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Wing Commander John Freeborn
Battle of Britain Spitfire ace who flew more operational hours than any other pilot and shot down at least a dozen enemy aircraft
Lieutenant-Commander 'Steady’ Tuke
Fleet Air Arm pilot who became one of the youngest men decorated during the Battle of Britain after taking on Messerschmitts in his sluggish biplane
Wing Commander Norman Hayes
Night fighter pilot who survived a catastrophic raid on Rotterdam to go on and test top secret radar equipment during the Battle of Britain
SOE agent who did valuable work in occupied France and survived Ravensbrück concentration camp
Eileen Nearne, known as “Didi” to her family and friends, was brought up and educated in Grenoble, where her parents were living at the outbreak of war. She and her older sister Jacqueline were bilingual in English and French and, after reaching England, responded to a call for volunteers familiar with France and the language. This led to their joining the Special Operations Executive (SOE), to which both gave valuable service after the fall of France in 1940. But Eileen was captured, interrogated and sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp.
After enrolment in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) that provided uniformed cover for women SOE agents, she was trained for signals duties, then retrained as an agent in 1943 and flown into France by RAF Lysander aircraft in March 1944. She and her accompanying agent — 35-year-old French lawyer, Maître Savy, brought back to England by another SOE agent — were landed near Châteauroux in order to establish a circuit of French supply and finance experts around Paris.
Soon after arriving in France, Savy received information about a stock of German V1s concealed in a quarry near Creil. Appreciating the crucial importance of this intelligence, he returned by the next Lysander flight to England to report it and sent Nearne and another radio operator to Paris. This resourceful pair attached themselves to the SOE “Spiritualist” circuit working on plans for railway sabotage that had urgent need for their services and radios.
The ensuing weeks were taken up by transmitting economic and military intelligence gathered by the Spiritualist circuit to London. Nearne sent 105 messages in all, including a number for arms drops. On one occasion it appears she transmitted just long enough from the same site to fall victim to the assiduous German radio detectors and was arrested in July 1944. Fortunately, hearing German voices and insistent knocking at the house next door while transmitting, she had time to burn her messages and hide the radio.
A thorough search of the house brought the set to light, together with an unused one-time-code pad and her pistol, so she was taken to Paris for interrogation at the Gestapo headquarters. Despite the incriminating evidence found in the house from where she had been transmitting, with remarkable sang-froid she maintained she was just a French shop assistant called Jacqueline du Tertre who had been sending messages on behalf of her employer with no idea that they went to England. Telling her interrogators she had met her employer in a coffee shop, that she had been working for him for only three months and that he had supplied the one-time pad, she made up a name and address for him when pressed. This bought her only such time as it took for the Gestapo to discover both were false.
She was then subjected to “strong interrogation” including being repeatedly plunged into cold water until her lungs were bursting. She stuck to her explanation, revealing nothing about the SOE or her true role but finally “admitted” to a planned meeting with the imaginary employer at Gare St Lazare at 7pm that evening. She was taken to the rendezvous and won another respite by the sounding of the air-raid warning at 7.15. Next day, to avoid further baignoire immersions, she offered to take the chief Gestapo interrogator to the addresses she had given. This offer was not tested and she was sent to Fresnes prison, then to the notorious women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück.
There she met Violete Szabo, later executed together with two other women SOE agents in early 1945. Nearne managed to escape while being marched with a group of prisoners through a forest at night to another camp at Markelberg on April 5, 1945. She slipped out of the line into the trees to be joined by two other women.
The rest of the escape involoved considerable hardship. After sheltering for two nights in a bombed house, the three women began walking westwards only to be stopped by SS troops demanding their identity cards. Having none, Nearne explained that they were French volunteers working in a German factory and were allowed to pass.
On reaching Leipzig on foot, they persuaded a German priest to shelter them until Allied troops arrived. On April 15, the three rushed out to greet American units entering the city only to be subjected to intense questioning yet again. Nearne, suspected for some reason of being a German agent, was put in a camp with Nazi women until identified and taken to safety by a British officer. She was later appointed MBE for her SOE services and bravery under intense and ruthless interrogation.
Eileen Nearne was the third child and second daughter of John Nearne and his Parisian-born wife, Marie, née de Plazoala. Understandably, she remained steadfastly reluctant to discuss her wartime experiences. She was unmarried.
Eileen “Didi” Nearne, MBE, SOE agent and radio operator and survivor of Ravensbrück concentration camp, was born on March 15, 1921. She died on September 2, 2010, aged 89
An Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) pilot during the Second World War, Pamela Tulk-Hart flew 23 different types of aircraft between June 1944 when she was involved in the frenetic ferry arrangements that accompanied the increased air activity surrounding the Normandy landings and August 1945 when she made her last delivery.
The ATA, a civilian organisation, had been born out of the necessity to relieve the strain on the RAF in delivering its aircraft from the factories to the front-line squadrons. The use of civilian or ex-service pilots who were no longer considered fit for frontline service liberated many RAF pilots for combat and other operational duties in the desperate early days of the war. A total of 1,318 pilots flew with the ATA throughout the war, an eighth of whom, 166 pilots, were women.
The ATA’s women’s section had come into being as early as late 1939 under the leadership of Pauline Gower, many (though not all) of its members at that stage being well-heeled young women who had learnt to fly during the expansion in recreational aviation in the 1930s. The women brought undeniable glamour to what might be seen as the routine business of ferrying aircraft — though that could often be dangerous, with a solo pilot flying without much in the way of navigational aids and, at that, in all weathers.
The male pilots had found themselves saddled, thanks to the initials of their organisation, with the sobriquet “Ancient Tattered Airmen”. By contrast the first women pilots soon became known by the dashing nickname “Atagirls”. Many an RAF squadron commander looking out over his airfield as the latest delivery of an aircraft rolled to a halt at the end of the runway, would be astonished to see a petite glamorous figure climb down from its cockpit. Among the many aircraft Pamela Tulk-Hart flew, her favourites were the Spitfire and its naval version, the Seafire.
She was born Pamela May Johnsen in 1918 into a family of Norwegian origins. Her grandparents had emigrated to London in the 1890s and her father had flown with the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War. She was educated at Benenden, where one of her contemporaries was Lettice Curtis, later to become one of the ATA’s most renowned pilots. Her subsequent education was in Munich, where she learnt German, and at Freiburg University. In 1939 she was presented as a debutante at court.
When war was declared on September 3, 1939, she was working as a subeditor on a women’s magazine, but she soon volunteered as an ambulance driver. When the ATA began to take women pilots she volunteered. At that stage only pilots with previous experience were being accepted, but by 1943, with the demand for ferry pilots far outstripping supply, the ATA started its first ab initio flying school. In August that year she began her training at ATA No1 Flying School at Thame, Oxfordshire.
By February 1944 she was qualified to fly any single-engine light aircraft and, after a period at ferry pools at Thame, White Waltham and Cosford, graduated to single-seat fighters such as the Spitfire and Seafire, which she was soon delivering from the factories to maintenance units where they were fitted with their armament. In the wake of D-Day ATA pilots were busy flying replacement aircraft to South Coast airfields and — decidedly more dangerous — flying damaged ones back to be repaired. In August she qualified to fly twin-engined aircraft.
The ATA continued busy until some time after the end of the war in Europe on May 8, 1945, and she made her final delivery, of an Airspeed Oxford, on August 11 that year. The ATA was disbanded towards the end of the year and its flag laid up at White Waltham church in November 1945.
In 1951 Tulk-Hart co-wrote, with Margaret Morrison, a novel, Paid to be Safe, based on her ATA experiences.
In 1944 she had married Richard Tulk-Hart, a doctor, who for some 20 years practised in Sussex. He died in 1996, and she is survived by her daughter.