Well, if it’s 17 June, it must be the 83rd anniversary of Major Alfred Wintle, MC, responding to the defeat of France by starting a one-man campaign to rescue the French Air Force using methods which landed him in the Tower of London.
Perhaps this was understandable, given that he’d impersonated top brass on the phone to commandeer a plane, and when the powers that be stopped him, marched into an Air Commodore’s office, produced a gun and said senior officers ought to be shot.
Wintle had seen action in WWI, too — to put it mildly. On his first night in France in 1915, at midnight, “the Germans had started a fantastic bombardment”…
It was as if iron sledgehammers were beating upon the gun pits we had hastily manned. Monstrous lumps of metal were winging towards us unceasingly. All around were craters, white in the pale light, which could have been part of a lunar landscape. To my young eyes, the scene closely resembled my childhood pictures of the Day of Judgement, with God’s wrath at its utmost peak… and I frankly confess I was terrified.
Nor was my equanimity much restored when a three-inch shell from a ‘whizz-bang’ (a 77-mm. field gun) burst in the trench and splashed over me the entrails of my young sergeant, to whom I had only just been introduced.
His solution to this horrific set of circumstances was simple:
I stood still, rigidly to attention… and saluted… Within thirty seconds I was able to become again an Englishman of action and to carry out calmly the duties I had been trained to perform.
Yes, Wintle was one of those chaps. William Donaldson’s Brewer’s Rogues, Villains & Eccentrics (Wintle is definitely in the last category) gives a short summary of the rest of his Great War service.
He is said to have found the time between 1918 and 1939 ‘boring’. In the August before WWII began, he was off to France for a “special mission and I went to say goodbye to my old Chief in the German Section of MI”, but was appalled to hear the man tell him:
War, of course, started anyway, and in December, he was back in France, running into an old friend, Jean-Achille-Henri Mendigal, now General Mendigal, Chief of Staff to the French Air Force, who asked a favour…
‘I am a realist,’ Mendigal said. ‘I do not believe that we will be ready to meet the German onslaught for many months to come. We are not prepared ourselves and Britain is not coming up to scratch. ‘Promise me this, Wintle. Promise me on oath that if Germany attacks soon and we are overrun you will immediately fly to me wherever I am. I trust you, my friend. And we both hate the Boche. So, if the worst happens, let us see if we cannot together save the bulk of the French Air Force and pilots to fight another day from England.’ I immediately gave him my solemn word that it would be so.
I think we can all agree from what we know of him so far that A. D. Wintle is not the sort of chap to let down a chap when he’s given that chap his word. No, that sort of thing would be A Very Poor Show. So he went to see Sir Edmund Ironside, Chief of the Imperial General Staff:
There was only one thing for it: “making a bloody nuisance of myself to get some action”. He applied for a medical, because the sight in the eye he hadn’t lost was bad, and he hoped to be invalided out and go to France “under my own steam and do some good for the war effort”.
He was appalled, then, to get a result which downgraded him to garrison duty at home, so he demanded a second opinion…
But before he got the result of the test, word came from a French Intelligence contact that over the Channel, surrender was imminent. “I realised the time had come for me to keep my promise to General Mendigal.”
So he rang Heston Airfield “giving every password and code sign I knew, and claiming to be a senior Staff Officer at the Air Ministry” demanding a plane, and telling them “absolute secrecy must be observed”.
Unfortunately, his ruse was a little too successful. The plane was ready before he could even get there, so the Commandant at the airfield phoned the ministry to say so. “The response, of course, was ‘What bloody plane…?’ The flight was cancelled.”
He called the Commandant a “blithering idiot for not maintaining secrecy” and “drove straight to the Air Ministry and stormed into the office of Air Commodore Boyle, the Director of Intelligence” — the man he’d been impersonating on the phone to the airfield earlier.
This did not appear to convince the man, so he went further
“Next morning”, he writes, in what may not be the most surprising sentence ever committed to paper, “I was arrested.” He was “to be placed under close arrest in the Tower of London while charges were prepared”. He reproduced the charge sheet in his autobiography
At this point, events, which had been merely entertaining, took a turn for the farcical. On the journey from his battalion to Liverpool, where they were to get the train to London, his “timid” escort repeatedly checked the documents, but “when we got to the station the travel warrant was missing”.
Wintle went off to get another warrant, but there was no other officer at Liverpool station, so “I signed it myself. This must surely make me the first-and only-prisoner who has ever signed his own travel warrant to the Tower of London.”
When he got there, people
cut me dead, thinking I was some kind of traitor; but when the news of my doings leaked out they could not do enough for me. My cell became the most popular meeting place in the garrison and I was as well cared for as if I had been at the Ritz.
It’s a bit long, but I think it’s worth quoting his summary of a typical day in a military prison in full:
I would have a stroll in the moat after breakfast. Then at eleven, Guardsman McKie would arrive from the officers’ mess with a large whisky and ginger ale. He would find me spick and span, for, though I have a great regard for the Guards, they have not the gift to look after a cavalry officer’s equipment. The morning would pass pleasantly. By noon visitors would begin to arrive. One or two always stayed to lunch. They usually brought something. I remember a particularly succulent duck in aspic gave me indigestion — and a fine box of cigars bought by my family doctor. Teatime was elastic and informal. Visitors dropped in, usually bringing bottles. I don’t recall that any of them contained tea. Dinner, on the other hand, was formal. I dined sharp at eight and entertained only invited guests. After a few days of settling in, I was surprised to find that being a prisoner in the Tower of London had its points. If there hadn’t been a war on I might have tried to get a life sentence.
In mid-August, he was charged at Court Martial with:
Stating that certain of His Majesty’s Ministers ought to be shot — thereby committing common assault. Endeavouring to evade active service by feigning blindness in one eye. Threatening a superior officer with a revolver.
Wintle began his ‘defence’ of the first charge by “carefully and loudly named all those of His Majesty’s Ministers whom I still thought should be shot”, the prosecution disappointed him by interrupting to drop that one.
On the second, he pointed out that he’d tried to get into action by pretending not to be blind in an eye which was blind, and called Sir Edmund Ironside as a witness, “and he gave me an excellent reference as an eccentric and a fighter for England”. (In other words: Wintle’s barking mad, but he’s on our side.) The third charge was argued at length
So, he was eventually charged with ordinary civil assault and sentenced to a severe reprimand. Then, although he couldn’t save the French Air Force single-handed, he did return to France. Back to Brewer’s Rogues, Villains & Eccentrics:
…which sounds too good to be true, but was confirmed by the Fort Commandant, Maurice Molia, in 1959 when Wintle was surprised by This Is Your Life.
Molia appeared on the programme to tell of my provocative behaviour in Toulon. And he added simply: ‘Shortly after Colonel Wintle left us I was moved-entirely because of his dauntless example and his tirade of abuse and challenge-to defect from Vichy. I took 280 men from the prison garrison- most of whom had also been inspired by the Colonel or shamed by him and joined the Resistance. Many of my men were later killed fighting the Germans but we harried and did down the enemy for years as Colonel Wintle would have wanted us to do.’
He also once wrote a splendid letter to the Times:
His autobiography, The Last Englishman, was assembled after his death from over a million words he left behind. Second hand copies now seem to cost at least £250. It must be high time someone reprinted it, surely?
There was also a TV movie in 1995 starring Jim Broadbent, which must be worth a look.
