"I've been researching and writing about the Second World War for years." "Along the way, I've interviewed veterans from almost every theatre of war." "Each one has been a privilege to meet, but for me, one man stands out " "Captain Eric "Winkle" Brown, probably the best pilot this country has ever produced." "He didn't fly for the RAF though." "Captain Brown was in the Fleet Air Arm, a pilot for the Royal Navy." "His career spans a remarkable period in aviation, from wood and canvas biplanes through to experimental Nazi jets and onto nuclear bombers at the height of the Cold War." "But his experience extends way beyond his achievements in the air." "From visiting Germany as a teenager in 1936, he witnessed some of the most extraordinary events leading up to and during the Second World War." "Captain Brown is a truly remarkable man." "This is his story." "To achieve supersonic flight was the Holy Grail of aviation in my time." "Here you had a new airplane, more power, more thrust, more aerodynamic refinement." "I got down to 4,0ooft." "Suddenly, the aircraft went into a violent oscillation." "I was beginning to lose consciousness." "One thought was survival." ""How do I get this sorted out?"" "What I did was hold the throttle, hold the stick, just hold both back gently together." "My name is Captain Eric Brown." "My last job was chief naval test pilot to the Fleet Air Arm." "My first actual flight was with my father." "I would be about ten years of age, much to my mother's absolute horror." "I suppose she wanted to preserve her young son." "Mothers do." "We were in a single seat biplane." "I was allowed to hold the stick, but of course, obviously, I couldn't reach the rudder pedals." "So it was just a gentle experience, if you like." "But he had pressed the right button." "I've always had in my life a tendency to try something hazardous." "I was the only one at school that had a motorbike, a 500cc Norton." "I used to make my summer money by being a motorbike rider on the wall of death." "Then, in 1936, the big event happened in my life that persuaded me to take up flying." "My father had been a Royal Flying Corp pilot in World War I." "The Germans had a society of World War I combatants." "They decided to invite the opposition over to have a shindig during the Berlin Olympics in 1936." "...der elften Olympiade neuer Zeitrechnung als eroffnet." "There was Herr Hitler announcing it open." "Now they're all cheering him and the whole crowd have raised their right arm." "The great event of course was the wonderful Jesse Owens." "Here was a man who won the 100m and 200m, the long jump and the 4x100m relay." "Four gold medals." "Not exactly what Hitler with his Aryan ideals had wanted." "I've read many stories that said Hitler ignored him." "Now, this is quite untrue because I actually witnessed." "Hitler shaking hands with Jesse Owens and congratulating him on what he had achieved." "Ernst Udet became famous in World War I, the top-scoring pilot after Richthofen." "He had many lady friends." "Cigar smoking, champagne drinking sort of chap." "Bigger than life." "He said, "Now, we're going flying," and I was in the front cockpit, he was in the rear." "He took particular attention to strap me in very carefully." "I thought, "Oh, that's just..." ""How nice of him," you know, but there was a purpose in it, as I found out." "He really threw that thing around." "He turned it inside out." "We came into land." "On the approach, he turned it onto its back." "I thought, "Well, he'll turn it over before." But nothing happened." "He kept coming on and I thought, really," ""I think the silly old fool's had a heart attack,"" "and I really thought that was going to be my demise." "But he turned it round and it literally fell onto the runway." "This is how good a pilot he was." "He slapped me on the back and said the German fighter pilots' greeting, "Hals und Beinbruch."" "He said, "You'll make a good fighter pilot."" "And he said, "Now, do two things for me." ""Learn to speak German and then learn to fly."" "It was a pivotal point in my life." "German troops made a formal entry into the demilitarised zone on the left bank of the Rhine." "Herr Hitler confirmed the reoccupation of the Rhineland." "I had achieved the two things that Udet had challenged me to do, so I wrote him and he said," ""Yes, I'll book you into a little guesthouse" ""and we'll show you a bit of Berlin."" "I was, in my teens, politically naive." "I really was just having a wonderful experience." "It seemed a very vibrant country." "Lots of uniforms could be seen around." "The Hitler Youth seemed to offer slightly more than the Boy Scouts offered, if you like to put it that way." "Nuremberg was a rallying point." "What's the biggest thing we do here?" "I suppose it was like... the coronation... with knobs on." "The only thing that drove me to want to see it was curiosity." "People said, "Oh, it's a fabulous show." "You must go and see it."" "There were so many people packed into one place all hugely enthusiastic." "Flink wie Windhunde, zah wie Leder und hart wie Kruppstahl." "I began to wonder, "How does this man attract all these people?"" "I thought there must be some strange charisma." "He's like the Pied Piper of Hamelin and they're all following him as he rants along." "For the triumphs of Hitler, his annexation of Austria, the crushing of Czechoslovakia, it has been a year of crises and we can hardly ignore them." "But it has also been the year of The Lambeth Walk and we may be grateful to that dance phenomenon which has helped to preserve our sense of values, for even gas masks and ARP have been unable to still" "that undaunted "oi!"." "A little group from the Foreign Office asked me if I was interested in joining the Diplomatic Corp." "And I said I was and they said, "Right." ""We will send you to Germany for six months."" "In early September, I decided to go up to Munich for a weekend and I'd drive up in my car." "On 3rd September, at about six in the morning, there was a thunderous knock on my door." "Two SS officers said, "I have to tell you, you're under arrest" ""because our two countries are at war."" "Now, technically this was untrue because 11 o'clock was the time, but I wasn't in a strong position to argue." "The same hour that chimed for armistice tolls the signal for another war." "They took all clothes I had, books, etc, and off we went." "I was in a little SS jail." "I wasn't at all ill-treated." "On the third day, one young SS lieutenant came to me and said," ""We're taking you down to the Swiss frontier."" "When we arrived, the lieutenant said to me, "You're free to go" ""and you can take your car."" "So, I said, "You've taken my clothes, my books, my money." ""Why are you giving me my car?"" "And he said, in German, "Because we have no spares."" "Very Teutonic attitude." "But now one bond unites us all, to wage war until victory is won and never to surrender ourselves to servitude and shame, whatever the cost and the agony may be." "I was taken to Bern and the ambassador said." ""Of course, I've been told to return you as soon as possible" ""because you've been called up."" "I was keen to get back at the Germans." "I was a bit piqued about being locked up and I was young, raring to go." "Suddenly, on the notice board, there went a thing saying," ""The Navy have lost a lot of pilots." "There's a shortage..."" ""..and if you're interested in moving over to the Fleet Air Arm," ""append your name to the board."" "So I did that very thing." "Here comes the Luftwaffe." "Hundreds of planes." "Bombers, fighters." "The RAF came and dove in, shouting the old hunting cry," ""Tally-ho!"" "HMS Audacity originally was a banana boat operating in the Caribbean." "Churchill, it was his original idea." "He thought, "Right." "Cut everything off" ""so that we can lay a flat flight deck on it to operate aircraft."" "The Wildcat, as the Americans called it, was an aircraft that had a bigger punch than the British aircraft of that time." "Instead of .303 guns, it had .50 guns." "Far out in the grey Atlantic, the big Focke-Wulf bombers range far and wide across the ocean, seeking out the convoys approaching British shores." "The courier was probably the most heavily-armed." "German aircraft in the sky." "It had machine guns firing out the side windows, cannon, two turrets on top and a complete gondola underneath." "All told, it was very heavily armed." "Realising what I was up against, I had studied this very carefully." "Worked out how the guns could depress or elevate." "There was only one blank spot which they couldn't reach and that was if you came in flat towards the pilot's cockpit." "When I opened fire, you could see the windscreen just disintegrating, so the pilots must have been killed." "Your own grave danger was colliding with your target and you had to break away, either up or down." "You get that exhilarating feeling that you've nailed him." "The U-boats lie in waiting." "Like wolves, they will stalk a convoy for days at a stretch, biding their time until the chance of wind and weather offers the fattest prize for their torpedoes." "We realised we were going to be under attack, so the captain of Audacity thought," ""We'll zigzag at full speed for the night."" "A lone submarine let fly at us." "Caught the rudder." "We were in darkness by this time." "We'd barely stopped when the submarine surfaced about 200 yards away on our port side." "It was an eerie sight." "As it popped out of the sea, it was covered in phosphorescence." "It was almost as if it was Christmas tree lights on it, all over." "The commander came up onto the conning tower." "We could see the gold braid on his hat." "We were that close." "He just leant over the tower surveying us." "We just stood and watched each other." "Somebody's nerve broke, one of the seamen, and he leapt to a 20mm Oerlikon gun and started firing at the submarine." "I thought, "He'll irritate the U-boat captain,"" "which is what he did, of course." "And the next thing was he just fired off a bevy of torpedoes at us." "Our carrier reared up." "I heard the twang of the hawses holding the aircraft breaking." "The six aircraft just broke loose, mowed down the deck into all these guys standing there and it was absolute chaos." "We were all swimming as fast as we could to get away from the vessel." "Turned around and she plunged down very rapidly." "Tremendous booming as things imploded." "There were a hell of a lot of people in the water, of course, by this time." "Another pilot called out and he said, "Let's tie ourselves together."" "I think we were 24 altogether." "Now, at first, we were all fine, we talked to each other and everything, but after about three quarters of an hour, everybody stopped talking and..." "falling asleep." "These chaps were falling forward cos there was nothing to support their heads and were drowning." "My section leader said, "The only thing we can do is" ""cut them off from us, otherwise we'll all go down together." ""The whole 24 of us."" "So, this continued right throughout the night, cutting one or two away and letting them drift off." "It really was a very nasty business." "By the morning, all the seamen had drowned." "There was only two of us left." ""Snow" by Yuki Murata." "Unknown to me, the captain of the Audacity said I had a facility for deck landing and the Admiralty should make use of it." "I got a telegram asking me to undertake a series of trials on various carriers." "Hellcat comes in too quickly." "The pilot seems none the worse." "This landing is particularly bad." "With this machine coming in, one would think all is well." "Deck landing, one has to accept, is quite a hazardous business." "A Firebrand bent on destruction." "Accidents were ten a penny." "Here you see another aircraft." "If it doesn't have an accident, it'll be a very unusual affair." "Did you crash many times?" "No." "I only ever had one crash caused by a hook not lowering and the batsman not having seen it." "A picture-by-picture analysis of the slow-motion film proved very useful." "As you go off on the catapult, like you're doing here, you do get a pretty big kick in the pants." "You are very hopeful that there's enough wind for you to get off cleanly." " The story of the DH.98, or Mosquito, is one of brilliant success." "At the moment, the fastest aircraft in operation in the world." "The Mosquito is a superb aeroplane." "I was asked to put it aboard an aircraft carrier." "It was twice as heavy as any aircraft that had ever been landed on a carrier." "It was twice as big." "The top entry speed that we could land was 86mph." "The stalling speed of the Mosquito is 110." "Hence everybody said, "Impossible."" "This picture shows the Mosquito doing crash barrier tests in HMS Triumph." "By all appearances, wooden-constructed aeroplanes would just seem to be unsuitable for this treatment." "But when you're young and confident you say brash things." "This de Havilland Mosquito was the first two-engine machine to land on an aircraft carrier." "The pilot was Lieutenant Commander EM Brown." "This really changed my life because the director of the RAE said to me later, "Frankly, I didn't think I'd ever see you again."" "Then I was promoted and became the chief naval test pilot at Farnborough." "V-1, the flying bomb, the robot bomb, the buzz bomb." "You're a passenger on a bus and this is the end of your last trip." "You're the man on the street and you do what you can." "You're an airman on leave and this is your welcome mat." "I was on duty." "A V-1 crashed in the garden of our house." "The house collapsed like a pack of cards." "My wife was concussed and our cleaning lady lost an eye and had 96 stitches." "Poor thing." "She came out of it rather badly." "The problem with attacking the V-1 is it came over at a steady speed of 400mph." "Even if you caught up with it and fired, the debris from it was likely to damage your own aircraft." "Between sorties, the pilots got together to discuss the best methods of attack." "We devised a method of flying alongside it and putting your wing under the V-1's wing, then if you raise your wing, you'll tilt their V-1 over in the other direction and away it'll go." "The best plane, I would say the Tempest V." "It had the speed to overtake." "It was a pretty rugged aeroplane too and it had the control to do the tipping." "I was doing a series of trials and the engine blew up and the propeller went absolutely solid." "I saw the engine was on fire outside." "I didn't realise I was burning inside until my feet cooked." "I realised that I had to get out." "Bailing out is not as easy as many people think and when I stood up in the cockpit to get my legs over the side," "I was pinned back by sheer slipstream effect." "So, then what I did was get one leg over the side, one leg on the seat lean in, get hold of the stick, pull it hard over towards me and that catapulted me out." "You don't get much time to worry about the finer points of it." "The thing is to get out and move out." "In test flying, we had a high casualty rate." "Year after year, 25% of the pilots involved in high-speed flight were lost." "This was for a very great cause - to keep our aircraft ahead of the enemy." "It was them today." "It might be me tomorrow." "One just had to shrug it off and say, "War is on." ""There are huge casualties." "They are just part of the cost."" "This is your victory, victory of the cause of freedom in every land." "We have never seen a greater day than this." "The director of the RAE formed a mission to go to Germany after the capitulation and find out more about their technology." "I was more than impressed, I was shocked by what we found... because they were so far ahead." " This is the Messerschmitt 262, the world's first operational jet fighter." "It was more than 100mph faster than the best piston engine fighter." "This was a lightning-fast aeroplane." "It looks in body form like a shark, swept-back wings and the under-slung engines." "It really looks power, power, power." "When I got the Me 262 into the air, it was so fast, it was virtually untouchable." "It had four 30mm canon which is a huge punch." "Batteries of rockets." "I saw an American Marauder aircraft being attacked by an Me 262." "One minute, there was this beautiful-looking Marauder in the sky." "A minute later, confetti." "I've flown almost all the World War II aircraft and I rank it as the most formidable aircraft of World War II." "Amid the ruins, the dazed people wander here and there." "Battered and shell-swept, not much remains." "One of the first war criminals is captured." "Hermann Goering." "Goering was Hitler's right-hand man." "Head of the Luftwaffe." "I was quite taken aback at how slimmed down from all the pictures I'd ever seen of him as a rather porky gentleman." "The Americans had weaned him off drugs." "They'd stripped him of all insignia." "He had been interrogated day in and day out." "But the invigilating officer said to him," ""Now you're going to be interrogated by a pilot,"" "and literally he brightened up instantly." "The first question I asked him was, "What, in your opinion," ""was the outcome of the Battle of Britain?"" "And he said, "It was a draw."" "He said, "If you look at the analysis of the battle," ""you will find that in the last week, for the first time," ""the German causalities were lower than the British."" "Now, this is perfectly true, if you look at the records." "And he said this showed a turning point had arrived." "The jaws of the Nazi whale were set to swallow Jonah." "But he said, "Unfortunately, we couldn't continue" ""because Hitler ordered all fighter units back" ""for the invasion of Russia."" "I've told many people this and nobody's said," ""Oh, no, you got that wrong."" "Many of them have said, "My God, weren't we lucky?"" "At the end, he came over and stuck his hand out to shake hands." "Now, I couldn't, under any circumstances, shake hands." "So, I thought, "What the hell do I do now?"" "Very quickly, I suddenly said to him, "Hals und Beinbruch,"" "the old fighter pilot's greeting." "He half smiled and just dropped his hand." "What does "Hals und Beinbruch" mean?" ""Broken neck and broken legs" was the greeting." ""Go in there and do your stuff." ""Maybe that's what you'll get, but as long as you survive."" "If you'll just answer my questions, we'll save a great deal of time." "Concentration camps was one of the things you found immediately necessary upon coming to power, is it not?" "'Having been to Belsen, I realised that Goering 'had a huge responsibility for the concentration camps.'" " Your answer is yes, I take it?" " Ja." "As the Allied procession moved onward, prison camps were broken open." "When we arrived at the gates, we could see the soldiers waiting for us." "The Germans had discovered there were 20,000 cases of typhus in Belsen." "They thought, "If the guards, the inmates, escape" ""we'll have a plague which could be worse than the war."" "I spoke to one or two, but they were like zombies." "When you stopped them, they would stop." "They wouldn't look at you, they would just look at the ground not reply at all." "When you finished, they would move aside and move on." "They were literally dying zombies." "I could see huts." "These had originally been built to accommodate 60 inmates." "When we got there, there were about 250 in each hut." "These people were theoretically still alive." "But..." "I say alive brackets." " To a British military tribunal has brought assorted assortment of Nazi war criminals, headed by the notorious Josef Kramer, charged with responsibility for torture and mass murder of 50,000 prisoners at the German death camp at Belsen." "Kramer was absolutely straightforward." "He realised the game was up." "He didn't make excuses, like, "I was obeying orders."" "He just said, "I had a job to do and I did it."" "Belsen's women, as savage as any of the men." "Kramer's chief assistant, 21 years old and a veteran of five years of atrocities, Fraulein Irma Grese." "Irma Grese, she was the female camp commandant at Auschwitz." "Had a dreadful reputation for cruelty to the female inmates there." "Cruelty seemed to be a second part of her nature, gave me an overpowering sense of evil and right away I classed as the worst human being I had never met." "My experience of the Germans before the war was a very friendly one." "I admired them for their disciplined way of life." "They were hard workers." "But my attitude totally changed when I witnessed what I did in Belsen because I thought, "If these people are capable of this," ""they are just an evil race."" "I began to query them." "Did they know about these concentration camps?" "How did they justify them?" "Their excuse was they had been offered something to put their country back to where it had previously been by Hitler." "And they would have followed anybody that offered them this." "Outside Hitler's bunker are five petrol cans used for burning his body." "The whole of this Reich Chancellery has fallen to pieces." "In the centre of Hitler's study stands his chair, in a confusion of smashed woodwork, of filth and rubble." "The Me 163 is a rocket jet plane." "It carries its own oxygen supply." "Therefore, is not hampered by thinning atmosphere and high altitude." "Me 163 was a rocket interceptor." "Everything about it was new and different." "Swept back, semi-tailless, skid landing, almost like an expanded bullet." "But above all, it was rocket powered." "Oh, it's dangerous to fly, extremely, because of the volatility of the fuels." "Mit einer Pipette wird eine kleine Menge T-Stoff entnommen." "Its operational record was terrible." "The number of its own pilots it killed was huge, really." "It could go up to a very high Mach number, but once you'd passed that number, you'd lost control of the aircraft and it would tuck under." "There was no way out until it made a hole in the ground." "Das krieg fahrt lauft allein." "If you landed with as much as a half a cup full of fuel, the impact of landing, it would explode the whole thing." "I'm sitting in the cockpit, ready to go." "The noise is thunderous and you are given a bit of a shake-up on the take-off." "The acceleration is unbelievable." "I thought the performance was..." "There's only one word for it, phenomenal." "I felt that I was flying in a tin coffin because your chances of bailing out were virtually nil." "I took it on in the full knowledge of what the risk was." "But at the end of the day," "I felt a tremendous satisfaction in having beaten the odds." "I think this is one of the most attractive aspects of flying, taking on danger and winning, because you know what waits for you if you don't win." "A few months after war ended, trials of the tailless DH 108 began with Geoffrey de Havilland's flight at Woodbury." "To achieve supersonic flight was the Holy Grail of aviation in my time." "At the end of the war, the de Havilland team visited Germany and were fascinated by the 163." "So de Havilland swept the wings back 45 degrees, upped the jet engine to about 3,500 pounds of thrust." "They decided to prepare for an attempt on the world speed record." "Their chief test pilot was Geoffrey de Havilland, the son of the founder of the company." "I knew Geoffrey very well, saw a lot of Geoffrey." "To me, Geoffrey was more of the Hollywood-type of test pilot." "The way he was going to work up for it was to start with high-speed runs at 10,0ooft... keep full throttle on each run." "He was running at seven when, suddenly, the aircraft disintegrated." "The aircraft debris and Geoffrey's body fell on Egypt Bay near the estuary of the Thames." "Geoffrey was still in his parachute, but it had never been attempted to be opened." "So, right away, there was the first mystery." "Secondly, it was found that Geoffrey had a broken neck." "The cause of the disintegration was to be investigated and this was given to Farnborough." "I started to follow the same pattern of flight that he had gone on." "I got down to 4,0ooft." "Suddenly, the aircraft went into a violent oscillation." "It did three cycles a second and in each cycle, I was subjected to plus 4 g and minus 3 g." "The medics say that a pilot will stand this for ten seconds before going unconscious." "The one thought was survival." ""How do I get this sorted out?"" "I was beginning to lose consciousness, so what I did was hold the throttle, hold the stick and..." "this was pure instinct, just hold both back gently together." "As suddenly as it had happened, after seven seconds, it stopped." "I was pretty pleased about it, I can tell you." "I could see clearly that." "Geoffrey's head had probably violently struck the canopy." "Broken his neck and... that was it." "When you take on a job like that, part of it is a dare, part of it is a professional challenge." "Somebody's done an analysis of my flying and they say I've had 13 that might have finished up fatal but, erm I don't know." "I think two things have contributed to my survival." "I was a stickler for preparation before a flight." "There was a type of pilot who was a bit gung ho." "A great saying would be, "Kick the tyres, light the fires" ""and the last one off's a sissy."" "Now, if you have that attitude in test flying, you are not going to last very long." "And secondly, the fact I am small helped my survival." "For example, I had a crash in a Vampire." "If I'd been 6ft," "I'd have lost my legs." "I survived purely because I was small and I curled myself up in the cockpit." "De Havilland were developing a jet fighter, the Vampire, and there was a strong desire to operate jet aircraft from carriers." "We knew the Americans were trying to be the first to land a jet on an aircraft carrier and it was nothing but a friendly rivalry." "The sea was so rough, the carrier was moving... enough to make life difficult, certainly for a first landing." "So the signal had been sent out, "Return to base."" "But I didn't get that, so I screamed overhead and that was the first they knew I was there." "Another page of history was written on December 3rd, 1945, when LZ 551 landed on and took off from HMS Ocean, the first jet aircraft ever to operate from a ship at sea." " And the pilot, Lieutenant Commander Brown, "Winkle" to his friends." "The event is the cause of interest." "Some very considerable interest." "There it is." "Coming up from below." "Still surrounded and commanding attention." "The pilot can be seen in the foreground without a helmet." "Where does the urge come from?" "Feeling's believing." "The Goofers Gallery, as we call it, was filled with brass, top brass, and they all flooded down onto the flight deck." "The sailors who operate the arrestor gear, etc, they all came round and the one thing they wanted to do was warm their hands from the jet engine." "Running up at full power before taking off." "The spectators, a little more distant, behind something, somewhere." "There was no trouble with a free take-off." "A new era had started and the aircraft had come to stay." "'Two-two-zero." "Seven-zero." "'Can't see it in my radar." "Down you go." "'OK." "Standard descent.'" "By the mid '60s, I was moving up the seniority ladder." "It was likely that I'd get an air station." "Being a good Scot, I was praying that I'd get Lossiemouth, the training ground for nuclear bombers." "When I first went to the Fleet Air Arm, the first aircraft I flew was the biplane Gladiator." "You finish up at the end of my career, the Buccaneer." "They were as different from that early era as chalk from cheese." "War had pushed progress along so fast, at a huge cost, of course, in money and in lives." "When you compare these two eras, with the biplane and the Buccaneer, you are talking about destructive loads being delivered with accuracy that was unbelievable in those early days." "Science fiction, almost." "At first, when I had to retire from flying," "I think it was a feeling similar to a drug addict when he no longer can get his drugs." "Withdrawal symptoms were fierce for about a year and then I came to terms with it, after a year, but it wasn't easy." "One thing I learned about myself was I was prepared to give up anything to stay in test flying." "For six years at Farnborough, I virtually never had a day's leave." "That is a terrible imposition on your family, so there are prices to be paid." "It did become an obsession with me and it was something" "I felt I had to do otherwise I was..." "My soul, if you like to put it that way, would never be at peace." ""Wings Over The Navy" by Lew Stone and His Band." "♪ Wings over the Navy" "♪ Wings over the sea" "♪ We're top of the service" "♪ The Navy's cavalry" "♪ High over the ocean" "♪ Flying wide and free... ♪"