One of the Few: A Story of Personal Challenge Through the Battle of Britain and Beyond

This book is rededicated to my children

Claudia and Raoul

in the hopes that it may in turn help them

to know and understand a grandfather

whom they, regrettably, could never meet.

He would have loved you both deeply.

Alexandra Kent

Acknowledgements

I am deeply indebted to countless people for the encouragement and help they have given me in my efforts in recent years to better understand my father’s life. I would like to express warm thanks to Richard King, author of 303 ‘Polish’ Squadron Battle of Britain Diary, who was one of the first to set me off on a great journey of discovery. I received invaluable help and kindness from the staff of the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London, in particular Krzysztof Barbarski and Wojtek Deluga, and from the curator of the RAF Museum at Hendon, Peter Devitt. Others who have tirelessly given me their time, assistance and stories along the way include Richard Kornicki, Chairman of the Polish Air Force Memorial Committee, and his wife Lepel; veteran fighter pilot Franciszek Kornicki and his wife Patience; veteran fighter pilot and author of First Light Geoffrey Wellum; Edward McManus of the Battle of Britain Historical Society; historians Peter Sikora and Andy Saunders; Witold Urbanowicz junior; Philip Feric-Methuen; the children of 303 Squadron Leader Ronald Kellett; and Danuta and Artur Bildziuk, Chairman of the Polish Airmen’s Association UK. Sincere thanks also to Rodney and Vicky Byles for – everything.

I am also grateful to Mark Cazalet for the introduction to Tim, and to Tim Cazalet and Liz Razzell for their hospitality. An especially heartfelt thank-you to Tim for encouraging me to write and for the extraordinary generosity of giving me your mother, Janet’s, photograph album and books. I am also obliged to Tim for putting me in touch with his aunt, Patsy Rawlins, and cousin Rob Rawlins, who received me and all my questions with such interest. Thanks are also due to Tomasz Magierski for all the work on the film 303 and for giving me the privilege of participating in such a fine production. I have met too many others on the course of this journey to include all their names but suffice it to say that I have been greeted with unfailing encouragement at the RAF Club in London, the Shoreham Aircraft Museum, RAF Biggin Hill, RAF Northolt and in Warsaw by those involved in organising the reunion of the Polish Air Force in 2012.

I wish too to express gratitude to my anthropology colleagues and mentors at Gothenburg University for many years of guidance. The insights into humanity that I gained under their tutelage have been invaluable in researching my own family. Warm thanks also to Kate Antonsson for her encouragement while I was writing the epilogue.

I would also like to take this opportunity to acknowledge all veterans and their families for everything that they have endured as a consequence of war.

Profound thanks also to my partner Jonas Persmark and my dear friend Harry Wright for their unstinting support, and to my brother Stuart, my sister Joanna and my sister-in-law Linda for sharing with me their memories of a man who lives on in our hearts.

Finally, I wish to thank my parents.

Alexandra Kent

Contents

Title

Dedication

Acknowledgements

The Man Behind the Memoirs, by Alexandra Kent

One of the Few, by Johnny Kent

About the Author

Foreword

  1    Early Experiences

  2    Flying Training

  3    Farnborough

  4    Test Pilot

  5    Battle of Britain

  6    Squadron Commander

  7    Wing Leader

  8    Lecture Tour

  9    The Middle East

10    Britain and Germany

11    Chief Test Pilot

12    Exchange Officer

13    Final Fling

The Human Costs of Heroism, by Alexandra Kent

Plates

Copyright

The Man Behind the Memoirs

by Alexandra Kent

Sunday Times, 19 January 1941, ‘Not a Poet’:

A young man of twenty-five stood beside two or three Polish airmen last week and received a decoration for gallantry from the Polish Foreign Minister. He was slim, with fine features and delicate hands. His face had little colour, and only a curious hardness about the mouth denied the idea that he might have been a poet or an artist.

A year before the war he came from Winnipeg and took a permanent commission in the R.A.F. When the balloon barrage was being prepared it became necessary to test the exact effect that contact with the cables would have on aeroplanes. The young Canadian volunteered and crashed the cables eighteen times. For that he was awarded the Air Force Cross. Later in the war he was given command of the Polish Squadron formed here after that country’s collapse. ‘They were so brave,’ he said, ‘that you didn’t dare to show a sign of fear even if your heart was in your mouth’. Under his leadership the ‘bag’ of the Polish Squadron reached amazing proportions. He was decorated with the D.F.C.

Now he has been given another command, but Poland has added her honours to ours. His name is Squadron-Leader Kent, and from his appearance he might have been a poet – but I would hate to be the German looking at those eyes and mouth behind a gun.¹

Many of those I have met who have read my father’s memoirs, One of the Few, have asked me the same question: ‘What was he really like?’ This was not easy for me to answer because my memories of him are from childhood and the man I knew had retired from the RAF before I was born. When his memoirs were published, I was 13 years old. I read them and found the voice that spoke from the pages quite different from the familiar voice of the father I knew. But, as Shakespeare so famously wrote, one man in his time plays many parts. In this introductory chapter and the epilogue that follows at the end of his memoirs, I shall bring together some of the different parts he played and place the story he told of his life into a broader context. In this way, I hope to give a fuller picture of what he was like.

One of the Few was very much of its time, and the Boy’s Own genre in which it was written was what its audience would have expected. I imagine that if fighter pilots like my father, who were virtually idolised as modern-day knights, had exposed self-doubt or frailty in their stories they might not have been well received. However, as the veterans’ stories become history, I believe it is worth re-examining the old stereotypes of gallant heroes in order to understand these men with a fuller sense of humanity.

Beyond my father’s memoirs, I find a complex character whose life was marked by powerful contradictions. There are many things about him that betray, if not a poet, then a person of aesthetic sensibility who valued solitude and peace. He may have been born to fly, and he certainly sought to excel, but there is nothing to suggest aggressiveness. However, coming of age in such brutal times meant his passion for flying and pursuit of excellence were channelled into the cruel business of killing. However noble the cause, slaying another human being, particularly in one-to-one duels, must impact the soul in ways that defy expression. Even before the war, my father demonstrated an impressive ability to keep his nerve in his test-flying exploits. But this does not mean he was fearless. As a leader who was responsible for his comrades in battle – some of whom proved to be more fearless than he – he must have been under inconceivable pressure to maintain morale by masking his feelings, perhaps even from himself.

There was also the contrast between the strict, almost ascetic discipline of service life and the raucous evenings at pubs and nightclubs, where alcohol played an important role in both sharing and deadening heightened sensitivities.

He writes, too, of the sacrifice his parents made for him and yet, perhaps driven to excel in the RAF as a way of thanking them, he deprived them of the presence of their only child. He left home at the tender age of 20 to embark on a hazardous career on the other side of the world, returning home only twice before his mother died in 1944.

There is also the ambiguity of his role in the RAF; his British heritage and Canadian upbringing meant he was part insider, adept at reproducing British and RAF attitudes and manners, but also part outsider, a condition that was influential in his relationship to the Polish airmen he came to lead. The challenge of gaining acceptance in English society is a point I return to in the epilogue.

Further, beyond the masculinised military world of the fighter pilots’ memoirs was a domestic reality in which women featured prominently and where romance blossomed. During the Battle of Britain, my father was moving constantly and rapidly between the sometimes conflicting demands of these two realms and ultimately he had to decide which to prioritise.

Finally, many of those who lived through the war must have found it disorienting when the wartime ethos gave way to the new liberal generation of the 1960s. While many pilots returned to civilian life immediately after the war, my father came of age in the RAF and remained in service for another decade after the war. When he retired, he had no experience of civilian life and the coping strategies and values that he had become habituated to in service were largely obsolete or, indeed, maladaptive later on – another theme I explore in the epilogue.

I was deeply attached to my father when I was a young child but my parents divorced when I was 11. I then lived with my mother, but she died not long after the divorce and my father was by then unable to care for me. Our contact during the final fifteen years of his life was sporadic and limited. He died when I was in my twenties. I then moved overseas and spent the next twenty-five years building my own career and raising a family. With my siblings living in other parts of the world and with no root left in England, there was little opportunity to revisit our shared past. However, in 2010, my sister sent me a copy of Richard King’s then newly published book 303 ‘Polish’ Squadron Battle of Britain Diary. In it I found quotations from a personal diary my father had kept during the Battle of Britain, whose existence I had until then known nothing about. This inspired me to try to find out more about what he was really like.

What follows is a compilation of my memories and insights I’ve gained during this recent quest to get to know him more fully.

MELLOW MEMORIES

My brother and sister, born almost a decade before me, had spent their early years being fathered by a man who was still caught up in the disciplinarian culture of military service and each experienced him in their own way. Our father retired from the RAF in 1956 and I was born two years later. By then, much of his youthful vigour had already been spent and he was mellowing into middle age. My early memories are of a soft-spoken, indulgent father figure who would buy me Walnut Whips on his way home from London.

All of us in the family went by nicknames. Soon after birth, I became known as Cinderella, later shortened to ‘Cindy’. By now, my father’s gracile, even delicate, but angular frame had gained some elasticity and he developed a paunch. We called him ‘Dumpy’ and this is the name he used in his handwritten inscription to me in my copy of One of the Few:

‘Cindy’

My Beloved and Adorable daughter – please accept

This little present to help

You, in years to Come, to

Remember what I was like.

I want you to know that I

Love You Beyond Description.

I Always have and Shall

Continue to do so Until I Cease

To Exist.

May Every Good Wish Be Yours for Ever,

Your

‘Dumpy’.

As the youngest, I had unique access to him. Looking back I can see that we valued one another’s qualities – like him, I loved to write and draw, and by the age of 8 I wanted to become an astronaut. I would spend hours by his side in his office paring away at scrap pieces of balsa wood that were left over from those he was painstakingly working into model aircraft. He would scrape, sand, paint and varnish his Spitfires to immaculate finishes while I produced chunky little spacecraft that I painted with black and silver lacquer. He seemed endlessly patient. One afternoon, when he was sitting in an armchair reading the Daily Telegraph, I asked him how a piston engine worked. He folded his newspaper and put it on the floor, then told me to go and get a pencil and paper. I did as I was told, then crawled up on to his knee and watched with fascination as he sketched a diagram and led me through the combustion process. We spent hours playing cards together in the sitting room while my mother busied herself in the kitchen. Every time I won, which was not infrequently, he would chortle and call me ‘cheatapator champeen’.

What I knew of his youth came from the wild and, quite possibly, embellished stories he told of how it could be so cold in the winter in Manitoba that the smoke would come out of the chimney and instantly freeze and cascade down the side of the house. There were swashbuckling tales of shooting rattlesnakes from horseback. A rattlesnake, he would say as my eyes widened, can move faster than a horse at full gallop. My childish imagination conjured images of him as a fearless cowboy charging across the plains on his steed. He seemed larger than life, the accuracy of his stories being of less significance than the daredevilry they summoned.

Our Hampshire garden had a row of sweet chestnut trees at the front and, in the autumn, he would be out there in a pair of old jeans, a cotton shirt and a V-necked knitted pullover raking golden leaves into heaps. While he raked, I would charge around pretending to be on horseback on the Prairies, occasionally halting to collect the prickly chestnuts that we’d later prise open with a knife so he could roast them in the fireplace. Once the coals were glowing, he’d hold a brown paper bag upside down inside the chimney and let the hot air shoot it upwards while I raced out of the French windows into the garden to catch it.

I had little insight into his life at this time but I knew he went off to London by train to work and my mother would often take me with her in the car to Hook station to meet him when he returned from Waterloo in the late afternoon. I would careen along the platform in my green corduroy Beatles hat and leap into his arms when he got off the train.

Then, when I was barely through primary school, he was suddenly gone from my life. Just a year after he and my mother separated One of the Few was published and I received a copy. I read it, eagerly awaiting the bit when he would write about me, and was disappointed to find that it was almost entirely about a military and masculine adult world of which I had little understanding and, although my brother and sister got a mention, I didn’t feature at all. We kept in touch and I saw him a few more times and then, when I was 27, he died and I lost the chance to ask him the numerous questions I later would liked to have asked. Delving into some of the materials that survive him has helped me construct answers to some of them.

HUMBLE ORIGINS

My father was an only child, born at the outbreak of the First World War. His father, Robert (‘Bertie’), was the second of four children in a butcher’s family in Dunoon, on the west coast of Scotland. The eldest of these four children, John, was chosen to take over the family business but he couldn’t abide the violence of butchering animals and so married a Scots girl and immigrated to Vancouver, where he worked for the Tramway Department. Bertie got a job at the Dunoon Post Office and then became a postman in Inverkip, just across the water from Dunoon, where he met an English girl called Elsie, who used to come to Inverkip on holiday each year. Bertie and Elsie married and then they too immigrated to Canada, where Bertie secured a job as a clerk at the Head Post Office in Winnipeg, where my father was born. Bertie’s sister Ruby remained in Scotland, married and had three children, while the youngest Kent brother, Alex, joined the army and died of enteric fever at the turn of the century during the Boer War in South Africa, aged only 19.

So my father had in his veins a mixture of the blood of a butcher, of a man who couldn’t bear the sight of blood and of another who had died very young in war. He also bore the legacy of his own father, Bertie, who joined the Great War in 1914, leaving Elsie with their new baby son, John Alexander. For the first years of his life, my father was cared for by his mother and his aunt from Vancouver, and it must have been a jolt to the female-dominated world of a 5-year-old boy when his father, now burdened with the experiences of a gruesome war, re-entered his life. I never met my paternal grandparents and my father spoke little of them, but it would be understandable if the little boy Johnny was in awe of his father and wanted to make him proud.

His all-consuming passion for flying began early when flight technology was still in its infancy and he shared his enthusiasm with many of his contemporaries. His flying instructor, Konnie Johannesson, must also have impressed his young protégé. Konnie had not only fought in the Great War, when he learned how to fly in Egypt, but was also an Olympic ice-hockey player. When I was a child, my father used to tease me by protruding his set of false front teeth – his own teeth had been knocked out during an ice-hockey game in Winnipeg.

After becoming the youngest pilot in Canada to receive his commercial flying licence, he left home to seek his fortunes with the RAF in England. The journey meant travelling from the Prairies across the vast expanse of the continent to the east coast, where he would see the sea for the first time in his life. On 16 February 1935, he set sail from Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the Duchess of Bedford, arriving after eight days at sea at the port of Liverpool. Ten days after docking, this pale, willowy young man of 6ft with smooth black hair and weighing only 9 stone arrived at the Air Ministry on Kingsway in London for his 12.30 appointment. Following his interview for a Short Service Commission, he enrolled in a training programme at the Flying Training School near Chester. However, he missed Canada and after this training he briefly went home to look for work in commercial aviation. However, when he was then offered the chance to test fly for the RAF, he returned to England and this was decisive for the course his life was to take.

He kept his soft Canadian lilt until the end of his life. His foreignness must have been both an advantage and an obstacle when he came to England; I believe it may have given him a cultural vantage point from which to critique the English but the unyielding structures of their class system must have dumbfounded him. He seemed able both to internalise and scorn Englishness in ways that earned him approbation as well as condemnation.

In the Royal Canadian Air Force Journal’s 2015 ‘Battle of Britain’ edition, Paul Collins tells a revealing story about my father. During his flight training at Duxford, my father was flying a Gloster Gauntlet in tight formation under the command of what Collins describes as ‘a classic English martinet, the strict and often unreasonable disciplinarian … who cannot grasp the difference between commanding respect and demanding respect’. As they were approaching the airfield, my father realised that the commander intended them to land in formation – something they had not done before. Noting the angle of the perimeter fence and the order of their approach, my father understood that he was at risk of catching his undercarriage on the fence and so he decided to break formation, circle around once more and land alone. This insubordination was met by what my father described as a ‘veritable broadside of invective and abuse which was repeated when I tried to explain why I had acted as I had’.

Paul Collins continues:

As Kent slunk away to lick his wounds, the flight commander detailed another of his charges to get ready for another formation practice. One of the officers who seemed to have taken the greatest pleasure at Kent’s misfortune was now flying in his place, and as they came in for their landing, that officer’s undercarriage struck the fence as Kent knew it would and his aircraft flipped over onto its back and was destroyed, with the pilot escaping serious injury.

With more than a little frustration, Kent was left with the definite impression that in this man’s Air Force, you just cannot win.

Such self-assurance and independence of spirit in such a young man may have irked his British superiors, but these were to prove among the most important qualities that later marked him out as ‘One of the Few’.

His willingness to undertake outrageously risky test-flying exercises in the run up to the war may also in part have been a way to prove himself to the Brits. His skills in ice hockey, rattlesnake shooting and baseball were worthless as social credentials in Britain. My brother recalls wishing the ground would open up and swallow him when our father participated in a parents’ day cricket match at Dane Court preparatory school in Surrey. Instead of following the rules of cricket, he simply played baseball, which met with a flurry of discreet coughing and rolling of eyes. Lacking fluency in English social codes, he had to rely on his wits and flying skills to get ahead. And he did so to effect. It wasn’t long until he received his longed-for permanent commission and he steadily climbed through the ranks of the RAF, earning himself a string of medals along the way.

When he returned to Canada on a lecture tour in 1942, by then a war hero, his mother evidently recognised her son’s extraordinary determination and desire to test his own limits. A newspaper article from the Winnipeg Free Press describing the reunion is entitled, ‘He hasn’t changed a bit, says John A. Kent’s mother’.

HIS FINEST HOURS

Although his entire flying career was remarkable, the part for which he has become best known was his role as flight commander of the legendary 303 Polish Fighter Squadron, the re-formed Kościuszko Squadron, whose history has been detailed by Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson in their book For Your Freedom and Ours. Those few weeks of the summer of 1940 were a profoundly transformative rite of passage. His expertise, his ability to maintain his composure, and his ambiguous status as both insider and outsider all became decisive for the role he played in this epic moment of history. However, combat also required that he find ways to stifle significant aspects of his nature.

The story of Poland’s conceivably decisive contribution to the Battle of Britain has, particularly since the end of Soviet rule in Poland, captivated the British public, such as through the Channel 4 documentary in its Bloody Foreigners series, ‘The Untold Battle of Britain’, and Tomasz Magierski’s recent film 303. In the speech he delivered at the Polish War Memorial service at Northolt in 2015, Chairman of the Polish Air Force Memorial Committee, Richard Kornicki, said:

It is often said that Britain stood alone in its ‘finest hour’. But that is not the whole truth. It still had one ally, bound to it in Treaty, whose Government and Armed Forces alone placed themselves alongside Britain for the common good. It was Poland. The only country in Europe which was occupied by the Germans, but never surrendered, never signed an Armistice, never gave up the fight, at home or abroad, through six long years.

However, before the Poles had entered the battle, the British command assumed the Polish pilots would be inferior to their own – their morale shattered after such a rapid defeat in their homeland. At that time, my father simply adopted the RAF ‘insider’s’ attitude towards the unknown new arrivals. In his diary entry for 22 July 1940, after visiting the fighter station RAF Northolt, he writes, ‘The chaps told me that there is a Polish Squadron coming here. They’ll be a bit wild and woolly I should think. I’m afraid they will present quite a problem on the R/T unless they speak English fairly well.’

On 25 July, when he learned that he had been posted to the Polish Squadron, he was nonplussed: ‘I can’t speak a word of Polish and I’m in a bit of a quandary over it all. The other boys are getting a hell of a kick out of it and are laughing a lot right now.’

Nevertheless, his own experiences as a newcomer to Britain perhaps primed him for the way he quickly bonded with his Polish colleagues. His efforts to learn basic Polish suggest not only pragmatism but also a degree of humility. His convivial attitude to the Poles earned him the affectionate nickname ‘Kentowski’ and he became a staunch supporter of their cause – he would later adopt as his personal emblem a Canadian maple leaf enclosing the Polish eagle. Cloud and Olson describe the transformation that took place in him after he began flying with them:

John Kent, who had been so depressed four months earlier at the thought of flying with a bunch of Poles, was now devoted to them. At a nightclub one night, he lunged at a fellow British officer who would not stand when the band played the Polish national anthem, Jeszcze Polska nie zginela. Kent hauled the miscreant to attention and bloodied his nose.

The RAF drew airmen from a variety of social backgrounds, amateurs as well as professionals. However, the English officers hailed largely from the upper and middle classes, and had been educated in all-male public schools, where they had learned that conspicuous shows of emotion were unmanly. The Poles, by contrast, soon earned renown for their popularity with English women, who were charmed by their social ease and expressiveness. My father, having been surrounded by British reserve for five years, also warmed to their flamboyance. When asked in a 1942 interview what he thought of the Poles, he responded, ‘Temperamentally, they are a lot like Canadians and we get along well together.’

Like the Poles, he too had to earn his credibility in Britain by demonstrating his mastery of the skies. To the Poles, he must also prove himself a fighter and a leader. In the same 1942 interview, he humbly admits, ‘The Poles are the best there are as far as fighters are concerned.’

The affection, respect and smooth communication that developed between him and the Poles, despite the language barrier, was facilitated by liberal quantities of alcohol. The squadron regularly frequented a pub called The Orchard in Ruislip, where they numbed themselves to the tensions or tedium of another day survived at Northolt. Riotous parties and copious drinking feature regularly in his memoirs and diaries, as forums of amity, competition and kudos. After a day of combat with the Poles, for instance, my father notes in his diary: ‘Taken all round we considered it was a day well deserving of a party at the Orchard – and we had it.’ His memoirs also record a magnificent farewell party the squadron arranged for him before he left them to command 92 Squadron at Biggin Hill: ‘I managed to hold my own and at three o’clock in the morning the only two left on their feet were Johnny Zumbach, my number two, and myself – and I saw him to bed! This feat boosted my reputation with the Poles quite considerably.’

When he was posted as a flight commander to 303 Squadron on 27 July 1940, my father had not yet experienced the gruesome reality of war. He had never killed a fellow human or experienced the shock of losing a brother-in-arms. In his diary entry for 17 July, he writes, ‘Normally I’m a frightfully gentle little lad.’ However, the tension inside him is by this stage evidently rising. In his diary he notes his bemusement about the fact that his fractious temper had almost brought him to blows with a restaurant manager in Chester: ‘My fighting blood seems to be very easily aroused these days.’

On 24 July, he grimly reflects on the implications of killing: ‘I wonder what it feels like to shoot down a machine and know that you have killed the man inside it? It would be rather interesting to know if any of the chaps who do get these machines have any feelings of remorse. I wonder if I should have any such feelings.’ Then, as though banishing any self-doubt and reiterating the national war sentiment, which had already been stirred in him when he had been flying over France and had seen the long lines of refugees fleeing the Nazis, he continues, ‘Somehow I don’t think so. It is my intention to get as many of them as possible, they have been responsible for so much misery and suffering that they deserve to die.’

When he met the Poles, they had already experienced Nazi brutality first hand and were bent on revenge. Air Chief Marshal Dowding later reflected in the London Gazette, 11 September 1946, ‘[The Poles and Czechs] were inspired by a burning hatred for the Germans which made them very deadly opponents.’ My father, who was working so closely with them, could not but be influenced. After the Polish flying officer Paszkiewicz, on his own initiative, broke formation to shoot down an enemy aircraft on 30 August, thus claiming the squadron’s first victory, my father wrote in his diary, ‘He followed it right down to the ground too just to make sure it crashed – I’d sure hate to have been that Hun as Paskiewicz [sic] hates them like poison.’ The Poles’ gritty resolve must have affected him profoundly.

THE STERN AESTHETE

When I first read Richard King’s book, 303 ‘Polish’ Squadron Battle of Britain Diary, in 2010, I was surprised to see the quotations from a personal diary I’d known nothing about, but still more astounding was the fact that the entries repeatedly mentioned a woman I’d never heard of named Janet. Who was Janet? When I asked my siblings, who are almost a decade my senior, if they knew who this woman was, they coolly explained that she was his wartime bride and dismissed it as a brief and insignificant romance. Our mother had met Janet once, they said. But this was all they knew. I was both astonished and curious and so, with nothing more to go on than the name Janet, I began investigating. Could Janet still be alive? What did she know of the young man behind the steely memoirs?

After a year of virtual detective work to try to find Janet, I’d uncovered boxes of my father’s letters, photographs, drawings, stories, rhymes and more stored in museums and archives in London and beyond. I’d heard of what an austere disciplinarian my father could be and had read what he said to the pilots of 92 Squadron after taking command of them towards the end of October 1940:

I have studied my officers’ behaviour with concern and frankly I think it stinks. You are the most conceited and insubordinate lot I have ever had the misfortune to come up against.

Admittedly you have worked hard and got a damn good score in the air – in fact a better score than any squadron in Fighter Command – but your casualties have been appalling. These losses I attribute to the fact that your discipline is slack; you never by any chance get some sleep; you drink like fishes and you’ve got a damn sight too good an opinion of yourselves …

Now, your billets. It appears that you have turned the living quarters, which were allotted to you to provide a certain amount of security and rest, into a night club. It also appears that you ask your various lady friends down to spend weekends with you whenever you please. This will cease. All women will be out of the house by 2300 hours sharp.

Your clothes – I can scarcely call them uniform. I will not tolerate check shirts, old school ties, or suede shoes. While you are on duty you will wear the regulation dress. Neither will I tolerate pink pyjamas under your tunics … Finally I want to see an all-round improvement. At the moment I think you’re a lot of skunks.

However, as I began to delve into the papers I’d found, other sides of his personality came into focus. I began to see how circumstances had conspired to produce a formidable leader out of an aspiring but affable young man. I found several short stories he had written. Judging by the addresses on the title pages, they