Falling In Love Again

When I was a child, there was a Sopwith Camel hanging over my bed. It was the most precious thing I owned and I stood on a chair to dust it every Saturday. My dad had given me an Airfix kit to make and paint when I was eight because I was obsessed with military aircraft. He’d been in the RAF at the end of the war but had only ever flown as part of the Berlin airdrop. In fact, that was the only time he ever left the UK.  To this day, I’ve no idea where my childhood obsession with aircraft came from but I used to know the outlines of every helicopter and fighter plane and I would watch the Red Arrows in awe on the black and white TV set. It wasn’t until I was 14 years old that I went to my first air show and I can still feel the vibrations in my bones of a Vulcan making a slow, low fly past. The huge aircraft, the smells, the sounds, I can remember them now. But it was hearing the distinctive chunky sound of a biplane overhead that gave me more of a thrill than any of the modern aircraft.

After the disappointment of realising that I couldn’t become a pilot in the RAF (women weren’t allowed to take up that role in the seventies), I headed off in a very different direction and, along the way, lost that model aircraft and my obsession for planes. Life takes over and childish passions are subsumed by the need to pay the bills and just be a grown up.

But a love for aircraft and military history never goes away. When Luca Lazzara, my writing partner, approached me with his research into the fate of a Swordfish mission, I was smitten all over again. Here was a story of a WW2 mission that was extraordinary and commonplace by turns. Extraordinary because of the skill and courage those men needed, night after night, with so little training, experience or technology. Commonplace because missions like it were repeated every day and night throughout the war without respite or rejoicing. Extraordinary because of the engineering ingenuity and mechanical tenacity that made the Fairey Swordfish a workhorse of the war when it should have been retired. Commonplace because that aircraft was nothing clever or fancy: it was a ‘Stringbag’ in design and practicality. Extraordinary because a contemporary commercial pilot had been inspired by a faded image of a WW2 aircraft, somehow upside down on the shores of Sicily. Commonplace because Luca now flies the route of the Swordfish mission frequently in his role as an airline captain, and he can do this because of the sacrifices of men like those who flew the Swordfish.  Extraordinary because Luca’s freedom to be a commercial pilot rather than a military one and to hold British citizenship as an Italian was secured by men like the Swordfish crews. Commonplace because meeting Luca through a LinkedIn exchange is the way of our world now and the complex communications we take for granted were heralded by experimental radio and radar technologies of the war.

Luca had set himself a personal challenge: to find out what had happened on that mission and to trace the families of the Swordfish crews. His own curiosity as a pilot, his love for the aviation industry, and his passion for finding connections in a disconnected world took him on an unexpected journey over many years and many countries. Using the power of online message boards and FaceBook, and the inimitable network of military families and historians, he was able to track down the ancestors of the crews and to bring them together for a memorial service in Cefalù, Sicily. As an Italian airline captain living as a British citizen, he had been able to reach out across time and place to find the fragments of one night of military history, the night of armistice day 1941.

Luca had also reached out to me, via that LinkedIn message and, in one random act of curiosity, reconnected me with my lost love of biplanes. He shared his research with me in a collection of images, emails, and articles. I immediately felt my heart racing and a familiar yearning to know more about these magical aircraft. This was a story I wanted to tell, to reimagine, to save for others to read as we move inexorably away from the events of that night. Like most of the WW2 veterans, the men of that mission are no longer with us and their Stringbags are long since lost. W5856 is the oldest surviving airworthy Fairey Swordfish and is based at the RNAS Yeovilton, UK. Another Stringbag is housed at the IWM in Duxford, UK, and a third is at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum. WW2 is rapidly becoming history locked into grainy film footage and the few remaining voices of veterans and their families. But the character of that aircraft and the men who flew them resonate down the years.

To be able to spend time getting to know the Swordfish and to imagine myself in the cockpit along with the crew has rekindled my love of aircraft. I spend a lot of my writing time being other people in situations I could never attempt in real life. Sitting in my comfy, warm office, I take to the cold night skies over Malta and Italy, reliving the weather conditions, the vibrations through the fuselage, the confusion and fear at being lost, the ultimate failure of the mission. Luca course corrects for me when my imagination strays and the generous memories of the family members of the crew brings new perspectives to the historical facts. The meticulous custodians of Navy Wings and the IWM provide the technical details I need to do justice to describing the Stringbag and the events of that night. Military history is a joint effort, piecing together the fragments of evidence with the emotions of the events. It is written out of a desire to understand the past, learn from it, and shape a better future. The more we remember, curate, and retell, the less likely we are to repeat the mistakes of our ancestors.

People often ask me why I write military history and why I love planes so much when I rarely fly anywhere and have only ever been a civilian with the military. Honestly, I can’t say. There’s just a deep connection to a childhood passion that never left me and still stirs me to dig deep into the tiniest details of military history.

And when I finished writing this blog, I found myself ordering a little bit of nostalgia and a new challenge…

https://uk.airfix.com/products/fairey-swordfish-mki-a04053b?_br_psugg_q=fairey+swordfish+mk.i

Bev Morris