The mystery of the last missing Seafire pilot

The crumbling concrete staircase winds up two storeys to the lighthouse’s badly damaged lantern room. From the balcony, the Pacific Ocean’s powerful swells are a white line breaking over the outer coral reef, a patch of dark blue indicating the north-east pass into the lagoon.

The Japanese military built Sapuk Lighthouse to guide warships and cargo vessels into the vast lagoon at Truk, which at the outbreak of the Second World War was its most important base in the central Pacific and was frequently described as Japan’s Gibraltar. On a promontory with the jungle sloping away steeply on three sides, it is today a peaceful part of Weno Island, in what is today Chuuk, one of the four states that make up the Federated States of Micronesia.

But in the latter stages of the conflict, it stood out as an obvious target.

The battering the lighthouse took from British and US carrier-based aircraft is most apparent on the upper levels. Deep gouges in the outer walls, most larger than my splayed hand, reveal the inner reinforcing steel beams. These were left by large-calibre rounds from Grumman Hellcats launched from US Task Force 58 as part of Operation Hailstone in February 1944 and followed up over two days in June 1945 by Fleet Air Arm aircraft operating from HMS Implacable, flagship of the British Pacific Fleet.

More than 80 years on, Chuukese know all about the three decades of often harsh Japanese rule and the US attack that sank more than 50 Japanese ships in their shallow waters, making this place renowned as the world’s best destination for wreck divers. But they know virtually nothing about the subsequent British raid.

And no one here has heard of Acting Sub-Lieutenant Mervyn Harold Payne, who was 20 years old and on his first operational mission in the cockpit of Supermarine Seafire PP975 when he simply disappeared over Chuuk.

Chuuk State Historic Preservation Office is only vaguely aware of the British raid, possibly because it did not result in the sinking of many Japanese ships and the damage to ground targets was limited. And it does not have the resources to scour the lagoon – one of the largest in the world, at nearly 40 miles from north to south and 50 miles east to west at its widest, and encompassing more than 822 square miles of ocean – for more ships and aircraft, including the missing Seafire.

As is common in these islands, Gradvin Aisek wears many hats. As well as serving as mayor of the island of Tonoas, the 66-year-old operates the largest scuba operation in Chuuk and has been diving these waters for more than half a century.

“To be honest, we only know about the US raids,” he says. “It’s a really big lagoon and you would either have to be very lucky to find another aircraft out there or know where it came down.”

He admits, however, that it is not impossible. Three years ago, a team from the US-based Project Recover used underwater drones to locate an aircraft that had taken part in Operation Hailstone but been enveloped in the explosion when the transport ship it was attacking blew up.

But without the technology that Project Recover can deploy, the challenges, Aisek says, are formidable.

“If a wreck or a plane is sitting on a sandy bottom in shallow water, you can see it quite easily, but we know where most of those are,” he says. “It is much harder if they are in deep water or if they are in rocky areas. And in many places, coral and other sea life have grown over them.”

The challenge in finding Payne’s aircraft is compounded by the largely contradictory accounts of his fate, including records from 801 Naval Air Squadron’s report on the engagement, post-war books by historians and other pilots who were on the same mission, and even a brief description by a Japanese officer of seeing his aircraft come down.

Michelle Cookson says the loss of her uncle in 1945 profoundly changed the lives of the Payne family, with his parents never really coming to terms with his death, particularly given that the Ministry of Defence could only provide scant details and having no grave where they could mourn him.

Cookson, a consultant at law firm Mills & Reeve in Cambridge, recalls framed photos of Mervyn around the homes of her grandparents. Her mother, Yvonne, who was 16 when her brother was posted as missing, kept them safe and left them to Cookson when she died.

“I don’t recall my grandparents ever talking about Mervyn, but I was only young when they died,” she says. “My mum talked about him – how much he’d been loved, how he lit up every room and how my grandma never got over his loss.”

“One of the worst things for the family was not knowing what had happened to him,” she adds. “All they knew was that it was somewhere in the Pacific, it was one of his first flights and that it was so close to the end of the war that he had almost made it home. All of which made it much harder to bear.

“It was a shadow that couldn’t be shaken off.”

Pilot Payne, the Lancashire lad

Mervyn Harold Payne was born in May 1925 in the rural town of Neepawa, in the Canadian province of Manitoba, the second son of Harold and Ethel Payne, who had emigrated shortly after they married in Manchester in 1919.

Mervyn had an older brother, Roy, and a younger sister, Yvonne, and the years growing up on a remote farm in Canada were idyllic, with Cookson recalling how her mother said the children had always been close.

“My mother talked of the many happy times they spent playing on the farm, eating corn cobs growing in the fields and going to school on a horse and trap,” says Cookson, who lives in Great Chesterford, Essex.

The family returned to Britain in 1937 and settled in Newton-le-Willows in Lancashire. Local newspapers show that Mervyn earned a place at Newton Technical School in July 1938, while the census of the following year shows that Harold was working at a local engineering works, his wife was an “unpaid domestic” and Roy was an apprentice fitter.

The outbreak of war in September 1939 quickly changed things.

With Mervyn still at school, Roy was the first to join up and served in the RAF, including in India. He would survive the conflict to return to Newton-le-Willows.

As soon as he was old enough, Mervyn followed in his brother’s footsteps and, in 1943, signed up.

“My mother talked of Mervyn coming home one day in his uniform after signing up with two of his friends,” Cookson says. “She said how handsome they all looked… and how tragic it was that none of the three came home.”

Selected for pilot training with the Fleet Air Arm, Mervyn returned to Canada for instruction and had spells at bases in the US. Among the family mementos are photos of Mervyn and his fellow trainees in the snow in Canada, and him standing on the wing of an aircraft of 719 Training Squadron. There are also formal portraits of a smiling young man with his cap at a slight angle looking confidently into the lens.

A postcard dated December 1943 reads: “Just back from 14 days leave in New York”, while what may have been his final message from the US read: “Feeling pretty happy, spending my last weekend in Detroit. Receive my wings next week, March 24th. See you all soon, lots of love, Mervyn.”

Evidence of Mervyn’s mischievous side has also survived. Preserved in the chapel dome of the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich is graffiti in mock Latin dated 1944 and etched by “Mid (A) Mervico Payne, RNVR” and “Mid (A) Alico Mitchell, RNVR” – or Alexander Mitchell, who survived the war – when they were meant to be watching for incoming V-1 “doodlebug” flying bombs and fires across east London.

Under their names and the year 1944 is the message “Flying bombs, we eat ’em” and “Disciples of Bacchus” alongside a mug of beer. The final touch is “Per vino ad urinalum”, which translates as “From wine to the urinal”.

The sense of humour on display in the dome matches his family’s memories of the young man.

“He was mischievous, he was adventurous and he wanted to ‘do his bit’ in the war,” Cookson says. “My mother always said he was great fun and much loved. People were drawn to him.”

With his training completed, Payne was posted to 801 Squadron and joined HMS Implacable as it set out for the Far East. The family has no letters from after his departure and it is likely that his days were taken up with intensive training, including aircraft carrier deck landings as the attack on mainland Japan drew closer.

The first notification that something had gone amiss on June 14, 1945 would have come with the delivery of a War Office telegram to Payne’s parents, opening with the dreaded phrase: “I regret to inform you…”

The local newspaper ran a short story headlined “Missing in Eastern Waters” on June 29 and, with their son listed as “missing in action”, the family retained some hope that he might still be alive. That cruel hope lasted for a full year.

“My grandparents posted an acknowledgement in the Earlestown Guardianon June 14, 1946, saying they had received official information from the War Office that their son, Mervyn, reported missing June 14, 1945, must now be presumed lost on operations over the Caroline Islands,” Cookson says.

“Not knowing where he had died, the circumstances and it all being so far away with no grave to visit undoubtedly made it harder,” she says. “Just being ‘missing’ and only ‘presumed’ was hard for them because there was no certainty.”

“Devastation would not be too strong a word,” she adds.

Another message, published on May 2, 1947 to mark what would have been Payne’s 22nd birthday, read: “God bless you dear, you will never be forgotten.”

Unaware of the details of Mervyn’s loss or where he might be, Harold Payne died in 1970, his wife, Ethel, in 1972, and Yvonne died in May 2009 at the age of 79. Looking through the family’s keepsakes last month, Cookson discovered her uncle’s service medals, pristine and still in the original box that was delivered to her grandparents’ address.

A disastrous mission

With the war in Europe requiring fewer capital ships by the latter months of 1944, the British Pacific Fleet was formed in what was at the time Ceylon – now Sri Lanka – in November 1944. With elements from Canada, New Zealand and Australia, the fleet had five battleships, six fleet aircraft carriersand a further nine escort carriers, 16 cruisers, more than 30 destroyers and around 50 escort vessels by June 1945, and had already conducted operations against oil production in Sumatra in January and supported the US invasion of Okinawa in March.

HMS Implacable joined the fleet in Sydney on May 8, 1945, which happened to be Victory in Europe Day, and was assigned a “work-up” mission – Operation Inmate – to acclimatise sailors and airmen who had not previously served in the Pacific. Some of the men taking part in the attack, including Payne, would be coming face to face with the enemy for the first time.

The intention was to offer a target that had already sustained extensive damage in Operation Hailstone some 16 months previously, and lost most of its aircraft, air defences and other key infrastructure. The sense was that the defences would be weak because the 40,000 Japanese troops and civilians on the isolated islands had not been resupplied in more than a year as US forces island-hopped across the Pacific. It was believed that only a handful of Japanese aircraft remained serviceable, there was virtually no fuel and morale would be low due to a lack of food and medical supplies.

With little in the way of resistance, an attack on Chuuk was intended to boost the British crews’ morale ahead of Operation Downfall, the anticipated attack on the Japanese home islands due to commence in late 1945 – which would be altogether more challenging.

HMS Implacable moved to the Allied base at Manus Island, one of the Admiralty Islands north of Papua New Guinea, in late May 1945 to finalise the details of the attack on Chuuk.

Accompanied by the escort carrier HMS Ruler, four cruisers and five destroyers, HMS Implacable was 80 miles south-west of Chuuk’s reef at first light on June 14, undetected by the Japanese. The carrier launched what was known as a ramrod mission, an offensive fighter sweep against ground targets, of four Fairey Fireflies and 12 Seafires, including the aircraft piloted by Payne, designated as Yellow Four.

Subsequent events, recalled from the heat of battle, are confused.

In his acclaimed 1986 book, They Gave Me A Seafire, Commander R Mike Crosley said that shortly after taking off, his flight was confronted by a “solid wall of black cloud ‘down-to-the-deck’ in front”. With visibility reduced to half a wingspan, Crosley led his unit in evading the worst of the weather until they could land back on HMS Ruler with barely any fuel left and having almost lost pilot Peter Arkell in the storm.

“The reason for the near loss of Pete and the probable reason for the actual loss of S/Lt Mervin [sic] Payne of 801 on this, his first operational trip, was doubtless due to his becoming lost on the formation entering rain and cloud at zero feet and the ship’s insistence on radio silence,” Crosley wrote.

“Payne did not appear at the far end of the cloud with the two others from 801 Squadron in CH’s [Lt Cmdr GP Campbell Horsfall’s] flight who made it to the target area.”

If this account is accurate and Payne’s aircraft came down outside the lagoon, there is little chance of finding him. The islands are the tip of a submerged mountain that rises almost sheer from the depths of the Pacific. And while the lagoon is typically around 130ft deep and with maximum depths of 300ft, areas beyond the passes were described at the time as “depth abyssal”. Today, the seabed is known to be 13,000ft deep.

Crosley’s recollection does not, however, tally with the accounts of others.

In 2022’s The Forgotten Fleet, author John Winton claims that Payne was shot down over the Moen 2 airstrip, the seaplane base on the south-western tip of the island now known as Weno. It does not specify whether he was lost to an enemy aircraft or ground fire, although anti-aircraft fire seems far more likely.

Dan Bailey, who published World War II Wrecks of Truk Lagoon in 2000, also claimed that Payne was attacking the Moen 2 base, which is across a strait of water a little over a mile north of Tonoas, when he was “downed”.

Neither version agrees with the entry for June 14 in the squadron’s Line Book, provided by the National Museum of the Royal Navy and which describes “appalling weather” and “flying between thunderheads” on the approach to Chuuk.

“The four 801 aircraft on strafing made a few runs and sent back a first-sighting report – this flash was picked up – then one strafing run on a ship off Dublon Island,” it said, using an alternative name for Tonoas, the main base for the Japanese garrison.

“Payne did not turn up at the rendezvous,” it continued. “After waiting for five minutes, CH turned into the murk once more and we made our way on instruments back to the steamer.”

The one eyewitness

Nor do records held at Japan’s ministry of defence in Tokyo shed any light on what might have happened, although for different reasons. The Japanese colonial administration typically kept meticulous records but these were burnt immediately after Tokyo announced its surrender on August 15, 1945. They had good reason to destroy their paperwork.

The Japanese military had put islanders to work on large-scale construction projects, including Sapuk Lighthouse, and mistreated these slave labourers. The islands also had at least one brothel where women from other parts of conquered Asia were forced to work. In addition, there are reports that, with the food situation becoming critical as the conflict wore on, Japanese troops resorted to cannibalism.

The situation was equally dire for any enemies who fell into their hands. After the war, Japanese officers who had been on Chuuk were tried by Allied courts for war crimes and sentenced to death for executing 12 US air crew who had been shot down over the lagoon or who had been taken prisoner elsewhere in the Pacific. Investigators believed that as many as 25 air crew were murdered there.

But with none of his colleagues seeing what happened to Payne, research by Colin Colbourn, lead historian for Project Recover, has uncovered what may be the only eyewitness account.

After the war, the US Department of Defence conducted thorough examinations of the impact of its bombing campaigns, releasing a classified study into Chuuk on November 25, 1945 that quoted a Japanese officer who erroneously described “Spitfires” strafing from “low altitudes”.

“The attack was principally against Dublon [Tonoas], Eten and Moen [Weno] islands. Practically no damage resulted,” the officer told his US interrogators.

“One Spitfire was lost when its wings came off in a dive.”

Over the course of the two days of attacks, only one aircraft was lost over the lagoon, so the Seafire this unknown officer saw can only have been Payne’s. Unfortunately, the report provides no additional information on where the aircraft went into the sea, although it does strongly support the theory that it is in the lagoon and probably close to Tonoas Island.

And while it remains possible that Payne was shot down by ground fire, reference to the aircraft’s wings detaching in flight offer an alarming alternative explanation for his loss.

Garren Mulloy, a professor of international relations at Daito Bunka University in Japan and a specialist in military issues, points out that Seafire pilots reported that “certain batches by a certain producer were prone to weaknesses, particularly noticeable in dives, where wings would flex, warp and even fold up”.

“I believe this was the first operation using Seafires in the fighter-bomber role and the first with rockets,” he says. And while Payne would have trained with firing 3in rockets from rails mounted beneath his wings, the stresses of his first combat may have led him to attack his target too fast and at too steep an angle.

“The catastrophic structural failures of his wings was possibly the result of the sudden acceleration in the dive, and the additional stress of the rockets inducing drag and added weight, [contributing] to the failure due to added stress when a certain speed was reached or when he attempted to pull out of the dive,” Mulloy says.

“As so little operational experience had been built up with Seafires in fighter-bomber operations, this may explain either pilots pushing their aircraft too hard or making handling errors because they did not appreciate how the aircraft’s balance had shifted due to the addition of underwing stores.”

“Payne was inexperienced, flying his first operational mission, in a type of aircraft nobody had flown operationally in this role,” Mulloy adds. “He had encountered appalling weather that had shocked veteran pilots, and perhaps encountered more [anti-aircraft] fire than anticipated.”

“In this context, diving fast and pulling up hard might have been the natural response to that situation,” he says. “And if the wings were a source of weakness, and highly stressed by diving with rockets, then any ground-fire hits could have produced catastrophic results which otherwise might have been relatively minor.”

Whatever the cause, if the Japanese officer’s account of the aircraft losing its wings in a dive is accurate, then it would have hit the water, “going very fast and very hard”, Mulloy adds. “If we accept he crashed in a dive – and even more so if we accept his wings came off – then the engine may be the only large item left in recognisable form.”

The wings could be a long distance from where the fuselage came down, Mulloy suggests, and while sub-systems such as guns, wheels, the propeller, radio and canopy frame could have remained intact, they would probably have been detached from the engine mounting in the fuselage “or else so crushed by impact with the water that after 80 years they would be tricky to recognise”.

That means that the best hope of locating Payne’s Seafire rests with Project Recover, which has to date located six US aircraft that were previously unaccounted for in the lagoon. Colbourn believes that there are as many as 30 US planes off these islands and possibly 50 Japanese aircraft. And one British Seafire.

In previous missions to Chuuk, Colbourn’s team deployed torpedo-shaped autonomous underwater vehicles that employ an array of sensors, including a sonar with one-centimetre resolution, cameras and magnetometers to pick out metal fragments from the background clutter on the seabed. In ideal conditions, the “fish” can carry out a grid pattern search covering 2.5 sq km per day. To date, Project Recover has managed to scan around 13 per cent of the lagoon.

“There are still areas off Moen [Tonoas] that we have not yet searched but there is a lot of coral in many areas, and while ships are big and easy to see, it is much harder to find an aircraft,” Colbourn says. The only indication is a “hard return” on the sonar that can then be more closely examined, including by sending divers down on to a target.

Teams from Project Recover have found human remains at other crash sites and used DNA testing to put names to those remains. Other crucial clues include identity tags and personal effects, which may also help to identify Payne – if his aircraft can be located.

British servicemen wore identity tags made of compressed fibre that will not have survived more than 80 years underwater, but photos of Payne show him wearing a watch on his left wrist and what appears to be a distinctive ring on the little finger of his right hand. Recovering such tiny scraps of evidence would still, however, require a large slice of good fortune.

“If we go with what we think happened, then the Seafire would have hit the water at high speed and fragmented, which would mean there would be little left of the fuselage, although there is a better chance of finding the engine,” Colbourn says.

And although Project Recover’s mission is to locate and repatriate the remains of US service personnel, Colbourn is aware of Payne’s Seafire.

“We have known it was in the lagoon since we started searching, we know what it looks like and how it is different to American and Japanese aircraft,” he says. “Please tell his family that we will continue to look for him.”

Michelle Cookson says the search for her uncle – who obtained his wings just 12 weeks before his death – has made her feel “connected” to him.

“I wish I could have known him but, more than that, that his parents and siblings hadn’t lost him so young as it affected them greatly,” she says.

“It’s just so sad that such a young life was lost – one of so many,” she adds. “But if his plane is discovered, I would want to go to Chuuk to pay our respects. So far from home, I want him to know that he has not been forgotten.”

[Source: Daily Telegraph]