From today's Times.
A few months after winning the Distinguished Service Order, one of the highest awards for gallantry, Wing Commander Jerry Witts wrote a graphic account of his first mission — his first experience of combat — over Iraq in early 1991.
Given command of an RAF bomber force in the build-up to the Gulf War, Witts led a formation of Tornados in an attack on a military airfield in central Iraq at the start of hostilities. The raid was ordered after the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein failed to meet a UN deadline to withdraw from the Gulf state of Kuwait, which his forces had occupied since the previous August.
As the two-man British bomber approached the target, the navigator, AJ Smith, gave Witts instructions: “Got the offset. Corrections in. Take it!”
Recalling the raid for a special edition of the 1991 RAF Yearbook, Witts wrote: “It all seems very unreal, creaming along at 500 knots [565mph] through the thick velvet darkness. The HUD [Head Up Display] tells me we are 180ft above the desert but it could just as well be 18,000ft because I can’t see a thing ahead, just the slowly unwinding time on the weapon-release circle in the HUD symbology. Thank goodness it’s flat — at least I think it is! Perhaps I should have put the Night Vision Goggles on after all? Too late now. . .
“We recite the litany of checks just as we have done a thousand times before. But never like this. This time it’s for real and ahead in only 30 seconds lies an Iraqi airfield. It’s shortly after midnight GMT on 17 January 1991 and we’re on our way to war.
‘Twenty seconds, fifteen, five.’
‘Committing.’ ”
Witts then described the release of the aircraft’s bombs, which were designed to crater runways. “There they go. The aircraft vibrates rapidly as our JP233s dispense their loads. There’s a pulsing glow from beneath the aircraft. Then suddenly, two massive thumps as the empty canisters are jettisoned.”
At the same time, “alarms sound, the autopilot drops out, we lurch sharply upwards and my heart rate increases to about 400 a second as I fight to get back down”. Suddenly distracted, he asked his navigator: “What are those flashing lights, AJ?”
“AAA [anti-aircraft artillery], you idiot!” barked the navigator, ignoring the niceties of rank.
As Witts recalled: “Flashing lights become white stair rods arcing over and around us. Away to the right the sky erupts in orange flames, quickly followed by a curtain of incandescent white lights as more and more AAA barrage fires into the darkness. A hundred fleeting experiences too rapid to recall in any detail. We rush onward. Homeward.”
As the four bombers flew on to their base at Dhahran in eastern Saudi Arabia, Witts noted: “Time seems to stand still and the brown line that marks the international border creeps so slowly down the moving map display. I suppress the irrational desire to laugh as we pass over a printed notice on the map — WARNING: Flight in Iraq outside controlled airspace is STRICTLY PROHIBITED.”
Over the next six weeks, he flew on 13 more raids, but it was those first moments in action that remained with him so vividly for the rest of his life.
A big man with a broad face and beaming smile, Witts was the commander of No 31 Squadron based at Bruggen in Germany when he was ordered to prepare for action in the Gulf. He arrived at Dhahran in late December and started an intense period of training and planning with what became a unit of 22 aircraft, with 33 crews from different squadrons, a key military component of the US-led coalition ranged against Saddam.
The citation to his DSO highlighted his “consummate courage” and “outstanding flying skill”. It said he had conducted himself “in a manner that reflects the highest tradition of the service”.
Witts had always wanted to fly.
He was born Jeremy John Witts in Marlborough, Wiltshire, in 1950, the eldest son of Eddy and Joan Witts, who had four other children: Aileen, Marilyn, Ashley and Simon. His father was an electrical engineer who worked on the development of radar with No 618 Squadron during the war, his mother a children’s nurse. Jerry grew up in a council house where education was treasured and nurtured.
The family remained close. On one occasion later in life when Simon was working as a ghillie in the Highlands, Witts and his navigator joined his siblings for a weekend.
“Naturally, we were all so glad to see each other that much beer and whisky was consumed in Mar Lodge bar,” recalled Marilyn. “On the Monday morning as we were walking up into the remote hills to go deer stalking, two Tornados came scorching up the glen at about 200ft. Of course, it had to be Jerry! Then the planes suddenly pulled up and did a victory roll before disappearing up through the clouds and onward to their mission.”
He won a place at Marlborough Grammar School, was a Scout, had a paper round and made model aeroplanes. He joined the Air Training Cadets and learnt to fly before he could drive a car. Entering the RAF College at Cranwell, Lincolnshire, straight from school he was commissioned on September 15, Battle of Britain Day, in 1969.
Posted to Cyprus, he flew Vulcans, a distinctive delta-wing strategic bomber, first as a co-pilot, then as a captain. He later trained on the Buccaneer, a much faster strike aircraft used in low-level attacks, and spent five years in Germany from 1979.
Witts became a formidable commander, in the air and on the ground, an almost Falstaffian figure who mixed easily and never forgot his roots. Sitting on the White House lawn years later at a ceremony to mark the occasion on which the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary joined Nato, Witts, then air attaché at the British embassy in Washington, was heard to mutter, “Not bad for a ploughman’s grandson!”
In the late Eighties he went to Staff College, served at Strike Command and the Ministry of Defence, before returning to flying duties with No 31 Squadron. After the Gulf conflict he went back to the MoD, was promoted to group captain and appointed to a senior role with Nato in Germany. In 1997 he took over command of RAF Northolt in west London, where a road is named after him, and became ADC to the Queen. Two years later he took over as air commander at Solenzara in Corsica, where Tornados were based for operations over the Balkans.
His last posting was in Washington, where he and his second wife, Liz, created a sports bar in the cellar of their home. They installed a billiards table and held quiz nights, which they described as “international evenings”. Indeed, the evening on which six air attachés from different parts of the globe were bent over his table football is perhaps testament to the success of his diplomatic mission.
Witts married for the first time in 1971 after meeting Maggie Kerley, a bookkeeper who supported him in his career and played a prominent role in helping other RAF wives during the Gulf War. They had three children: Rebecca, who is a neurological physiotherapist; Claire, a veterinary nurse; and Andrew, who served with the Royal Engineers and later became a manager in windfarm construction. The marriage, however, did not last and the couple divorced in 2002.
A year later he married Liz Hryniewicz, a university lecturer whom he had known since childhood. Their fathers had worked together in Malmesbury and they went to the same school. She had three children by an earlier marriage: Laura, who is an assistant head at an academy; Alex, a media executive who has won three Baftas and an Emmy; and Sophie, who is an alternative therapist.
Witts embraced civilian life just as energetically as he had done his military career. He took an MSc in international security and global governance at Birkbeck, University of London, and became director of finance and administration at University College School, a private school in Hampstead, north London, where he generated new sources of income to fund places for children whose families could not afford the fees. He also became chairman of governors at Westminster Academy in central London, which he helped to transform from a failing school into an outstanding one.
According to his wife, Witts valued the air force as a meritocracy and “believed that everyone should have an equal chance”.
He enjoyed the music of the Eagles and saw them at five concerts around the world. Taking up skiing in his fifties, he threw himself into après-ski with some enthusiasm. He was an adventurous cook who made extravagant Thai curries. He also drew cartoons and painted watercolours.
At the age of 61 his life changed. His health deteriorated and he had a brain disease called corticobasal degeneration diagnosed. He helped to raise funds for research, but his condition deteriorated, and in later years his only movement was the blink of an eye. He was taken to a nursing home when his wife, who had cared for him, developed Covid-19, but he died there, cut off from his family.
At his funeral AJ, his navigator from the Gulf War, read John Gillespie Magee’s best-known poem, High Flight, which includes the lines: “Up, up the long delirious burning blue/ I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace/ Where never lark, or ever eagle flew.”
Air Commodore Jerry Witts, DSO, pilot, was born on June 18, 1950. He died from pneumonia on June 3, 2020, aged 69