A couple of years ago, I wrote a series of blogposts about the Short Sunderland flying boat. In at least one of them, I talked about how a civilian airliner, with the film star Leslie Howard on board, was shot down over the Bay of Biscay on June 1st 1943. Howard, and the crew and all of the other passengers were killed. I mentioned those events because, the following day, a Short Sunderland was sent out to look for the missing airliner. They didn’t find it, but they did find the eight German fighters which had shot down the BOAC Douglas Dakota DC-3. There then ensued one of the legendary battles of the Second World War as the Sunderland fought off a pack of Junkers Ju88s. That particular series of blog posts, though, concentrated on the Short Sunderland flying boat and the Junkers Ju88 long distance heavy fighter.
This series of blogposts which begins today, however, concentrates not on the aircraft involved, but instead the still unanswered question of……….
“Why did the Germans have to destroy that airliner ?”
And first of all, let’s take a look at the man who is usually put forward as the prime suspect for the reason that the Dakota had to be destroyed……..
Leslie Howard was a film star who starred in “Pimpernel Smith”, “The First of the Few”, “Of Human Bondage” and most famous of all, “Gone with the Wind”, a huge smash hit in 1939. Here he is in “Journey’s End”:
Howard’s father was Ferdinand Steiner, a Hungarian Jew, and his mother was Lilian Blumberg, from an English Jewish family of German origin. Howard had originally styled himself Leslie Stainer in an effort to anglicise his real name of Leslie Howard Steiner, but eventually he decided on the name by which he is known nowadays.
On June 1st 1943, Leslie Howard was in Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, with his business manager, Alfred Chenhalls. They intended to take the civilian passenger aircraft of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines which, even in wartime, made a regular morning run between Portela Airport to the north of neutral Lisbon and Whitchurch Airport near Bristol in England. Neither Howard nor Chenhalls had tickets, so two passengers were turned off the aeroplane to make room for them. The lucky two were a little boy called Derek Partridge and his nanny called Dora Rove. Or, in another story, one of the two passengers was a Catholic priest, Father Holmes. Or perhps the lucky two were George and William Cecil, recalled from their boarding school in Switzerland.
There is a story that the take-off was delayed while Howard went to collect a small parcel full of silk and nylon stockings, a present, perhaps, for his wife and daughter. While filming, Howard was pretty much a serial adulterer, who said….
“I never chased women but I couldn’t always be bothered to run away”
The aircraft was a Douglas DC-3-194 called “Ibis” with the civilian letters G-AGBB. Here it is, complete with its Dutch flag:The aircraft had hardly ever been impeded by the Luftwaffe on its 1,000 mile, seven hour, flight:
In actual fact, though, the Germans had already attacked the aircraft on two occasions in the previous six months. On November 15th 1942, it had been challenged by a single Messerschmitt Bf110 Zerstörer heavy fighter and on April 19th 1943, it had been ambushed by a patrol of six Bf110s. Here’s the nightfighting version of the Bf-110. The Zerstörer heavy fighters would have lacked the radar antennae….
On both occasions, the camouflaged airliner escaped a watery grave. The first attack involved a party of very high ranking American Eighth Air Force officers which included Ira Eaker. They were saved when the Bf110’s engine caught fire as it attacked. Everybody in the airliner, both passengers and crew, was terrified. In the second attack, the pilot, Captain Koene Dirk Parmentier, dropped down to the waves and then climbed steeply into the thick low clouds.
On the other hand, though, the trip had been made more than 500 times between 1939-1943 without the slightest problem.
On this occasion, though, just after midday, they were shadowed initially by two Junkers Ju 88s over the countryside of northern Portugal and then of north-western Spain. They broadcast a message “we are being followed by enemy aircraft” and then “we are being shadowed”.
At around 12.45 pm eight different Junkers Ju88C-6 fighters of Gruppe V / Kampfgeschwader 40 spotted the “grey silhouette” of the DC-3. The Ju88s were flying with six aircraft abreast, fifty yards or so apart, with another two flying above them and acting as “spotters”. They had apparently been told to look for a twin engined grey aircraft. Their commander, Oberleutnant Heintze, had been told to carry out rigorous patrols during June and to shoot down the aircraft they found. This is a Junlers Ju-88 heavy fighter:
The Ju88s attacked the airliner at between 6,000-10,000 feet over the Bay of Biscay some two hundred miles north of the Spanish coast. One of the pilots, Oberleutnant Albrecht Bellstedt, radioed to his companions: “Indians at 11 o’clock, AA”. This meant enemy aircraft ahead, slightly to the left, attack, attack. One fighter came in from above and one from below. With their heavy calibre cannons, they set the Dakota’s port engine on fire and this then spread to the wing. A radio message was picked up from the wireless operator, van Brugge: “I am being followed by a strange aircraft….Putting on best speed….we are being attacked by enemy aircraft….cannon shells and tracers are going through the fuselage…. Am wave hopping and doing my best.” Oberleutnant Heintze, however, drew level with the stricken aircraft and quickly realised that it was a civilian airliner. He immediately stopped the attacks. Three, presumably, crew members, jumped out of the DC-3, deploying their parachutes but they did not open as they were already on fire and all three fell to their deaths. The aircraft plummeted into the sea where the wreckage floated on the surface for a very short period and then sank. By one o’clock, all four crew members and all thirteen passengers, including Leslie Howard, had been killed.
The four members of the crew were the pilot, Quirinus Tepas MBE, the second pilot, Captain Dirk de Koning, Cornelis van Brugge, the radio operator, and Engbertus Rosevink, the flight engineer.
Whoever was their intended target, the Germans were certainly serious about killing him or her. They had sent eight twin engined heavy fighters from Gruppe V / Kampfgeschwader 40 in a deliberate attempt to intercept that lone Dutch aircraft. If they had come across it purely by chance then surely there would have been just a single fighter involved, at best two, surely not a group of eight. And after they had shot down the DC-3, the German fighters circled the floating wreckage and took photographs of the burning plane before it finally sank. You don’t do that with just any old aerial kill. It has to be done for a very special reason. But that reason has never been found.
Here’s Alfred Chenhalls, Old Nopttinghamian, and Leslie Howard’s business manager. And with a cigar in one hand, and a whisky in the other, he’s a Winston Churchill look-alike. Apparently…………..
Don’t forget, though. In this day snd age, it was by no means simple to identify a famous person. They might have seen them in the cinema, but apart from this, there were only newspapers, magazines and, most of all, the radio. The latter, of course, was useful only for voice identification!
John Knifton 
What do the mission orders, mission reports, etc., of Gruppe V / Kampfgeschwader 40 have to say about the event? There is a lot more information that I would want to have before making the assumption that this flight was specifically targeted.
To be honest, I have never seen anything from the German point of view about these sad events of June 1943, insofar as the Luftwaffe, at the end of WW2, were enthusiastically destroying their records and I had always presumed that nothing had ever been found. To add a little spice to the story, the British have always seemed extremely keen themselves to limit access to their own files about Lelsie Howard.
Maybe the answer in the German files isn’t actually about Leslie Howard. Perhaps, that’s only an English conceit. The German files may contain only records of German patrols, fighter sweeps if you will, to protect U-boats returning to base with direction to fire upon targets of opportunity. Chance played a tremendous part in aerial warfare of the time.
I couldn’t really agree with that as Howard, and several of the others others, were very big figures in this area of the world, especially Spain and Portugal. He had also been picked out personally by Goebbels as a trouble maker who could well be killed as soon as possible.
There is an expansive account on Wikipedia, “BOAC Flight 777” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOAC_Flight_777), of the shoot down of the DC-3. The Wikipedia account includes commentary by Germans involved in the attack. According to the Germans’ account, the on-going mission of JU-88 flights was the escort of U-Boats returning to France across the Bay of Biscay. The DC-3 was shot down on Tuesday, 1 June 1943 while the JU-88s were searching for a U-Boat they were to escort. The following day, Wednesday, 2 June, a Short-Sunderland was also attacked by a flight of eight Ju-88s. The Bay of Biscay was the site of on-going air-sea battle to destroy deploying and returning U-Boats protected by Luftwaffe escorts. It seems insane that the British would schedule civilian flights through such a hostile environment. While there may be those who might equate Leslie Howard’s death to that of Yamamoto’s destruction in the Pacific, I think Leslie Howards death was simply a matter of bad luck. On the other hand, bad luck sells neither newspapers nor books.
We’ll have to agree to differ. You’ll see my ideas as the rest of the blog posts see the light of day.
Fascinating
I’m glad you are enjoying it, Derrick. The plot will definitely thicken as events are examined.
Curious.
It certainly is, and possibly one of the great mysteries of the Second World War.
Did I miss it? Why was a civilian aircraft flying there?
The Dakota was preserving a link between the UK and neutral Portugal and Spain. It was mainly used by businessmen and the representatives of large companies. On most occasions when it flew, there would have been a spy or two on board, but neither side was particularly bothered, because they saw it as a means of keeping tabs on enemy agents.
Thank you. I’ve often wondered what those two nations were up to during those years.
It’s going to be a cliff hanger John. I love a mystery.
And it still is a mystery, some eighty years or so after the event. I hope you enjoy it, Pierre!
I hope this becomes viral on the Internet.
John, I had no idea about the mystery of Leslie Howard’s death. I remember being fascinated by his character Ashley in “Gone with the Wind.” Look forward to the next episode 🙂
Leslie Howard was a very brave man, and a great fighter for democracy and the idea that everybody is important, not just the ones at the top. I think you will enjoy what I have written, especially the 101 theories as to why he was killed and by whom!
Can’t wait to read more, John!
Interesting – I’ve never heard about this one before.
That could be because the British at the time fought tooth ad nail to suppress the news, including keeping all of the official documents secret. As far as I know, some of them are still secret even now.
It is a fascinating mystery – I appreciate you taking it on. Curious things without factual support always result in speculation, and in any case, modern society loves a good conspiracy. Just because we can’t prove something happened doesn’t mean it didn’t. Howard’s death is a puzzle to us now – it may have simply been a matter of terrible luck. When American planes sought out and eventually destroyed Admiral Yamamoto’s aircraft, it was dumb luck that the American pilots even discovered the Japanese transport. Are we prepared to believe that (1) Howard had become a German target and (2) that German pilots were capable of finding Howard’s plane in a very wide sky? That said, I cannot imagine that any German (then or now) would gleefully admit to shooting down a noncombatant airliner. I will tune in for further information. Thank you!
I’m glad you are enjoying it. There’s quite a way to go yet, but every few years or so, a different theory emerges and that will remain the solution of choice until the next one comes along.
I recently read a book about the role of the “Enigma” machines during WW2 and according to that, Yamamoto was killed because the British decoders at Bletchley Park told the US Air Force where he was going to be and they managed to intercept his aircraft and kill him. On the other hand, nobody has to believe anything just because it appears in a book!
Fascinating reading John. I must admit I didn’t know that Howard had been killed in a situation such as this. What I do know however, is that ‘civilian’ aircraft did regularly fly between Britain and both occupied and neutral countries. I wrote an article myself about BOAC operating Mosquitos in such a way, transferring agents and scientists across the waters, often bringing back ball bearings and important people stashed in the bomb bay. The Lusitania was carrying arms when sunk and by doing so perhaps made itself a ‘legitimate’ target to the enemy. Was this aircraft deliberately attacked or was it by chance? I don’t think we’ll ever know the answer to that one, but any ‘celebrity’ whether military or civilian would provide a propaganda boost in war both good and bad!
My blog posts will look at whether the Dakota was shot down deliberately to kill Howard or any of the other prominent people on it, or whether it was just a cock=up by the Luftwaffe. That brings in the idea of why the official papers on Howard have been locked away for so long. To be honest, there must be ten or a dozen reasons why things developed as they did!
I’m certainly intrigued and look forward to more.
This is fascinating. I was dimly aware of the death of Leslie Howard but thought it was just an accident. Now that you mention the resemblance of his manager to Churchill it becomes much more sinister. How might the Germans have known of his flight? Intriguing.
Good morning, Chris.
The thinking is that if “Churchill” reported for his flight an hour beforehand, then that would have given a German agent sufficient time to phone either the airfield at Bordeaux or in Britanny and to scramble the necessary aircraft. For me, that is the clincher in the argument, If you wanted to shoot down any aircraft you came across, you might send just one or two fighters to make random interceptions. If you are 100% set on shooting down a specific aircraft, then you send eight.