Captain Eric 'Winkle' Brown CBE DSC AFC RN died aged 97 on February 21. He was the Royal Navy's most decorated pilot, a record-breaking daredevil and interrogator of the Nazis. Surrey Downs Magazine's Emily Horton was the last journalist to interview the aviation legend
Captain Brown tribute: Emily Horton interviewed on Radio 4's Today programme
You may never have heard of Captain Eric Brown – but you should have done. The world’s most decorated test pilot, he pushed himself – and his aircraft – to the limits of the possible, paving the way for modern technological advances and setting three Guinness World Records. Then, at Nuremberg, he interrogated Göring and Speer. On any list of greatest living Britons, Eric’s name should be written in ink.
Today his home is at Copthorne, just over the Sussex border and – fittingly enough – a few miles from Gatwick Airport, gateway to the skies where his aviator’s heart takes wing. In January he celebrated his 97th birthday at The Ritz, his appetite for life still undimmed by the peril and pioneering of his youth. His tale is the stuff of Hollywood, far removed from the colder, northern shores where it began.
Eric Melrose Brown was born in 1919 at Leith, near Edinburgh, to a former First World War pilot. His first flight came at just 10, sitting on his father’s knee, and the experience clearly didn’t put him off. When his father later took him to the Berlin Olympics in 1936, Eric experienced a chance encounter with German fighter ace Ernst Udet.
Udet – who went on to became Director-General for Equipment in the German air force, the Luftwaffe – invited the young man for a flight. With his passenger safely strapped in, Udet put the aircraft through its full range of aerobatic paces, suddenly rolling it on its back as he brought it in to land.
Credit: Laura Dodsworth
“It was like approaching my demise,” recalls Eric. “We were actually just 50ft up.”
At the last moment, however, Udet rolled the plane the right way up and landed with everything intact.
Back on terra firma, Eric was speechless. Udet roared with laughter, hitting him smartly between the shoulder blades.
“Hals und Beinbruch!” he yelled, favouring Eric with the German fighter pilot’s greeting. Freely translated: ‘Break a leg!”
Eric’s calling to the cockpit was born.
“From that moment I was unswervingly dedicated to emulating those feats,” he recalls.
First stop, however, was Edinburgh University to read modern languages.
“German was my primary subject. It attracted me as unusual and, of course, the university had the great advantage of having an air training squadron.”
Eric’s first flying instructor quickly singled him out as a natural pilot. And Eric’s penchant for daredevil activities also led him to earn money as a wheel of death stuntdriver, driving a motorcycle around a vertical track with his eccentric employer’s pet lion riding shotgun in the sidecar.
In 1938, in his penultimate year of study, he went to Germany as an exchange student to teach. He made a “huge number” of friends, he says, but the influence of the Nazi regime was pervasive; an oppressive shadow portending war.
“Every little boy was attracted to the Hitler Youth. I certainly thought it looked better than the Boy Scouts. They had many more privileges – like flying! I used to talk to them, but they would never take me up, although they did let me stay in their clubhouse and read their magazines.”
Eric was in Munich on that fateful September morning in 1939 when World War II was declared, and he awoke to find two men from the SS at his door. Interrogated for three days, he was eventually driven to the Swiss border where, to his surprise, he was released – along with his British MG car, of which the Germans also wanted to be rid.
Once home, Eric signed up to the Fleet Air Arm, flying section of the Royal Navy. His initial operational flying was from the escort carrier HMS Audacity, and he was on board when it was hit by three torpedoes from a German U-boat in 1941. The consequences were catastrophic.
“The ship reared up so steeply that all the aircraft plunged down the wildly tilting deck. When she sank, she took them all with her. I lost many friends that day.”
Indeed. There were 480 on aboard Audacity: Eric was just one of two pilots out of the handful of men who survived.
Moving into test flying, Captain Brown pioneered the art of landing heavy aircraft on carrier ships. No small feat, given the imperative of precision when hitting a 100m moving target. Thanks to some meticulous calculations, Eric concluded that a curved landing approach was best, and both the Admiralty and the US Navy adopted it as standard procedure. He was to carry out a total of 2,407 landings and fly 487 types of aircraft – both records that are unlikely to be broken.
“I was flying up to eight different aircraft a day, which does test you a bit, but you learn to handle these things. It is a question of gaining confidence in your own ability. There was little room for error though. It’s like playing Russian roulette and pilots were routinely killed.”
An ability to remain cool, calm and collected certainly helped.
“You are asked to do things which you know will take you pretty close to the wind,” he reflects. “But then, that’s what you are there and being paid for.
Did he ever feel fear?
“I didn’t, but others did. I was always calm – there just wasn’t enough time to think about these things. The fact is, I enjoyed test flying – it’s exciting! It would be a miserable job if you didn’t.”
Word of this fearless flier began to spread, and by the end of the war it had reached the ears of Winston Churchill, who singled him out for a special task. Thus, in 1945, Eric was appointed as chief pilot on the Farren Mission, part of an Anglo-American initiative to retrieve Germany’s most closely guarded technological secrets. Fears of a Nazi revival abounded, and the Western powers were equally determined not to let planes or other technology fall into the hands of the Russians.
“It was obvious that I wasn’t adversely affected by test flying. Somebody had to do this mission and, as in any walk of life, the more you succeed, the more your reputation grows.”
So Eric set off for Germany, where he did indeed discover supersonic wind tunnels and the Germans’ jet-powered aircraft. He was greatly impressed, if a little alarmed.
“I tested their top fighter, only to discover that it was 125mph faster than our equivalent. It was a great shock, but a thrill to fly it,” he admits with a smile. “I admired their aviation scientists very much indeed. In fact, the Mission’s greatest legacy was the supersonic Concorde, of which the aerodynamics stemmed directly from the Farren findings.”
With such awesome weaponry at its disposal, it is tempting to wonder – if only for a moment – whether Germany could ever have won, or at least prolonged, the war. Captain Brown thinks not. The inherent evil of the Nazi regime, he believes, was enough to ensure its ultimate destruction.
“The Nazi Party was an unhappy organisation, full of backbiting. They were all super-ambitious men who thought that they could do the job better than the person actually tasked with doing it. As a result, there simply wasn’t the infrastructure to support the jets and technology. Plus they ran out of vital resources – aluminium, fuel and, above all, pilots.”
Credit: Charles Parsons, Collection: Tom Marshall (PhotograFix)
It was during his first Farren run that Eric’s role in Germany suddenly took a quite different turn. Proficient in the language, he was asked to accompany a medical unit to help liberate Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which had been turned over to the Allies by the German High Command. The experience left him reeling.
“I was quite unprepared for the horrors,” he admits. “There were mounds of dead bodies, all bulldozed grotesquely into pits. Inmates shuffled about like zombies, barely aware of the activity around them. Huts that had been built for 60 people held 250 dying women in indescribable filth. The stench of that has never left my nostrils.”
Eric was instructed to speak to the captured prison chiefs.
“I interrogated the camp commandant, Josef Kramer, and the senior female guard, Irma Grese. Kramer was as bad as they come, but he attempted to give a reason for his behaviour, citing his deprived childhood in the years following the First World War. Recourse to the Hitler Youth and then moving up the ladder to the SA, and then the SS, seemed to him the only good option.
“Irma Grese was one of the worst human beings I have ever met. She was addicted to pain and particularly loved to torture the women – nothing was too bad. Some of the things she did to the prisoners were unbelievable.”
Captain EM Brown by John Goodman Photography
Eric attended both executions.
Later, at the Nuremberg trials, he interrogated some of the most senior Nazi figures of all: Hermann Göring, founder of the Gestapo and commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe; aviatrix Hanna Reitsch; and Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect and minister for war production, who famously admitted and accepted responsibility for complicity in Nazi crimes.
“Speer was just about the only one who had any damn good in him. He was probably in denial, as he wasn’t prepared to act openly as a Nazi and kept what he did low-key.”
Meanwhile, Eric was also testing out the Germans’ highly sophisticated aircraft. At times, it was a hairy experience.
“We were testing to see how planes behaved at the speed of sound, when this particular one got totally out of control, porpoising violently. It flung me up and down in the cockpit, cracking my head against the canopy, and the g-force meant that I couldn’t reach up to operate the ejection seat.”
The solution?
“I sat back and thought of England,” says Eric with a wry smile. “Somehow I regained control and, by a margin of three seconds, all was well.”
It was his comparatively diminutive stature (5 ft 7”) – for which he attracted the nickname ‘Winkle’ – that helped him survive. Prior to the incident, the body of a pilot who had died with a broken neck was discovered. He had been attempting the world speed record and Eric instantly realised that he must have been subject to similarly violent oscillations.
“Such incidents do change your perspective,” he says. “You may have started to see yourself as immortal, but when you look at the records and the names of all your dead chums, you realise that you are very far from being so. We suffered about 500 losses in eight years.”
With such a wealth of experience behind him, Eric has been in demand worldwide in the decades since the end of the war. Early astronauts, the new generation of risk-takers, were among the first to seek his advice. Unlike many other test pilots, however, Eric was never attracted to the final frontier.
“I talked about it with Yuri Gagarin and my great friend Neil Armstrong. Yet I always felt that I would sooner be a test pilot than an astronaut. As a pilot you can control your fate, but as an astronaut you are obliged to follow instructions with which you may not agree.”
Still, he’s in contact with Britain’s star astronaut Tim Peake, as well as Andy Green, the first man to break the sound barrier on land. Even at 97, it seems, the contemplation of risk remains the dominant motif in the life of Captain Eric Brown.
“We just talk about the dangers, analysing everything that might go wrong and how to counteract it. I have great admiration for these men.”
Spitfire Book
The baton has been passed; the legacy preserved; the mantle conferred. But in the eye of this most distinguished daredevil, the joy of new horizons still gleams.
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Read Emily's blog introducing Capt Eric Brown from her March issue of the Surrey Downs Magazine
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In commemoration of the 80th Anniversary of the Spitfire's maiden flight on March 5, 1936, we are giving away three copies of Paul Beaver's Spitfire People, for which Capt Brown wrote the foreword. Enter online
Written by Paul Beaver (who also appeared on Radio 4), published by Evro Publishing (RRP £25, Spitfire People explores the people behind this amazing, iconic WW2 aircraft... read more here
Our thoughts and condolences to the family and friends of Captain Eric 'Winkle' Brown CBE DSC AFC
Image: Laura Dodsworth
