BOAC Flight 777
During the Second World War, British and German civilian aircraft operated from the same facilities at Portela, and Allied and Axis spies watched the incoming and outgoing traffic.
After the fall of Norway, and the entry of the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Italy into the war, only neutral Sweden, Ireland, and Portugal remained as European destinations for BOAC.
With the loss of a DC-3 on 20 September 1940 in a landing accident at Heston, and the destruction of another DC-3 in November 1940 by Luftwaffe bombing at Whitchurch, only four aircraft remained: DC-2 G-AGBH Edelvalk (ex-PH-ALE), DC-3 G-AGBD Buizerd (ex-PH-ARB), DC-3 G-AGBE Zilverreiger (ex-PH-ARZ), and DC-3 G-AGBB Ibis (ex-PH-ALI).
"[1] According to CIA archives: "Most OSS operatives in Spain were handled out of Lisbon under nonofficial cover because the diplomatic staff in Madrid made a practice of identifying intelligence agents to the Spanish police.
On 15 November 1942 G-AGBB Ibis was attacked by a single Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighter, but was able to limp on to Lisbon where repairs were carried out; damage sustained included the port wing, engine nacelle, and fuselage.
Derek Partridge, the young son of a British diplomat, and his nanny Dora Rove[N 5] were "bumped" to make room for Howard and Chenhalls, who had only confirmed their tickets at 5:00 the night before the flight and whose priority status allowed them to take precedence over other passengers.
[10][N 6] Anne Chichester-Constable, 7-year-old daughter of WRNS Chief Officer Gladys Octavia Snow OBE was also booked on the flight which connected her return to England from New York.
[23] Another passenger was Wilfrid Israel, a member of an important Anglo-German Jewish family and a rescuer of Jews from the Holocaust who had close connections to the British government.
He was born in England to an Anglo-Jewish mother and German Jewish father, and he and his brother had run the Nathan Israel Department Store in Berlin until it was seized by the Nazis in 1938.
He worked with consular officials in the British embassy to obtain visas, and he dismissed 700 of his firm's Jewish staff with two years' pay in 1936, telling them to save themselves by leaving Germany.
[3][4] The flight was roughly 200 miles (320 km) northwest of the coast of Spain when Whitchurch received a message from wireless operator van Brugge that they were being followed and fired upon at 46°30'N, 009°37'W.
[4] The following day, BOAC released a statement: The British Overseas Airways Corporation regrets to announce that a civil aircraft on passage between Lisbon and the United Kingdom is overdue and presumed lost.
[25]The New York Times announced on 3 June: "A British Overseas Airways transport plane, with the actor Leslie Howard reported among its 13 passengers, was officially declared overdue and presumed lost today....
At this point flight leader Hintze, at the head of the remaining six Ju 88s, caught up to the DC-3 and recognised the aircraft as civilian, immediately calling off the attack, but the burning DC-3 was already severely damaged with the port engine out.
[29] Hintze states that all the German pilots involved expressed regret for shooting down a civilian aircraft and were "rather angry" with their superiors for not informing them that there was a scheduled flight between Lisbon and Britain.
Goss writes that official German records back up Hintze's account that Staffel 14/KG 40 was carrying out normal operations and that the day's events occurred because the U-boats could not be found.
In late May 1943, Churchill and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden travelled to North Africa for a meeting with United States General Dwight D.
In addition, some have speculated that the tall and thin Howard may have been mistaken for Detective Inspector Walter H. Thompson, Churchill's personal bodyguard who had a similar physical appearance.
[31] There is an even more elaborate version of this theory that posits Chenhalls was employed by the British government as Churchill's "deliberate double" and that he and Howard boarded BOAC Flight 777 knowing they were going to die.
It is difficult to understand how anyone could imagine that with all the resources of Great Britain at my disposal I should have booked a passage in an unarmed and unescorted plane from Lisbon and flown home in broad daylight.
Speculation by historians has also centred on whether the British code breakers had decrypted several top secret Enigma messages that detailed the assassination plan.
Churchill wanted to protect any information uncovered by the code breakers so the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht would not suspect that their Enigma machines were compromised.
[31] A 2008 book by Spanish writer José Rey Ximena[36] claims that Howard was on a top-secret mission for Churchill to dissuade Francisco Franco, Spain's authoritarian dictator and head of state, from joining the Axis powers.
[37] Via an old girlfriend (Conchita Montenegro), Howard had contacts with Ricardo Giménez-Arnau, who at the time was a young and very humble diplomat in the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
"[6] The downing of BOAC Flight 777 elicited headlines around the world and there was widespread public grief, especially for the loss of Leslie Howard, who was championed as a martyr.
In 2003, on the 60th anniversary of the downing of Flight 777, a pair of television documentaries on the subject were released: the BBC series Inside Out and the History Channel's Vanishings!
In 2009 the grandson of Ivan Sharp, who lives in Norwich, and has the same name as his grandfather, arranged for a memorial plaque for the crew and passengers of BOAC Flight 777 to be dedicated at Lisbon Airport.
On 1 June 2010, a similar plaque, paid for by Sharp, was unveiled at Whitchurch Airport in Bristol, and a brief memorial was held by friends and family of those killed on the flight.
On the 1 June 2023 a minute silence was held, followed by the names of the passengers and crew was read out by Mr Robert Clark of the United Reform Church Bristol.
This was then followed by Rabbi Monique Mayer[49] from the progressive Jewish congregation[50] who spoke about those who died and Wilfrid Israel in particular, finishing by offering Hebrew prayer for the dead.
