WITH the Second World War not even two months old, on November 1, 1939, King George VI visited one of the few operational airfields in the country to hand out medals to airmen who had already displayed astonishing bravery.
Accompanying the king were his wife, Queen Elizabeth, and their two daughters, Princess Elizabeth, 13, and nine-year-old Princess Margaret – this, we believe, is the very first time that Princess Elizabeth, later the queen, took part in an official visit to our neck of the woods.
The king arriving at RAF Thornaby on November 1, 1939. Below: The queen being helped out of the Hudson with Princess Elizabeth behind her. All pictures courtesy of Geoff Hill
The princesses on the left, and the queen and king in the middle as they arrive at a rather muddy looking RAF Thornaby
The party was visiting RAF Thornaby, which had been built on farmland in 1929 as the home for the newly formed 608 County of York (North Riding) Squadron. When the war broke out on September 3, 1939, it was one of only 10 airbases in the country with paved runways, so it played a crucial early role in keeping the enemy at bay.
And that’s what the king, and his family, came to see.
“In a huge, camouflaged hangar, four RAF officers and one NCO were personally recognised by the king in recognition of gallantry,” said The Northern Echo the following day. “It was a strange, somehow unreal yet impressive ceremony. One would expect it to be so, for it must be hundreds of years since a British king personally conferred honours to men on active service in this country.”
The king presents a medal at RAF Thornaby with the princesses and the queen behind him
He gave the Distinguished Flying Cross to Flying Officers Thurston Smith and John Barrett, who had been on reconnaissance work over the Atlantic in a flying boat on September 18, 1939, when they picked up distress signals from a merchant navy vessel, Kensington Court. It had been torpedoed by a U-boat off the southern coast of Ireland. They landed their plane on the water and used collapsible rubber dinghies to rescue the 34-strong crew.
Flying Officers Kenneth Doran and Andrew McPherson also received the DFC from the king for their work in early raids on the German fleet in the North Sea, but the big story for the Echo was the award of a Distinguished Flying Medal to Sgt Pilot William Willits.
The five airmen wearing the medals presented to them by George VI at RAF Thornaby on November 1, 1939. From the left: Flying Officers Andrew McPherson, John Barrett, Kenneth Doran and Thurston Smith. As officers, they are all wearing their Distinguished Flying Crosses but, on the right, the non-commissioned Sgt William Willits is wearing his round Distinguished Flying Medal
“This 25-year-old Middlesbrough man, I understand, has not yet told his parents or his fiancée of the incident,” said the Echo’s reporter.
Willits had joined the RAF four years earlier as an accountant, but “he longed for more action” and so received his wings in January 1939.
On September 19, he was the second pilot in an Avro Anson plane doing reconnaissance work from Thornaby over the North Sea when they spotted a German Dornier 18 flying boat.
“The British plane, taking advantage of its superior altitude, went into a dive behind the Dornier, but the German pilot managed to get in first, fired a few rounds and two bullets hit the British plane,” said the Echo. “One killed the pilot instantaneously, the other penetrated the fuselage.
“Willits did not realise what had happened until he felt it was time the pilot pulled out of the dive. Looking round he saw the pilot was dead and had collapsed over the control column.
“Willits at once dragged the dead pilot away, clutched the joy-stick and pulled the plane out of the dive.”
The Echo’s report perhaps underplays the drama of the incident. The pilot, a big man, had been shot through head, and his heavy body took some shifting. It took Willits “some considerable time” to wrestle him clear of the joy-stick so that he could pull the plane out of its dive with only a couple of hundred feet to spare. Then, single-handedly, he had to move the body from its seat so he could assume full control of the plane.
“By this time, the German plane had disappeared, and Willits devoted all his ability to getting the plane back on an even keel and piloting it to his home base, a distance of 140 miles,” said the Echo. “But for his prompt action, the whole of the plane’s crew would probably have lost their lives.”
The king then met pilots who had taken part in the first raids on Germany.
The king inspects six pilots in front of a Hudson aircraft at RAF Thornaby on November 1, 1939. From the left: Waters Rankin and Gradon Gilbert, both Australian; William Coulson, a former pilot with Trans-Canada Airways until the war broke out and, aged 37, he was posted to RAF Thornaby; Geoffrey Bartlett, a British flier; Derek Hodgkinson, a British airman, who was shot down in June 1942 and spent the rest of the war in Stalag Luft III; and Chris Holdway, another British airmen. All of them survived the war
“Heroes who wrote the newest epic of the skies when they flew blind for six hours over Germany with ice-laden wings in a temperature of 30 below zero were lined up in a hangar,” said the Echo. “In quiet, conversational tones these men told of the perils they had experienced – how their limbs became numbed and they had to fight against losing consciousness.”
With the war less than 60 days old, there is an air of novelty to the Echo’s report as these new air aces told the king of their daring escapades.
“The pilot of one plane tried to keep going on one engine, but as the machine was rapidly losing height he decided to abandon it. When it had descended to 2,500ft he ordered the other four members of the crew to jump. He saw three leave and their parachutes open, but he could not receive any reply from the rear gunner.
“He concluded that the gunner had jumped, so he put the machine into a gentle glide and left by a parachute.
“The plane crashed into the side of a hill and burst into flames. The gunner was still inside, trapped in the cockpit by loose wire entangled around his neck.
“With the machine blazing fiercely, this man fought his way out.”
Sadly, as the war wore on, such stories became commonplace, and the rate of death among the aircrew became horrific. During the war, 51 per cent of aircrew were killed on operations, 12 per cent were killed during accidents and 13 per cent became prisoners of war. Only 24 per cent of aircrew made it through the war unscathed.
Having listened to the pilots, the king then went up onto the North York Moors to visit Danby radar station. This was a prescient visit because three months later, at 9.05am on February 3, 1940, the Danby radar operator spotted German planes approaching the North East coast. His message scrambled fighters from RAF Acklington near York and one of them piloted by Flt-Lt Peter Townsend hit a Heinkel bomber which, at 9.50pm, crashed into Bannial Flat Farm, near Whitby – the first German plane to be brought down on British soil in the war.
Queen Elizabeth inspects the clothing at RAF Thornaby which kept the airmen alive at minus 30 degrees
The newspaper reports of the 1939 visit don’t mention whether the queen and the princesses went with the king to Danby. In fact, they don’t feature at all – the only reason we know they were definitely there is because they are on pictures from the day which are in the collection of aviation historian Geoff Hill.
As we told last week, the king, the queen and Princess Elizabeth returned to the region in 1944 to visit the airbases. By the time of visit, Elizabeth had turned 18 and, as the heir to the throne, she was very much in the spotlight, but this 1939 event appears to have been her very first official occasion in our region.
Princesses Margaret and Elizabeth are on the left of the royal party at RAF Thornaby
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