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 