Leslie Howard – “one of the most valuable facets of British propaganda”

After the rise of Nazism, Howard made anti German propaganda his goal and during the war decided to help shore up support for the Allies

He was involved, so it is said, with British or Allied Intelligence

When flying back on a passenger plane from Lisbon to Bristol…the Luftwaffe shot the plane down and Howard was killed.

It was said at the time that the plane was shot down as the Nazis thought that Churchill was on board

But it later emerged that Howard was the target as it was believed that he had been on a secret mission for Churchill

A long-standing but ultimately unsupported hypothesis suggested that the Germans believed that the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was on board the flight. 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. 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”.

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, 1984), asserted that the target was Howard instead: that Germans deliberately shot down Howard’s DC-3 to demoralise Britain. Howard had been travelling through Spain and Portugal lecturing on film, but also meeting with local propagandists and shoring up support for the Allies. The British Film Yearbook for 1945 described Leslie Howard’s work as “one of the most valuable facets of British propaganda”