Arthur Clouston

Arthur Edmund Clouston DSO DFC AFC and Bar, was born in Motueka, New Zealand on 7 April 1908, to Robert Clouston and Ruby Scott. Robert was manager of a gold mine but when gold-mining became uneconomic, he became a ranger on a native game reserve. Arthur’s grandfather, Captain Henry Clouston, came to New Zealand about 1850. He had been born in Jamaica, where his father Edward owned a sugar plantation, the Mt St Oliver Estate. Edward was a son of Rev William Clouston, minister of Sandwick and Stromness and a very well-known naturalist and historian.

Having learned to fly as a teenager, Arthur found there were no vacancies in the New Zealand Air Force so he moved to Britain and eventually succeeded in joining the RAF. He passed through the one year course in six months, though he said he felt no conscious sense of prowess, as "flying came as naturally as walking."

Clouston was posted to No 25 Squadron at Hawkinge, an elite squadron who performed fly-pasts and put on displays at the Hendon Air Display, including nine aircraft looping-the-loop while tied together. At the end of his four year short-service commission he intended to look for a job with the New Zealand civil airlines but an invitation to apply for one of two new posts as a civilian test pilot for the RAF quickly changed his mind.

This job suited him down to the ground, hair-raising though it sounds to the outsider. The two series of experiments that he discusses in his autobiography both produced far-reaching benefits but clearly required great skill and nerve to carry out. The first was to study the problem of planes icing over when they flew through storm clouds. Clouston would fly into the clouds and wait for two inches of ice to form on the wings and propeller; the plane would then plummet earthwards until the ice melted off, when he’d fly up and start again.

The other question to be considered was the effectiveness of barrage balloons. Ben Lockspeiser and Roxbee Cox, two RAF scientists who were later knighted for their work, wanted to investigate the effect of barrage balloon wire on aircraft and said to Clouston “All we want you to do is to fly into the wire and see what happens.”

Clouston began by taking a Miles Hawk, an open cockpit, wood and fabric two-seater plane, up to 5000 feet and throwing out a ball of fishing line attached to a parachute. As the line unrolled, he would fly around in a circle and line up so that the line struck about half way along the wing. These tests showed that the string cut into the wing but the main danger was from the end of the string whipping around and tangling with the propeller. Tests were then made with wire, this time with an all-metal plane over Salisbury Plain. It was harder to see and to hit at the right angle so sometimes he returned to base trailing hundreds of feet of wire.

“There was nothing I could do about it, but trail the wire across the town as I made my approach to land. Once I caught some painters on a work-stand. They were painting the senior scientists’ mess when the wire whipped round the painters’ two-storey-ladder stage, and dragged the entire structure, with paint and painters, to the ground …On another occasion I netted a bicycle rack holding eight or ten bicycles. The wire caught it at the main gate of the RAE and the rack trailed behind me in mid-air, with the bicycles dropping off in a trail across the airfield.”

“The swaying and whipping of the wire made it very much more dangerous than the string. One afternoon I flew at 170 miles per hour into the wire, but it caught the tip of the metal propeller and was whirled like a flail round the cockpit, fuselage and wings. By the time I had throttled back the engine, there were deep gashes several feet long, wherever the wire had struck. One ran down the side of the cockpit and fuselage from a point two inches away from my ear. A fire started behind the propeller, but fortunately went out by itself after a few seconds.”

A steel mesh cockpit canopy was installed and tests went on, this time against wires hanging from barrage balloons over derelict ground in Norfolk. Clouston and the scientists then considered protection against the wire and developed cutters for the wing tip. He derived considerable satisfaction during the war from the sight of the balloon barrages around Britain.

During his last year in the RAF, he began competing in air races. He won various small prizes and then, in 1936, took part in a race from England to Johannesburg. It went well until he had to make a forced landing in a swamp 2000 miles short of his destination. He spent the rest of the night crouched on the cockpit floor, listening to the figures moving in the swampy water.

“As daylight came I cautiously raised my head above the cockpit. About fifty yards away was a string of natives armed with spears and small bows and arrows. They were jet black and completely nude.”

After wading through the swamp for nearly three miles and following a clay road for another mile they came to a white washed mud hut where he was greeted by the words, “Flying Officer Clouston, I presume?” by a Scot called Monty Dwen, manager of a sisal farm, who had been listening to the race on the radio.

Clouston had landed 140 miles from Entebbe and was determined to complete the race within the time limit. There was only one other competitor left in the race so, if he could cover 2,000 miles in less than 48 hours he would at least come in second.

With the help of hundreds of natives, they got the plane onto the road by late afternoon and used fuel for the farm engine to fly forty miles to an emergency landing field at Massindi where he got aviation fuel. On the last leg, from Salisbury to Johannesburg, fighting exhaustion, his engine began to miss and suddenly stopped dead.

“I was too stupefied to know fear. There was a stoical resignation to the inevitable. This was the end of the race, and this was the end of Flying Officer Clouston. For a few seconds I had a strong urge to get it all over by diving the machine into the ground. But the instinct of self-preservation prevailed. Instead, I trimmed the aircraft to the slowest safe gliding speed. I put the flaps down to their maximum lift position, and glided at an airspeed of sixty miles per hour, just above the stall. The moon had not yet risen. The night was pitch-black. I could not see where I was going or what kind of landing-ground awaited me. I just sat there, gliding straight ahead into the pitch blackness.

I estimated I still had some 3,000 feet to go when the impact came. There was noise and shock, an impression of disintegration and fragments flying through the air, and then I was engulfed by the pitch blackness of the night.

It was very quiet. There was no sound, nothing. Just a deathly silence and stillness. I supposed I was dead. My body was no longer a part of me. I could feel nothing… And then from a long way off I heard voices, and in particular a woman’s voice. She was speaking a language strange to me, but I knew she was saying: ‘Don’t go near him. He’s dead.’

I wanted to protest. I struggled to shout out that it was not true. At long last my voice responded to the urging and I knew that I had called out physically aloud.

Hands came to me. Hands and a ring of grass torches flickering through the blackness. I wanted then to be certain that I would not fall asunder as the aircraft had done. Slowly, cautiously, I began to explore my body, telling in turn an arm to raise, a leg muscle to tighten, a toe to wriggle. There was no pain, there was no refusal to function. Even then I could not believe that there were no bones broken.

Words in guttural English came to me, encouraging, reassuring. I surrendered to them and let myself be helped to my feet.

I looked down at the dust and the wreckage. There were no wings, no fuselage. They lay around in fragments. Only the engine was intact, battered, but in one piece. Only the engine and myself: and I had not suffered a scratch.

On the ground I saw a brown-paper parcel. I picked it up. Inside was my wrinkled, but clean, change of clothing and tooth-brush. I felt more reassured. I may have arrived uninvited, but at least I had my luggage.”

He managed to hitch-hike to Johannesburg, arriving just in time for the air-race banquet.

In 1937, Clouston took part in a race from Istre, near Marseilles, over Italy and Greece to Damascus and then straight back to Paris. He was now flying a Comet, which he described as probably the most efficient aeroplane ever built, doing twenty miles to the gallon. A friend from his early training days with the RAF, Flight Lieutenant George Nelson, agreed to be co-pilot.

The flight to Damascus was completed without any serious problems and they had perfect weather for the return leg, until they reached the Alps, covered in towering storm clouds. Clouston tried to climb over them but at 19,000 ft the Comet could climb no higher so he had to level out in the storm cloud and fly on instruments. They flew for thirty minutes as the weather got worse; rain turned to hail, lightening flashed and turbulence threw them around; ice an inch thick formed on the wings. As the control stick became almost impossible to move, Clouston realised that the ailerons had frozen solid. Worse still, the engines slowed and they began to lose height rapidly, while flying over 16,000 ft high peaks.

“We had no parachutes or we would have jumped there and then to save our necks. As it was, whether we continued towards Paris or turned back for Venice the result was inevitable. Sooner or later we must hit a mountainside. We had no power to go up, we could not go forward or back, so there was only one thing left to do, go down. That was our only chance, to go down and trust to God we were over a valley.”

He put the Comet into a spiral, gliding turn. The altimeter needle dropped to 13,000 ft before they broke into a pocket of clear air, with cloud in every direction and only their instruments to tell them which way was up. Slowly the ice fell off the wings and the engines picked up. Flying straight in any direction wasn’t an option so Clouston spiralled up again, hoping to clear the bad weather before icing forced them down again. He climbed for twenty minutes through rain, sleet and snow and levelled out at 17,000 ft. Fifteen minutes later the engines began to falter again as they flew through a heavy snowstorm. He spiralled down through the cloud again, praying for their luck to hold. Then, after a brittle explosion, rain and hailstones began to beat down on them. He ducked behind the instrument panel and realised that the sudden temperature and pressure changes had shattered the cockpit canopy. At 11,000 ft the engines returned to life and they circled up again and levelled out for Paris. After twenty minutes, they thought they were clear but then hit heavier snow and down they went again, to 8,500 ft. As Clouston began to ascend again for the third time he realised they must have used up all their luck and dreaded having to descend again.

“And then I caught a shrouded glimpse of the rocky floor of a valley rushing past several hundred feet below us. I promptly pushed the nose of the Comet down. We broke cloud almost in the snow waters of a swollen river. We flew along it. Cloud hung all around us. A mountainside sheered up before me. I banked sharply, missing the ground by feet as the valley took a sharp turn to the left. Precariously we followed the river down a narrow gorge. I was more frightened than ever, not knowing whether we would be caught out at any minute by the wall of cloud in front of us. For minutes that seemed hours, we hugged the valley, until the sight that we had no longer dared to think about broke suddenly upon us. We were out of night into day, out of cold and into warmth, out of mountains into lowlands. We were flying over the sunlit plains of France, and the sun was in our hearts.”

Thirty-five minutes later they sighted the Eiffel Tower and landed at Le Bourget airport but found that three planes had just landed ahead of them. They were the last to arrive; the other six competitors had crashed or were lost. Even after WWII, Clouston regarded his crossing of the Alps as his worst hour in the air.

In 1937 Clouston met Betty Kirby-Green, who had recently acquired her pilot’s licence and wanted Clouston to join her in an attempt to break the record for the return flight to Cape Town. She said she could raise the finance, if Clouston attended to the planning and flying. The preparations were intense.

“Permits had to be obtained from all the countries we were to fly over, and also from those within the vicinity of our route. Strip-maps of the route were drawn up with all the detailed information I could gather. Tracks, distances, speeds, altitudes, the times of the rising and setting of sun and moon, and a plan of all the aerodromes along the route for use in emergency were printed at the side of each strip of map.

I prepared diagrams of the Comet, with details of the petrol tanks, the amount of fuel required, and the position of the filler-caps, and sent them to the petrol and oil representatives at my proposed stopping-places along the route so that refuelling could be carried out with the minimum of delay.”

The Comet, originally called Grosvenor House, was christened the Burberry, in return for £250 and clothing that included flying suits made to Clouston’s design. These were later marketed as the Clouston Flying-suit.

The first leg of their flight was to Cairo and sounds idyllic. “Flying was easy and straightforward, and I was getting a great kick out of Betty’s excitement as we saw the lights of Paris in the distance; the Rhone valley bathed in the moonlight; the port of Marseilles; the Mediterranean. Everything was marvellous to her, and the way things were going, it was marvellous to me too.

Daylight brought the first glimpse of North Africa, with the coastline of Libya running along the horizon to starboard. Away to port the mountains of Crete pushed their peaks through ruffs of cloud. Soon we were speeding over the sails of the Arab dhows that dotted the rivers of the broad Nile delta between Alexandria and Cairo.”

They covered the 2370 miles to Cairo in ten hours, 55 minutes, knocking several hours off the record. Flying via Khartoum and Johannesburg, they approached Cape Town after night-fall and saw the light of Cape Town lighthouse dead ahead and a “white ribbon of car lights [that] stretched along the surrounding roads for miles.”

In those early days of aviation, record-breaking flights generated enormous excitement. “We touched down lightly, and were slowing at the end of our run when a black wall of literally thousands upon thousands of people emerged from the darkness, sweeping towards us.” It was estimated later that over 100,000 people surrounded the plane within seconds and it took the police and military more than thirty minutes to clear a path to the hangar. When they tried to get to the office to complete customs formalities, a dozen policemen in a battering-ram could make no impression. Clouston and Betty were eventually passed over the heads of the crowd, walking from shoulder to shoulder.

There was no chance to sight-see, the next day was spent in personal appearances and interviews. When they set off early the following day, the return trip was more of a struggle, through tiredness and bad weather over the Alps. Including the two nights and a day in Cape Town, the trip had taken 5 days, 17 hours, and 30 minutes, breaking all the existing records by Amy Johnstone and lowering the time for the round trip by about five days.

Journalists and newsreel photographers covered the arrival and official congratulations were brought from the Secretary of State for Air. The Grosvener Hotel provided two suites and laid on a cocktail party. Clouston delivered a letter of greetings from the Lord Mayor of Cape Town to the Lord Mayor of London and was interviewed for In Town Tonight. Clouston was awarded the 1937 Segrave Trophy for the best performance in the British Empire on an internal-combustion engine and the Royal Aero Club’s Britannia Trophy for the best performance in the air.

Clouston got married to Elsie a month after the flight to Cape Town and promised his wife that he’d give up long-distance flying. Then Victor Ricketts, air correspondent of the Daily Express, asked if he would make a record-breaking flight to Australia with him. Australian Consolidated Press put up the money and renamed the Comet Australian Anniversary, in honour of Australia’s 150th anniversary. They took off from Croydon on 6 February 1938, heading for Aleppo in Turkey. They flew over cloud for eight hours burning more fuel than expected and eventually had to land near the Turkish town of Adana. The police there tried to delay their departure, as they did not think their paperwork was in order, so that night they climbed through a window and ran to the airfield. The take-off would have to be on 400 yards of stone road, between two small bridges and lined with deep drainage ditches. Clouston warned Ricketts there was only a 50-50 chance but Ricketts was willing to take the chance if Clouston was.

Clouston taxied as close as he could to one of the bridges and then managed to turn the plane in the road to race down towards the other bridge. “We had nothing like enough speed as the bridge raced to meet us. But it was a case of now or never. I eased back the stick. The Comet staggered into the air. I could feel her petering on the edge of the stall, and dared not climb away. We jarred abruptly as the port wheel hit the top of the bridge. We were air-borne.” However, one wheel wouldn’t retract.

Intending to land under British rule, they flew to Cyprus and found a small airfield. Despite all Clouston could do, it was impossible to land on one wheel and the plane landed on her belly. A car raced up and two men ran out and hoisted the wind-sock. When asked what they were doing, they replied that this was their job when an aircraft arrived and it cost the pilot two and six. Clouston assured them that he wasn’t paying for a windsock to be hoisted several minutes after he’d landed. Engineers were sent from England and they flew home two weeks later. It was agreed they would try again at the March full moon.

On 15 March they set off again and had a trouble-free flight to Cairo, then set off across the Arabian desert to Basra, the first time a plane had made the direct, thousand mile flight. The only things marked on the map were a few explorer’s tracks. At mid-day they were astonished to suddenly fly into a snowstorm. Clouston climbed to 12,000 feet as ice formed on the wings and propellers and was deeply grateful he had done so when the storm cleared and they looked down on a snow-covered range of mountains, 5000 ft high and not marked on the map.

They flew on via Basra, Allahabad, Penang and Singapore but bad weather and the safer route they’d taken meant they didn’t break the London - Darwin record. Next day they flew to Charleville and then on to Sydney. Clouston couldn’t understand why thousands of people packed Sydney airport. He had focused on the Darwin record and didn’t at first realise they had broken the London - Sydney record by several days.

Clouston was determined to fly on to New Zealand, to see his family for the first time in eighteen years, so the next day they headed for Blenheim, where Clouston had first learned to fly. He was excited to see the town again but couldn’t understand why the streets were deserted. The answer became apparent when they discovered the entire population, including his parents, brothers and sisters and civic dignitaries at the airport. He spent the evening with his family and set off for London the following morning.

The return flight was hard and tiring and had to be done in smaller hops but they finally crossed the Sussex coast. Another reception committee included a cabinet minister who passed on the congratulations of the Prime Minister on “the longest and greatest flight and test of endurance that has yet been attempted. The trip had taken 10 days, 21 hours, and 22 minutes, and they had had a total of sixteen hours sleep. They set records to Sydney and New Zealand and across Australia and the Tasman Sea. The England- New Zealand record still stood when Clouston was writing his autobiography in 1952.

The Comet was discovered rusting away in a shed and, with its body restored, it was exhibited at the Festival of Britain. It was subsequently restored sufficiently to be flown again in ?. It is now part of the collection of planes at Old Warden, Bedfordshire, in what is described as a taxiable condition.

Shortly after this, when Clouston was back at Farnborough, a Jewish businessman came to see him. He said that he represented a group of wealthy industrialists and they were willing to pay Clouston whatever he asked, if he would assassinate Hitler by dropping a bomb from the Comet. Clouston argued that he would be readily identified but found that they had worked out a careful plan. They had a secret airstrip where the Comet could be disguised, Clouston would fly north and come in from the Baltic to drop a bomb on Hitler’s car during a ceremonial parade.

When told he could name his own figure, Clouston said that was ridiculous, as he could say he wanted a million pounds. He was told they were willing to pay that. Two things prevented him; his belief that the Germans would never stop looking for him and the fact that he, at that time, had nothing against Hitler personally and so would be killing for money. He argued that a Jewish pilot should do it. In 1952 he wrote, “I have thought about it a lot since. Few men get such an opportunity of learning the truth about themselves. Even so, I have never been really sure how much I was held back by conscience, and how much by fear of being caught.” Of course, when war came he wondered what difference he could have made but in the end he believed that things could have been worse without Hitler’s control over German High Command.

When war broke out, Clouston was called up as a Squadron Leader but carried on test flying. He was frustrated that they were not allowed to arm the planes, ready to respond to raids. This became acute when he heard that his brother, Flight Lieutenant Falcon Nelson Clouston had been shot down and killed while flying a Hurricane over Dunkirk. A few weeks later the fighters were armed and Clouston managed to shoot down two enemy planes.

Then the Battle of Britain was over and the night bombers arrived. Tests were begun at Farnborough on flares to illuminate the bombers. Clouston wasn’t keen on the idea of flying a plane lit up by flares in an area where there was enemy activity, so they headed to Silloth on the North-east coast.

A Whitley bomber flew in front of Clouston and switched his lights off. The scientist in Clouston’s plane switched on the two million-candle-power flares under each wing and Clouston was immediately blinded. He warned the bomber to get away and then had to wait three and a half minutes for the flares to burn out. Just then, he was warned that an enemy aircraft had been detected alongside him.

“Twisting and turning I set off for the coast, feeling as naked as on the day I was born, and just as helpless. Below, the aerodrome lights had been switched off, but the airfield and the countryside for miles around were lit up as if it were day.” The German plane didn’t attack Clouston but used the illumination to bomb the airfield. Clouston said he had never known a longer three and a half minutes and described it as being like dreaming you are naked in Picadilly Circus “but this was reality and fifty times worse.”

When he could finally land, he was relieved to find damage had been confined to a barn and haystack. However, they were asked to take their tests elsewhere.

Clouston enjoyed the next tests, which involved steering a remote controlled launch from his aircraft. Tests on a large reservoir near Heston were successful but Clouston’s request to fit launches with high explosives and steer them into German submarine pens was refused. A party of VIPs and scientists came to see the experiments and Clouston gave them a trip around the reservoir, steering from his spitfire 10,000 feet up. He brought them back to the hastily improvised steel jetty but misjudged it slightly, so that, as the scientists disembarked, the bow of the launch lifted and got entangled with the jetty.

“I had the engine of the launch running full astern, and realised too late that the jetty with the scientists still on it was being dragged into the reservoir. Horrified I looked down and saw the jetty and scientists sink in sixty feet of water, with a cauldron of bubbles and an assortment of city hats marking the spot. Fortunately they were all fished out by boat-hooks, but not before some had lost spectacles and false teeth.”

Clouston had been asking for some time for a transfer to operational flying and in 1942 he was finally posted to take command of Number 224 Anti-Submarine Squadron, based at Beaulieu and equipped with Liberators. This was part of Coastal Command and he found himself fighting a different kind of war. The patrols were long, fourteen to sixteen hours hunting for submarines.

Clouston found the threat of the sea something new and believed that other pilots struggled as well and sometimes hesitated to attack, for fear of having to ditch in rough seas. He believed that on one occasion this was why five Me110s didn’t attack his group of three Liberators. “The sea was certainly rough all right. It was no exaggeration to say that the waves were big enough to swallow a battleship, for we were in fact, returning from escorting a battleship down the Bay of Biscay. She was the Renown, a majestic sight ploughing her way at full speed through an Atlantic gale. Every third wave seemed to envelop her; but then she would rise triumphantly, shaking off the water and riding the next two seas, taking a fresh breath before disappearing again under the towering wall of grey-green water. For the solitary escorting destroyer the going was even heavier, and for moments on end, it seemed, nothing but a white flurry of foam marked her position.” He only discovered afterwards that the Renown had been taking Churchill to Teheran to meet Roosevelt and Stalin to discuss Operation Overlord.

Sometimes a single mysterious plot would appear on the wall map and if it was near his patrol, Clouston would take a look “Nothing gave me a greater thrill than to discover an anonymous plot to be the troop-laden Queen Mary, zigzagging and unescorted, relying on her superior speed to protect her from the 500 submarines that Hitler had at one time on prowl in the deep.”

Clouston vividly described an attack on a u-boat that they had approached under cloud cover.

“I put the nose down. From 1,000 feet we dived out of cloud and rain into brilliant sunshine. Sea and submarine raced to meet us. We could almost hear the shouts of Achtung and the racketing hooter of the sub’s ‘Action Stations’ alarm.

Three power-operated turrets swung to meet us, and the multi-gun units lined up in our path of flight. Grapes of flak began to blister the sky around us, jolting and shaking the aircraft. We were looking down the barrels of their guns. It was impossible for them to miss at such point-blank range.

But the stick of depth charges was away, straddling the submarine, and the Liberator was straining and shuddering as I levelled her up at ten feet, and had to bank violently to avoid hitting the periscope with the port wing. Then the blast from our own high explosives lifted us into the air.

We came round for another attack. The submarine was trying to crash-dive, sliding under the water with the gunners still firing in their turret. We could see the tense fear in their faces, but still they kept up the barrage, firing at us to the last as the waves drowned them in their seats.

The sea closed over the conning-tower; and then the tail rose out of the water, standing up almost vertically for moments that seemed minutes, its propellers threshing the air. At last, slowly, lazily almost, she slipped below for the last time, and the sea began to boil with bubbles of air, and oil, and mud, and debris.”

Although he doesn’t mention it, this is probably the action for which he was awarded the DFC in 1943. He was already the holder of the AFC and bar for his work as a test pilot and was awarded the DSO in 1944 for his work as a Squadron Commander.

After his twelve-month tour of operations at Beaulieu, Clouston was ordered to take command of a new station opening at Langham in Norfolk. Two Beaufighter Squadrons were based there; 455, which was Australian, and 489, which was a New Zealand Squadron. Formations of thirty or forty planes would attack shipping from the Belgian coast to the tip of Norway. Clouston found it particularly hard that as Station Commander he could not take part in dangerous raids. The Beaufighters transferred to Scotland and their place was taken by three Wellington squadrons, to attack the E-boats which were dashing across the channel at night, laying mines and attacking convoys. The Wellingtons used radio telephones to direct motor torpedo boats to attack the e-boats. When the Second Front opened, the squadrons had to increase their patrols but didn’t see much action. When the signal came that the war was over, Clouston led a united thanks-giving service for the entire station of almost 3,000 service-man and women. Almost immediately afterwards, he was posted to Germany.

Clouston went to Germany to take charge of a newly constructed airfield at Buckeburg, which was to become the HQ for the British Air Forces of Occupation. It was the air-transport centre for all the British forces in Europe and handled up to 100 aircraft a day. While there he accepted a permanent commission only to shortly afterwards be offered the position of Director-General of Civil Aviation in New Zealand. The RAF refused to release him but did post him to New Zealand for a two year tour of duty.

His autobiography ends there but his career continued upwards. From 1954-57 he was the Air Officer Commanding in Singapore and he received a CB in 1957. The last three years before his retirement were spent in charge of the experimental station at Boscombe Down. He died in Cornwall in 1984, at the age of 75. The Times wrote, “That his name is not a household one such as these other aviators was due to his dislike of publicity and a single-minded dedication to his task which shunned ballyhoo and other external distractions.”

His autobiography, “The Dangerous Skies”, published by Cassell & Co in 1954 and Pan books in 1956, from which most of this article is taken, is fairly widely available and is a fascinating and well-written first-hand account of an astonishing career, which he was very fortunate to survive. It is dedicated, “To my brother, Flight Lieutenant Falcon Nelson, Fighter Command, Royal Air Force, killed in air combat whilst helping to defend the beaches at Dunkirk, May 1940; and to all the others who did not return”.