Peter Butterworth English Actor

 
Eighty years on, Peter Butterworth's recently discovered
German prison identity card is going on display as
part of an exhibition telling the story of his life as a
prisoner of war.

Butterworth served in the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm
during the war but was shot down in 1940, spending
the rest of it as a prisoner of war.

A cache of prisoner of war documents recently
released from a German archive is now going on
display at the National Archives in London, which
adds new detail to the gradually unfolding story.

The documents arrived from Germany and have been
catalogued by a team of volunteers.
For his son Tyler Butterworth, it has been a revelation
"They keep declassifying things and more seems to
bubble up. It's remarkable."
However, in Stalag Luft 3, he was an officer and code
writer in MI9, the military intelligence agency
responsible for organising escapes from prison
camps. It was a mystery to even his own son until
long after his death in 1979.

He did suffer from what we now call post-traumatic
stress disorder (PTSD). He never said this to my
sister and I, but my mother (the impressionist Janet
Brown) told me about things that happened,
especially right at the start of their marriage, after the
war, where he'd suddenly leap out of bed at night and
throw himself on the floor and start hiding. She had
to barricade the bedroom door because the staircase
was outside."

Butterworth helped hide the soil from the tunnels in
the camp theatre. Inmates would be encouraged to
smoke pipes near where the soil was stored to mask
the smell.

In the Wooden Horse escape, in which a tunnel was
dug underneath a vaulting horse, he was one of the
organising committee. When the story was adapted
in 1950 for the big screen, he auditioned for a role but
was turned down for not looking sufficiently like a
pnsoner

Alongside him in Stalag Luft 3 was another prisoner,
Talbot Rothwell, who would go on to write many of
the best Carry On films. He and Rothwell convinced
the camp commandant to allow them to build a
theatre, with the sounds from the performances
helping drown out the noise of digging the tunnels.

Italo Balbo, (1896-1940)

   Italian air marshal who argued against fighting the Allies in
World War II. Born in Qartesana, Italy, on 06th June 1896, Italo
Balbo joined the army in 1915 when Italy entered World War
I and fought as a lieutenant in the Alpini. Balbo joined the Fascist
Party in 1921 and was a leader of the 1922 Fascist March on Rome.

   One of the more brutal commanders of the anti-
Socialist Fascist militia, he became a top adviser to Benito
Mussolini. After Mussolini became premier, Balbo held various
cabinet posts before becoming minister of aviation in 1929,
in which position he Worked to make Italy a major air power.
Balbo personally led a number of transatlantic flights
to North and South America that captured public attention in
Italy and abroad. But the Italian air force, despite setting
numerous air records, was largely a paper tiger and had few
modern aircraft.

   Promoted to Italy’s first air marshal in 1933, Balbo came
to be seen as a political threat by Mussolini, who, in January
1934, appointed him governor and commander in chief
of Italia.n forces in Libya. There, Balbo Worked against the
policy of Italian domination advocated by others, instead
favoring a degree of assimilation for the Arab and Berber
populations.

   Balbo criticized Italy’s alliance with Germany. At a Fascist
Grand Council meeting on 07th December 1939, he raised the
possibility of Italy fighting on the side of France and Britain.
He continued to speak out, even to the British ambassador,
against Italy going to War with the Allies.

  After Italy declared war in June 1940, Balbo accepted com-
mand of Italia.n forces in North Africa. But on 28th June, his
plane was shot down near Tobruk by Italian anti-aircraft fire,
and he was killed. A British air raid had just taken place, and
Balbo’s plane was downed while attempting to land after it
failed to give the proper identification signal. Rumors had it,
however, that Mussolini had ordered his death. II Duce later
remarked that Balbo was “the only one capable of killing me.”

Alphonse Joseph Georges French Forces

 Alphonse Joseph Georges 

(15th, August 1875 in Allier, Montlucon - 24th April , 1951 in Paris)

 was a French army officer. He was commander in chief of the
North East Front in 1939 and 1940. Opposing the plan by
supreme commander Maurice Gamelin to move the best
Allied forces into the Low Countries, he was overruled.
Georges tried to allow as much initiative to his
subordinates as possible to improve operational
flexibility.