| Timeline
and summary |  David
Irving explains:
I SUMMARISE below
the principal contents of a Ministry of
Defence file newly released (June 2002)
into the Public Record Office in London.
It is a file previously maintained by the
Air Historical branch (AHB) of the Air
Ministry, headed by Squadron Leader L A
Jackets (whom I knew well), who was
replaced by Mr Haslam and Mr Heskett. I
was fortunate to be permitted extensive
use of the AHB archives up to certain
levels in the 1960s and 1970s.  In
January 1965 I had met Rolf
Hochhuth, the German leftwing liberal
playwright, at Hamburg and we became
lifelong friends. He provided to me the
tip that I should investigate the airplane
crash of General Wladyslaw
Sikorski, the exiled Polish prime
minister, which killed him at a
politically convenient moment for the
British, at Gibraltar's RAF North Front
airfield, on July 4, 1943. (Photo
right: the B24 Liberator plane lying on
the seabed).
A formal RAF Court of Inquiry
established that the pilot, apparently the
sole survivor (a Czech airman, Edward
Prchal) was not to blame. The second
pilot, Squadron Leader "Kipper"
Herring, was missing; his body, like
several others, was never found. A second
Court of Inquiry, signed off by Marshal of
the Royal Air Force Sir John
Slessor, came to the same conclusion.
Sabotage was ruled out, but no cause for
the crash could be established. (Most of
the documents summarised below are from
the files of Sir John Slessor himself, who
honestly admits in the 1970s that he had
totally forgotten the Sikorski incident,
as his primary role was hunting U-boats at
the time.) In 1967 Hochhuth's play Soldaten
("Soldiers") was staged in Toronto, and in
1968 in London by Kenneth Tynan at
the West End's New Theatre. The plane
crash, and Churchill's involvement, formed
one of the two central themes. Harold
Wilson as prime minister condemned the
play as anti-British. Lord
Chandos's file on the matter (he was a
board member of National Theatre, which
refused to stage the production) in the
Churchill archives is still closed. My book on the crash appeared soon
after. It triggered days of sensation and
speculation in the Conservative
newspapers, and led to a tidal wave of
hostility from what might be called the
Establishment. The book itself, published
by William Kimber Ltd., sold less than a
thousand copies. Leaping on to the
bandwagon with unerring skill, television
presenter David Frost staged three
Frost Programmes on the topic, one in 1967
with Randolph Churchill, son of the
late prime minister, and two more on
consecutive nights in December 1968 with
myself, Tynan and -- as a surprise guest
-- the pilot Prchal, flown in from
California. Perhaps unwilling to upset the
Establishment, Frost (or his producers)
had rejected my request that they invite
Prchal to demonstrate donning a Mae West
lifejacket while we timed him. Everybody
who knew him had testified that he had
never before worn one as it was to bulky
for the B24 cockpit; when he was fished
out of the sea, semi conscious, on the
July 1943 occasion, he was found to be
wearing one, although the plane had been
in the air for less than seventeen
seconds; among the private papers of the
late Governor of Gibraltar I found his own
highly suspicious account
of the events of that night, which
confirmed that the pilot had been strapped
into a properly inflated lifejacket, but
Prchal, questioned under oath, denied to
the Court of Inquiry that he had worn
one. It was a story with many twists. The
widow of the second pilot Herring (she had
remarried and become Mrs Joyce
Robinson) told me that she was sure
that he had phoned her on the day after
the crash -- she vividly recalled it, as
she was in hospital having their first
child -- and she had afterwards found that
he had left his lucky flying suit at home.
An eye witness reported in later months to
me that they had seen somebody ("like a
Michelin man") walking unsteadily along
one wing of the sinking plane. Two men on
board for part of the flight, who
vanished, turned out to have been Secret
Service agents.  An
RAF officer with a very strange career,
Charles William Bowes Massey, was
stated by the King's secretary Sir Alan
Lascelles, in a letter to Lord
Chandos, to have been on the plane. On
February 20, 1968 I rang his doorbell in
South Kensington to interview him but the
building's porter said he had suddenly
vanished for good, "done a bunk," in
September 1967, the time that the Sikorski
controversy began to rage: his daughter,
his favourite daughter, contacted me in
August 1996 to say that she had never seen
him again from that day to this -- but she
had just learned that he had not died, as
she had been told, but had been living
under a new identity in Cheltenham, where
he had died only the previous year, in
June 1996. His executor described to her
how at his humble funeral a staff car
arrived from London flying the pennant of
an Air Chief Marshal of the RAF. There are
not many ACMs, and she tracked the man
down; it was Air Chief Marshal Sir
William Wratten, but he was evasive
and refused to talk with her. Of course an
innocent explanation is possible; not
probable, but possible.
The actual event, the Gibraltar crash,
is still shrouded in mystery. I have an
open mind. But now, thirty years after the
book was published, we catch more
unintended glimpses of how, during the
early 1970s, an uneasy British
Establishment closed ranks in its
determination to smash me -- unable to
fathom how I had survived their first
attempt, the libel action brought by
Captain Jackie Broome over my book
The
Destruction of Convoy PQ.17. They even
spread the story that I was funded from
behind the Iron Curtain (for the record: I
wasn't). On February 19, 1968, before that
action was heard, my publisher William
Kimber told me in private of a
conversation overheard in the Garrick
Club, in which Lord Justice Winn,
the former naval Intelligence officer
Rodger Winn, brother of the famous
homosexual columnist Godfrey Winn,
had bragged loudly that they were going to
smash me somehow. I noted the words in my
diary that same day, that Kimber had told
me, "Winn [had said that he] was
going to ruin me. 'With Irving there can
be no compromising'." After the book Accident was
published, the Churchill family hired
lawyers, and funded an Argentinian actor,
Carlos Thompson, to destroy my
name. Winston Churchill jr. boasted
of the fact in his otherwise excellent
biography of his father Randolph. Thompson
was married to Viennese Jewish film
actress Lili Palmer, who later
apologised to Rolf Hochhuth that her
husband was not of sound mind and was
always in and out of clinics, an imbalance
which he demonstrated in October 1981 by
turning up at my front door in Duke
Street, opening his case to reveal a
revolver and flashing a Mossad badge at
me. He later shot himself (in 1990). This hired gun, Carlos Thompson, duly
published a book that contained a string
of seemingly deliberate libels; it was
called The Assassination of Winston
Churchill. In 1969 my solicitors
Rubinstein, Nash & Co issued a libel
writ against the book's publisher and
author, as the latter had no doubt
intended. To the Churchill family's fury,
the book trade panicked and withdrew it
from sale. After the momentary setback of the
February 1970 defeat in the PQ.17
libel action (I wrote a private
account called "Dismasted,
but not Dismayed"), we went on to
appeal, and every penny was required to
fight that action. I had to shorten the
front-line, and called off the libel suit
against Thompson, so that battle was never
fought. The real war was raging, as is
apparent from the documents now released,
behind the scenes. |
Summary
of the contents of PRO file
AIR2/15113 The first item in the file (i.e., right at the
back) is a photostatic copy of the handwritten
version of the lengthy Court of Inquiry proceedings
and attachments, including the map of the runway at
Gibraltar. The next item is a typed copy of the
same; superficially there appear to be no
variations. 1969 Algernon Llewellyn, a former wing
commander who had commanded the Liberator Flight of
No. 511 Squadron until May 1943, just before the
crash, wrote to accident investigations expert
Squadron Leader Roland Falk on January 8,
1969, that he was the chap who advised Irving to
check with Falk about his theory that loose freight
stowed in the nosewheel area had fouled the control
lines. The same thing had happened to him some
months earlier in the Middle East when he had had
to flight-test a Liberator. 'I've forgotten exactly
which controls were fouled but I was frightened
enough to remember the incident today jolly
clearly. … Irving is highly sensitive on the
subject and has tried to dismiss the possibility
when raised on British TV [handwritten in
margin 21/21 Dec 1968,
Frost] and, I hear, German TV
[handwritten:
Köln 3/1/69],
where it is too technical for mudslinging
programmes. Without trying to put words in your
mouth, I think you might be able to kill stone dead
this whole rotten thing which is causing damage, if
you recorded your opinion, as the then chief test
pilot, Boscombe Down, and expert witness to the
Court, to, say, the Daily telegraph, the Times, or
the Express.' Falk replied writing from his home in the
Channel Isles [Les Huriaux, St Ouen,
Jersey] to Llewellyn on January 21, 1969. He
was interested that Llewellyn had experienced
fouling of the control mechanism in a B24. The
court at Lyneham had investigated jamming of the
controls by the nose wheel mechanism, and decided
it was 'was extremely unlikely and could not be
considered as a possible cause of the accident.'
Falk said this was the only part of the Inquiry
with which he disagreed. 'I have not written to the
newspapers on this subject because I believe that
this is just what Irving and his cronies desire in
order to obtain more publicity for what they are
doing.' There appear to have been high-level
discussions about the controversy at the same
time, as Air Commodore J W Frost of DPS1(RAF)
writes on January 24, 1969 to the private
secretary to the Permanent Under-Secretary at
the ministry, sending him the photostat copy of
the Court of Inquiry (file CS20396), and adding:
'I shall be available on Monday should PUS wish
to discuss the case with me before he attends
Sir Burke Trend's meeting.' Trend was the
much-feared Secretary to Prime Minister
Harold Wilson's Cabinet. Llewellyn typed a letter to Marshal of the Royal
Air Force Sir John Slessor, on January 24,
1969, inviting him to consider writing to The
Times, 'something on general lines of the attached'
to put a brake on the muck flying around.
Explaining why he did not want to send the letter
to the press himself, Llewellyn wrote: 'I have been
cast in the not incorrect role of a leading
debunker of Irving and as such am regarded as a
biased, interested party.' Roland Falk had been in
touch with him. revealing which camp he was part
of, Llewellyn concluded, '[Carlos]
Thompson's book will not be out until end
March/early April [1969].' Slessor did as bidden, and wrote a long letter
to The Times. He wrote a pencil draft beginning, 'I
hesitate to give added publicity to the utterly
fantastic accusations by Messrs Hochuth
[sic] and Irving to the effect that
the crash in which Gen Sikorski died was due to
deliberate sabotage by the British authorities on
the orders of Sir Winston Churchill.' He argued
that an unhappily large number of crashes remain
unexplained. The one thing of which he was
completely certain was that the sabotage idea 'is a
vicious canard.' He offered as his own the possible
explanation which had in fact been put to him by
Llewellyn: the nose of the Liberator contained the
mechanism for retraction of the nose wheel after
take off, and also the freight compartment, and had
fouled the control mechanisms. The letter was not
published, seemingly because of the litigation
pending. On February 10, 1969 Llewellyn wrote to Marshal
of the Royal Air Force Sir John Slessor,
thanking for sending him the response from
Rees-Mogg, editor of The Times, declining to
publish the letter. 'Even so, around 31st January
the Express published a pretty unhelpful letter
from an anonymous AVM -- I assume
Kingston-McChoughley -- which directly says he
thinks the second pilot pulled the flaps up.
[Slessor in red ink in margin:
!The idiot.]
Llewellyn says this is unlikely: the Polish
observer at the Court of Inquiry would have blabbed
about such a stupid mistake; Prchal in evidence
said he actuated the undercarriage lever, so the
second pilot, Herring, would not be
involved; Herring was top quality, and would not
have made such an elementary mistake. Keeping him informed, Llewellyn wrote to Sir
John on February 2, 1969, 'The legal chat at the
moment seems to be that Hochhuth's and Irving's
"masters" will pay anything to settle the different
writs out of court while our judiciary seem to be
solid in doing everything possible for the widest
possible exposure in court. 'Prchal came to see me
on 18th Dec here, immediately after he landed from
California. I had not seen him for 25 years. Up to
1967 he was living a humble happy existence as No.
2 librarian in some small library … in Los
Altos, near San Francisco. His dislike for Irving
and his knowledge about the "revisionists" of
history -- a thriving American industry -- decided
him to fight back. He was much encouraged by the
trouble decent people are backing him over the
whole affair, and now the
whole legal setup which lies behind the Churchill
family dropped everything to help him. 'Some time when you are in London, you
might be interested to hear the very long road
which started from our meeting in the 'In and
Out' [nickname of the RAF Club in
Piccadilly] (1967). It
is a good example of how England does work still
when sufficiently roused -- thank God!
Yours sincerely, Algernon Llewellyn.' [Comment:
Indeed. Bookrights having been sold to Germany,
William Kimber who was Mr Irving's friend but not
infrequently as publisher took strange liberties,
like quietly inserting paragraphs in his authors'
books expressing his own views, decided to do the
same with the German edition, writing to the German
publisher with material which he felt should be
surreptitiously included, namely the Llewellyn
Hypothesis. Without telling Mr Irving, Kimber
approached Slessor for
assistance.] Sir John Slessor drafted a response to Kimber on
May 26, 1969, putting a draft to Kimber for his
letter to the German publisher. 'We do not know
what changes Irving has made in his book for a
German edition, but in our view the highest
importance should be attached to one particular
item,' -- namely the hypothesis of Llewellyn and
Falk about a simple accident caused by the baggage
in the nose wheel compartment. William Kimber replied to Sir John Slessor on
June 24, 1969, that he had now written to the
publishers of the German version of the book, 'in
which I embodied the main points that you kindly
made in your recent letter to me.' 'I have not
mentioned your name, but should David Irving
discover that you are the person with whom I have
discussed the matter, and tries to get in touch
with you [pencil note:
he has not] may I
warn you that anything you might say to him over
the telephone will almost certainly be tape
recorded at his end. You might therefore prefer to
restrict any communication with him, should he
approach you, to the written word.' [Very
true. But the first that Mr Irving knew of the
above was when he read this file in November 2002.
The next item, a letter dated May 7, 1970, 5 pages,
has been retained on Apr 11, 2002, under section
3(4) of the Public Records Act, i.e. it is still
secret] There follows a one page closely typed letter
from Argentine film actor and writer Carlos
Thompson to Slessor, May 17, 1970, from Villa
Sarita-Rose, Campo-Mijas, Fuenjirola,
Málaga:, Spain. A few weeks earlier WH
Smiths had decided to ban distribution of his book
The Assassination of Winston Churchill,
fearing libel action. Hatchards and Harrods
were unconcerned, as Irving was suing only him;
'Less likely is this now, after the delightful
beating he took in the Jack Brooke case, which
amongst other things, I am sure, must have brought
home to him the news that British justice is alive
and well.' Thompson had printed 5,000 copies and
sold half, he claimed, but the gigantic legal
expenses being incurred in defending Mr Irving's
libel action made it essential now to sell the
rest. He wrote an even more rambling, extraordinary
four-page typed letter, long, muddled, and
vainglorious, to Slessor on July 20, 1970: They
had, he said, now had to put the stocks of The
Assassination of Winston Churchill in
store. 'As for dear Irving and Co., the status
quo is one of quietly waiting for him to make
the next move. We have prepared our arsenal for
the 'Discovery of Documents' festivities. It is
he, now, who must play full out the hero and
press on with the case. … I simply cannot
wait to have the blackguard in that witness box,
to tear him to pieces -- even if the kicks
should prove expensive. The lad is still very
young (34) amd has the resilience of those
deprived of the gnawings of a conscience -- it
will take many Jackie Broomes and many
[Carlos] Thompsons to silence him. In
the Broome case, for instance, he's only had to
pay £10,000 himself (and that comes off his
income tax); the rest is paid by his publishers.
As you see, when a man gets himself well
organized, crime does pay, up to a point --
repeat, if he lacks the chemicals that make up
that delicious product called shame. I for one,
who grew up in a world and next to a father who
was literally obsessed with a sense of honour,
quite simply mourn the fact that one is no more
allowed to fights [sic] duels, because
in my earstwhile [sic] country, the
Argentine, in my youth and in the severe days of
my ancestors, that was the only way to redeem
one's honour -- one did not buy it back in
Court, in the shape of damages and
tax-deductible commodities, but with a hot pint
of blood. If I said this to dear Irving, he
would surely laugh himself to death… not a
bad idea, perhaps, for a chap who is no more
than a nuisance joke?' He then fulminates on for a page about
Kenneth Tynan, 'the worst egg of the lot,
you are quite right.' 'Do remember, Sir John, that
he too, as well as Irving, can be had for
£1,000/-, if you remember one of the last
chapters of my book (where I relate how David
Frost told me in details of Ty's and Irv's
efforts to stop the showing of the 2nd programme). Thompson also mentions Carl-Theo Thorne,
an evidently deranged German expatiriate who had
written 'asinine' letters to Mrs Robinson, and to
Graham Herring, son of the missing second
pilot, and the fact that Herring's CO had taken
exception to the 'article publishing by Irving
where he claimed that the son of "Kipper Herring"
was "still looking for him."' Thompson admits however that the book had made a
huge hole on his side, 'And so it is that our boat
is sinking slowly, with all the papers in
order.' [The
file reveals that on May 30, 1970 Thorne had begun
litigation in a disjointed, but decidedly awkward
way, issuing a writ against the publisher of
Hochhuth's play, and serving sub-poenas which he
had drafted himself on a host of personalities
including Slessor, Harold Macmillan, Harold Wilson,
Lord Portal, Sir Ronald Melville, the wartime Air
Ministry Intelligence officer Fred Winterbotham,
and the widow of the second pilot, Mrs Robinson. Mr
Irving had no knowledge of this litigation].
Poor Mrs Robinson was already frantic at the
possibility that her husband "Kipper" Herring might
have survived all these years; she had sent a
handwritten letter to the Ministry of Defence on
March 19, 1971 to ask what she should do about the
Thorne subpoena -- what it was all about. 'I don't even know this Dr Thorne,
although he has written to me before. Kipp is
not [underlined twice]
still alive is he? I just don't know what to
think. I have been in [illegible word]
again, & really all this worry does upset
me. … Prchal would have told me if Kipp had
lived, I am quite sure. I do hear from him
[Prchal] from time to time.' G W Owens of the ministry made on March 25, 1971
a handwritten minute to Mr Heskett on Mrs Robinson
etc., and added: 'As to the [Thorne] case
itself, I do not believe it will ever reach a
courtroom and it seems a very long shot to subpoena
Mrs Robinson. … One of the intriguing features
of the incident of course was the the body of Mrs
Robinson's husband (S/L Herring) was never
found.' Mrs Herring evidently had her doubts, because
the ministry's veterans affairs office were
involved. V A Dawes of OA (RAF) wrote a minute on
April 14, 1971, recalling that the widow had
earlier contact with AR9(RAF) on the question of
her former husband's death, but that aspect was
cleared when they wrote her on Jan 16, 1969
confirming that for official purposes S/Ldr Herring
was presumed to have died on July 4, 1943. They had
sent her one further letter on Slessor's advice on
March 7, 1969 'about the accident.'  Sir
John Slessor apeared to have become obsessed with
Mr Irving and his books. Unaware that he was not
involved in and indeed unaware of the Thorne
action, on May 1, 1971 Slessor wrote to Heskett at
the Air Historical Branch, 'In my view Thorne is a
vicious lunatic and Irving is just what that Lord
of Appeal [Phillimore, LJ] so
rightly described him.
If I had to bet I would say that
neither of these clowns will in fact bring their
cases to court unless (which seems to me not
impossible) they are being paid from the other
side of the Iron Curtain to throw the blackest
possible light on the British in the late war.
Irving's Dresden
book and the PQ17
book lend some substance to that idea.' In the same vein, Slessor wrote to Mr G W Owens
at the ministry on May 6, 1971, 'Personally I feel
some doubt whether in the event either Irving or
Thorne will actually bring their cases to Court.
How the devil can they afford it, particularly
Irving after the pasting he got over the PQ17
convoy book. I have a nasty feeling that they are
both being subsidized from behind the Iron Curtain.
I have not read Irving's book, as did not realise
it had already been published. Would you kindly let
me have the name of the book and publisher.' The next day, May 7, 1971 Slessor wrote again to
Mr Owens: 'I think I told Mr Heskett (AHB) in a
letter a week or so ago that Mrs Joyce Robinson (
Herring) is again being pestered by this chap
Thorne. In the past, when I gathered Irving (that
great historian) was at the back of it, through (I
gather) a man called Gunnarson, I advised Mrs
Robinson to send all his letters to Carlos
Thompson's solicitors, Metson Cross. Then this bird
Thorne bobbed up, in pursuit, I gather, of another
hare, I adviser her to send his letters to the
solicitors, for the defendants in this case,
Rubinstein Nash …" He asked the Treasury
Solicitor to represent her along with the rest. On August 12, 1971 Slessor was allowed to come
to the AHB and look at the Sikorski papers. (He had
previously written in a note that he had forgotten
all about the crash in the intervening years). There are several missives from Thorne to
Slessor on the file, mostly incoherent, including
one hostile note dated December 25, 1971 advising
the air force officer that he cannot duck out of
the service of the sub poena. Fred Winterbotham , the former
Intelligence officer (later author of The Ultra
Secret, 1974) wrote to Slessor on January 1,
1972, that he had unfortunately been properly
served with the sub-poena. He adds,
interestingly, 'Unfortunately I was on the Rock
[i.e. Gibraltar] that [July
1943] night on my way back to London after
finalising arrangements with Ramsay, Tedder and
Alexander concerning supply of certain
intelligence [evidently the
ULTRA codebreaking
Intelligence reports] for the
HUSKY operation.
Incidentally [P J] Grigg the
Minister for War was also there, we were
travelling back to London in [General
Carl F] Spaatz's Liberator…. No
doubt such characters as Irvine[sic],
Hochhuth, Tynan etc will be there
[in court],
and I don't want any mud.' He was evidently nervous about being asked about
the ULTRAS, although it
would have been wholly improper even to mention the
word in correspondence. Thorne's action against publisher Andre Deutsch
was listed as Queens Bench, 1970, T No. 1319.
Thorne claimed damages 'on the ground that they
failed to pay him for certain information which he
gave them about the Sikorski crash.' The subpoenas
were all shortly set aside by the Court, Master
Lubbock, on the application of the Treasury
Solicitor (who traditionally represents serving
officers in lawsuits) on the ground that the issue
of the writ was aggressive and vexatious and an
abuse of the process of the Court. Mrs Robinson was
able to plead ill health and avoided testifying.
The ministry was satisfied that the case would then
inevitably be withdrawn for lack of witnesses, and
it was eventually dismissed with costs. The Case
was heard February 7, 1972. There is one last item on this file indicating
how governments can dispose of awkward problems;
Inspector Chandler of Lincoln Police rang the
ministry to say that he was preparing a
comprehensive report for the Home Office -- in
charge of immigration affairs -- on Dr Carl Theo
Thorne's pestering of Mrs Joyce Robinson. 'Thorne
was originally a German but was now stateless, and
he might be recommended for deportation,' hinted
the ministry's A Davis on June 21, 1972. 
 on
this website:
Speculation in
The Times, Jul 4, 2003 on who was behind the
death of Sikorski | David Irving's
reply-
"Churchill's
War", vol. ii: "Triumph in Adversity":
Appendix on death of General Sikorski, the
contents of a Harold Wilson
file (pdf
format)
-
David
Irving: Radical's Diary, Nov 14, 2002
-
The
PQ17 Libel Action, 1970
-
David
Irving, Accident: The Death of General
Sikorski
-
Private
account dated July 18, 1945 by General Mason
Macfarlane, Governor of Gibraltar, of the night
Sikorski was killed
-
David
Irving protests to the Air Ministry, April 1,
1969
|
write
to David Irving