SECRET LETTERS

A BATTLE OF BRITAIN LOVE STORY

Writer: John Willis Publisher: Mensch Publishing Price: £18.99

BASED ON PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED LETTERS FROM PILOT OFFICER GEOFFREY MYERS, THIS BOOK PROVIDES A UNIQUE INSIGHT INTO LIFE DURING THE CRITICAL MONTHS OF 1940

With the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, we might reasonably have expected the publication of a plethora of new titles covering this well-trodden genre. Among those with a passion for the subject, there was doubtless a weary anticipation that we would see more of the ‘same old’.

But Secret Letters is in a different league.

John Willis’s truly superb work is based on letters written by Geoffrey Myers (the intelligence officer with 257 Squadron throughout the Battle of Britain) to his wife, Margot. Letters that were written, but never sent. This was because Myers had left his wife and children behind in France, and he expected that they would never be read – not least of all because the family were Jewish.

These letters are a wonderful contemporary account of the Battle of Britain as seen through the eyes of a man who lived and worked with some of ‘the Few’. Reading them, we find sadness, humour, tragedy and drama as Myers sets out the day-to-day life of a front line fighter squadron. We see the foibles and eccentricities of some of the pilots, including fascinating insights into their daily lives and a brutally frank revelation concerning one of the squadron’s COS who would prove to be ineffectually disastrous.

It would be wrong of the reviewer to reveal what eventually happened to Geoffrey’s Jewish family who were trapped in hostile territory. Suffice to say, though, that this is unquestionably the most fascinating book on the Battle of Britain that this reviewer has ever read – and he has read many!