May 2, 2013

FINEST HOUR 148, AUTUMN 2010

BY WILLIAM VAN DER KLOOT

Mr. VanDerKloot ([email protected]), the son of Churchill’s wartime pilot, is the Peabody Award-winning producer of documentaries and children’s programming. He is based in Atlanta, where he spoke on this subject to the Churchill Society of Georgia. 

ABSTRACT
They flew the most important person in Britain across enemy-patrolled seas and continents, but when they realized they had become celebrities, they separated for the good of the cause. 

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My father met Winston Churchill in London in 1942. They were last together in New York in 1946. Quite a bit happened in between.

I first began to understand the stature of Winston Churchill in 1963, when I was in a sixth grade history class. Our assignment was to bring in something—an article, artifact or photograph—that tied our family or community to World War II.

All I knew was that my father was a pilot during the war—but like many of his generation, he spoke very little about his experiences. My idea was to bring in his leather flight jacket or his logbook. My father was out of town, but my mother had a better idea. She handed me an inscribed photograph that had been presented to my father, and suggested I bring that to class instead.

The next day, our classroom was full of wartime artifacts. One student had a Japanese flag, another his dad’s helmet, and someone even brought a bayonet. Our teacher walked around the class and looked at each student’s item. When she came to me, she picked up the photograph and held it for a moment. Then she asked,

“Was your father in the British army?”
“No, he is an American, a civilian.”

She studied the photograph—a portrait of a rather portly man in a three-piece suit with an inscription that read: “To Captain Vanderkloot with fond memories of Commando. —Winston S. Churchill.”*

Riveting the class’s attention, our teacher began to describe the man in the photograph. He was one of the great leaders of the war, she said—one of the towering figures of the 20th century. At that moment I knew I needed to learn more about how my father and this great man had come together.

THE TRANSATLANTIC FERRY

It’s essential first to know the story of a secret band of aviators called the Royal Air Force Ferry Command: pilots with the critical and dangerous task to bring planes, and later passengers, across the North Atlantic: an ocean so cold that survival in the water is measured in minutes. Even ships with experienced crews have a treacherous time in winter. A crossing by air, at the time of World War II, was deemed almost impossible.

The first successful aerial crossing of the North Atlantic was made in 1919 by a pair of Englishmen, John Alcock and Arthur Brown. In response to a prize offered by the Daily Mail, they took off from Newfoundland, and twenty-three hours later crash-landed in a peat bog in Ireland. At a ceremony in London, Alcock and Brown were awarded their prize cheque by a sometime pilot, Secretary of State for War and Air Winston S. Churchill.

Over the next twenty years under 100 attempts were made to fly the North Atlantic, fewer than half of which were successful. The needs of war created an aviation revolution, and by 1945 transatlantic flights were commonplace, but the transformation wasn’t easily achieved.

The tenth of May 1940, when Winston Churchill became Prime Minister, was one of the worst days of the Second World War. The Germans, supreme in Poland, Norway and Denmark, had now invaded Holland, Belgium and Luxemburg, and were making for France. The Luftwaffe was in daily action and the RAF was desperately short of aircraft. Britain needed planes, especially bombers, a major source of which was the USA.

But America was neutral. U.S. neutrality laws forbade military aircraft from flying to Canada, which like Britain was a belligerent. So some U.S. planes were flown to an airfield in North Dakota and pulled by horses legally across the border. They were then flown to Canadian ports, disassembled and placed on ships bound for Britain. If the convoys made it, they were reassembled and delivered to the RAF. The process took months, and many planes were lost to the attacks of German U-boats.

Churchill’s appointee Lord Beaverbrook, Minister of Aircraft Production, was told to get needed aircraft by any means necessary. A Canadian press baron disdainful of bureaucracy, Beaverbrook was determined to succeed on his own terms, famously remarking: “They’re planes, aren’t they? Let’s just fly them over!” But RAF commanders told him that flying the dangerous Atlantic was foolhardy, and refused to offer pilots, even for a test mission.

Beaverbrook needed a miracle, and he found it in a gallant Australian, Donald C.T. Bennett, a man born for this dangerous adventure. A record-setting transatlantic flier and expert navigator, Bennett convened a group of American aviation experts and Canadian business leaders to form a secret operation that became Ferry Command.

In November 1940, the group flew seven Lockheed Hudsons to Gander, Newfoundland, their departure point for flying the Atlantic. They arrived in the middle of a snowstorm, and crews had to camp in converted rail cars, the only structures available, to wait out the weather. On the afternoon of November 10th the weather broke. After chipping ice off their planes by hand, the crews prepared for departure. A small military band showed up. As the engines started, they played, “There’ll Always Be an England.” Some observers may have thought it a funeral dirge.

Flying the Atlantic in winter was so dangerous, RAF commanders said, they would consider the operation a success if only half the planes made it. To the pleasant surprise of everyone, they all survived. Bennett and his team had proven that the North Atlantic could be flown even in winter. Beaverbrook was vindicated, the RAF had their bombers, and Ferry Command was born.

Now the task was to find experienced, long-distance aircrews to continue this dangerous mission. The lure was the romance of flying, combined with the sense of patriotic duty. But in the neutral United States, all the recruiting was done in secret.

Bennett and Beaverbrook enlisted the help of the Canadian Pacific Railroad to act as a cover and an organizational parent, which delivered the American-built planes to Montreal. From here they were flown to Gander, and then across the ocean. The transatlantic leg was done at night, since celestial navigation was the only method of holding a course. Naturally, if clouds covered the stars they would have to proceed by dead reckoning, for there were no radio beams and no radar.

The planes had unpressurized cabins, no sound insulation, and no heat. Aircrews said that if it was 50 below outside, it was 50 below inside. Many men suffered from frostbite. When the planes were delivered, their chilled crews were sent back to Montreal by ship, a two-week trip that guaranteed seasickness and risked attack by U-boats. Later crews returned by air in the cold of converted bomb bays. Either way, it was not amusing work.

Despite the challenges, Ferry Command delivered thousands of badly needed bombers on a regular basis: Lockheed Hudsons, B17 Flying Fortresses, B-24 Liberators, B-25 Mitchells and B-26 Marauders, as well as Canadianbuilt Lancasters and Mosquitoes. Then Ferry Command began to ferry VIPs on certain flights.

VANDERKLOOT AND CHURCHILL

As one of the senior Ferry Command pilots at 24, my father began to fly VIP missions across the Atlantic to Britain and Africa. In less than two years at Ferry Command he accumulated over one million miles.

In July 1942, having landed a new long-range Liberator in London with an important passenger, he was told to report to Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, head of the RAF. Portal asked the young captain a hypothetical question: If he were to fly to Cairo, what route would he take?

My father might have been surprised at the question. At the time, the Germans controlled North Africa and were advancing on Cairo itself. Nevertheless, he told Portal, “I’d take off just before dark, I’d go straight down the Mediterranean for a few minutes just to clear Tangiers, and I’d turn and go southeast, over the Atlas mountains; go south of the battle line, follow it straight through to the Nile River, turn north at the Nile and go into Cairo.”

Portal told him: “Stay close to the phone.” 

The phone rang two days later at 8pm. Captain Vanderkloot was told that an RAF car would pick him up downstairs and to please come alone. Driving through the blacked out streets of London, they arrived at a dimly lit street. The driver told him to exit the car and walk to the middle of the block, where a light was shining over a doorway.

He walked to the light. It was Downing Street. The door was numbered “10.” A butler opened the door and led him to the private office, where he was greeted by the British Prime Minister. Dressed in a bathrobe, Churchill wasted no time on preliminaries: “Well, Captain Vanderkloot, I understand we’re going to Cairo.”

Trying to take this all in, my father replied, “Yes sir, I suppose we are.”

They would fly in a Liberator named Commando (see foregoing article by Chris Sterling)—an unarmed B-24 painted flat black. It had few creature comforts and no passenger windows. A bed was constructed for the Prime Minister under the large fuel tanks near the wing. The rest of his party had to sit in seats in the converted bomb bay.

My father was told that he could choose the night he wanted to leave, but was warned to tell no one. Portal said, “I am not to be told of the exact route of your flight, nor is anyone else. We know your departure points and your destinations. Details of anything that lies in between must remain secret, even to me. You are on your own. Good luck.”

On a rainy night a few days later, a line of official cars arrived at RAF Lyneham. Waiting for their special passenger was a five-man crew, all Ferry Command veterans. Two were Americans: Captain Vanderkloot and co-pilot Jack Ruggles; three were Canadians: radio operator Russ Holmes, flight engineers Ron Williams and John Affleck. The oldest man among them was 26.

The Prime Minister clambered up the metal ladder into the black converted bomber along with a dozen officials. Just after midnight, Commando took off toward a destination known but to a very few.

Reaching the safety of Gibraltar at dawn, they refueled and waited for nightfall to make their way toward Cairo. The Germans had information that an important flight was heading to Egypt that night. The unarmed bomber would be an easy target, if they could find her. But Commando slipped unseen through the night sky and approached the Nile at dawn.

“It was my practice on these journeys to sit in the copilot’s seat before sunrise,” Churchill wrote later, “and when I reached it on this morning of August 4, there in the pale, glimmering dawn, the endless winding silver ribbon of the Nile stretched joyously before us. Often had I seen the day break on the Nile. In war and peace I had traversed by land or water almost its whole length, except the ‘Dongola Loop,’ from Lake Victoria to the sea. Never had the glint of daylight on its waters been so welcome.”

Winston Churchill surprised many when he arrived personally to review operations and deliver his own brand of encouragement. This included sacking General Claude Auchinleck, which he personally regretted, and ultimately installing General Sir Bernard Montgomery as head of the British Eighth Army.

A few days later Commando took off again, en route to Moscow with an additional passenger, Roosevelt’s envoy to Stalin, Averell Harriman. Churchill, as he wrote, was bearing unwelcome news: “General Wavell, who had literary inclinations, summed it all up in a poem. There were several verses, and the last line of each was, ‘No Second Front in nineteen forty-two.’ It was like carrying a large lump of ice to the North Pole.”

Their route took them first to Teheran, to refuel and pick up two Soviet military guides, who would help them through Russian air space, which was on constant high alert. As Churchill stepped from Commando onto Soviet soil, the event was recorded in worldwide newsreels. Seventy years later it is hard to imagine how dumbfounded the world was at a 68-year-old Prime Minister flying more than 6000 miles through enemy-infested airspace, all in secret.

PARTING COMPANY

As Christopher Sterling has related, Commando’s crew flew Churchill and other VIPs to a number of wartime conferences and meetings. But once they had become minor celebrities for their exploits, they asked to be reassigned, because they feared they would attract unwanted attention to their secret flights.

The crew split up, but continued to fly for Ferry Command throughout the War. My father was awarded a CBE for flying Churchill and for setting up air routes across the Atlantic and the Pacific.

Churchill never forgot Bill Vanderkloot’s contributions. In 1946 when he visited the United States for his famous speech at Fulton, Missouri, and speaking engagements in Virginia and New York, he invited my parents to join him and Mrs. Churchill for dinner in their suite at the Waldorf Astoria. Before parting, Churchill gave my father the personally inscribed photo which I later took to my sixth grade history class.

The complete story is told in a documentary film I produced and directed, “Flying in the Secret Sky: The Story of the RAF Ferry Command,” which has been broadcast on PBS and distributed by PBS and the National Geographic Channels and is available on DVD through amazon.com.
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* My father used the Americanized spelling of the name in one word. Alas, the photograph disappeared in a burglary; autograph dealers should be on the lookout for it. 

 

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