Layout 8 - Winston Churchill

Small Craft, Short Visits
On at least three occasions, Churchill spent short
periods on destroyers. Six days after the Normandy landings,
he took a one-day outing to view the invasion beaches
aboard HMS Kelvin which, to his delight, fired on German
shore positions while he was aboard. The ship sailed from
and returned to Portsmouth. Ten days later he boarded the
destroyer HMS Enterprise off Arromanches, France to
witness the invasion’s progress. And in August 1944, he was
aboard HMS Kimberley to observe troops going ashore on
the French Riviera.
He briefly traveled on two light cruisers: Early in
1945, traveling as “Colonel Kent” en route to Yalta, he
spent two days aboard HMS Orion in Malta’s French
Creek. He used the admiral’s cabin to sleep and shake a
fever, and to meet with aides. 20 Homeward bound after
Yalta, he rested for a few days aboard the cruiser HMS
Aurora in the Egyptian port of Alexandria.
Churchill made numerous short hops to visit troops
on the Continent on C-47 Dakota twin-engine transports,
usually flown by the RAF. Some 10,000 were manufactured;
this military version of the ubiquitous DC-3 airliner saw
service in every theater. Seating twenty-one in airline
service, but twenty-eight or more in military guise, the C-
47 carried anything and everyone. Americans dubbed it
“Skytrain” for its flexible capacity. The Dakota was the
largest of the twin-engine aircraft which carried WSC.
In addition to the Flamingo for his French flights in
mid-1940, Churchill also flew on Lockheed Lodestars.
Based on the civilian Model 18 airliner, the military
Lodestar first flew in mid-1941 and saw extensive use with
multiple services and countries in most theaters. Supplied to
the RAF under Lend-Lease, Lodestars served as VIP transports
operated by RAF No 173 squadron in North Africa
beginning in mid-1942. 21 And Churchill flew aboard a U.S.
Navy Lodestar from Norfolk to Washington on one of his
American trips.
Churchill’s exhaustive wartime travel and vast array of
conveyances demonstrate his determination to overcome
time and distance, even in the face of discomfort and potential
danger. The logistics in arranging these trips were
complex; many were pioneering flights over huge distances.
But he was a great believer in personal diplomacy, and his
methods helped him cement the personal relationships he
saw as so valuable to international relations. ,
Endnotes
1. For the chronology, see Lavery, Pawle and (though less detailed)
Celia Sandys, Chasing Churchill: Travels with Winston Churchill (London:
HarperCollins, New York: Carroll & Graf, 2003). As for the substance of
these trips, there are shelves of books, including Churchill’s own sixvolume
war memoirs.
2. The best and most complete account of most (though not all)
of these journeys is in Brian Lavery, Churchill Goes to War: Winston’s
Wartime Journeys (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2007). Lavery’s maps,
diagrams and photos are especially helpful.
3. The first detailed account of the arrangements that lay behind
these many trips is in Gerald Pawle, The War and Colonel Warden
(London: Harrap, 1963) whose title is one of Churchill’s travel code
names. Pawle’s book is based on the recollections of Royal Navy
Commander “Tommy” Thompson, who closely planned many foreign
trips and was present for most.
4. For a summary, see Christopher Sterling, “Churchill Afloat:
Liners and the Man,” Finest Hour 121 (Winter 2003-4),16-22.
5. Christopher Sterling, “Churchill and Air Travel: Ahead of His
Time,” Finest Hour 118 (Spring 2003), 24-29.
6. Email communication, Robert Duck to Richard Langworth, 9
December 2007.
7. Three of the craft, huge for their time, had been purchased for a
million dollars each from Pan American Airways, which retained nine
others for its Pacific and Atlantic routes. The purchase was made about
the time Churchill was making his aerial round-trips to France.
8. Vanderkloot’s adventures flying Churchill (he died in 2000 at
age 85) are related in the accompanying article by his son, and in Bruce
West, The Man Who Flew Churchill (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson,
1975). Unfortunately, the book is filled with fictional “conversations”
and suppositions of what people were thinking, and it lacks an index. See
also Verna Gates, “Churchill Was His Copilot,” Today’s Officer (October
2004), available at http:// www.moaa.org/todaysofficer. Vanderkloot’s son
recently addressed our Georgia affiliate.
9. Commando was not always black. One of the few photos of the
complete aircraft shows her in natural metallic finish, but not the olive
drab then so common. See Peter Masefield and Bill Gunston, Flight Path
(Shrewsbury, England: Airlife, 2002), 131. Masefield claims Churchill
flew this trip on a different though similar transport, the Marco Polo, but
no other source—including Churchill’s own memoirs—agrees.
10. T. M. Gibson and M. H. Harrison, Into Thin Air: A History of
Aviation Medicine in the RAF (London: Robert Hale, 1984), 80.
11. Jerrard Tickell, Ascalon: The Story of Sir Winston Churchill’s
War-Time Flights 1943 to 1945 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1954),
79. The subtitle is anachronistic, since Churchill was knighted in 1953,
not during World War II. The book is now difficult to find.
12. Donald Hannah, The Avro York (Leatherhead, England: Profile
Publication No. 168, no date), 4. Lavery is mistaken when he says this
airplane was lost over the Atlantic in 1945 (371). In reality she served for
a decade after flying Churchill. The lost aircraft was Commando.
13. Arthur Pearcy, “Douglas DC-4,” Chapter 8 of Douglas
Propliners DC-1 to DC-7 (Shrewsbury, England: Airlife, 1995), 105-16.
Douglas began designing a larger follow-on airliner to its world-beating
DC-3 in the late 1930s. First flown in 1938, the DC-4E (for experimental)
was deemed too large by airline managers of the time, and the
prototype was sold to Japan. Reworked to a trimmer size, the new aircraft
first flew in early 1942. Army and Navy demand for a larger transport
meant that none would enter their intended airline service until after the
war. Instead, designating them C-54 “for the duration,” Douglas began
turning out bare bones four-engine transport aircraft.
14. Several sources quote this line. See, for example, Lavery, 301
(and the previous page, which includes a diagram of the special
Skymaster’s layout).
15. Pearcy, 108.
16. This journey was Churchill’s first trip aboard a ship he would
sail on often in later years. He published an article about the Queen Mary
at the time of her maiden voyage, in The Strand Magazine, May 1936. A
reprint is in Finest Hour 121 (Winter 2003-04), 23-28.
17. John Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries
1939-1955 (New York: Norton, 1985), 424.
18. A good contemporary account of the trip is in H. V. Morton,
Atlantic Meeting (London: Methuen, 1943).
19. Tickell, 69-70.
20. Douglas Austin, Churchill and Malta: A Special Relationship
(Stroud, England: Spellmount, 2006), 161.
21. David J. March, ed., British Warplanes of World War II
(London: Amber Books, 1998), 171.
FINEST HOUR 148 / 15