Sean Feast speaks to Marc Hall about flying, Operation Hurricane, and the cases of missing aircrew waiting to be found.
Originally from Kent, and with a father who worked for a firm based on the industrial estate on the airfield at Biggin Hill, it was perhaps inevitable that Marc Hall should grow up loving aircraft.
“From as far back as I can remember, I enjoyed a varied and loving childhood with many a day spent at aviation museums, airfields, and airshows and surrounded with anything of an aircraft nature,” he explains. “If I was not playing with toy aircraft or building Airfix models, it was always something linked to aeroplanes.”
To that end, he admits, he differed from other members of his household: “I was in some respects seen as an oddball member of the family,” he laughs. “I had a passion for anything aviation related that was not shared with my siblings. We were like chalk and cheese as they say.”
Working nights to pursue a love of flying
Educated locally, Marc worked hard at his studies and left secondary school at 16 with a fistful of GCSEs and a determination to pursue his love of flying. From his State School his earned a place at the local Grammar to study A level Computing, Physics and Chemistry. Concurrently he worked part time in a local restaurant to save money to pay for flying lessons. It all started with a residential flight school course in Welshpool, Mid-Wales: “I had a wonderful and very memorable time learning to fly single engine aircraft,” he says, “and will never, of course, forget my first ever solo!”
“Biggin Hill has a strange atmosphere in the dark when there’s no one else about,” he continues. “It’s especially eerie when you’re flying solo.”
Having completed his studies, Marc continued to work part time to fund his hobby and saved up enough to enrol on a ground school course with Oxford Aviation on the way to attaining a commercial pilot’s licence (CPL). Successfully completing 14 exams in subjects such as navigation, meteorology and air law, Marc began flight training for the practical CPL which again he passed after many months of hard graft. With a flight instructor’s rating under his belt, by the age of 21 he was teaching others to fly from Stapleford airfield.
Marc spent several happy years instructing before deciding upon a total career change and joining the Police: “Not coming from a wealthy background and also not able to obtain sponsorship, I simply couldn’t afford to pursue my ultimate dream of becoming an airline pilot,” he explains, “and so I had to literally change course.”
Working for the Police service on 999 calls and protecting the vulnerable
Marc has now worked for the Police service for almost 20 years, undertaking a variety of support functions ranging from 999 operator to a role undertaking Disclosure Barring checks. Flying, unfortunately, became a hobby to be occasionally enjoyed, rather than a career, though his love for flying has never diminished, and his love of history has taken him down a secondary career as an author:
“Sometime around the start of the new Millennium my grandfather began telling me stories about his family and their wartime service,” Marc continues. “His father had served on the Somme during the first world war, and lived to tell the tale, and his brother was captured at Dunkirk in 1940 having lost an arm. The family therefore had a rich military background.
“He also told me about a cousin who had served in the RAF but never knew what became of him. I decided to see what I could find out.”
The search for the missing airmen of Essen
In Marc’s research, he discovered that his relative had been part of a Lancaster crew of 12 Squadron, killed on the night of 14 October 1944. It led to a visit to RAF Wickenby and to his relative’s grave at the Reichswald War Cemetery in Kleve, on the Dutch/German border.
“With my background in flying, and a love of history (fuelled by a brilliant secondary school teacher), my interest in Bomber Command developed,” Marc explains. “I learned that the operation on 14 October 1944 was part of a huge 24-hour round the clock attack on Duisberg which was called ‘Operation Hurricane’ and so decided to write my first book about the operation and those who failed to return.”
Operation Hurricane, published by Fighting High in 2013, gives a comprehensive account of this historic attack. It uses a wealth of eyewitness accounts and post war recollections, accompanied by numerous previously unpublished photographs. The success of his Operation Hurricane book prompted Marc to explore other stories involving aircrew missing from operations, sometimes mysteriously.
One, in particular, led to an investigation into the ‘Essen West Case’ war crime, in which a number of unknown aircrew were reported to have been murdered. Marc set out to discover the identity of the murdered men and their final resting place. The result was Missing Presumed Murdered published in 2018, which Marc co-authored with Bomber Command historian Sean Feast who took a personal interest in the case since one of the aircrew unaccounted for was his Great Uncle!
Memorial service to the murdered men
Marc and Sean subsequently attended a memorial service to the murdered aircrew in Essen on the bridge from which the men had been thrown to their deaths.
In recent years, Marc has met and interviewed dozens of Bomber Command veterans, as well as meeting and corresponding with fellow historians and enthusiasts including the late Traugott Vitz, one of the most respected researchers in his field: “I am grateful to them all,” he adds.
Further stories are waiting to be told, and Marc is currently working with Sean on a new title planned for 2028 which again seeks to reveal the identities and possible whereabouts of more missing men.
While Marc’s ambition to become an airline pilot remains unfulfilled, he does still occasionally get behind the controls of an aircraft, as well as flying radio-controlled models at his local club.
And if he’s not there, then he can be found travelling around in his camper van visiting catacombs, crypts and cemeteries across the UK and Europe: “I appreciate it sounds macabre but they reveal so much history,” he concludes.
