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Geoffrey Myers was a caught up in the major turning points of the early years of that war – the Battle for France, Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain – his French wife and two half-Jewish children were trapped in Nazi-occupied France, desperate to escape the enemy and be reunited with her husband in England.
He wrote secret letters that were never posted and not read by Geoffrey’s family until later in the war. They were designed to be read if he was killed. They begin, ‘Three months now, and I have kept silent. I have been hoping to write letters that would reach you. I have been wanting to do something that would help you to escape from Occupied France and to get us all out of this living grave.’
Contemporary personal accounts of the Battle of Britain of such frankness are extremely rare. Individual narratives on this scale, encompassing two of the great turning points of the war, the Battle of Britain and Dunkirk, and much else besides, just do not exist. So the letters from Geoffrey Myers to his family are unique, offering an original insight from a witness to so much history. More than that, the letters tell a powerful love story between two people caught up in war, and at real risk of never seeing each other again.
As a Daily Telegraph journalist before the war, Geoffrey Myers writes with eloquence and insight and, because his notebooks were not designed to be published, the letters are an unvarnished, sometimes brutal, portrayal of war as his Battle of Britain Squadron suffers terrible losses. As an Intelligence Officer, Geoffrey was well placed to understand the chaos all around him but his letters are shot through with humanity, and sometimes humour.