Having conquered most of western Europe by the end of June 1940, Germany was now ready to direct its “whole fury and might,” as Winston Churchill put it, against his small island nation. “What General Weygand called the battle of France is over,” Churchill told Parliament on June 18. “I expect that the battle of Britain is about to begin.”
By the first days of July, Germany had transferred more than 2,500 fighters and bombers to captured bases in northwestern France as well as to Norway, Denmark, Belgium, and Holland. Luftwaffe head Hermann Göring assured Hitler that his fearsome air fleet would wipe out the RAF by the beginning of autumn. And once that job was finished, he said, Germany would have no trouble bombing Britain into submission or launching the cross-Channel invasion, code-named “Sea Lion,” that the Führer was now considering.
As it prepared to square off against this utterly confident, seemingly invincible enemy, RAF’s Fighter Command struggled to rebuild its forces, shattered in the debacle in France. Lacking combat experience and steeped in fly-by-the-book procedures, the British pilots sent to fight there had had no idea what they were getting into. For that matter, neither had their superiors. In just three weeks, more than three hundred British fighter pilots had been killed or reported missing—close to a third of the command’s overall strength. More than a hundred had been taken prisoner. During the Dunkirk operation alone, the RAF had lost some eighty pilots and one hundred planes. Altogether almost a thousand aircraft, about half the RAF’s frontline strength, had been destroyed.
In mid-July, the Luftwaffe began attacking British ship convoys in the Channel as well as targets on England’s southern coast. The RAF warded off these limited assaults fairly well, but against an all-out German air attack, it would be able to send up a combined total of only about seven hundred fighters—Hurricanes and the faster Spitfires. Worse, fewer than two pilots per plane were available. It would take a good many more of both for the British to maintain control of their skies. New Hurricanes and Spitfires were being turned out as fast as possible, and Hugh Dowding, the head of Fighter Command, was doing everything possible to make up the shortfall in men.
Among other things, he was now pirating pilots from the RAF Bomber and Coastal commands as well as ordering mere trainees to prepare for combat—youngsters “with blond hair and pink cheeks,” wrote the American journalist Virginia Cowles, “who looked as though they ought to be in school.” Many of them had fewer than ten hours of flying time in either Hurricanes or Spitfires. Barely 10 percent had undergone rigorous gunnery practice. Few knew how to sight their guns: when attacking, they tended to open fire at ranges of 500 yards or more, then break away just as they were getting close enough to actually hit something. They learned their lessons quickly in combat, but a good many died before they could put the lessons to use.
Even with all his foraging, Dowding still came up short and had to turn to fliers from other countries to fill his depleted ranks. As a result, fully 20 percent of the RAF pilots who fought in the Battle of Britain were not British. About half that number—250 in all—came from British Commonwealth countries, including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Many more were needed, however, and the RAF, much against its will, was forced to use pilots who had escaped to Britain from occupied Europe.
Dowding himself was highly doubtful about the wisdom of what he called “the infiltration of foreign pilots into British squadrons.” His definition of “foreign,” as it turned out, was highly elastic. Although he clearly would have preferred to use only homegrown or British Commonwealth fliers, he did assign several dozen western European pilots, including thirty Belgians and eleven Frenchmen, to undermanned RAF squadrons early in July.
But that was as far as he was initially prepared to go. Like other top officials in the RAF and Air Ministry, Dowding wanted nothing to do with the Poles and Czechs, who made up the lion’s share of the European pilots in Britain. Indeed, he insisted that he would dissolve British squadrons before allowing the eastern Europeans to join them. Dire as the situation was, Britain, in his view, did not need the help of a couple of benighted countries that, to most Britons, were little more than “names on a map.”
Neville Chamberlain had spoken the truth in September 1938 when he had noted that to most Britons, including himself, Czechoslovakia was “a faraway country” populated by “people of whom we know nothing.” Similarly, Poland was, for most Englishmen, “the other Europe”—exotic, unknown, a bit savage. According to Geoffrey Marsh, an RAF officer who taught English to Polish fliers, the average Englishman imagined that Poland “was some one hundred years behind” Britain and that “its inhabitants lived in a state of superlative ignorance.” RAF commanders, for their part, regarded the Poles and Czechs as being on “a rung or two lower on the ladder of civilization.”
When Germany crushed Poland in September 1939, its victory merely confirmed British prejudices about the alleged fecklessness of the Polish war effort. As in the United States and most of the rest of Europe, Britons accepted as truth Germany’s claims that the Poles had demonstrated both military ineptness and lack of will in their fight against the Reich. Neither charge was true: the Poles in fact had managed to inflict relatively heavy losses, killing more than 16,000 German troops and wounding some 30,000.
Senior RAF officers, meanwhile, were highly doubtful about the flying skills of Polish pilots, who they believed had lost their nerve in confronting the Luftwaffe. “All I knew about the Polish Air Force was that it had only lasted about three days against the Luftwaffe, and I had no reason to suppose that [it] would shine any more brightly operating from England,” noted Flight Lieutenant John Kent, one of the RAF’s hottest test pilots, who, much to his chagrin, would be named deputy commander of an RAF Polish squadron.
While the Poles were distrusted because of their defeat, the Czechs were scorned because they hadn’t defended their country at all when the Germans had occupied it. British officials seemed oblivious to the fact that the Czechs’ failure to fight had in no small part been due to the British and French betrayal of their country at the 1938 Munich conference. Before Munich, Czech president Edvard Beneš had declared that his nation would resist if German troops marched into the Sudetenland. The highly trained, well-equipped Czech army—more than a million men in all—had been mobilized, as had the air force. The country’s already formidable fortifications had been strengthened; all main roads and bridges had been blocked and mined. “The country was poised for action, calm and determined in full preparedness for the expected bloody struggle,” a Czech government official recalled.
But Beneš’s will collapsed when he was informed that France and Great Britain would not stand behind him. To the horror of Czech military leaders, the demoralized president ordered the country’s forces to stand down. “We are only adding our name to the cowardice of our allies!” a distraught general exclaimed. “It is true that others have betrayed us, but now we alone are betraying ourselves.” Beneš paid no heed. The army and air force were disbanded, and the news was announced to weeping crowds in Prague’s Wenceslas Square.
After the Sudetenland was surrendered, thousands of Czech soldiers and pilots streamed out of their country; more followed after Germany’s occupation of the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. The fact that a number of them joined Poland’s air force and army and took part in the Polish fight against Germany meant little or nothing to the British.
In the end, the RAF did change its mind about using eastern European fliers—but only because it had no choice. On August 13, the Luftwaffe launched its all-out air assault against Britain, blitzing airfields, radar installations, and aircraft factories in the southern part of the country. “We have reached the decisive point in our air war against England,” Göring declared. “Our first aim must be the destruction of the enemy’s fighters.” Day after day, hundreds of German bombers, closely guarded by swarms of fighters, swept over the Channel with the intent of blasting British defenses into rubble.
To help counter this onslaught, dozens of Polish and Czech pilots were integrated into already existing RAF squadrons. In addition, the RAF agreed to form two squadrons made up solely of Poles, as well as two all-Czech units. The new squadrons, however, were firmly under British command and subject to British regulations; their pilots wore dark blue RAF uniforms with “Poland” or “Czechoslovakia” flashes on their jacket sleeves. If Polish and Czech “air units in this country are ever to become efficient,” said one RAF report, “their command must never be taken out of British hands.” The eastern Europeans, especially the Poles, the report added, needed to suppress their “inherent individualism and egotism,” show some discipline, and “learn by example” from their British counterparts.
That kind of condescension only compounded the grievances already held by the Poles and Czechs against the country that, along with France, had failed to come to their nations’ aid. The fliers also were less than impressed by the quality of the British military effort thus far. “My mind was still reeling from the desperately heroic Polish shambles and the insouciant French shambles,” recalled a Polish airman. “Therefore it was with some apprehension that I awaited the first symptoms of some third variety of shambles—a British shambles.”
Most of the Polish fliers in Britain were already battle-hardened pilots. The problems they had faced in defending their country had had little or nothing to do with their flying skill. Many had been flying at Polish aeroklubs since they were boys, and most were graduates of Djblin, one of the most difficult and demanding air force training academies in the world. Virtually all had flying experience against the Luftwaffe, which was more than most British pilots, including those who commanded them, could claim.
That was particularly true of one of the all-Polish units, known to the RAF as 303 Squadron but called the Kościuszko Squadron by those in its ranks. Named for Tadeusz Kościuszko, the young Polish patriot who became an American hero in the Revolutionary War, the unit contained some of Poland’s most skilled fliers. It was assigned to Northolt, a key RAF station only fourteen miles from central London, which was under the umbrella of the all-important 11 Fighter Group. The twenty-one squadrons belonging to 11 Group would be in the thick of the Battle of Britain, responsible for protecting London as well as the rest of southeast England. As such, the group’s squadrons would be crucial to Britain’s defense, and many in the RAF had serious doubts that the Poles of 303 were up to the challenge.
Polish pilots from the RAF’s 303 Squadron.
Even as German air activity increased markedly over the Channel and the English coast, the RAF insisted that the squadron could not become operational until its personnel learned British tactics and basic English. “I’m not having people crashing round the sky until they understand what they’re told to do,” declared Group Captain Stanley Vincent, the station commander at Northolt. When they arrived in Britain, none of the Poles or Czechs knew the basic English vocabulary for flying. At language school, they learned RAF code words—“angels” for altitude; “pancake” for landing; “bandits” for enemy planes; “tally ho” for launching an attack. They learned how to count to twelve in English so they could understand the clock-face system for giving bearings—for example, “bandits at twelve o’clock.”
During their early training in Hurricanes, the Poles of 303 also struggled with the many unfamiliar intricacies of modern aircraft controls. Having trained in primitive planes and being unaccustomed to having radios in the cockpit, they often violated proper radio-telephone procedures or failed to respond properly. In Polish planes, to accelerate you pulled the throttle back, whereas in British planes you pushed it forward. “We had to reverse all our reflexes,” said one of 303’s pilots. There were several instances of overshooting the runway, and because most of the fliers had never flown aircraft with retractable landing gear, a number of landings occurred with the wheels still up.
At one point, the Poles were ordered to ride a fleet of oversized tricycles—each fitted with a radio, compass, and speed indicator—in flying formation around a football field. As they rode, they were directed to “interceptions” from an “operations room” at the top of the bleachers. The indignity of it all infuriated the Poles—skilled veteran pilots being forced to ride around a field on trikes.
For almost a month at the height of the Battle of Britain, the British and the Poles of 303 engaged in a tense, stormy conflict of wills. It had been nearly a year since Germany had swept into Poland. In that time the Polish fliers had experienced nothing but frustration, bordering on despair. Their inaction fed their already considerable guilt about not being able to save Poland. They also agonized about escaping and leaving their country, especially their families, to suffer under the twin occupations of Germany and the Soviet Union, which, under a secret codicil to the Ribbentrop-Molotov nonaggression pact of 1939, had invaded and annexed eastern Poland in mid-September of that year. Hungry for combat, the Poles of 303 discovered that, in the words of one of them, “we were not to be let off the leash.” Adding to the torture was the knowledge that at least forty other Polish pilots were already operational—in otherwise all-British squadrons.
The pilots of 303 particularly objected to being forced to take orders from British officers, whom they considered arrogant and condescending. They were in no mood to be lectured to about their language abilities or their tactics, least of all by the likes of their squadron leader, Ronald Kellett, a wealthy London stockbroker in civilian life who had never flown in combat for as much as a minute.
The emotional, high-spirited Poles showed their rebelliousness in various colorful ways. They were constantly being reproved for not conforming to regulations in dress (unbuttoned uniform jackets, missing belts, nonregulation shirts and shoes) and for sneaking into Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) housing at night or smuggling WAAFs into their quarters. “They were a complete law unto themselves,” recalled a British air mechanic.
As the training continued, however, the Poles’ British commanders gradually began to show more understanding and respect. Despite the belly landings and other early problems, it soon became clear to Kellett and Kent that the pilots under their command were very good indeed. Kent was impressed with both their flying ability and their unusually quick reaction times, and Kellett even developed into something of an advocate for them, quick to challenge any disparaging remarks by other RAF officers—remarks such as he himself had made in the beginning. When Northolt officials offered the squadron the use of a battered old truck, instead of the usual car, to take them from the officers’ mess to the airfield, Kellett declared that such a shabby form of transportation simply would not do. He brought in his own Rolls-Royce, a roomy 1924 open touring car that could ferry as many as twelve pilots at a time to their planes.
Meanwhile, the intensity of the battle over southern England was steadily mounting. Every day, the three-hundred-plus Hurricanes and Spitfires of 11 Group hurled themselves against massive enemy bomber and fighter formations. The days were clear and hot, and the RAF pilots scrambled from dawn to dusk, which in Britain at that time of year amounted to about fifteen hours a day. Their lives had suddenly become a madness of activity—fierce combat, followed by frenzied refueling and rearming on fields that German bombing was turning into lunar landscapes. The stress of several sorties a day took an enormous physical and psychological toll: some fliers were so exhausted after a sortie that as soon as they landed they immediately fell asleep in their cockpits. Nerves were frayed, morale began to slip; more and more mistakes, including faulty landings, were made, and accidents occurred.
During this period, both the RAF and Luftwaffe suffered severe losses of both men and planes. The planes were replaceable—and, in the RAF’s case, were being replaced by British industry—but the men were another matter. From August 8 to 18, 154 RAF fliers were killed, seriously wounded, or missing in action—more than twice as many as could be replaced. By the third week of August, Fighter Command was short more than two hundred pilots.
“Most people who went into 11 Group didn’t last,” recalled one flier fortunate enough to have survived the Battle of Britain. “They couldn’t last. They had no chance at all.” Many years after the battle, another former RAF pilot was paging through a book listing the names of the pilots who had been in his squadron. “Some I couldn’t remember,” he said. “They passed through, and had been shot down before I could get to know them.”
During this period of “intense struggle and ceaseless anxiety,” as Winston Churchill called it, the Germans were relentless. As August drew to a close, they launched raids in such numbers against RAF airfields and radar stations that the controllers in 11 Group were forced to choose which attacks should get priority attention from their depleted squadrons. “On virtually every occasion that the Germans operated in force, they grossly outnumbered the defending squadrons,” noted the official postwar RAF account of the Battle of Britain. For the most part, RAF squadrons went into combat one unit at a time, sometimes engaging enemy formations of fighters and bombers that outnumbered them more than tenfold. Yet despite the crisis, the Poles in 303 Squadron were kept far from any action.
On August 30, the Germans mounted their most concentrated assault yet, cutting the electricity to seven radar stations and knocking them temporarily off the air. Most key air bases in the south were hit as never before. That evening, Ronald Kellett put in a call to Fighter Command headquarters, urging that it make 303 operational. Having lost nearly a hundred pilots in the previous week, the RAF finally gave in and ordered the squadron into battle the next day.
The fighting on August 31, as it turned out, was even more intense than the day before. On that single, white-hot day, the Luftwaffe flew more than 1,400 sorties against the beleaguered airfields and radar stations encircling London. Shortly before 6 P.M., 303 Squadron finally got its orders to fly. It had been one year, almost to the day, since the Luftwaffe had devastated Poland and humiliated the Polish air force. Now, after twelve months of anguish, anger, and frustration, the time had come to begin settling the score.
Shortly after taking off, the Poles hurtled down on the surprised enemy like avenging furies. In less than fifteen minutes, six of them had each shot down a Messerschmitt in the skies over south London. While the squadron would go on to compile a brilliant overall record in the Battle of Britain, it is doubtful that its contribution was ever more urgently needed than on its first day of combat. For it was on August 31 that Fighter Command suffered its heaviest losses of the entire battle—thirty-nine fighters shot down and fourteen pilots killed. The Germans, however, lost an identical number, with 303’s pilots credited with 15 percent of those kills—and no losses of their own.
The RAF senior command, which just the day before had been so loath to let 303 fight, now deluged the squadron with congratulations. “Magnificent fighting, 303 Squadron,” cabled Sir Cyril Newall, chief of the air staff. “I am delighted. The enemy is shown that Polish pilots [are] definitely on top.” And that was just the beginning. On September 5, 303 was credited with destroying eight enemy aircraft—20 percent of that day’s RAF kills.
Two days later, the now-familiar waves of German bombers and fighters failed to head for their previous targets—the coastal defenses and RAF bases of southern England. Following the curve of the Thames, they were aimed straight at London. Hitler had ordered attacks on the British capital in retaliation for a few scattered RAF bombing raids on Berlin. He and Göring had also persuaded themselves that the Luftwaffe had neutralized the RAF and therefore was free to concentrate on London and other British cities. It was a spectacular miscalculation—and no less so for being almost true. In the previous two weeks, the RAF had lost 227 fighters, had seen major damage inflicted on airfields and sector-control stations, and was close to being finished. What Fighter Command needed above all was time to regroup, and Hitler provided just that. Instead of persisting in heavy attacks against RAF installations and communications, the German air force began eight weeks of massive bombing of London—the most intense chapter in the eight-month reign of terror called the Blitz.
On that frenzied first day of the Blitz, the Poles of 303 shot down fourteen German planes in less than fifteen minutes. They also managed to disperse a German bomber formation before it could hit London. With nearly a quarter of the formation destroyed, the surviving bombers turned and headed back to France.
In just over a week of combat, the all-Polish squadron had destroyed nearly forty enemy aircraft—by far the best record in the entire RAF—and in doing so had become unofficial heroes of the realm. Government officials, senior RAF commanders, private citizens, Churchill, and the king himself joined at various times in paying honor to 303’s fliers. “You use the air for your gallant exploits, and we for telling the world of them,” the BBC’s director general wrote the unit. “Long live Poland!”
At Buckingham Palace, King George VI’s secretary, Alexander Hardinge, admiringly referred to the Polish pilots as “absolute tigers.” In a letter to Lord Hamilton, Hardinge wrote, “One cannot help feeling that if all our Allies had been Poles, the course of the war, up till now, would have been very different.” An RAF squadron leader, speaking of the Polish airmen, was quoted as saying, “They are fantastic—better than any of us. In every way they’ve got us beat.”
Again and again, the question was asked: What made the Poles so good? The answer wasn’t simple. Generally older than their British counterparts, most Polish pilots had hundreds of hours of flying time in a variety of aircraft, as well as combat experience in both Poland and France. Unlike British fliers, they had learned to fly in primitive, outdated planes and thus had not been trained to rely on a sophisticated radio and radar network. As a result, said one British flight instructor, “their understanding and handling of aircraft was exceptional.” Although they appreciated the value of tools such as radio and radar, the Poles never stopped using their eyes to locate the Luftwaffe. “Whereas British pilots are trained…to go exactly where they are told, Polish pilots are always turning and twisting their heads to spot a distant enemy,” an RAF flier noted.
The Poles’ intensity of concentration was equaled only by their daring. British pilots were taught to fly and fight with caution. The Poles, by contrast, had been trained to be aggressive, to crowd and intimidate the enemy, to make him flinch and then bring him down. After firing a brief opening burst at a range of 150 to 200 yards, the Poles would close almost to point-blank range. “When they go tearing into enemy bombers and fighters they get so close you would think they were going to collide,” observed one RAF flier. On several occasions, crew members of Luftwaffe bombers, seeing that 303’s Hurricanes were about to attack, baled out before their planes were hit.
On September 15, the Poles of 303 were given their biggest opportunity to date to show off their exceptional combat skills. More than a month had passed since the Battle of Britain began. The RAF was still flying, and London, after a weeklong battering, was still defiant. Although Hitler was having doubts about Operation Sea Lion, he decided to give Göring another chance to make Götterdämmerung possible. And so Göring gave the order: every available Luftwaffe aircraft was to be unleashed in an all-out push to end RAF resistance. All of 11 Group’s squadrons were engaged in combating the furious daylong assault, plus much of 12 Fighter Group, which included the other Polish squadron and a Czech unit. In all, some one hundred Polish and Czech pilots participated in the dogfights of September 15, making up about 20 percent of the total RAF force.
Churchill would later call the September 15 melee “one of the decisive battles of the war.” The Luftwaffe had thrown nearly everything it had at the British but had failed to achieve its main objective: elimination of the RAF as a defensive force. There would be more German raids in the future, more destruction and death visited on London and other English cities. Nevertheless, the myth of the Luftwaffe’s invincibility was forever shattered. Two days later, Hitler decided he’d had enough and canceled Operation Sea Lion until further notice.
Years after the war, a Battle of Britain historian would write, “Even though it was equipped with the Hurricane, the least effective of the main fighters, 303 Squadron was by most measures the most formidable fighter unit [RAF or Luftwaffe] of the Battle.”
In only six weeks of combat, during the battle’s most crucial period, the squadron was credited with shooting down 126 enemy aircraft, more than twice as many as any other RAF squadron during that time. Nine of its thirty-four pilots qualified as aces—fliers who had shot down five or more enemy planes. One of them, Jozef František, who flew with a fury that no other flier could match, was the RAF’s top gun in the battle, with nineteen kills to his name.
František, as it happened, was a Czech—one of the pilots who had escaped to Poland after Munich—but from the day he arrived there, he had allied himself with Poland. In the days after the German invasion of Poland, he had flown reconnaissance missions for the Polish air force and on at least two occasions lobbed grenades from his unarmed, open-cockpit observer plane at German infantry columns. In England, when asked his nationality, František invariably answered, “I am a Pole.” Proud to be in 303, he refused many invitations to join a Czech unit.
In the opinion of a number of RAF pilots and commanders, the contribution of the Polish pilots, particularly those in 303 Squadron, made the difference between victory and defeat in the battle. Perhaps the most telling comment came from no less than Hugh Dowding, initially so reluctant to send the Poles aloft. Shortly after the battle, the head of Fighter Command declared, “Had it not been for the magnificent [work of] the Polish squadrons and their unsurpassed gallantry, I hesitate to say that the outcome of Battle would have been the same.” Many years later, Queen Elizabeth II would make the identical point: “If Poland had not stood with us in those days…the candle of freedom might have been snuffed out.”
BY SEPTEMBER 1940, THE RAF’s early doubts and suspicions of the eastern Europeans were nothing but a memory; the same was true of the Poles’ and Czechs’ qualms about the British. Regardless of nationality, all airmen in the RAF were fused together now, fighting for the common cause of freedom.
Alexander Hess, the senior pilot in one of the all-Czech units, recognized the power of that union when he and his squadron were ordered into the air, along with dozens of other squadrons, on September 15. As the Czechs flew at top speed toward London, the forty-two-year-old Hess felt great strength “in the knowledge that every one of us in the RAF was there for all of us—and that all of us were there for every single RAF man.” As he gazed down through the haze at London’s “stripes of streets, tiny rectangles of gardens, and millions of invisible people,” he felt, too, that “all of this was mine—my house, my street, my child, my future. As if thousands of voices were calling up to me” to protect them.
A few minutes later, Hess’s Hurricane was hit by a Messerschmitt; trailing clouds of black smoke, it began plunging toward the ground. Realizing he was coming down over a heavily populated neighborhood in the eastern suburbs of London, Hess frantically maneuvered the plane away from the area. He was barely three hundred feet above roof level when he spied a small open field. Just as he reached it, his plane burst into flames, and he parachuted out. When he opened his eyes after a hard landing, he saw “the stern face and ice cold eyes” of a member of the Home Guard, Britain’s volunteer defense organization, who was pressing the barrel of a hunting rifle into his chest.
With a shock, Hess realized that the man thought he was a Luftwaffe pilot. “I am British!” he shouted again and again, but he could see that his heavy foreign accent only intensified the guardsman’s suspicions. Just then, a military car roared up, and a couple of RAF officers stepped out.
After a few moments of discussion between the RAF men and the Home Guard volunteer, Hess was gently helped to his feet, put into the car, and taken to the volunteer’s home. There he was placed in an easy chair, covered with a blanket, and given a whiskey as well as thanks for guiding his crippled aircraft away from nearby homes. “A feeling of deepest gratitude overwhelmed me from head to foot,” Hess remembered. “I was grateful for all the kind and loving care, for the blanket and warm drink, for the people around me.”
Alexander Hess would later be awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross for his heroic actions that day.
OF HESS AND THE other pilots who defended Britain, Winston Churchill declared: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” Yet there were countless other heroes who emerged during that chaotic summer and fall of 1940. Chief among them were the members of UXB (unexploded bomb) squads, who, throughout the Blitz, were dispatched to neighborhoods in London where bombs with delayed-action fuses, their timers still ticking, had burrowed underground. In this frantic race against time, the volunteer squads would dig down to the bombs, knowing they could go off at any moment.
Just two months after his rescue mission in France, the Earl of Suffolk organized a unit to perform experiments on various kinds of German bomb fuses and to come up with safer and more effective ways of dismantling them. Working with the Ministry of Supply’s scientific research department, he, together with his squad of sappers, transformed a van into a mobile laboratory, retrieving bombs from sites and bringing them back to Richmond Park just outside London, the main proving ground for experimental bomb research.
Possessing a “rare combination of steel nerves and a scientific mind,” Suffolk constantly prodded the scientists with whom he worked to greater efforts. “He had us all slapping bombs around as if they were ostrich eggs,” one researcher noted, “but we made progress that we’d never have made without him.”
It was the perfect job for a man with an unquenchable thirst for adventure and danger. Happily shedding his aristocratic lifestyle, Suffolk turned over his mansion and estate to the government for use as an army hospital and took up residence in a small room at the Royal Automobile Club in London. He spent most of his time with his team of sappers, many of whom were from the city’s East End; after a tense day of extricating and defusing bombs, he would often treat them to dinner at his favorite restaurant, a smart place called Kempinski’s, in west London. In return, Suffolk’s men presented him with a silver cigarette case inscribed with their names.
For eight months, Suffolk and his unit led what others considered a charmed existence, putting themselves daily in harm’s way and emerging without a scratch. Then, on May 12, 1941, they drove out to a marsh in southeast London to dismantle a bomb, called “Old Faithful,” that had lain there for months without detonating. Just as the thirty-five-year-old Suffolk was withdrawing the fuse, Old Faithful exploded, shattering windows a quarter of a mile away. The Earl of Suffolk was killed, along with his secretary, his driver, and six other members of his team. The only trace of him found in the rubble was his silver cigarette case.
Weeks later, British newspapers noted that King George VI had posthumously awarded the George Cross—the civilian equivalent of the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest military honor—to “Charles Henry George Howard, Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire, for conspicuous bravery.”