‘Are we downhearted?’ cried the Prime Minister, waving his hat and puffing on his cigar.
This continued for about a mile, with unbroken crowds along the side of the roads, well marshalled by alert police officers, all of whom, I noticed, were eager to take a look of their own at the famous visitor. We reached an area of total destruction where even the bulldozers had not yet started work. It was shocking to realize that the undulating, broken mass of concrete slabs, splinter-ended beams, broken brickwork, millions of shards of glass, large pools of water, rampant weeds already poking up through the rubble, had all of it once been people’s homes and places of work. There were no crowds here, probably because there were no homes left, no reason for anyone to be about. We remained on our feet, silent as we passed along the navigable track that was cleared on the edge of the Luftwaffe’s night-time work.
Eventually the car entered a less damaged area and drew to a halt outside a tall Victorian edifice. Apart from a few boarded-up windows and the ubiquitous sandbags, it appeared to be comparatively untouched by the bombs. From a sign near the main gate I saw that the building was Whitechapel Hospital. A squad of uniformed police was waiting in the yard to greet us, saluting as Mr Churchill stepped down. We walked at a smart pace into the building, my injured leg giving me difficulty for the first time that day, but I managed to keep pace. A huge roar was going up: people had crowded into the yard to welcome the Prime Minister, and seemingly hundreds more were leaning from all available doorways and windows, waving and shouting and cheering.
Mr Churchill raised his hat, beamed about in all directions, puffed cheerfully on his cigar.
‘Are we downhearted?’ he shouted to the crowd.
‘NO!!’ they yelled back, waving their flags enthusiastically.
We toured the wards, spoke to doctors, nurses and porters, chatted to patients. Mr Churchill spent extra time in the children’s ward, meeting not only the children but their parents too. At every point his message was the same, endlessly repeated, with only minor variations: ‘We’re going to see it through to the end, we’ll never give up, we’ve got Hitler on the run now; we can take anything he throws at us, he’s in for a few surprises.’
After the hospital we drove to a large school in Leytonstone which had taken a direct hit from a German parachute bomb. After that we drove down the badly bombed High Road in Leyton, where people were crowding on both sides of the street. Wherever there were crowds, Mr Churchill repeated his performance with the hat, the smile and the cigar.
We were back at Admiralty House by lunchtime. With a curt nod to us and a word of thanks Mr Churchill hastened away into the interior of the huge building. By this time I was exhausted after the morning of crowds and noise and the long walks among them. Mr Churchill remained spry and energetic to the end. I was given a light lunch with the other ADCs, then our respective cars arrived to take us home. I went to my room at RAF Northolt and fell asleep at once.
Nothing happened the next day, but the day after I was summoned again to Admiralty House. This time the tour Mr Churchill took was to the south of the river, visiting the areas of Southwark and Waterloo that had been devastated in a raid at the end of April. The next day we returned to the East End and dockland. Two days later the entourage travelled north for tours of the worst-hit parts of Birmingham, Coventry, Manchester and Liverpool. Back in London after a week, we immediately set off touring Battersea and Wandsworth.
I served as a Churchill ADC for just under three hectic weeks, by the end of which time I was convinced of two things about the Prime Minister.
The first was that he was a truly great man, inspiring belief in the impossible: that Hitler could and would be beaten. In that summer of 1941, the Germans were massively engaged in the first phase of the invasion of the Soviet Union, so for a while the pressure was off the British Isles. But the danger of air raids never really went away and the submarine war in the Atlantic was entering its most dangerous phase for Britain. The fighting in North Africa, which had been thought to be almost over when the Italian army collapsed, suddenly took a new and more worrying direction as Rommel assumed command of the Afrika Korps and moved swiftly on Egypt and the Suez Canal. Most of Europe was occupied by the Germans. The Soviet Union was in retreat. The Jews were being moved into ghettos; the extermination camps were built and ready. The Americans were still not involved. Whichever way you looked at it, the British were not in reality winning the war, nor did the prospects look at all good. Churchill, however, would have none of that. Britain has never had a greater leader at a worse time.
But I was also convinced of an altogether different matter.
I quickly realized what the other ADCs must also have known, but which none of us ever admitted or discussed. The cheerful, charismatic man who toured the bombed-out streets and homes of London’s East End, who smilingly received the cheers and shouts from the crowds, who gamely puffed his cigars and uttered the familiar words of patriotic encouragement and defiance, was not Winston Churchill at all.
I do not know who he was. Physically he was almost identical to Churchill, but he was not the great man himself. He was a double, an actor, a paid impostor.
17
I returned to my college in Oxford at the end of September 1936, feted as a hero and briefly the subject of great interest and curiosity. The fame was only brief, though, because a bronze medal is not the same as a gold, and sporting achievement is ephemeral when you cannot follow it up. That is what happened to me, because Joe showed no interest in returning to Oxford. My career as one half of a coxwainless pair immediately ended.
For a while I tried to find another rowing partner, meanwhile concentrating on solo rowing, but it was not the same without Joe. Gradually, my practice sessions grew shorter, less frequent, until the cold spell in January 1937 when I no longer rowed at all.
Instead, I turned to flying, the other obsession of mine that rowing had for a long time overshadowed. I had joined the University Air Squadron as soon as I arrived in Oxford for my first year, and even through the long months of my most intensive training before the Olympics I managed to keep up my flying training hours with the squadron. After the Games I spent more and more time flying, neglecting my academic course. Everyone at Brasenose College knew that I was at Oxford because of my skill at sport, not because of academic brilliance, but I had become a rowing blue who no longer rowed. Flying was no replacement, so I turned reluctantly to the books. I came down from Oxford in July 1938 with a third-class honours degree in German History and Literature.
Through the adjutant of the University Air Squadron I applied for a permanent commission in the Royal Air Force, intending to become a fighter pilot. I had already logged many solo flying hours and I was qualified to fly single-engined aircraft. It seemed to me that I possessed all the natural aggression and quick reactions needed in a fighter pilot and that the RAF would welcome me with open arms.
Nothing, of course, is ever as easy as that. After my first medical examination I was told I was physically unsuited for fighters: I was simply too tall and big-boned and would not fit into the cockpit of any of the aircraft in service. Instead I was selected to fly bombers.
After my time at Cranwell, the officer college for the RAF, I ended up as a trainee Flying Officer with 105 Squadron, equipped with the Blenheim light bomber. By the time war broke out, at the beginning of September 1939, I was in command of my own aircraft and I was ready for operations.
When the Germans launched the Blitz, Britain at first tried to respond with bombing attacks on German targets. I was part of that effort: I had been posted to 148 Squadron, equipped with Wellingtons, and I began flying operationally from the end of 1940. At first our targets were the French ports occupied by the Nazis - Brest, Boulogne, Calais, Bordeaux -but with increasing frequency we were sent to attack targets in Germany itself: Gelsenkirchen, Emden, Wilhelmshaven, Cologne, Berlin, Hamburg. Over Hamburg it ended for me, on May 10, 1941.