Did you know a man died during World War II because he resembled Churchill?

The threat of assassination was a fact of life that every major head of government or state had to live with during World War II, even though none of them actually ended up being killed that way. One very ordinary man, however, might have become an assassination victim because he happened to look like British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
 
On the morning of June 1, 1943, Alfred T. Chenhalls, a business manager in the world of film and entertainment, boarded a DC-3 plane of the British Overseas Airways Corporation Lisbon, the capital of neutral Portugal, headed for Britain. Chenhalls was travelling with one of his clients, stage and movie star Leslie Howard, who was best-known for playing Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind, but had also recently appeared in the patriotic films The 49th Parallel, “Pimpernel” Smith, and The First of the Few (“Spitfire” in the U.S.), the last one about the designer of the Supermarine Spitfire (Read our earlier article) Several hours into the flight, the plane was attacked by eight German Junkers Ju 88 heavy fighters; it crashed into the sea, killing all 13 passengers and 4 crewmen.

There was an understanding between World War II combatant nations not to attack civilian planes taking off from neutral countries, so why was this one plane destroyed? The prevailing theory is that German secret agents in Lisbon spotted Chenhalls board the plane, and mistook the stocky, cigar-smoking man British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (not impossible, as there was a significant similarity between the two). It’s also possible that tall and thin Howard was mistaken for Churchill’s bodyguard, Walter H. Thompson. The Germans knew that Churchill was due to return home from a visit to North Africa, so the timing of the flight was also suspicious. (In actual fact, Churchill flew home three days later in his personal modified B-24 Liberator (Read our earlier article)). One quick mistaken radio message about the plane carrying the precious passenger, and the tragedy would have been inevitable.

To be fair, several alternative theories have also been advanced. It’s been suggested that the real target was Howard, who was born a Hungarian Jew and was vocally anti-Nazi, and who was both a powerful propaganda figure and quite possibly a spy who returning home from secret talks with Spanish dictator Franco. Another explanation put forward was that the Ju 88s were in the area searching for German U-boats, they have come upon the plane by accident, and misidentified it as a hostile warplane. We might never know the true reason for sure, but Churchill certainly believed he was the intended target. Of course, he was quick to point out the German plan’s stupidity in his war memoirs: “The brutality of the Germans was only matched by the stupidity of their agents. It is difficult to understand how anyone could imagine that with all the resources of Great Britain at my disposal I should have booked a passage in an unarmed and unescorted plane from Lisbon and flown home in broad daylight.”

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