, but every word drew me in to read the next until the end. Wonderful! The passing of the #GreatestGeneration will leave a hole not easily filled for generations.
Thank you. Reminded me of First Light, a beautiful memoir by Geoffrey Wellum DFC, who at 18 was the youngest Spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britain. He appears in a BBC dramatisation of it made in 2010 to mark the 70th anniversary.
“If you could survive three weeks, you had a good chance of surviving six. Or even longer.”
https://youtu.be/qdmXIgbbX6I
What a wonderful piece.
.
A beautiful piece of writing, thank you.
If you haven’t seen it, this is worth watching (2 mins) volume up!
https://youtu.be/4iOoiEbtf2w