Editing Leslie Howard (section)

==Death==
{{Further|BOAC Flight 777}}
[[File:BOAC777passengerlist.jpg|thumb|[[BOAC Flight 777]] passenger list]]
[[File:Bay of Biscay map.png|thumb|BOAC Flight 777 was shot down over the Bay of Biscay.]]

In May 1943, Howard travelled to [[Portugal]] to promote the British cause. He stayed in Monte [[Estoril]], at the Hotel Atlântico, between 1 May and 4 May, then again between 8 May and 10 May and again between 25 May and 31 May 1943.<ref>[[Exiles Memorial Center]].</ref> The following day, 1 June 1943, he was aboard [[KLM|KLM Royal Dutch Airlines]]/[[BOAC Flight 777]], "G-AGBB" a [[Douglas DC-3]] flying from [[Lisbon]] to [[Bristol]], when it was shot down by ''[[Luftwaffe]]'' [[Junkers Ju 88]] C-6 maritime fighter aircraft over the Atlantic (off [[Cedeira]], [[A Coruña]]).<ref name=":0" /><ref name=goss>Goss 2001, pp. 50–56.</ref> He was among the 17 fatalities, including four KLM flight crew.<ref name="Crash"/><ref>[http://www.cwgc.org/find-war-dead/casualty/3168815 "Casualty details: Leslie Howard."] ''Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC)''. Retrieved: 4 August 2010.</ref>

The BOAC DC-3 ''Ibis'' had been operating on a scheduled Lisbon–Whitchurch route throughout 1942–43 that did not pass over what would commonly be referred to as a [[War|war zone]]. By 1942, however, the Germans considered the region an "extremely sensitive war zone".<ref name="Rosevink and Hintze, p. 14">Rosevink and Hintze 1991, p. 14.</ref> On two occasions, 15 November 1942 and 19 April 1943, the camouflaged airliner had been attacked by [[Messerschmitt Bf 110]] fighters (a single aircraft and six Bf 110s, respectively) while ''en route''; each time, the pilots escaped by evasive tactics.<ref name=dutchairlines>{{cite web |url=http://home.hetnet.nl/~dutchairliners/klm/DC3.htm |title=Douglas DC-3-194 PH-ALI 'Ibis' |access-date=2017-05-14 |url-status=bot: unknown |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20041106060816/http://home.hetnet.nl/~dutchairliners/klm/DC3.htm |archive-date=6 November 2004 }}. Retrieved: 23 July 2010.</ref>

On 1 June 1943, "G-AGBB" again came under attack by a swarm of eight V/KG40 Ju 88 C-6 maritime fighters. The DC-3's last radio message indicated it was being fired upon at longitude 09.37 West, latitude 46.54 North.<ref name="Crash">[http://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19430601-0 "ASN Aircraft accident Douglas DC-3-194 G-AGBB Bay of Biscay."] ''Aviation Safety Network.'' Retrieved: 23 July 2010.</ref>

According to German documents, the DC-3 was shot down at {{coord|46|07|N|10|15|W}}, some {{convert|500|mi|km}} from [[Bordeaux]], France, and {{convert|200|mi|km}} northwest of [[La Coruña, Spain]]. ''Luftwaffe'' records indicate that the Ju 88 maritime fighters were operating beyond their normal patrol area to intercept and shoot down the aircraft.<ref name="ron" /> ''[[Oberleutnant]]'' Herbert Hintze, ''[[Staffelkapitän]]'' of 14 ''Staffel'', V./[[Kampfgeschwader 40]], and based in Bordeaux, stated that his ''Staffel'' shot down the DC-3 because it was recognized as an enemy aircraft.

Hintze further stated that his pilots were angry that the ''Luftwaffe'' leaders had not informed them of a scheduled flight between Lisbon and the UK, and that had they known, they could easily have escorted the DC-3 to Bordeaux and captured it and all aboard. The German pilots photographed the wreckage floating in the Bay of Biscay, and after the war, copies of these captured photographs were sent to Howard's family.<ref name="goss"/>

The following day, a search of the waters on the route was undertaken by "N/461", a [[Short Sunderland]] flying boat from [[No. 461 Squadron RAAF]]. Near the same coordinates where the DC-3 was shot down, the Sunderland was attacked by eight Ju 88s and, after a furious battle, it managed to shoot down three of the attackers, with an additional three "possibles", before crash-landing at [[Praa Sands]] near [[Penzance]]. In the aftermath of these two actions, all BOAC flights from Lisbon were re-routed and operated only under the cover of darkness.<ref name="N461"/>

The news of Howard's death was published in the same issue of ''[[The Times]]'' that reported the "death" of [[Major William Martin]], the "Man who never was" created for the ruse involved in [[Operation Mincemeat]].<ref>''The Times'', Thursday, 3 June 1943, p. 4.</ref>

===Theories regarding the air attack===
[[File:Monumento á memoria do actor Leslie Howard.jpg|thumb|Monument to the memory of Leslie Howard and his companions in [[Cedeira]], [[Galicia (Spain)|Galicia, Spain]]]]

A long-standing but ultimately unsupported hypothesis suggested that the Germans believed that the [[Prime Minister of the United Kingdom|British Prime Minister]], [[Winston Churchill]], was on board the flight.<ref>Wilkes, Donald E., Jr. [http://www.law.uga.edu/dwilkes_more/other_1ashley.html "The Assassination of Ashley Wilkes."] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120111080221/http://www.law.uga.edu/dwilkes_more/other_1ashley.html |date=11 January 2012}} ''The Athens Observer'', 8 June 1995 p. 7A, via ''law.uga.edu.'' Retrieved: 23 July 2010.</ref> Churchill's history of World War II suggested that the Germans targeted the commercial flight because the British Prime Minister's "presence in North Africa [for the 1943 [[Casablanca conference]]] had been fully reported", and German agents at the Lisbon airfield mistook a "thickset man smoking a cigar" boarding the plane for Churchill returning to England. This thickset man was Howard's agent, Alfred Chenhalls.<ref>[[Neill Lochery|Lochery, Neill]]. ''Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light, 1939-1945''. New York: Public Affairs, 2011, pp. 156, 159.</ref> The death of the fourteen civilians including Leslie Howard "was a painful shock to me", Churchill wrote; "the brutality of the Germans was only matched by the stupidity of their agents".<ref>Winston Churchill, ''The Second World War: The Hinge of Fate'' (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1950) Vol. 4 p. 830.</ref>

Two books focusing on the final flight, ''Flight 777'' (Ian Colvin, 1957) and ''In Search of My Father: A Portrait of Leslie Howard'' ([[Ronald Howard (British actor)|Ronald Howard]], 1984), asserted that the target was Howard instead: that Germans deliberately shot down Howard's DC-3 to demoralise Britain.<ref name="ron">Howard 1984</ref><ref>Colvin 2007, p. 187.</ref> Howard had been travelling through Spain and Portugal lecturing on film, but also meeting with local propagandists and shoring up support for the [[Allies of World War II|Allies]]. The ''British Film Yearbook'' for 1945 described Leslie Howard's work as "one of the most valuable facets of British propaganda".<ref>Noble 1945, p. 74.</ref>

The Germans could have suspected even more surreptitious activities, since Portugal, like [[Switzerland]], was a crossroads for internationals and spies from both sides. British historian James Oglethorpe investigated Howard's connection to the secret services.<ref>[http://lesliehowardsociety.multiply.com "Leslie Howard."] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101024013919/http://lesliehowardsociety.multiply.com/ |date=24 October 2010 }} ''lesliehowardsociety.multiply.com''. Retrieved: 22 July 2010.</ref> Ronald Howard's book explores the written German orders to the Ju 88 squadron in great detail, as well as British communiqués that purportedly verify intelligence reports indicating a deliberate attack on Howard. These accounts indicate that the Germans were aware of Churchill's real whereabouts at the time and were not so naïve as to believe he would be travelling alone on board an unescorted, unarmed civilian aircraft, which Churchill also acknowledged as improbable. (Coincidentally, Ron Howard's financial advisor, who happened to take the same flight, looked like Churchill; Howard bore a resemblance to Churchill's bodyguard).<ref>{{cite web | url=https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/52800458 | title=Why was the Leslie Howard plane shot down? A WAR MYSTERY IS SOLVED | work=Examiner | date=30 December 1950 }}</ref>

Ronald Howard was convinced the order to shoot down Howard's airliner came directly from [[Joseph Goebbels]], [[Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda|Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda]] in [[Nazi Germany]], who had been ridiculed in one of Leslie Howard's films, and believed Howard to be the most dangerous British propagandist.<ref name="ron" />

Most of the 13 passengers were either British businessmen with commercial connections to Portugal, or lower-ranking British government civil servants. There were also two or three children of British military personnel.<ref name="ron" /> Two passengers were bumped off the flight, [[George Henry Vanderbilt Cecil|George]] and [[William Amherst Vanderbilt Cecil|William Cecil]], the teenage sons of [[Cornelia Stuyvesant Vanderbilt]], who had been recalled to London from their Swiss boarding school, thus saving their lives.<ref>Covington 2006, pp. 102–103.</ref>

A 2008 book by Spanish writer José Rey Ximena<ref>Rey Ximena 2008</ref> argues that Howard was on a top-secret mission for Churchill to dissuade Spanish dictator [[Francisco Franco]] from joining the [[Axis powers]].<ref name="UPI">[http://www.upi.com/Entertainment_News/2008/10/06/Book_Howard_kept_Spain_from_joining_WWII/UPI-48541223340587/ "Book: Howard kept Spain from joining WWII."] ''[[United Press International]]'', 6 October 2008. Retrieved: 25 May 2009.</ref> Via an old girlfriend, [[Conchita Montenegro]],<ref name="UPI"/> Howard had contacts with Ricardo Giménez Arnau, a young diplomat in the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Further merely circumstantial background evidence is revealed in Jimmy Burns's 2009 [[biography]] of his father, spymaster Tom Burns.<ref>Ridley, Jane. [http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/5457543/from-madrid-with-love.thtml "From Madrid with Love"] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101207010519/http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/5457543/from-madrid-with-love.thtml |date= 7 December 2010 }} ''The Spectator'' via ''spectator.co.uk'', 24 October 2009. Retrieved: 4 August 2010.</ref> According to author [[William Stevenson (Canadian writer)|William Stevenson]] in ''A Man Called Intrepid'', his biography of [[William Stephenson|Sir William Samuel Stephenson]] (no relation), the senior representative of British Intelligence for the western hemisphere during the Second World War,<ref>Stevenson 2000, p. 179.</ref> Stephenson postulated that the Germans knew about Howard's mission and ordered the aircraft shot down. Stephenson further argued that Churchill knew in advance of the German intention to shoot down the aircraft but allowed it to proceed to protect the fact that the British had broken the German Enigma code.<ref>[http://www.trueintrepid.com/CndPress.htm "Intrepid Book Brings Spy's Life From Shadows."] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110529122053/http://www.trueintrepid.com/CndPress.htm |date=29 May 2011 }} ''trueintrepid.com''. Retrieved: 23 July 2010.</ref> Former CIA agent Joseph B. Smith recalled that, in 1957, he was briefed by the National Security Agency on the need for secrecy and that Leslie Howard's death had been brought up. The NSA stated that Howard knew German fighters would attack the aircraft but went on the plane anyway to protect the British code-breakers' secret.<ref>Smith 1976, p. 389.</ref>

A secretly taped account by one of the pilots involved appears in Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer's ''Soldiers: German POWs on Fighting, Killing, and Dying''. In a recently declassified transcript of a surreptitiously recorded conversation by two German Luftwaffe prisoners of war{{who|If one of them is one of the responsible pilots, and this must be specified, because it effectively debunks all the preceding circumstantial theories|date=August 2020}} talking about the shooting down of Howard's flight, one seems to express pride in his accomplishment, but states clearly he knew nothing of the passengers' identities or importance until hearing an English broadcast later that evening. Asked why he shot down a civil aircraft, he states it was one of four such planes he shot down: "Whatever crossed our path was shot down."<ref>Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, ''Soldiers: German POWs on Fighting Killing, and Dying''. Translated by Jefferson Chase. Vintage Books (NY: 2013). p. 139.</ref>

The 2010 biography by Estel Eforgan, ''Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor'', examines then recently available evidence and concludes that Howard was not a specific target,<ref>Eforgan 2010, pp. 217–245.</ref> corroborating the statements by German sources that the shootdown was "an error in judgement".<ref name="N461">Matthews, Rowan. "N461: Howard & Churchill", ''n461.com '', 2003. Retrieved: 23 July 2010.</ref>

There is a monument in [[San Andrés de Teixido]], Spain, dedicated to the victims of the crash. Howard's aircraft was shot down over the sea north of this village.<ref>Castro, Jesus (translated by Rachael Harrison). [http://www.eyeonspain.com/blogs/jesuscastro/2961/the-actor-the-jew-and-churchill%E2%80%99s-double.aspx "The actor, the Jew and Churchill's double"] ''eyeonspain.com.'' Retrieved: 18 August 2011.</ref>

=== ''The Mystery of Flight 777'' (documentary) ===
''[[The Mystery of Flight 777]]'', by film-maker Thomas Hamilton, explores the circumstances, theories and myths which have grown around the shooting down of Howard's plane. The film also aims to examine in detail some of the other passengers on board. Originally intended as a short companion piece to the Leslie Howard film, this project expanded in scope and as of January 2021 is still in production.{{cn|date=March 2024}}