DEFIANT – the untold story of the Battle of Britain

‘From the corridors of the Air Ministry to the skies over Dunkirk, Robert Verkaik tells the story of the Battle of Britain’s unlikeliest hero with verve and phenomenal grasp of detail. He brings the Defiant fighter back into focus as an important part of the victorious RAF in the hour of its greatest trial’
Mark Urban

‘Meticulously researched and rich in human and social as well as military interest, Defiant fills a crucial gap in our understanding of that most perilous time’
David Kynaston, author of Austerity Britain

‘Firmly establishes the aircraft’s role in those crucial aerial battles of 1940 and elevates the brave aircrews who fought and died in their forgotten Defiants, to rank alongside their comrades in the better remembered Hurricanes and Spitfires.’
David Fairhead, director of Spitfire

The crucial role played by the Spitfire and the Hurricane has been exhaustively recorded, but, to date, next to nothing has been written about the third British fighter which took part in the battle. By writing from the unique perspective of the pilots who flew the Defiant and their air-gunners, Verkaik helps to set the record straight.

The Air Staff regarded the Defiant as a state-of-the-art bomber destroyer and wanted to equip a third of all Fighter Command squadrons with this new plane. But the head of Fighter Command, Hugh Dowding, had other ideas and went to war with Whitehall over its plan to saddle him with hundreds of ‘obsolete’ turret fighters. Then at Dunkirk, a Defiant squadron scored a huge success against the Luftwaffe by shooting down more German planes in one day than any other RAF unit before or since. Fighter Command, enthusiastically urged on by the Air Ministry, now committed its third fighter to the coming air battle over southern England. In the desperate dogfights of the battle, Defiants shot down both German bombers and fighters but suffered heavy losses too – one squadron was almost wiped out when it was ambushed by a superior force of Messerschmitt 109s. On 30 August 1940 all Defiant squadrons were withdrawn from the front line.

The families of the Defiant aircrews believed that their husbands, brothers and sons had died in vain, but the truth is that their vital contribution to the battle over Dunkirk and their role in the Battle of Britain has been all but erased from the official history. The story of the Defiant has not been allowed to mar the glorious victory won by the Spitfire and the Hurricane.

But Verkaik has uncovered new records, including top-secret memos written by Hugh Dowding and his deputy Keith Park as well as correspondence with the Air Staff, combat and squadron reports, pilot logs and recordings of the last interviews with Defiant crews. He has also succeeded in tracing relatives of Defiant pilots and gunners to tell the story of the Battle of Britain as it has never been told before. He reveals how the myths which have grown up around the Defiant mask some inconvenient truths.

Times coverage of Defiant – the untold story of the Battle of Britain.

SECURITY AND TERRORISM

By Robert Verkaik

Sunday Telegraph. July 29th 2018

RICH RUSSIAN oligarchs are deserting Britain’s public schools, as the economic reality of the new cold war starts to bite.
Figures published by the Independent Schools Council (ISC), which represents 1,300 private schools in the UK, reveal a steep decline in numbers of Russian pupils being taught in the UK over the last three years.
The trend is believed to have been exacerbated by the nerve agent attack against a former Russian spy and his daughter in Salisbury in March this year.
Relations between Russia and Britain soured after Sergei and his daughter Yulia were targetted by the Russian state using a soviet-made poison called novichok.
A number of Russian diplomats and their families, including children at leading public schools, were expelled from the UK as Theresa May had no hesitation in blaming the Kremlin for master-minding the attack.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/07/29/russian-oligarchs-deserting-britains-public-schools-economic/

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YULIA SKRIPAL and the ‘art of disappearing’: Assuming a new identity in the internet age. By Robert Verkaik. The i June 25th.

The lives of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia will never be the same again. After surviving a murder attempt alleged to be by the Russian state, they must now prepare to disappear, take on new identities and say goodbye to family and friends for ever. Yulia Skripal left hospital this week and will have already entered a shadow state of safe houses, false passports and Government-issued credit cards. She still needs medical care and may have begun her secret new life in the safety of a private medical clinic, away from the attention of the media, including unscrupulous members of the Russian press who found their way into Salisbury hospital where the Skripals were being treated.

Read more at: https://inews.co.uk/news/long-reads/yulia-skripal-disappearing-new-identity/

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Sunday Telegraph by Robert Verkaik

6 JANUARY 2018 • 9:30PM

FORMER SPIES who received six-figure redundancy pay-offs have been re-employed by MI6 as part of a massive £1.2 billion spend by Britain’s security services on hundreds of agents and outside contractors.
Three MI6 officers who received compensation packages are among 73 spies to be rehired by the service in a scramble to reverse staff cuts in the wake of the heightened terror threat facing the UK.
The Government’s top secret listening station, GCHQ, has rehired 200 former employees while MI5 has taken on just seven former officers.
But MPs have criticised the recruitment policy as “very poor value for money” which “highlight a lack of adequate skills planning.”
Members of Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee said in their annual report: “Whilst it may always be necessary to re-hire some former staff in exceptional circumstances, this should be kept to a minimum given the potentially significant costs involved.”
The overall cost of hiring consultants and contractors for last year reached £1.2 billion, a third of the combined budget of MI6, GCHQ and MI5. The report found that on average these temporary contractors were being paid up to £144,000 – twice the annual salary of their in-house staff.
In 2011 it was reported that twelve senior MI6 officers had won generous pay and pension packages as part of a secret deal struck with Ministers, ahead of a clampdown on civil servant pay in 2010.
The new report said “This Committee previously criticised an expensive redundancy exercise run by SIS in 2011/12, when it made payments to 111 staff to take early retirement. Given that a few years later it is looking to increase staff numbers by considerably more than this, it does not appear to have been well planned.”
The head of MI6, Sir Alex Younger, refused to justify the policy, telling MPs: “I make it a rule not to comment on decisions made by my predecessors… I was not in the leadership then… It was an extraordinary time, do you remember? It was just after the banking crisis and all of that”.
MI6 is in the process of boosting its staff numbers from 2,368 full-time equivalent staff at March 2014 to 3,231 staff by March 2020 – a 36% increase in headcount over six years.
Questioned on whether it would be possible to bring in so many new staff so quickly, MI6 said: “So we are very aware that it is a challenge. If I focus on the absorption as opposed to the recruitment for the moment, a lot of the investment that we have been doing this year is in the things that will enable that, recruitment included, and up powering our learning and development effort, and we are looking really hard at what sort of people we bring in and where we are going to put them and then making sure they are going to be alongside people who are more experienced.”
MI6 was also asked to justify a £800,000 cost for employing outside business consultants to reorganise the structure of the service.
The report, pubished last month, found that GCHQ was facing competition from private tech and internet companies who could offer bigger pay-packets to attract its staff to the private sector.

Sunday Telegraph by Robert Verkaik

A British Muslim man who claimed he was discriminated against after being stopped and questioned by police under terrorism laws has won the right to challenge the secret intelligence used against him.

The case could have far-reaching implications for the security services who use undisclosed intelligence to conduct tens of thousands of random stops at airports each year.

Shayab Miah, from Southampton, was stopped and detained for an hour by counter-terrorism police at Heathrow Airport after returning from India in August 2009.

Later Mr Miah, who was released without further action, complained to the Metropolitan Police that his detention was not based on a random stop but motivated by religious discrimination.

Sunday Telegraph by Robert Verkaik
18 NOVEMBER 2017 • 10:00PM

British spies have been citing a controversial security company, which is run by a former KGB-trained intelligence expert, to help warn the public about cyber and hacking attacks.
GCHQ, the UK’s frontline in cyber defence, has five times in the last year published “threat alerts” based on Moscow-headquartered agency, Kaspersky Lab.
Last week Kaspersky Lab faced claims that its software maybe being used by the Kremlin to spy on British banking customers.
Yet, as recently as November 10th, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, which is part of GCHQ, issued a threat alert citing Kaspersky research about the dangers of using dating apps.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/18/british-spies-using-controversial-security-company-run-former/

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