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Clan Donald Magazine Online Edition
The War Hero Clan Chief by Julian
Champkin
Reproduced from
The Scottish Daily Mail, Saturday 29 October
2005: Shot down over the Channel, he
helped other POWs escape, became the face of RAF heroism and spied
in the Cold War.
Watch almost any film or television
account of the Battle of Britain and almost certainly in the
black-and-white historical footage will be shots of the archetypal
Spitfire pilot. Look carefully and you will see one face in
particular, time and again.
He is curly-haired, handsome, young,
obviously brave, in his cockpit or beside his machine, wearing a
flying helmet and sporting that small, clipped moustache that RAF
men in those days seemed to find mandatory. In ground shots he may
be smoking his pipe.
There is a reason he turns up so
often in archive footage. Back in 1940, few films were made of the
battle being fought overhead. The major exception was when the Air
Ministry decided to make a documentary film, called Fighter Pilot,
about the battle just won.
It was 64 Squadron they filmed, for a
couple of days in November of 1940, and the officer commanding that
squadron and the pilot in many of their shots was Donald MacDonell.
Excerpts from that film have been used in TV documentaries ever
since. As just one example, the Science Museum in London has a
display about RJ Mitchell, the designer of the Spitfire. 'I went,
and that film was playing continually as a background loop,' says
MacDonell's widow Lois, editor of his newly published memoirs. 'It
was very strange seeing his face all around me.' The brave and
handsome, pilot of the 1940s was, to give him his full name by the
time of his retirement, Air Commodore Aeneas Ranald Donald
MacDonell, CB, DFC, 22nd Chief of Glengarry and 12th titular Lord
MacDonell and Aros.
Shot down, he became a prisoner of
war and participated in the famous escape known as the Wooden Horse.
And, if all that were not enough, in the 1950s, while the Cold War
was at its coldest and most frightening, he was sent to our embassy
in Moscow as air attach� - for which read intelligence-gatherer or
spy.
For all the clan connections, the
future clan chief of the MacDonell�s was actually born in 1913 in
Russia - in Baku, where his father was British vice-consul.
During the civil war that followed
the Russian Revolution, the vice-consul facilitated secret
negotiations between the commu�nists and the White Russian army.
He did, however, lose all his money
in the revolution and had to return to journalism jobs in the south
of England. The MacDonell�s had not lived in Scotland for two or
three generations.
From the first name given to his
child, Aeneas, you might suppose the vice-consul was a classical
scholar. Actually, Aeneas was the traditional first name of the
Glengarry Chiefs, and was not from the Trojan hero Aeneas at all: it
is a corruption of Angus.
Donald's father and grandfather were
both Aeneas Ranald MacDonell. Lois says: 'It was only when
pink-enveloped love letters began being delivered to the grandfather
at the family breakfast, and he had to hand them to their proper
recipient, his son - to their mutual embarrassment - that they
decided any third generation should have another Christian name as
well.'
So Aeneas Ranald Donald MacDonell was
always known as Donald. He joined the RAF in 1931. During the
Abyssinian crisis of 1935, when Italy invaded Ethiopia, his squadron
was sent by a ship of the Anchor Line to Egypt, potentially to
intervene by force on Ethiopia's side.
On the voyage out, when an Italian
destroyer shadowed them, half the RAF men on board were told to don
frocks and skirts as it passed, to fool the Italians that they were
merely civilian passengers on a holiday cruise. Donald thought the
Italians were proba�bly not convinced - especially as one of the RAF
men persisted in smoking his pipe in drag.
More serious warfare was near. Back
in Britain, MacDonell found himself commanding a Spitfire squadron
in the Battle of Britain. He first had to meld a dispirited unit of
raw inexperienced pilots into a fighting unit under stress of
battle.
'He was a natural leader - quite a
charismatic person, very unstuffy,' says Lois. 'One former squadron
member keeps telling me how wonderful Donald was at drawing them all
together.'
It was a successful squadron. In the
early days, they were bringing down Stuka dive-bombers attacking
shipping in the Channel. In the battle proper, it was Messerschmitt
fighters and Dornier bombers.
MacDonell was leading his squadron
aloft when their base, Kenley airfield, was bombed and its runway
rendered unusable. One of the attacking bombers was brought down by
a bizarre secret weapon - a rocket which lifted a chain attached to
a parachute into the air. The chain descended slowly, the German
Dornier flew into it, and was brought down on the airfield boundary.
It seems to have been the only
success of that particular British invention. After that, MacDonell
was the first to land on the cratered runway. Elsewhere, he scored
his victories - he is credited with 11-and-a-half kills -and was
shot down twice.
The first time, over Hampshire, he
landed in a back garden and was mistaken for a German and held at
shotgun-point. The second time, over the Channel, was more serious.
In his memoirs, he wrote: 'Spitfire cockpits were neither
pressurised nor heated, but they had oxygen masks. At 30,000 ft, my
left hand, the one which rested on the throttle lever, began to get
cold. Over the French coast, I was smacking it on my knee to try to
restore the circulation.'
The knocking accidentally pulled out
the lead of his radio transmitter. He was trying to reconnect it,
and at the same time engaging a flight of Messerschmitt Bf 109
fighters, when 'there was a hell of a bang somewhere below my
cockpit'. He went into a steep diving turn - and then slowly passed
out. His oxygen pipe had been severed, and lack of breathable air
was suffocating him. He came to in a spin at 7,000ft, still groggy
from lack of oxygen, and managed to pull out and head for home. But
the lack of oxygen had left him confused and he realised, some
minutes later, that he had set course in the wrong direction and was
over occupied France - with a shot-up plane, an over-heating engine
and guns that would not fire. He turned round, made it through the
flak over Calais, but soon afterwards, with the temperature gauges
off the clock, 'with an appalling shudder my Merlin engine seized
and I sat staring in disbelief at a completely stationary propeller.
I was at about 8,000ft and a quarter of the way across the Channel.'
And another Bf 109 was on his tail. With the German's cannon shells
whining over his cockpit, he baled out and saw his Spitfire nosedive
into the sea. He was rescued, but by a German boat, and so captivity
began.
One of the first things he was handed
by his captors in prison camp, was a sealed brown envelope. Inside
it, a sheet of notepaper read: 'Bad luck. For you the war is over!'
It was signed 'Werner Molders', the German air ace who had shot him
down.
Prison camp was an ordeal for
MacDonell, as for others. There were many escape attempts, mostly
unsuccessful. Some were quite bizarre, such as the would-be escaper
who planned to tie together all the elastic trouser-braces in the
camp and have himself catapulted over the wire while the Germans
were not looking. Not surprisingly, that one never got off the
ground.
MacDonell found himself on the camp's
escape committee, co-ordinating many of these efforts - hence his
involvement with the Wooden Horse. He thought it at first an
imaginative effort, but hopeless - the go-ahead was given in the
expectation that it would be discovered by the Germans and divert
attention from a much bigger, longer tunnel that was being dug from
the cook-house.
But it was the unfinished, bigger
tunnel which the Germans tracked down. Earth from it, hidden in the
barrack roof spaces, caused the roof beams to collapse and crash
down on the heads of the searching German guards.
It was the Wooden Horse tunnel that
succeeded. The 'horse' itself was a gymnasts' vaulting-horse, which
was carried out into the open compound, close up against the wire,
each day. While the prisoners amused themselves with physical
exercise jumping over the horse, an escaper was hidden inside it
inside it, concealed from the eyes of the guards, digging the
tunnel.
By day, the horse hid the entrance to
the tunnel. Each night, a lid covered with sand disguised it, and
the horse and its digger were carried back into the huts. Three men
got out that way, and made it home to Britain. One of them, Eric
Williams, wrote a book about it, which was filmed, starring Anthony
Steel.
MacDonell was not one of the escapers
- it was his job to organise the rota of volunteer jumpers who had
to exercise, on inadequate rations, for hours each day as cover for
the tunnel being dug beneath their feet. As camp adjutant, MacDonell
also tried continually to get the best treatment he could for the
prisoners from the Germans.
Douglas Bader, the legendary Spitfire
pilot with no legs, turned up as a prisoner. They had known each
other as squadron leaders - but it was not a happy reunion.
MacDonell had worked hard to make the
Germans respect the Geneva Convention rights of the prisoners - he
felt the brash Bader imperilled it by his lack of understanding.
Fortunately, Bader was transferred to another camp within a few
days. But the nervous strain began to tell on MacDonell and he began
to have blackouts, from which he had suffered previously, before the
war.
It was in the German prison camp that
he heard of the death of his father, and his inheritance of the clan
titles of the MacDonells and Glengarry. It was to be years before he
returned to claim his inheri�tance, and also to see for the first
time his new son.
His homecoming at the end of the war
was not happy. While he was away, his first wife, Diana, had
developed incurable schizophrenia. When he got to London, she was
not there. When he found her in Ireland, she was a grotesque
caricature of the woman he had left behind.
His young son Ranald, whom he had not
seen, looked from MacDonell to the car driver and asked
pathetically. 'Mummy, which might my Daddy be?'
Diana had eventually to be con�fined
to a mental hospital for the rest of her life, and MacDonell had to
combine the rest of his service and diplomatic career with bring�ing
up a young, motherless family of three. Nor were matters made better
by his posting to Moscow in the 1950s, when tensions were at their
highest. He was not one to reveal even out-of-date secrets, so much
of his spying activities there must remain unknown, but again he
found himself in what was virtually another prison.
HIS flat was undoubtedly bugged and
he was followed everywhere by KGB men, whom he christened 'goons'
after prison camp guards. On two occasions, the embassy was besieged
by 'spontaneous' - in fact, carefully choreographed and
officially-organised - anti-British demonstrations.
There were humourous moments, though.
Diplomacy turned out to be an ordeal by vodka, pressed on MacDonell
at every opportunity at diplomatic gatherings by his Russian hosts.
International prestige depended on who was still standing at the end
- and Russians can drink an awful lot of vodka.
The little of McDonell's spying that
he did talk about has a pleasantly amateur air, bordering on farce,
such as trying to take photographs of a Russian airfield from the
lavatory window of a train - the Russians foiled him by rescheduling
the train so it passed the airfield at night. After that, MacDonell
left such antics to the Americans, who did not mind their
'diplomats' being regularly exposed for such activities and
expelled. There were certainly more serious aspects to it all, which
MacDonell did not reveal.
When his young family came out on a
holiday visit, the goons were baffled by ten-year-old Ranald's
butterfly net and collecting jar. They seemed to regard it as some
kind of secret weapon, and followed the child till he returned to
the family picnic.
MacDonell did get permission to
revisit his birthplace in Baku - but Soviet bureaucracy made him
turn round and go back to Moscow within hours of arriving,
forbidding him a proper view of the place.
He returned to Britain and, in 1973,
he married his second wife, Lois. He was in his sixties when they
began a second family, with a son and a daughter. In 1981, they
retired to Fortrose on the Black Isle.
MacDonell died in 1999. A memorial to
him, with the RAF crest and the Glengarry raven, stands outside the
new Museum of the Isles at the Clan Donald centre on Skye.
 From Dogfight to Diplomacy: A
Spitfire Pilot's Log 1932-1958, by Donald MacDonell, Pen and Sword
Books, �19.99. Available from our
Clan Donald Amazon Bookshop,
currently at �13.99.
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