July 5, 2013

RIDDLES, MYSTERIES, ENIGMAS: FINEST HOUR 128, AUTUMN 2005

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Q: It is widely published in South Africa that our erstwhile Prime Minister, Jan Smuts, who was good friends with Churchill and a member of WSC’s War Cabinet, served by an act of default as the Prime Minister of Britain for two days when Churchill was out of the country, because he was the senior leader in Britain at the time. Can you help us on this one? —Matthew Buckland, Publisher, Mail & Guardian Online, Johannesburg

A: Although a member of Lloyd-George’s War Cabinet in 1917-18, Smuts was not a member of the Churchill War Cabinet, though he attended its meetings by invitation when visiting England.

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Winston Churchill had such a high opinion of Smuts that he toyed with the idea of leaving him in charge when he went to the Teheran conference in November 1943, but this never happened. The constitutional difficulties would have been almost insuperable; Smuts would probably have had to be created a peer, with a seat in the House of Lords, in order to have been able to govern. Yet as early as 1940 Jock Colville (then WSC’s assistant private secretary) thought that if anything happened to Churchill, Smuts should replace him; Colville went so far as mentioning this idea to his mother, who was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary and thus in a position to mention it to Her Majesty in the expectation that it would filter through to her son, the King.

Q: The famous portrait of WSC in RAF uniform shows him sporting wings of the RAF. Are you able to tell me when he was awarded them?

A: Wings are for pilots only, but on 1 April 1943, the 25th anniversary of the creation of the Royal Air Force, the Air Council, with the King’s approval, awarded Churchill honorary wings. Thus any photo or painting of WSC in RAF uniform can be instantly dated as either before or after 1 April 1943. Churchill acknowledged this honor in the following letter to Air Marshal Sir Bertine Sutton (Air Member for Personnel): 

“Dear Air Marshal Sutton, “I take it as a high compliment that the Air Council should wish to give one of their honorary commodores his honorary wings. I value this distinction the more because it comes to me on the 25th anniversary of the formation of the Royal Air Force. My memories go back six years earlier, when in 1912, as First Lord of the Admiralty, I began to cherish the Royal Naval Air Service.

“I consider that Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Trenchard is the founder of the Royal Air Force. He it was who proposed to me, when I was Air Minister in 1919, that Mesopotamia should be held by air power, thus releasing a number of army divisions, which cost us £40,000,000 a year to maintain in that country. This proved, in a manner patent to all intelligent minds, the immediate part which the air would play not only in war but in peace.

“Since those now distant days, we have had the epic of the Battle of Britain, upon which, under Providence, the freedom of the world, perhaps for several generations, was staked. The name of Sir Hugh Dowding is linked with this historic episode.

“At this moment, we may say without vanity that the Royal Air Force—taken all in all—is ‘Second to None.’ At this moment it is the spearpoint of the British offensive against the proud and cruel enemy who boasted that he would ‘erase’ the cities of our native land, and hoped to lay all the lands under his toll and thrall. As the world conflict deepens, the war future of the Royal Air Force glows with a still brighter and fiercer light.

“I am honoured to be accorded a place, albeit out of kindness, in that comradeship of the air which guards the life of our island and carries doom to tyrants, whether they flaunt themselves or burrow deep.” —PAUL H. COURTENAY

Q: Churchill’s personal aircraft was made available to a group of British-trained Czechoslovak paratroopers on 28 June 1944 for actions behind enemy lines and, in fact, took them on that day from airfield in Reading to Algiers. What was its name? —Dr. Jan A. Klinka, Victoria, B.C.

A:We could find no mention of the mission in the two books about Churchill’s aircraft, and hope a reader will be able to clarify. The planes were “Ascalon,” a DC3; and “Commando,” a converted Liberator bomber. The books were Ascalon by Jerrard Tickell (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1964); and The Man Who Flew Churchill by Bruce West (Toronto and New York: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1974). 
 

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