JUST OVER TWENTY-THREE YEARS AGO fifty small boys, in uniform for the first time, panted up the hillside from the River Dart to the Royal Naval College. They were making their first bow to a life of their choice, ardent even at thirteen; and they walked too fast either to be comfortable or sensible. If it had to be a spartan life they would treat it as such from the outset.
Among them was Peter Medd and those others of us who were in time to become numbered among his nearest friends, not only because we followed the same profession, but because each of us, in one sphere or another, was to come to appreciate something of the enthusiasm which Peter radiated and to love him for the zest he gave to life in such a diversity of ways.
I must make clear from the outset the impertinence I feel in presuming to write this personal note about Peter as an introduction to his last work. There are countless people who loved him as I did and who were, I am sure, able to share more of his life. Yet there was so much to be shared with Peter that it would have been scarcely possible for any one of his friends to achieve it all. Games, sailing, languages, literature, music, ski-ing, climbing; and with it all not only was he a brilliant young leader and seaman in his Service but exceptional in the branch in which he chose to specialise, the Fleet Air Arm (as it was then called).
At college he excelled, as, I understand, he excelled at the Dragon School beforehand. His even temper, his utter lack of self-consciousness with all alike, his selflessness, his humour, his wide open honesty endeared him to all who knew him. He played all games well and sailed a boat as though born to it. He was promoted to Cadet Captain as soon as was possible and was scholastically among the leaders of his Term. There was not one of us who did not admire and respect him.
Passing out of Dartmouth with a brilliant record, he joined HMS Rodney in 1930 and remained in her throughout his three years as a Midshipman. He was as successful in this part of his training as his college days would lead one to expect.
Following this he embarked, with the rest of our batch, upon the round of Sub-Lieutenant’s technical courses at Greenwich and Portsmouth; and it was at this time that I began to appreciate the scope of Peter’s personality.
My own parents were living in Switzerland and I had not therefore the same assured escape at weekends as had my messmates. Peter noticed this and used regularly to invite me to his home in Surrey. This kindness was typical of him, for we had so far discovered very little in common. Whereas he had led in every sphere of activity at Dartmouth, my own performance had been entirely mediocre. Inspired by Anthony Kimmins, our Term Officer throughout our last two years at college and himself a pioneer of naval flying, Peter was always fascinated by this branch of the Service; my own interests were quite different; but he saw I was at a loose end and so he took me in.
Henceforth our friendship was firm. We were at the age of discovery. So much of our earliest life had been occupied by the concentrated shaping to the gunroom mould that now, with more latitude of choice in our own pursuits, our individual horizons were given their chance to extend. Although our particular interests had hitherto scarcely overlapped, we now developed an understanding, born of a mutual love of country and all that that implies.
It was, I remember, on the occasion of the birthday of His Majesty in 1934 that we were granted a long weekend from the Gunnery School. Peter and I decided to cross the spine of the South Downs from Cocking to Eastbourne. We carried packs which were foolishly heavy for the sixty miles we covered in the three days and, out of training as we were, we suffered for our folly. But on the roof of the South Coast I first knew Peter. His marked perception of detail, his buoyancy, his very love of living, his instinctive leadership to which one could not but gladly submit, combined to make him the incomparable guide and companion who was one day to prove supreme in extremis.
During our next leave we stayed with my parents in Switzerland. Peter loved mountains with his whole being, a love which upheld him through the complexities of his last big walk. The spirit of the hills and the dignity of high places were absorbed by him to the full, and their repose became a part of him.
I have stressed this particular side of Peter’s character not because it was the side in which I could personally share most intimately, but in order to illustrate his mental approach to the escape through the mountains of Italy ten years later. Adventure he courted, risk he accepted, anxiety he concealed; so that when, in a London club, we first met after his three years of captivity he was being perfectly natural when he said: ‘It was a wonderful walk, John. Just the sort you would have loved.’
The war overtook us when we were twenty-six, a little more than half-way through our Lieutenants’ time. Peter had by then been in the Air Arm for five years and had already established his reputation as a pilot of courage, judgment and initiative. After serving for three years on the China Station in HMS Eagle, he was appointed to HMS Warspite in 1940. It was while carrying out reconnaissance work for that famous ship in the Mediterranean, in August of that year, that his plane was shot down and, after many hours in a rubber dinghy, he and his observer were taken prisoner by the Italians.
It is not hard to imagine what captivity must have meant to someone of Peter’s outlook, particularly in those desperate early days of the war. He could have had no illusions as to the time his wings must be clipped.
They took him to an old monastery near Sulmona. As well as constantly planning to escape (which he sporadically succeeded in doing only to suffer the inevitable consequence of solitary confinement), he quickly taught himself the language of the country, an asset which was to stand him in such stead during his escape. His vivid letters, brief as they had to be, showed that his humour and his ingenuity were still sustaining him. He knew well enough where the true heart of Italy lay—among the blue-dungareed peasants who work her olive groves in an aura of garlic and strong cheroot. He found it hard to take his Fascist guards seriously.
But they were weary years for him. He was moved from camp to camp. They were moving him again, this time to Germany after Italy had capitulated, when, on the moonlit night of 13th September 1943, he saw his chance and jumped for it. That was about thirty miles north-west of Genoa.
Then followed the adventure which is told in The Long Walk Home, the greater part of which Peter shared with Frank Simms, a major in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, who was playing the same critical game. Feeling for each foothold of shelter before daring to reveal their identity, existing on the country as best they could, they traversed Tuscany, Umbria, Abruzzi, with the Appenines their main protection, to reach the Allied line across the Sangro river after seven hundred miles on foot in seven weeks.
From Bari Peter came straight home and into hospital. On a grey November evening in 1943 my wife greeted me with ‘Peter’s home’ and I felt as though the sun had come out.
As soon as he left hospital the meeting which I have already mentioned took place. The same Peter; modest, gentle, exuberant, far more anxious to hear about his godson (our son) than to talk of his adventures.
That was to be the last time I saw Peter. Once more throwing himself with zest into flying, amid the company of old friends, he began to recapture his technique. At the beginning of 1944 he was posted to a Royal Naval Air Station as C.O. of a squadron and instructor. While he was directing night landings from the ground, a pupil made a ‘flat landing’, the propeller flew off, hit Peter and broke his leg. This meant three more weeks in hospital and it was now that he began to develop his story from the brief notes which he had jotted down at the end of his escape. He had only half completed it when, fit enough to fly once more, he crashed with his plane through the mist into a Northumberland hillside on 19th August 1944 and was killed.
Such examples as Peter’s perhaps shine the more brightly before us by the shortened span permitted them. Certainly during his few years of manhood Peter shed more happiness about him than many longer lives could justly boast.
His life was gentle; and the elements
So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, ‘This was a man’.
Peter Medd was awarded the MBE early in 1944 for courage, enterprise, and devotion to duty.
When he was killed he had, as I have said, only half completed the story of his escape. The latter part remained, unembroidered and in the briefest note form, a few lines scribbled from memory during his rapid journey home from Italy.
To publish these skeleton notes would admittedly have shown the extraordinary clarity with which every incident, each personality, the slightest turn of shade and colour in the changing landscape of his wanderings must have imprinted themselves at the time on Peter’s mind. It would have shown, moreover, with what twist of humour and sense of atmosphere, overlaid by resolute faith and shrewd philosophy, he was able to expand his one-word reminders into description down to the smallest detail; but at the same time, had these notes been the only way of ending the story, one would inevitably have been tantalised by conjecture of what Peter would have made of them had his life been spared.
We are therefore most fortunate in that his companion, Major Simms, possessed the same faculty for memorising detail and was consequently able to reconstruct his own narrative of the escape journey. We owe it to him, and his kindness in allowing parts of his own diary to be used, that the story did not have to be cut short. Written quite independently of each other, the two styles inevitably contrast to accent different aspects of a vagabond existence throughout those testing weeks. But the facts speak for themselves. Peter Medd and Frank Simms together formed the perfect team, each drawing upon his particular qualities in order to survive a form of ordeal which, however resolutely it may have been faced by others, can surely not have been more vividly recorded?
Of Peter, Major Simms writes:
‘I would never have got through alone and I could never have had a more reliable or uncomplaining companion. Even when he had boils and his feet were bad, and his stomach gave him pain, he never grumbled. He was filled with a firm, unwavering courage of a very enduring kind, and a great and sincere belief in the principles of his country and the Navy. I will always remember him with gratitude.’
Commander J. O. C. Hayes, O.B.E., R.N.