Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller (25 page)

It all seemed idyllic. But, as ever with Heath, his attempts to secure a golden future for himself and his family were to be thwarted by his past behaviour which, still unresolved, now came back to haunt him.

P&O, who owned the
Mooltan,
imposed a fine of £100 on anyone who absconded from troop transport. Since Heath had jumped ship at Durban, he was personally liable for the fine and had been pursued by the South African CID. They were also keen to trace him because of the money he had illegally withdrawn from Barclays Bank in Durban and the hotels he had defrauded before signing up with the SAAF. This meant that not only was his false identity exposed to the SAAF authorities, but the full extent of his past misbehaviour and dishonesty would now be known to his wife and to his in-laws. Heath had married Elizabeth under an assumed name, so the Rivers family were concerned that the marriage wasn’t legal. An amendment to the marriage certificate was hastily arranged to make it valid. Heath had jumped ship without permission and was an illegal immigrant. His application to join the SAAF was almost entirely fiction and he had also lied that he had had no previous criminal convictions. Now that the full details of his court martial at Jerusalem were revealed, Heath’s entire new life was held in the balance.
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The Immigration Authorities indicated that his continued presence in South Africa was entirely dependent on how the SAAF wanted to deal with his career of repeated deception. Due to the valuable work that he had done in training pilots at a time when the SAAF was rapidly expanding, the authorities discussed Heath’s case at the highest level, even involving the director general of the service. Heath’s commanding officer offered a glowing recommendation for leniency.

He [has] carried out all his duties in the air and on the ground in a perfectly correct manner. He is keen and takes a great interest in the work he is now performing. His personal conduct has been exemplary.
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On 18 March, Heath himself wrote an impassioned and contrite letter from Randfontein to the director general of the Air Force in Pretoria. He outlined his commitment to the Allied cause and his usefulness as a pilot. He stressed that since joining the SAAF, he had not committed a single misdemeanour. He admitted that his former behaviour was simply due to his natural impetuosity. Desperate to make a fresh start for himself, he pleaded that if he were dismissed from the SAAF, it would ruin his life.

I decided to change my name and make a really serious attempt to change my character, the fact that I am now married has helped me – and my wife, who knows the whole story and has helped me – is shortly expecting a child.

Proof that I have made this serious attempt at reformation is easily recognizable from my record during the past 15 months and by my present Commanding Officer’s personal report. I can also produce the names of at least ten officers of Field Rank who would testify on my behalf.

May I respectfully submit that my services be retained on probation. If I commit the slightest misdemeanour I shall have failed in my attempt to reform myself and then any action which may be taken will be entirely of my own manufacture. I can honestly promise that such a state of affairs will never come to pass.

I have served as a fighter pilot for two years in the Royal Air Force in peace time and served with an International Fighter Squadron in Spain during the civil war. May I request that I may be retained in the SAAF on the above conditions and posted to one of the fighter squadrons on operations.

I am convinced that if this request could be granted and a little trust placed in me by higher authority with regard to my future behaviour, I shall not fail.
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There is no evidence that Heath fought in the Spanish Civil War nor did he have the opportunity to do so, given he was in the RAF when it started and at Hollesley Bay thereafter. It’s doubtful, too, that Elizabeth was pregnant again, their son being only seven months old when this letter was written. But it’s typical of Heath to risk lies such as these (one heroic, one sentimental) that could fairly easily be disproved. Fortunately for him, this gamble worked. Given his good record in service and apparent sincerity to reform his character, the director general of the Air Force thought he should be given another chance. He could remain in the SAAF on six months’ probation on the condition that he repaid all his outstanding debts.
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Heath’s father-in-law reluctantly obliged. The Immigration Authorities would hold his deportation in abeyance. Once again, he was offered an extraordinary opportunity to rehabilitate and redeem himself.

Having successfully deflected these issues from the past, Heath might have embraced the strategy he had implemented at Hollesley Bay; to keep his head down for the duration and concentrate on training other pilots. However, on the international scene, the war was now moving in the Allies’ favour. The Axis powers had surrendered in North Africa, British troops had landed on mainland Italy and the Italians had declared war on Germany. With a series of concentrated bombing raids on Germany beginning in February 1944 and the Germans heavily invested on the Eastern Front, Allied victory seemed a real possibility – a far cry from the situation when Heath had last been in England in 1940. It is at this point, Heath recognized in retrospect, that he made a fundamental mistake. Rather than settling for a safer, duller life in South Africa, he still wanted to go on active service and take part in the war.

One thing is certain, and it is that if I had I not left Training Command in South Africa to go on ‘ops’ none of this last eighteen months of hell would have occurred.
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Heath’s desire to fly again with the RAF was intense. He had been trying for a secondment or transfer since 1940. His objective was not to work as part of support staff or in training, but to go on operations in one of the active theatres of war. He specifically wanted to return to Fighter Command, the daring, glamorous face of the RAF. In April 1944 he achieved his long-held ambition and successfully arranged a transfer, with the RAF presumably unaware that ‘J. R. C. Armstrong’ was actually ‘N. G. C. Heath’, who had been dismissed from the service in 1937.
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Arriving back in England, he was sent to Dunsfold Aerodrome in Surrey to join 180 Squadron, part of the 2nd Tactical Air Force.
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The squadron flew under the motto ‘
suaviter in modo fortier in re
’ (charming in manner, forthright in deed), perfect for the golden-haired adventurer Heath.

On 27 June, Heath called at the Borstal Association wearing the uniform of a captain in the SAAF, bearing his wings and two ribbons on his chest. He told Mr Scott that he was now based in South Cerney in Gloucestershire working on Intruder Operations. This involved fighter planes making night attacks on German fighter bases, hoping to cause disruption to reduce the heavy losses that were being suffered by Bomber Command at the time. However, whatever he told Mr Scott, Heath was not flying in Fighter Command at all, but had been training to fly bombers.This was a significant change for Heath as flying a fighter and flying a bomber demanded very different skills of their pilots and – some aviation experts would say – different personalities. Much of the bomber’s work was done before they left the ground and flying over to Europe could mean flights of seven, eight or nine hours. These journeys were highly dramatic at take-off and landing, and particularly intense over the target, but outside these peaks there were long periods of boredom and fatigue. Heath had been used to flying up-to-the-minute fighter planes like the Hawker Hurricane – sports cars of the air. The Dam Busters veteran Guy Gibson likened flying a bomber to driving a bus.
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As well as the different technical and intellectual demands that flying fighters and bombers made on their pilots, one of the crucial differences between Bomber Command and Fighter Command was the number of fatalities they suffered. Of the 125,000 airmen who served in Bomber Command during the war according to one study, fatalities were as high as 65 per cent. Two thirds would be expected to die. These terrifying statistics would have been known to all bomber aircrew. Air Chief Marshall Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, Bomber Command’s Commander-in-Chief later noted that:

These crews, shining youth on the threshold of life, lived under circumstances of intolerable strain. They were in fact – and they knew it, faced with the virtual certainty of death, probably in one of its least pleasant forms.
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One nineteen-year-old flight engineer, Sergeant Dennis Goodliffe, was told on arrival at his squadron: ‘You’re now on an operational squadron, your expectation of life is six weeks. Go back to your huts and make out your wills.’
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Yet, extraordinarily, even in 1944 when Bomber Command was suffering terrible losses, the supply of aircrew candidates never dwindled and the Air Ministry felt able to turn away 22.5 per cent of the volunteers who applied to join them.

Over several months of training, crew members would be taught in a particular role for which they had shown aptitude – pilots, navigators, engineers, wireless operators, air-gunners and bomb-aimers. But even in training the notion of death was never far from their minds as over 8,000 trainee aircrew died before they qualified – one seventh of fatalities that Bomber Command suffered throughout the duration of the war. These accidents in training often provided young crews with their first direct acquaintance with death, as many were still in their teens. The average age of an airman in Bomber Command was just twenty-two.

Heath was trained to fly American-made two-engined Mitchell bombers, the B-25. Having completed specialist training, pilots, navigators and bomb-aimers were given further advanced instruction before finally arriving at an Operational Training Unit where they would join the wireless operators and gunners, who had been trained elsewhere. It is at the OTUs that British trainees would meet their various counterparts from Australia and New Zealand who had been trained at the Empire Training Schools abroad. Crews were then put together in an extraordinarily unscientific process known as ‘crewing up’. The requisite numbers of each aircrew category were put together in a large room or hangar and simply told to team up. Each potential aircrew member would need to make instinctive decisions, attempting to interpret a special chemistry between a group of complete strangers. Jack Currie, who reached his OTU in 1942, remembered that ‘I had a strange recollection of standing in a suburban dance-hall, wondering which girls I should approach.’
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And indeed, crewing up was a sort of mating ritual. Who would be calm, efficient, hard-working, reliable, great to have a laugh and a drink with and – most, importantly – who would be lucky? There must also have been some subliminal sense of attraction between the men who were drawn to each other. Heath was fit, good-looking and charming and it’s easy to see how he would be able to attract an enthusiastic crew around him. The decisions that he and his fellow crew members had made in this casual, haphazard way were to be the most important decisions these young men would ever make, as it would dictate whether they – as a crew – would live or die.

Captain William Spurrett Fielding-Johnson was a hugely distinguished and much-admired flying ace, credited with five aerial victories in the First World War. He had been awarded the Military Cross in 1915 whilst serving with the Leicestershire Yeomanry. Following an injury in 1916 he had trained as a pilot with the RAF. In 1918 he destroyed four German fighters and a reconnaissance aircraft. He was exactly the sort of daring, heroic airman that Heath aspired to be.

Fielding-Johnson had volunteered for the RAF immediately the Second World War broke out and served as a squadron leader and aerial gunner. In 1940, at the age of forty-eight, he was the oldest rear gunner in the service and had been awarded the DFC. Having been wounded in June 1944, he was in recovery until September of that year, when he rejoined 180 Squadron as a squadron leader. He was responsible for the maintenance of aircraft armaments and assisting the commanding officer in observing the physical and mental wellbeing of the aircrews in his care.

As the Allies were forcing their way through Europe, 180 Squadron was preparing to move from RAF Dunsfold to Melsbroek in Belgium. The bulk of personnel, including ground staff, were sent to Belgium by road and sea, whilst the aircraft were flown over. Heath accompanied Fielding-Johnson with the land and sea party and this was the first time they came into each other’s company. As the journey continued, Fielding-Johnson became aware of Heath’s unusual behaviour, as he had ‘periods of irresponsibility during off times and when he had a drink or two’. On more than one occasion, he took issue with Heath’s behaviour – and despite Heath’s ranking as a captain, Fielding-Johnson felt more and more that he was thoroughly unreliable. Once they had settled at the Melsbroek air station, Heath’s behaviour continued to trouble him. When he had been drinking, Heath was like a completely different person; supremely arrogant, talking wildly about his past exploits and – in a most ungentlemanly manner – about his finances. Hugely knowledgeable about the pressures and strains that airmen had to cope with, Fielding-Johnson felt that Heath’s behaviour was very similar to cases he had previously dealt with when a pilot’s nerve had gone due to operational exhaustion or simply from the strain of flying itself. Effectively, he identified that Heath was in the throes of some sort of breakdown.
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