Spitfire Mk.Ia, 609 Squadron, September, 1940

[Old Man]

 

     The Supermarine Spitfire is one of a handful of aircraft to have passed from history into legend. Its good looks helped (good looks often do) --- the curve of a Spitfire's wing might well stand for an essence of beauty in the ruminations of some Romantic esthete. It is the Spitfire that is the emblem of the Battle of Britain, the iconic mount of 'the Few' who delivered the first solid check to Nazi arms, and it does no good to point out Hawker's Hurricane did more of the heavy lifting, or that the effectiveness of the Me 109 was greatly hampered by limited range, and at times by escort deployments mandated more for boosting the morale of bomber crews than for their combat utility. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend, so the saying goes, and don't bother arguing. Just about every modeller feels impelled to do a Battle of Britain Spitfire sometime, and this model of Spitfire Mk Ia serial R6915 is mine.

 

      Spitfire Mk Ia serial R6915 is preserved at the Imperial War Museum, albeit as it appeared during the twilight of its career in an Operational Training Unit. This aeroplane, however, began its active service career just as the Battle of Britain commenced. It was built to a contract let shortly before the war began, and on July 11 1940 was delivered to No. 6 Maintenance Unit. On July 21, R6915 was received by 609 (West Riding) Squadron, an old Auxiliary Air Force formation based then at Middle Wallop. The aircraft was assigned to B Flight's Blue Section, and marked as PR-U. Several pilots flew R6915 PR-U in its early days with the squadron, but by late August, this machine became the favored mount of a Pilot Officer with the striking name of Noël le Chevalier Agazarian.

 

      Noël le Chevalier Agazarian was one of four sons and two daughters born to an Armenian electrical engineer and his wife, a genteel Frenchwoman. After the Great War, she purchased a surplus Sopwith Pup airframe that was installed in the garden of their London residence as a children's plaything. Which may account for the unusual degree of 'air mindedness' among the Agazarian brood, for four of them when grown took up aviation. Noël's younger sister Monique was a ferry pilot for the Air Transport Auxiliary during WWII, and afterwards became a prominent authority on simulator training and instrument flying. Their eldest brother, Levon Berdj Agazarian, joined the RAF and served in the Far East, flying Thunderbolts from Calcutta at the end of the war. Another of the brothers, Jack Charles Agazarian, joined the RAF, but during his training was recruited into the Special Operations Executive for service as a radio operator in France, where in 1943 he was betrayed into Nazi hands under circumstances which on their face are none too favorable to MI-6 (see note below).

      Known as 'Aggie' to his friends, Noël le Chevalier Agazarian proved to be quite an athlete in his school days, excelling at rugby, swimming, and boxing. He was denied entry to Trinity College by its President, with the comment that "In 1911, when the last coloured gentleman had been at Trinity, it had really proved most unfortunate." Noël was accepted at another Oxford school, Wadham College, in 1935. While studying law Noël kept up his championship caliber boxing, and joined the Oxford University Air Squadron, part of the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve. Here he met and became good friends with another aspiring pilot, Richard Hillary, who in his war-time memoir The Last Enemy (see note below) described Noël Agazarian as an extremely intelligent fellow with 'a pleasantly ugly face' who seemed a bit bewildered at finding himself to be such a fine athlete instead of a scholar.

      Early in 1939, the reservists of the Oxford Squadron were called up for active training at Lossiemouth. Agazarian and Hillary, along with several others, coalesced into a clique who referred to themselves as 'the longhairs', and plagued the RAF sergeants in charge of their initial training by their studied indiscipline. On completion of their flight training, Agazarian and Hillary both were disappointed to be assigned to Army Cooperation School at Old Sarum. There they flew exercises on obsolete Hawker Hector biplanes (one of which Noël crashed without injury to himself) and on the standard service type, the Westland Lysander. When their class at Old Sarum concluded in June, 1940, the RAF was bracing itself for an impending aerial onslaught by the Luftwaffe, and almost all graduates of the Army Cooperation School were assigned to Fighter Command.

 

      Noël le Chevalier Agazarian joined 609 Squadron in July, and soon showed himself a good fighting pilot.  By mid-August, he had been credited with destroying three German fighters in air battles over naval installations on the south coast. Noël was flying PR-U R6915 on August 25, when he was credited with a fourth German fighter, an Me 110. From then through the end of September he flew this machine, being credited with two more fighters confirmed and two bombers as probables. On two occasions while attacking bombers, PR-U R6915 took damage from their defensive fire that forced Pilot Officer Agazarian to make a hurried landing, once with a bullet through the Merlin engine's oil sump, and once with a bullet through its glycol coolant tank. Both these, being in the lower part of the aeroplane's nose, were particularly vulnerable to well-aimed fire from a gunner directly attacked.

 

      PR-U R6915 was not flown by Pilot Officer Agazarian on its last sortie for 609 Squadron, but instead by Flying Officer John Dundas, considered a leading 'ace' at the time. Engaged with an Me 110, R6915 was struck by cannon shells, and the damage was beyond what a squadron workshop could cope with. The aeroplane was sent to a Civilian Repair Unit at Crowley on October 14, where it would remain till December. Noël le Chevalier Agazarian requested a transfer to North Africa in December, and was assigned to 274 Squadron there in January, 1941. Flying a Hurricane in support of 'Operation Brevity', he was killed on May 16.

 

      Spitfire Mk Ia R6915 had emerged from the repair shops and been delivered to 602 (City of Glasgow) Squadron in late January, 1941. With the new Spitfire Mk V coming into service, in July R6915 was relinquished to an Operational Training Unit, 61 OTU. R6915 then commenced to shuttle between various training units and repair facilities till summer of 1944, when it went into storage at Cardiff. From there, it was struck off RAF charge to the Imperial War Museum for static display in 1947, where it exists today.

 

      This model is built from the 'old tool' Airfix Spitfire I/II in 1/72. It was recommended back when I bought it as having better shape to the wing than the Tamiya offering, and Airfix was at the time putting out a 50th anniversary re-issue of the kit, the first one it had put on the market, which like the original came in a bag, not a box, and was moulded in bright blue plastic. I built the kit to OOB standard, with panel lines scribed and pilot figure employed. National markings are from an old Techmod sheet, ID codes from what remains of a Fantasy Workshop sheet. Wife printed up the serials. I doubt many of these are going to be built up nowadays, with the excellent new tooling available, but it went together well, and I think still does the business of making a decent miniature Battle of Britain Spitfire.

 

      When I chose PR-U R6915 as a subject for my model, I had no idea what lay behind the machine. I was simply looking through profiles in an old Aircam number for a Spitfire that had been in the thick of things in the Battle of Britain, whose codings could be replicated with decals I had on hand. Looking into operations of 609 Squadron, and refreshing my memory of Spitfire development and service, led to the discovery this machine was preserved in the Imperial War Museum. Reading the museum's 'History Note' for R6915, the name Noël le Chevalier Agazarian leapt out as something that just might be worth a closer look. Doing so led not only to a good deal of information about the gentleman, but to other stories his touched on, such as the skein of betrayals which caught up his brother Jack in France, and the painfully-won celebrity his friend Richard Hillary briefly enjoyed. I have prepared a note on each of these gentlemen, presented below in separate posts. It would be churlish to present here no detail concerning the career of Noël's sister Monique, but I can do no better justice to her than was done in her obituary in The Independent, written by someone she taught to fly, who considered her both mentor and friend....

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-monique-agazarian-1499214.html

 

Edited July 21, 2020 by Old Man

[Old Man]

Jack Agazarian
      The Special Operations Executive sent Jack Agazarian to France in December, 1942, where he joined a group (one of many run by the SOE) known as the Prosper or Doctor network. By February, 1943, he was radio operator for one Henri Alfred Eugène Déricourt, who had arrived from England in January to take over arrangement of clandestine flights transporting agents and documents between England and France.
      Déricourt had worked for French intelligence during the Spanish Civil War, and while doing so had become friends with an English journalist, Nicholas Bodington, and a German policeman, Karl Boemelburg. When France fell, Déricourt devoted himself to black market dealings, and renewed acquaintance with his friend Boemelburg, who was now head of the Sicherheitdienst in occupied Paris.
      In August of 1942 Déricourt made his way to England, offering himself as an agent. Though MI5 thought Déricourt unreliable, MI6 snapped him up, and grafted him onto the French Section of the SOE, where Déricourt's journalist friend Bodington held high rank. When Déricourt returned to France, his Parisian residence was but a short stroll from Boemelburg's Sicherheitdienst office, and next door to the home of the counterintelligence chief of the Abwehr.
      By the summer Jack Agazarian was convinced Déricourt was at the very least a serious security risk. His concerns, and those of other Prosper network operatives, went unheeded. Shortly after Jack carried his suspicions back to London on June 16, Déricourt began turning the Prosper network over to the Nazis, with the first arrests carried out on June 23. Déricourt's friend Bodington accompanied Jack Agazarian back to France to investigate on July 22, and sent Jack alone to meet a man who had already been arrested by the Gestapo. Bodington came to no harm, but Jack Agazarian was taken, tortured for months, then held in a concentration camp until being finally killed in March, 1945.
      There is no doubt MI6 thought they were running Déricourt as a double agent against the Germans, though it certainly seems the balance of his treacheries were of greater benefit to the Germans than otherwise. What is open to some question is whether MI6 considered that Déricourt's several betrayals of SOE operations served their interests as much as those of the Germans. MI6 regarded the SOE with great distaste, and not only as a potential competitor, for among the French resistance the SOE serviced were a great many Communists. Since a double agent must be allowed to give the other side something genuine, the possibility that damage to the fortunes of the SOE in France was an aim of running Déricourt, and not just an unfortunate but necessary cost of doing so, cannot be dismissed.

[Old Man]

Richard Hillary
     Richard Hillary was in New York when he commenced writing his best-selling memoir, The Last Enemy. He was part of a goodwill tour of English notables despatched to the United States in 1941 as part of Churchill's effort to turn public opinion in America in favor of joining the war against Hitler.
     When Richard Hillary's Oxford Squadron friend 'Aggie' Agazarian departed Old Sarum in June of 1940 to join 609 Squadron, Hillary was assigned to a different Spitfire unit, 603 (City of Edinburgh) Squadron, with the rank of Pilot Officer. 603 Squadron was based in the north at Montrose, and held in reserve there during the early stages of the Battle of Britain. At the end of August, 603 Squadron was finally sent south, one of several replacements for battered formations in 11 Group, and commenced flying from the airfield at Hornchurch.
      Thrown into the climactic stage of the aerial battle, Richard Hillary lasted a week as a fighter pilot. He was credited with five German fighters destroyed in that time, but he held on shooting at the last of them a few seconds too long. Cannon shells from another German fighter set the fuel tank behind his Spitfire's instrument panel ablaze, and its cockpit became a conflagration. Hillary amid the flames managed to get the canopy open, and unbuckle his safety harness, but blacked out before he could clamber from the fire. The gyrations of the falling aeroplane threw him out, and he regained consciousness in time to release his parachute, though his hands, like his face, had been burnt down to bone in places. After some time in the sea, he was rescued by a Margate lifeboat.
      A great portion of The Last Enemy describes the agonizing course of hospitalization and plastic surgeries, including reconstruction of lips and eyelids, which gave Richard Hillary something resembling a face, and at least some use of his hands. Though it was his character as a man badly wounded in  England's fight for her life which secured him a place in the propaganda tour of the United States, Hillary was only allowed to give newspaper interviews, and to speak on the radio, for fear his appearance might dampen the ardor for war the tour was intended to arouse in the American public.
      Something about the man, however, appealed to the actress Merle Oberon, a great star in English pictures during the thirties, who had accompanied her director husband Richard Korda to Hollywood after the war began. She and Hillary had what is described as 'a brief but torrid affair' before he returned to England. There he underwent further surgeries, and managed to wrangle a return to active service in the RAF, being assigned late in 1942 to 54 OTU, where he was to learn to fly light bombers. On January 8, 1943, on a night flight in a Blenheim, Flying Officer Richard Hillary encountered bad weather, and lost control of the machine, killing himself and his trainee navigator, Sgt. Wilfred Fisson.
      Richard Hillary's memoir was published in the United States, under the title Falling Through Space, before it was published in England under the more familiar title. It was a best seller before its author died, and was well received in literary circles as well. It is an interesting book, well worth reading. Hillary's account of what drove him to seek out being a fighter pilot is honest and unsparing, and given the consequences of that desire, something he is clearly at pains not to disown or regret. It is also a good window into the world inhabited by young men of means who, before the war, were raised in boarding schools, and went to the best of colleges as much for sport as for learning.
      The book may be found online here, for any interested:
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0501181.txt

Edited July 21, 2020 by Old Man

[Angell328]

Lovely build and history, always nice to hear the background of machines and the men that flew them.

[Spitfire31]

A neat Spitfire and riveting tales, well told. Thank you!

 

Kind regards,

 

Joachim

[2996 Victor]

Lovely build and fascinating back stories. I've never read Richard Hillary's book, but will definitely seek it out now.

 

Many thanks and kind regards,

 

Mark

[bigbadbadge]

Lovely model and fascinating background too, great work.

All the best

Chris

[Old Man]

Thank you, Gentlemen, for the kind words. This was a project that started small, just something to build after a long spell away of not building anything, and turned into something else once I started looking into the pilot's name.

[sanfrandragon]

Lovely model and fascinating history!

[Serkan Sen]

Lovely build with great history...

Serkan

[Wulfman]

You’ve done a great job on the old Airfix kit, nice presentation too !
 

Wulfman