Captain Vyvyan Howard, who has died aged 102, was a Fleet Air Arm pilot, probably the last to fly a wartime Fairey Swordfish, and the last remaining British survivor of the infamous Stalag Luft III pr…
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The Telegraph
2022-10-06T16:00:00Z
Captain Vyvyan Howard, who has died aged 102, was a Fleet Air Arm pilot, probably the last to fly a wartime Fairey Swordfish, and the last remaining British survivor of the infamous Stalag Luft III prisoner-of-war camp.
In September 1940, having learnt low-level torpedo-dropping techniques in the Fairey Swordfish, Howard joined the newly equipped 828 Naval Air Squadron, flying the Fairey Albacore torpedo bomber, at Lee-on-Solent.
In 1941 the squadron deployed to the Orkney Islands on anti-aircraft and convoy escort duties, and in June 828 NAS embarked in the aircraft carrier Victorious. On the afternoon of July 30, in bright Arctic sunshine, the squadron attacked German shipping at Kirkenes, close to the Norwegian border with Russia.
The enemy were alerted and had strong air and flak defences. Howard recalled: “We launched our torpedo at a German ship in the harbour. As we turned to make our escape, I heard a roar of cannon fire from below us; we were hit, and the aircraft broke up around us. The next thing I knew we were in the fjord and swimming to the shore and captivity.”
Sixteen aircraft were lost in this raid and on another on nearby Petsamo, a dozen Fleet Air Arm aircrew were killed, and a score, including Howard, were captured. Over the next 3½ years he was held in two small PoW camps, and then in June 1942 was transferred to Stalag Luft III.
There, Howard was a keen participant in events which were dramatised in the films The Wooden Horse (1950) and The Great Escape (1963). He spent many an hour vaulting over the wooden horse or talking in his fluent German to the guards to distract them.
The entrance to the tunnel called “Tom”, which the Germans discovered, as depicted in The Great Escape, was in Howard’s hut, and the tunnel called “Dick”, which they missed, ran directly under his hut. Howard’s fluency in German led to him attending meetings as interpreter between senior Allied prisoners and the camp commandant, Oberst Friedrich von Lindeiner. (He also learned to speak Polish and qualified as a Polish interpreter after the war.)
Howard thought himself unlucky not to have his name drawn as one of the actual escapers, and in January 1945 he was forced to join the “Long March”, when the prisoners were marched away on foot from the advancing Russians. He recalled that he owed his life to a Polish fellow prisoner who advised him: “Don’t ever take your boots off, only loosen them, or you will never get them on again because your feet will swell.”
After three months of harsh winter weather, and having been strafed by the RAF, Howard arrived at Wulmenau, a village south-west of Lübeck, where he wrote to his fiancé, Bernadette Taylor: “A couple of British tanks caught us today, 2 May at 11.40 hours and the infantry should be here this afternoon. Oh, ye Gods, what a day of joy and rejoicing – cheers and wild waving – all of us, English, American, Polish, Russian, Dutch, French – everybody shouting to the stormy sky.” A week later he telegrammed: “Home today. Be seeing you soon.” They married on June 2 1945.
Charles Vyvyan Howard was born in Hartlepool on November 11 1919 and brought up in Greatham, Co Durham, where his father was headmaster of the local primary school. He won a scholarship to Henry Smith Grammar School in Hartlepool and his first job, in 1937, was in the research laboratories at ICI Billingham. As war loomed, his father advised him to join the Royal Navy and to train as a pilot.
He learnt to fly in Tiger Moth biplanes at Elmdon, now Birmingham International Airport, and it was on weekend leave from there, “a jolly to Blackpool”, that he met his future wife. He was awarded his pilot’s wings in May 1940.
After the war, Howard accepted a permanent commission in the Navy and was based at Culdrose for several years, flying Seafires and Sea Furies and, in the new jet age, Sea Vampires and Meteors.
In early 1956 he took command of 830 Naval Air Squadron at RNAS Ford, Sussex, flying the Westland Wyvern, the largest propellor-driven, single-seat aeroplane to operate from a British carrier. The squadron embarked in the carrier Eagle for Operation Musketeer, the Anglo-French intervention during the Suez Crisis – the squadron’s 16 aircraft becoming the only Wyverns to see combat when Howard led the first wave, on November 1, to attack Egyptian airfields near the Suez Canal, and flew two and three sorties a day until the action was suspended.
“It was,” he said, “a very small
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